Sources: weight loss tips
Losing weight and getting fit preoccupied Americans in 2009:
- Nearly one out of two American women, including high school girls, were on a diet.
- Over 40 billion was spent on branded diet plans.
- Children as young as 9 to 11 years old were sometimes or very often dieting.
Yet an epidemic of obesity continues to affect more people than ever before:
- Less than a third of adults enjoyed normal weight.
- Children were two to three times more likely to be overweight today than they were 30 years ago.
Can we begin to reverse these worrisome trends in 2010?
We can if we update our old views with new ways to look at fitness in the coming year.
Old View: It's hopeless! Efforts to lose weight are inevitably doomed to fail. Even if a person manages to lose weight, he or she will eventually regain the weight and add back even more.
New View: You can do it! Strategies for making healthier choices involving diet, physical conditioning and improved self-care are available to you and can be learned. Championing this view is Kelly Brownell, Ph. D., who heads the LEARN Program for Weight Management at Yale University. And thanks to widespread access to the Internet, peer counseling in online communities is expanding. Internet support may include food and exercise diaries, weekly counseling, online weight-loss lessons and motivational phone calls.
Old View: Thin is in! Most individuals, especially women, seek to lose weight because they have internalized the media's ultrathin ideal.
New View: Healthy is in! Health is replacing vanity as the primary reason for pursuing fitness and weight loss. In 2009, researchers reported that four healthy habits could reduce or eliminate 80 percent of major medical problems: eating a healthy diet, not smoking, exercising regularly and maintaining a normal body weight. This insight, combined with rising medical costs, is triggering a focus on fitness.
Old View: If you are fat, you are a bad person. Obesity is a personal problem caused by a lack of willpower.
New View: Obesity is a disease that is treatable. The cost of providing medical care per person has skyrocketed from $356 in 1970 to $8,160 in 2009. Moreover, in 2009, the cost of treating obesity-related medical problems reached $147 billion. Given these costs, obesity has become a public health concern requiring a multifaceted community-based approach. In response, community leaders in Albert Lea, Minnesota, implemented a comprehensive lifestyle program to improve the health and longevity of the city's residents. To increase employee productivity and reduce health insurance costs and absenteeism, corporate wellness programs are proliferating.
Old View: Low-fat diets are required to lose weight. Eating fat makes a person fat. To lose weight, a dieter needs to stick with low- or no-fat foods.
New View: Total calories actually determine weight. The total calories consumed by a person, whether from carbs, fats or proteins, determines weight. Since the goal is a balanced diet, the Mediterranean diet, which includes healthy fats, is recommended by the Mayo Clinic and the American Heart Association as a nutritionally sound and healthy eating plan. Nuts, which until recently were on dieters' “do not eat” lists, are making a comeback because of their health benefits, especially almonds, walnuts, cashews, pecans and macadamia nuts. Momentum is growing for mandating information on the caloric content of fast foods and food products.
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Old View: Medical intervention is needed. Weight-loss drugs or bariatric surgery can solve the problem of surplus pounds for many people, and advances in medicine can address obesity-related problems such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer.
New View: A healthy lifestyle is the best way. Prevention, rather than treatment of obesity-related medical problems, will move to the forefront because of the rising cost of medical insurance and healthcare. While the number of bariatric surgeries will continue to skyrocket, family physicians will increasingly write exercise prescriptions in lieu of drug prescriptions.
Old View: Ignore overweight children. Children who are overweight will outgrow their chubbiness, so kids' surplus pounds can be ignored.
New View: Help overweight children now! Dr. Robert Murray, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on School Health, is alarmed that nearly half of kids and teens are overweight or obese and, as a consequence, children's life expectancies are lower than their parents'. Treating childhood obesity is a serious medical problem that if ignored will place the child at risk for heart disease, diabetes and other serious medical conditions.
Old View: Don't ask, don't tell. Asking employees to modify their unhealthful behavior is an invasion of privacy and violates employees' right to choose their own lifestyle.
New View: Offer help, incentives and access to experts. In 2008, medical insurance premiums reached a record $15,609 for a family of four. Employers are proactively seeking to reduce costs (medical insurance, workers' compensation claims and absenteeism) by restructuring benefit programs. In increasing numbers, employees are being offered incentives to quit smoking or lose weight. They face penalties if they refuse to change habits that drive up the cost of healthcare.
Old View: Hard-core exercise one hour daily. Going to a gym daily for a 60-minute workout on a treadmill and resistance equipment is the best way to exercise.
New View: Diversity, fun and enjoyment. Thanks to popular television programs, dancing for fitness is back, particularly Zumba, a one-hour workout that fuses Latin rhythms with calorie-burning dance movements. Exergaming, such as Wii and Dance Dance Revolution, continues to grow in popularity with young and old alike. Michelle Obama has made the Hula-Hoop popular once again. The use of technologically sophisticated feedback gadgets, from pedometers to heart monitors, will expand. To attract members to the gym during tough economic times, more fitness centers will offer cardio cinema so members can watch a movie while exercising.
Will we continue to get fatter until 2018 when, according to research by Kenneth Thorpe, PhD, of Emory University, 40 percent of us will be obese (and another 33 percent overweight)?
If we are to succeed in reversing the obesity trends and mounting medical care costs, we'll have to find new approaches. And the more readily we learn from the past and update our understanding of the complex nature and causes of obesity, the more quickly we can successfully move into a healthy future.
Blocking a single enzyme leads to increased energy expenditure and loss of body fat — at least in mice, researchers said.
Mice treated with a compound that blocks the so-called Fyn kinase expended 14% more energy than animals treated with an inert compound, according to Claire Bastie, PhD, and colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
They also displayed a significant weight loss within 12 hours of receiving the compound, compared with animals given the inert substance, Bastie and colleagues reported in the Feb. 3 issue of Cell Metabolism.
“This is a new mechanism to help the body to burn extra energy,” Bastie said in a statement.
The Fyn kinase has previously been linked to energy use: animals with the enzyme blocked burn more fatty acids and are leaner than their normal littermates, Bastie and colleagues noted.
Those animals also had increased insulin sensitivity, the researchers said, but the absence of the enzyme did not block the normal anabolic processes of protein synthesis and muscle growth during the feeding cycle.
The findings suggested that drugs blocking the enzyme might have a significant effect on energy balance and weight, they theorized.
To test the idea, they turned to wild-type mice and a compound called SU6656, a known inhibitor of the Src family of tyrosine kinases, of which Fyn is a member.
The mice spent spent 48 hours getting used to a so-called metabolic chamber, which allows researchers to monitor energy intake and expenditure. Then the compound was administered via intraperitoneal injection.
Control animals got injections of an inert substance, the researchers said. The shots were given at the beginning of the light cycle, when the animals are least active.
Both groups showed identical carbohydrate use during the dark cycle (when they are most active) that preceded the injection.
After the injection, the control animals reduced energy use as their bodies switched to the normal lipid production seen during the light cycle.
The treated animals, on the other hand, continued to expend energy at a rate that was significantly greater (P<0.0098) than the controls, although there was no significant difference in physical activity.
Because mice eat 80% of their calories during the dark cycle, they have a daily pattern of weight loss and gain, Bastie and colleagues noted, so that 12 hours after the start of the light cycle — when they had been given the shots — their weight was lowest.
But the SU6656-treated mice had a 40% greater weight loss than the control group, a difference that was significant at P<0.003.
Lean mass was slightly reduced in all the animals, Bastie and colleagues said, but without significant differences between groups. On the other hand, fat mass was significantly reduced (P<0.05) in the SU6656-treated mice, they found.
The metabolic effect of the inhibitor appears to be specific to Fyn, because it had no effect on mice lacking the enzyme, the researchers noted.
Unfortunately, SU6656 itself isn't a good choice for clinical trials of the idea in humans, Bastie said, because the Fyn kinase affects the brain, as well as muscle and fat tissue.
“Our next goal,” she said, “is to design something extremely specific to muscle and adipose.”
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