Lose Weight in 60 Seconds
20 weight-loss secrets to make you look like you've shed kilos in under a minute.
Source: Yahoo Lifestyle
Got a minute? Try a tip! After consulting health and fitness experts and the latest scientific studies 20 quick weight-loss strategies have been discovered that work. Add one to your routine today and watch the scale go down!
Change your clothes
If you exercise after dinner, put your workout gear on before you get to the gym. You're less likely to veer off to the couch, says Karen Bridson, a Toronto fitness trainer.
Start with salad
Jennie Wilson of Toronto loads up her plate with a luscious salad before she has her main course, a strategy that's helped the 29-year-old lose 40 pounds in two years. It packs a double-punch: you meet your veggie quota and take the edge off your hunger with filling fiber before diving into the higher-cal entree.
Work out with a cheerleader
A Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania study found that participants who received frequent positive feedback during exercise worked harder than those who received infrequent encouragement or none at all. Click here to find a fitness buddy in the Chatelaine Fitness & sport forum.
Sip green tea
In a study on mice, Japanese researchers found that green tea extract helps endurance during exercise. You may see a similar effect from drinking four cups(1L)of green tea daily.
Talk on the move
Use a cordless phone at home so you can walk laps and do stairs while you chat. Every step counts!
Identify the emotion
"If you find yourself craving something or wanting to overeat, ask yourself why," advises Nancy Saunders, a registered dietitian in Ormstown, Que. Take the time to figure out what's going on - chances are you'll discover a bag of cookies isn't what you really need
Go green
Arrange individual green grapes on a cookie sheet and pop them into the freezer. After they freeze, put them into a container and leave them in the freezer to munch on the next time you want a quick sweet snack. It's a favourite trick of Denise Hargrove, a registered dietitian in Kingston, Ont.
Open a can
A ton of fast and tasty recipes call for beans and legumes, which are naturally high fiber, high protein and low fat. Give Quick Lentils with Coriander and Mint a try.
Schedule in fitness
Jennie Wilson sits down and plans out her workouts week by week. "Thinking about workouts ahead of time helps me make them part of my day," she says. Tight on time this week? Work in a workout with our fast fitness exercise plan.
Do the hand jive
Control portion sizes with this no-fail guide: a serving of meat is about the size of the palm of your hand, and a fist equals about a cup (250 ml) of fruit, vegetables or grains. Your thumb is the size of about one ounce (30 g) of cheese.
Brush your teeth
A Japanese study of nearly 14,000 people learned that slim people brushed their teeth after every meal. The brushing doesn't burn calories, but it's a sign that you're a healthy person. Plus, many people don't want to eat after they've brushed so that they can preserve the clean minty taste!
Fool your eyes
When you grate your reduced-fat cheese, use the side of the grater with the smallest holes, suggests Areli Hermanson, a registered dietitian in Victoria, B.C. The pile of cheese will be fluffier, so you'll use less.
Take the stairs
Research shows that walking two flights of stairs a day for a year can help you shed up to six pounds. Find other great no-gym workouts at the Chatelaine Fitness Center.
Get your thyroid checked
According to the Thyroid Foundation of Canada, thyroid problems may affect up to eight per cent of Canadian women. Since an underactive thyroid can contribute to weight gain, ask your doctor about this simple blood test.
Freeze and tease
Stash your favourite single-serving size yogurt (crème brûlée and cappuccino flavours are yummy) in the freezer for a decadent frozen treat that's good for you. Choose low-fat (one per cent or less) and lower-sugar (15 g or less) varieties. Bonus: studies show that milk products may help reduce body fat.
Divide your plate
Fill one-half of your dinner plate with veggies, says Jackie Allen, 25, of Cambridge, Ont. Use one-quarter for rice, pasta or potatoes and use the final quarter for meat or beans. She's lost 15 pounds with the help of this trick.
Shop the U
Focus your grocery shopping on the perimeter of the store, where the fresh produce, meat and fish are kept. Avoid the processed items in the middle section.
Eat brown instead of white
This means choosing brown rice and whole grain bread and pasta, which are crammed with healthful fiber and nutrients. "To get used to the change, start with a mix," advises Jenny Okroj, a registered public health nutritionist in Regina. Use one slice of white bread and one of whole grain bread to make a sandwich, or mix different different varieties of rice together.
Join the club
Slash your fruit juice calories in half by turning it into a spritzer - mix half a serving of juice with an equal amount of club soda. Or, enjoy a frosty club soda on its own with slices of lemon and lime for a zero-cal beverage.
Sideline fat
In a restaurant, order sauce and salad dressing on the side. Dip your fork into it, and then pick up a bite of your food. "This allows you to enjoy the sauce or dressing, but limits the amount," says Kathryn Proudfoot, an Edmonton registered dietitian.
Showing posts with label WEIGHT MANAGEMENT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WEIGHT MANAGEMENT. Show all posts
Thursday, February 26, 2009
THOUGHTS AFFECT WEIGHT
Can Your Thoughts Affect Your Weight?
After the end of holidays you generally find that your waistline is as overstretched as your credit card. So, it is time to take action! What should you do?
A) Hit the gym.
B) Make a solemn pledge to never ingest another sweet for as long as you live.
C) Hit the gym and make a solemn pledge to never ingest another sweet for as long as you live, or…
D) Sit around on the couch eating chocolate bonbons while genuinely believing that you are getting a lot of rigorous exercise.
The answer to this multiple-choice quiz might not be as straightforward as you think. In fact, a recent study by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer seems to challenge our basic assumptions about the relationship between the physical body and the mind — and perhaps even our assumptions about the nature of objective reality itself. It certainly challenges our assumptions about the limits of the placebo effect.
Langer is a researcher who has published several important and provocative studies. In this study, she decided to look at whether our perception of how much exercise we are getting has any effect on how our bodies actually look. To do this, she studied hotel maids.
As any casual observer of the hospitality industry knows, hotel maids spend the majority of their days lugging heavy equipment around endless hallways. Basically, almost every moment of their working lives is spent engaged in some kind of physical activity.
But Langer found that most of these women don't see themselves as physically active. She did a survey and found that 67 percent reported they didn't exercise. More than one-third of those reported they didn't get any exercise at all.
"Given that they are exercising all day long," Langer says, "that seemed to be bizarre."
Perceptions Change Your Body and Weight
What was even more bizarre, she says, was that, despite the fact all of the women in her study far exceeded the U.S. surgeon general's recommendation for daily exercise, the bodies of the women did not seem to benefit from their activity.
Langer and her team measured the maids' body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, weight and body mass index. They found that all of these indicators matched the maids' perceived amount of exercise, rather than their actual amount of exercise.
So Langer set about changing perceptions.
She divided 84 maids into two groups. With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the surgeon general's definition of an active lifestyle.
The other group was given no information at all.
The Results - One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.
One possible explanation is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting somehow changed the maids' behavior. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women's mindset.
Essentially, what Langer is talking about is a placebo effect. She says that if you believe you are exercising, your body may respond as if it is. It's the same as if you believe you are getting medication when you are actually getting a sugar pill — your body can sometimes respond as if a placebo is actually working.
The implication is that the "objective reality" of the physical body is not as immovable as we might have assumed. Hence, the theoretical possibility that, if done with genuine conviction, one might be able to sit around eating chocolate and still lose weight.
Placebo Effect Limited?
But Martin Binks, director of behavioral health at the Duke Diet and Fitness Center in North Carolina, is skeptical of Langer's conclusion, even though he is impressed with the physical changes in the maids.
"There's a very high likelihood that [the maids] behaved differently after they received that information," he says, "and they were being more active and eating more healthfully. And that resulted in their improvements in health."
But Binks has a more substantive criticism. He does not believe that placebos are capable of producing the kind of objective change in the physical body that Langer is claiming.
"Generally what placebos work on is subjective types of findings," he says.
In other words, a placebo can help change something like your perception of pain or perhaps your sense of whether you feel depressed, but it can't do something objective like shrink a tumor or cut three pounds off your waistline.
Or can it?
Howard Brody has spent years looking at this issue. He says that a number of relatively new studies challenge the old assumption that the placebo effect alters only subjective perception. He is the director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
For example, Brody notes one study where researchers gave asthmatic patients a drug that actually makes asthma worse. When they gave the drug to the patients, they told them that it relieves asthma.
"A significant number of those patients said that my asthma got better when you gave me the drug," Brody says, "and they measured better when you measured the lung findings.
"So the idea that the placebo effect applies only to subjective things is really one that we have to dismiss."
So maybe it really might be possible to sit on the couch eating chocolates and lose weight. I, for one, am certainly willing to sacrifice and give it the old college try.
After the end of holidays you generally find that your waistline is as overstretched as your credit card. So, it is time to take action! What should you do?
A) Hit the gym.
B) Make a solemn pledge to never ingest another sweet for as long as you live.
C) Hit the gym and make a solemn pledge to never ingest another sweet for as long as you live, or…
D) Sit around on the couch eating chocolate bonbons while genuinely believing that you are getting a lot of rigorous exercise.
The answer to this multiple-choice quiz might not be as straightforward as you think. In fact, a recent study by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer seems to challenge our basic assumptions about the relationship between the physical body and the mind — and perhaps even our assumptions about the nature of objective reality itself. It certainly challenges our assumptions about the limits of the placebo effect.
Langer is a researcher who has published several important and provocative studies. In this study, she decided to look at whether our perception of how much exercise we are getting has any effect on how our bodies actually look. To do this, she studied hotel maids.
As any casual observer of the hospitality industry knows, hotel maids spend the majority of their days lugging heavy equipment around endless hallways. Basically, almost every moment of their working lives is spent engaged in some kind of physical activity.
But Langer found that most of these women don't see themselves as physically active. She did a survey and found that 67 percent reported they didn't exercise. More than one-third of those reported they didn't get any exercise at all.
"Given that they are exercising all day long," Langer says, "that seemed to be bizarre."
Perceptions Change Your Body and Weight
What was even more bizarre, she says, was that, despite the fact all of the women in her study far exceeded the U.S. surgeon general's recommendation for daily exercise, the bodies of the women did not seem to benefit from their activity.
Langer and her team measured the maids' body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, weight and body mass index. They found that all of these indicators matched the maids' perceived amount of exercise, rather than their actual amount of exercise.
So Langer set about changing perceptions.
She divided 84 maids into two groups. With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the surgeon general's definition of an active lifestyle.
The other group was given no information at all.
The Results - One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.
One possible explanation is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting somehow changed the maids' behavior. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women's mindset.
Essentially, what Langer is talking about is a placebo effect. She says that if you believe you are exercising, your body may respond as if it is. It's the same as if you believe you are getting medication when you are actually getting a sugar pill — your body can sometimes respond as if a placebo is actually working.
The implication is that the "objective reality" of the physical body is not as immovable as we might have assumed. Hence, the theoretical possibility that, if done with genuine conviction, one might be able to sit around eating chocolate and still lose weight.
Placebo Effect Limited?
But Martin Binks, director of behavioral health at the Duke Diet and Fitness Center in North Carolina, is skeptical of Langer's conclusion, even though he is impressed with the physical changes in the maids.
"There's a very high likelihood that [the maids] behaved differently after they received that information," he says, "and they were being more active and eating more healthfully. And that resulted in their improvements in health."
But Binks has a more substantive criticism. He does not believe that placebos are capable of producing the kind of objective change in the physical body that Langer is claiming.
"Generally what placebos work on is subjective types of findings," he says.
In other words, a placebo can help change something like your perception of pain or perhaps your sense of whether you feel depressed, but it can't do something objective like shrink a tumor or cut three pounds off your waistline.
Or can it?
Howard Brody has spent years looking at this issue. He says that a number of relatively new studies challenge the old assumption that the placebo effect alters only subjective perception. He is the director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
For example, Brody notes one study where researchers gave asthmatic patients a drug that actually makes asthma worse. When they gave the drug to the patients, they told them that it relieves asthma.
"A significant number of those patients said that my asthma got better when you gave me the drug," Brody says, "and they measured better when you measured the lung findings.
"So the idea that the placebo effect applies only to subjective things is really one that we have to dismiss."
So maybe it really might be possible to sit on the couch eating chocolates and lose weight. I, for one, am certainly willing to sacrifice and give it the old college try.
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