Quitting Caffeine and other Healthy Moves...
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Well, I almost got kicked out of my old car pool for answering just that question honestly, but here goes again: 1) Every day after work, I drink 2 beers and take a nap so I don't lose any more weight. 2) I usually walk to the end of the block and watch my wife jog for an hour, unless it's hot or cold or raining. Seeing her sweat is stimulating and enough incentive to keep me from actually running when not in any eminent danger. 3) I switched from drinking 2 pots of regular coffee every day to drinking 2 pots of an Indonesian blend. That keeps me awake better until it's time for the 2 beers and the nap. 4) After I had a cholesterol check and went on the resulting diet for 6 months, my cholesterol was higher. Solution: I stopped getting cholesterol checks and worry much less. Less stress => easier to take the nap. Works for me ...
The PetroNerd
Walt Fair, Jr. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
Well at least you have the courage to be honest with yourself and others. That's about all you've got :laugh: but that puts you way ahead of others. ;P
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Interesting... I'll just chime in with my own efforts to get more healthy and lose weight. I'm 35 years old, 5'10" and weigh about 195 pounds right now. 2 years ago a weight as much as 220. In college I was super healthy and weighed about 170 and used to run all the time. Now I'm in my mid 30's with a family and frustrated that I've slowly let myself get to this point. Here's what I've (slowly) been doing to get more healthy and lose weight: 1) About 3 years ago I quit sodas cold turkey. I'm absolutely amazed I was able to do this because I used to around 4 sodas a day. I drink mostly water now with an occasional juice. I would say this mostly helped with my sleep. It just made me feel better and have more energy throughout the day. I used to drink diet coke, so i didn't see any significant weight loss. 2) I started becoming more active (again). I made a new years resolution to run 2 days a week about 2 years ago. When I started I couldn't run more than a half mile without stopping. I now run 2, 3 or 4 miles (depending on my mood) with ease. I've been timing myself and keep a log of my times to watch my improvement. Remarkably, I really didn't lose much weight doing this. I lost a little weight though. 3) My wife cooks pretty healthy all the time, so I'm pretty lucky here. We rarely eat out and I eat lots of vegetables. About a year ago I've made a conscious effort to eat 1 bowl of cereal (instead of 2) every morning. I also went on weight watchers in January of this year and I went from 215 to 205 pretty quickly. I sort of gave up on weight watchers after a few months but haven't gained any weight back. 4) I've even been going to the gym about 3 days a week for about 6 months now. I've noticed a big difference in my strength but my weight hasn't changed. I do think I've lost some fat though and it's been replaced with muscle. Not sure if that counts ;) 5) About a month ago, I came to the realization that I eat healthy and am very active. I even play basketball once a week. My remaining problem is the volume of food that I eat. I decided to just consciously eat less (aka another diet) and now I'm down to 195 and am to the point now where people I haven't seen in a while make comments which is nice. So after all this, the most difficult thing is the volume of food that we all eat. They say something like 2000 calories is average, so eating less at first feels like you're starving yourself. But your body adjusts (as it does to many things). So I've still got to lose about 20 pounds (accord
I love your answer and it pretty much describes my experience more or less perfectly. Awesome answer, well thought out. Doesn't it feel great to be in control of your own life and health. I love the heightened awareness for life I have now. Life is a gift and I know I'm protecting it in the best ways I can.
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Totally AWESOME!!!:rose:
Thanks Rex! :rose: Quite honestly there's no-one more surprised than me....sometime in the past couple of months my mindset has changed from "Beth wants to drag me out for a run" to "Yay! Let's run!"... :-\ It all goes to show - most of the time, the only thing holding us back is our own excuses. :-O
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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Well at least you have the courage to be honest with yourself and others. That's about all you've got :laugh: but that puts you way ahead of others. ;P
Well, that was meant mostly tongue-in-cheek, although it's true. Here's what I left out: 1) I'm 58 and not over weight -- never have been. 2) I don't drink carbonated beverages (excepting beer, of course). Never have because I just don't like them. Mostly we drink (besides coffee) iced tea or fruit juices made from real fruit, not concentrated or powders. Always have, because they taste better. 3) My wife cooks mainly healthy Bolivian-style food -- lots of baked chicken, soups, beef stew, rice, quinoa, yucca, etc. and plenty of vegetables. I eat a hamburger or fast food a couple times a year, maybe. 4) I haven't used a car for work in the last 11 years. (My car is a '95 Taurus and my wife has a '87 Camry, but both stay parked except for an occasional trip to the store or to visit.) I walk about 2 km each way to work and back every day. If I don't, I don't feel well. I also take the stairs rather than the elevators if I'm going up or down 5 floors or less. 5) My annual checkups show me in good health, with the only major problem being a problem disk in my back. That's been there for 30 years and was due to a car accident I had as a teenager. In other words, I figure if you live a healthy life style, why worry about the small stuff? And if you don't live a healthy life style, the small stuff may not save or prolong your life, either.
The PetroNerd
Walt Fair, Jr. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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The great part is there is no scientific evidence that any of these things cause increased health problems. Ironically, they do cause increase health expenditures because the overweight and "clinically obese" live the longest. (The only reliable indicator of actual heart disease is high blood pressure. High cholesterol indicates nothing. Interestingly, there is evidence that drastically lowering your cholesterol increases heart attacks.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
I think your statements are incorrect or wrong. On the contrary, the restriction in food intake is found to promote longevity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction[^]
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I work out at home every single day, seven days a week. I've got an elliptical trainer and a full set of dumbbells up to 80 pounds. I've got a pretty spiffy collapsible weight bench and I use the stairs plus hand-weights for my leg-work. It can be done at home very well and more effectively than in a gym. The trick is just keeping it up for 30 days. After that the habit is formed, the mind is shaped and resolve is firm. I love working out at home and to me the biggest thing is my kids see their formerly fat dad working out every single day so they intuitively understand that physical fitness is a lifestyle and they just think everyone does it.
code-frog wrote:
The trick is just keeping it up for 30 days. After that the habit is formed, the mind is shaped and resolve is firm.
I see that's the toughest part - but if you can do that, then home is an excellent place. But there's the other side of the coin, you miss out being inspired by those great bodybuilders that you may see in a good gym. I personally prefer a gym, but I'll totally agree on what you said. :)
code-frog wrote:
my kids see their formerly fat dad working out every single day so they intuitively understand that physical fitness is a lifestyle and they just think everyone does it.
I never looked at it this way, this is a pretty good way to inspire the kids to stay fit. But again, only if you do it regularly. Or the kids may think that this is something that should not be done regularly. :-D
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal - Friedrich Nietzsche .·´¯`·->Rajesh<-·´¯`·. [Microsoft MVP - Visual C++]
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I think your statements are incorrect or wrong. On the contrary, the restriction in food intake is found to promote longevity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction[^]
pashkevich wrote:
the restriction in food intake is found to promote longevity.
The article you linked to is utter rubbish. It has no scientific foundation and is the rantings of lunatics. In case you haven't noticed, the Jews incarcarated at Buchenwald weren't healthy. Neither are anorexics. [Don't bother responding; I'm not going to argue with someone who uses Wikipedia, or even the New York Times, as a scientific source. Try reading the actual studies, removing the ones that are obviously flawed and/or biased (like like of a control or not being double-blind.) Be aware that since most people don't understand statistics, it is common for even the authors of studies to declare conclusions different from what their own studies found--most commonly, they attribute significance to results for which there is none. The motivation is simple--you don't get funding showing that being of normal and over weight is healthy and that the current anti-food, anti-fat fad is causing great harm to many people.]
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Sunday, August 31, 2008 3:19 PM
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So what are other people doing to get healthier? I noticed in Alabama (I think.) that if you are clinically obese you have to pay 50% of your insurance premium and are eligible for fines if you don't change your ways and start losing weight. So you can do it by force or on your own but if you are doing it then what exactly have you done. John Simmons dropped soda pop and his weight came down like a crashing plane. I'm not so lucky. I have to sweat it off or I don't get any change. The rest of you??? Shog you are banned from this thread. I already know your reply and I'm pretty sure it's something like "I actually walk to the fridge to get my beer now instead of making my wife do it." :laugh:
This is a great book & exercise program by John Walker (one of the co-creators of AutoCAD): The Hacker's Diet It is a great read and is definitely worth trying!
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Interesting... I'll just chime in with my own efforts to get more healthy and lose weight. I'm 35 years old, 5'10" and weigh about 195 pounds right now. 2 years ago a weight as much as 220. In college I was super healthy and weighed about 170 and used to run all the time. Now I'm in my mid 30's with a family and frustrated that I've slowly let myself get to this point. Here's what I've (slowly) been doing to get more healthy and lose weight: 1) About 3 years ago I quit sodas cold turkey. I'm absolutely amazed I was able to do this because I used to around 4 sodas a day. I drink mostly water now with an occasional juice. I would say this mostly helped with my sleep. It just made me feel better and have more energy throughout the day. I used to drink diet coke, so i didn't see any significant weight loss. 2) I started becoming more active (again). I made a new years resolution to run 2 days a week about 2 years ago. When I started I couldn't run more than a half mile without stopping. I now run 2, 3 or 4 miles (depending on my mood) with ease. I've been timing myself and keep a log of my times to watch my improvement. Remarkably, I really didn't lose much weight doing this. I lost a little weight though. 3) My wife cooks pretty healthy all the time, so I'm pretty lucky here. We rarely eat out and I eat lots of vegetables. About a year ago I've made a conscious effort to eat 1 bowl of cereal (instead of 2) every morning. I also went on weight watchers in January of this year and I went from 215 to 205 pretty quickly. I sort of gave up on weight watchers after a few months but haven't gained any weight back. 4) I've even been going to the gym about 3 days a week for about 6 months now. I've noticed a big difference in my strength but my weight hasn't changed. I do think I've lost some fat though and it's been replaced with muscle. Not sure if that counts ;) 5) About a month ago, I came to the realization that I eat healthy and am very active. I even play basketball once a week. My remaining problem is the volume of food that I eat. I decided to just consciously eat less (aka another diet) and now I'm down to 195 and am to the point now where people I haven't seen in a while make comments which is nice. So after all this, the most difficult thing is the volume of food that we all eat. They say something like 2000 calories is average, so eating less at first feels like you're starving yourself. But your body adjusts (as it does to many things). So I've still got to lose about 20 pounds (accord
Well muscle is heavier than fat... so must be losing fat. Also weight training increases your metabolism, and more muscle requires more energy to feed during the day too. Also, important to get plenty of protein for muscle growth after heavy workouts.
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
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Thin people do NOT have a lower risk of heart attack. Risk of heart attack crosses weight classes. Except for the truly undernourished, the only predictive indicator of heart disease is high blood pressure and that turns out not be weight related either.
M Towler wrote:
"Obesity is a known risk factor for developing heart disease and heart failure"
Most studies have not found this to be true at all. This is a throw away line given by the author of the study article [note that the scientists didn't make this statement because they know they cant'] with no actual scientific evidence to support it and plenty that completely disproves it. Unfortunately, this is all too common in many of these studies--they find no correlation, but the study authors spin the press release to suggest that a statistically significant correlation has been found.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
So you're saying the American Heart Association[^], the Mayo Clinic[^], and the CDC[^] have their risk factors all wrong? Forgive my skepticism, but I find that hard to believe. In fact, a quick googling finds a study[^] by the University of Michigan which shows that, even absent other risk factors, obesity alone does increase risk of heart disease. I'm not saying they can't all be wrong -- I'm pretty willing to put on the tinfoil hat. I just need to see more evidence of it than you've presented, besides referring to "studies". I didn't find any that backed your position when I googled "obesity not linked to heart attack". In fact, that's the string that returned the University of Michigan study. I did see a blog post about it, but it didn't link to the actual article or study.
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pashkevich wrote:
the restriction in food intake is found to promote longevity.
The article you linked to is utter rubbish. It has no scientific foundation and is the rantings of lunatics. In case you haven't noticed, the Jews incarcarated at Buchenwald weren't healthy. Neither are anorexics. [Don't bother responding; I'm not going to argue with someone who uses Wikipedia, or even the New York Times, as a scientific source. Try reading the actual studies, removing the ones that are obviously flawed and/or biased (like like of a control or not being double-blind.) Be aware that since most people don't understand statistics, it is common for even the authors of studies to declare conclusions different from what their own studies found--most commonly, they attribute significance to results for which there is none. The motivation is simple--you don't get funding showing that being of normal and over weight is healthy and that the current anti-food, anti-fat fad is causing great harm to many people.]
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Sunday, August 31, 2008 3:19 PM
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You realize there were 38 notes and 17 references at the bottom of the wikipedia article, right?
So what? They were all to other crackpot sites. This is a common scam in pseudo-science. Create a plethora of bad studies and then site them, using the citation as evidence, not validity of the studies. (In the most egregious cases, the scientists cite themselves!) Even outside science, this is why Wikipedia has to be taken with a grain of salt. Aside from the above situation, surely I can't be the only one to read an article on Wikipedia, follow a reference and find it says exactly the opposite as what was stated in the Wikipedia article.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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So you're saying the American Heart Association[^], the Mayo Clinic[^], and the CDC[^] have their risk factors all wrong? Forgive my skepticism, but I find that hard to believe. In fact, a quick googling finds a study[^] by the University of Michigan which shows that, even absent other risk factors, obesity alone does increase risk of heart disease. I'm not saying they can't all be wrong -- I'm pretty willing to put on the tinfoil hat. I just need to see more evidence of it than you've presented, besides referring to "studies". I didn't find any that backed your position when I googled "obesity not linked to heart attack". In fact, that's the string that returned the University of Michigan study. I did see a blog post about it, but it didn't link to the actual article or study.
In this case, yes. The public relation arms of these organizations have a vested financial and professional interest in sticking with convention. It is very telling that many of things promoted by these organizations, especially the American Heart Association, are being disproved and quietly dropped (like promoting anti-oxidants.)(One disturbing aspect of this is the number of studies where the authors publicize results that are directly contradicted by their own studies, apparently for the same politically correct reasons.) The bottom line is this; can a person's weight be used to predict a heart attack? No. LDL cholesterol levels cannot be used either. The only physiological factor that can reliably predict a heart attack or stroke is high blood pressure and that only applies in a minority of cases. (If a direct family member had a heart attack before the age of 50, the odds of predicting a heart attack increase, but not by much.) You can begin with this study and explanation in English: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18421264[^] http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/08/japanese-researchers-find-no-support.html[^] Another interesting study: http://www.ahjonline.com/article/S0002-8703(08)00154-3/abstract[^]
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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In this case, yes. The public relation arms of these organizations have a vested financial and professional interest in sticking with convention. It is very telling that many of things promoted by these organizations, especially the American Heart Association, are being disproved and quietly dropped (like promoting anti-oxidants.)(One disturbing aspect of this is the number of studies where the authors publicize results that are directly contradicted by their own studies, apparently for the same politically correct reasons.) The bottom line is this; can a person's weight be used to predict a heart attack? No. LDL cholesterol levels cannot be used either. The only physiological factor that can reliably predict a heart attack or stroke is high blood pressure and that only applies in a minority of cases. (If a direct family member had a heart attack before the age of 50, the odds of predicting a heart attack increase, but not by much.) You can begin with this study and explanation in English: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18421264[^] http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/08/japanese-researchers-find-no-support.html[^] Another interesting study: http://www.ahjonline.com/article/S0002-8703(08)00154-3/abstract[^]
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
They should have measured body fat percentages, not BMI. A moderately muscular athlete is going to have a BMI that is "too high". I'm not sure why people use BMI as a ruler. I guess because it's extremely easy to calculate, while body fat percentage is difficult to calculate. It's also worth noting that when most people lose weight, they aren't just losing fat, they're also losing muscle and bone mass. So if you lowered your BMI without maintaining you muscle mass, you might end up unhealthier than you were fat. This happens a lot when people go on fad diets, and don't exercise. The thing is, you can weight double, triple, or even more of you're "ideal" weight. What you can't do is weigh half or an third or a quarter of your ideal weight. Being "underweight" gets you into an "unhealthy" zone much quicker than going overweight does. For example, if you were 20 lbs underweight, you're facing a MUCH more serious health risk than being 20 pounds overweight. Then again, we're measuring weight where we ought to be measuring body fat. Body fat has a pretty hard minimum you can't cross, but no real maximum. What this DOESN'T mean is that you can weigh 350 pounds and be at less risk for heart disease than some skinny person. Most "skinny" people aren't underweight or anorexic. It's just that, relative to so many fat people, they seem that way. I'm from the south, and we're close to being 1/3rd obese down here. So I'm right in the middle "idea" weight (6'4" 180#), and everyone in my family thinks I'm too skinny, and need to gain weight. My scale I got from Sears says I'm at 17% body fat. It uses some radio waves to try and estimate it. I think that's pretty accurate -- maybe a little low. I'm lankier than most people my height, so I think it underestimates some. I could get down to something like 8% -- which would mean losing 16.2 pounds of fat. Assuming I didn't gain or lose any muscle mass, that would be about 165# -- which would be pretty lean for my height, but still squarely in the "ideal weight" zone. I'd have to get down to 150 to even cross the "underweight" threshold, which would mean having 1% body fat or less. Since that's realistically impossible to get to without dying, you'd have to assume I'd be losing muscle mass along with the fat, making me less healthy overall. I think that's pretty consistent with the study you listed, and also pretty consistent with the conventional thoughts on heart health.