Lap band surgery

According to a latest report by Japanese researchers, doing exercise with breaks can burn higher amount of fat for us as compared to doing it continuously. Report says that we have much more chances of losing extra fat when we do exercise workouts with rest in between.

American College of Sports Medicine suggests modest exercise for 45 minutes to burn extra fat. But this study shows that we have better chances of losing fat if we keep some rest period between our exercise programs (From Medical News Today).

So far I believe in doing exercise for hours without any rest. But now I have a solid reason to have some rest between my exercises. Now I hope I will be able to concentrate more on doing exercise regularly and for longer hours with some rest period in between.

According to a latest Harvard and California University, our chances of getting obese increase by 57 percent if my best friend is an obese. For this researchers studied more than 12000 various friends network for 32 years and also monitored their weights during this interval (From Yahoo news).

According to the researchers, weight gain in person has direct effect on weight gain in other people in the friend’s circle.

Also if any of husband or wife becomes obese, the chances of other were getting obese increases by 37 percent.

This is the first ever study that shows how obesity spreads with social networks and from friends to other friends.

We all need to slow down this wide spread of obesity by eating healthy and doing exercise regularly.

NBC show “Biggest Loser” ideas are seems to be spreading in many offices where employees are more concerned about their obesity and employers about the overweight employees cost.

Agora Inc, a newsletter publishing company in Baltimore, offered one such 12 weeks “biggest loser” contest. The prize for the winners was $1000 for top male, female and team category.

During this 12 weeks period, 84 employees were able to lose around 1000 pounds. Two of the employees in Agora Inc were able to lose more than 40 pounds.

The goal of such programs in offices is to increases employees health, more productivity and lower employees costs (From BBC NEWS).

According to a latest study, the eating pattern of a pregnant women may tell us whether their child will be overweight latter in life. The study conducted by British and New Zealand scientists states that that women who do not take care of their eating or do not eat properly, their children are have higher chances of putting on weight later in their life. Read the complete story at Women poor diets effect on her kid

This AP article via the Washington Post is typical of many articles that have been reporting on a recent study of 9,000 observations of middle-aged men and women which was published Monday online in the journal Circulation.

The study has reported that “People who drank one or more diet sodas each day developed the same risks for heart disease as those who downed sugary regular soda.”

Needless to say this is somewhat of a surprising result since it’s definitely counter intuitive that the diet colas would have the same impact as fully sweetened sodas given the massive calories contained in the latter. Not surprisingly, a representative from the American Beverage Association opined:  "How can something with zero calories that's 99 percent water with a little flavoring in it ... cause weight gain?"

Still, the study found those who “drank one or more sodas a day diet or regular had an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, compared to those who drank sodas infrequently. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that increase the risk for heart disease including large waistlines and higher levels of blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and blood fats called triglycerides.”

Some of the theories being put forth are as follows:

1.      Adverse selection problems.  One contingent of diet soda drinkers are already overweight and drink diet sodas in an attempt to keep from gaining more.  Their link to heart disease is due to their overweight status, not the fact that they drink diet sodas.

2.      Diet sodas condition the palette to sweetness and users over consume non diet sweetened products elsewhere in their dietary intake, increasing weight gain and heart disease.

3.      There is something about diet drinks that we don’t understand.

Still, according to the article, the American Heart Association still condones the use of diet sodas as part of a program to control weight.

In our opinion, the most useful function of diet drinks is to help wean yourself off of regular fully sweetened soft drinks.  If you are still drinking fully sweetened soft drinks you are definitely not serious about losing weight.  However, once you have successfully accomplished this goal, the next step should be to replace diet drinks with, yes you guessed it, water.  Over time, you can adjust your palette so that ice water or carbonated ice water is just as refreshing as diet sodas.  And when you drink water you don’t have to be concerned with the caffeine content, availability, or the risk that this recent study  may in fact be correct.  Dribbling a little orange juice into soda water over ice can also be a refreshing low calorie and healthful drink.