There are many ways to diet for weight loss but every single one of them require reducing caloric intake. Every diet, every diet book, and every diet guru merely promotes a way of making calorie reduction palatable. This is done by making recipes that supplant the many trigger foods or components, like sugar, fats, whiteRead More
Fitness Blog
Why Walk When You Can Sit?
I”m pretty sure by now that you can figure out where this blog post is going: Here he comes again talking about sedentariness vs being physically active. You’d be close in making that guess, but wrong. This week in national political news, Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican from Arizona, announced from the Senate floor why he’sRead More
From Music to Muscles
Many studies have explored the effects of music on human emotions and motions. We’ve all had some experience with songs that revive the soul, allowing certain memories or feelings from way back to reammerge. Music, about which I know so little, also has medicinal value. As this summary by Gracy Liura, a blogger who writes onRead More
King of Hearts: The One Bet That’s Well Worth It
Last summer I went to the American College of Sports Medicine (www.acsm.org) Annual Meeting in Denver where I sat in on a lecture about the dangers of overexercise. The doctor who presented it was from a Midwestern City University where he’d seen many patients come in with cardiac troubles from shoveling snow. His basic thesisRead More
Part 2: Sane Weight Loss: The 2/3 Diet
In Part 1 of this two part series, I discussed the two articles on dieting and my experience speaking with professionals who help those with eating disorders resume/restore a healthy/healthier relationship with food…and exercise. I wrote about how difficult it is to lose weight for those who are overweight, and how challenging it is for eatingRead More
Part 1: Sane Weight Loss: The 2/3 Diet
Normally I don’t get so worked up about weight loss but this article in the WaPo, “Intermittent fasting vs daily calorie-cutting diets: Both help you lose weight”, on top of last night’s gathering at Table 3 on behalf of the Renfrew Center’s 10th year in Nashville has me thinking diet. Generally, as a trainer ofRead More
Guts, Bugs and Health
There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the latest trends in wellness, especially if you’re healthy. You see, maybe your health is a function of those bugs in your gut, and not just good fortune, good genes or good habits. You’ve probably been reading more articles about our microbiota, those gut bacteria whichRead More
How athletes age – like the rest of us
The NYT fitness writer added some more fodder to the aging well discussion with an article that summarized the results of a study of elite athletes from 50 years ago. As one might expect, these old coots were still pretty fit, retaining higher-than-average aerobic capacities compared to others in their now-older age group. But they stillRead More
Running and Knee Arthritis
For starters, let’s separate the two main arthritises we often conflate. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an auto-immune disease whereby the body mistakenly attacks itself as if the target tissue is an outside threat. In the case of RA, the cartilage which protects the ends of bones that make up a joint get damaged during anRead More
Genes, Genomics and Common Sense
Whilst on vacation in Philadelphia visiting my daughter, Sophia, who’s studying at Penn to be a nurse practitioner, this article came to my email address. As usual, with Western science, reductionism grabs the agenda. That is, the search for the gene that makes people gain excess weight drives not just research but also Big Pharma.Read More