Posted 08/25/2014 You must have read somewhere that every piece of research in the past few years has categorically shown the health benefits of walking or bicycling to work. If you live too far away from your workplace to make those options feasible, this Health Tip will make your day. With walking or cycling, your […]
Category: Weight Issues
MSG In The News Again (And A Personal Story)
It’s seems we’ve always been worrying ourselves about the health consequences of MSG, the world’s most popular flavor enhancer. That’s because monosodium glutamate has been around for more than a century, invented by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1909, when the professor extracted a substance from a species of seaweed and realized it had a […]
Diet Drug Controversies
The FDA recently approved two new weight-loss drugs and literally within hours of the drugs being officially released a pharmaceutical rep for one of the companies left his card with me and a patient called wanting a prescription. In the weeks that followed, full-page ads for the drugs began appearing in every medical journal I […]
The HCG Diet Actually Works
I imagine diet books began appearing worldwide shortly after the Gutenberg Bible hit the shelves. And ever since, physicians, nutritionists, alchemists, personal trainers, and others have attempted to convince us that their diet is the one that will change everything. All diets fail for the same reason, an assertion I base on my experience both […]
Chinese Medicine Tackles Your Weight Concerns
Despite all the hoopla about the “best” way to determine if we’re overweight–getting on a scale, BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, pants won’t button, body fat percentage–we ultimately rely on our intuition to let us know we feel fat. In other words, if you think you’re overweight or obese you probably are. Two-thirds of Americans are one […]
Overweight? Blame Your Car
The endless and usually irritating “which is better?” debate between city dwellers and suburbanites came to a grinding halt in 2003 when a study was published showing suburbanites were on average several pounds heavier than their urban counterparts.
Avoiding Holiday Weight Gain
The next two weeks are the year’s most dangerous when it comes to the radius of your waist, the width of your thighs, and the heft of your chins.
As I write, it’s two degrees below zero in Chicago and I think we can safely agree most of us won’t be jogging off the extra calories we’re facing from now into the new year. Driving to the health club in a winter storm is also a bit off-putting
Why We Get Fat: It’s Official
Don’t “Ho-ho-ho” me, Santa baby, with a “Because we eat too much.” While it’s true that overeating even a healthy diet will set you in the direction of being mistaken for the Michelin woman, it’s what you’re chowing down that really counts.
Women and Weight: Don’t Shoot the Messenger
During a typical week in the office, sometimes I think the number of women who tell me “I’m trying to lose weight” is equal to the very number of women patients I see.
48,328 Diet Books
That’s the number of titles that pops up when you enter “diet books” into amazon.com, and this reflects only books still in print. Diet books have been regularly published for more than 100 years, including such gems as the Cigarette Diet (“Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”), The Drinking Man’s Diet, The Beautiful People’s Diet, and even The Eskimo Diet.
Exercise and Weight Loss
The Time Magazine article that ran last week was food for thought for people who exercise regularly. Let’s face it, many of us who work out aren’t doing so to boost mood, enhance mental skills, prevent Alzheimer’s disease, or reduce heart attack risk–all of which exercise does–but rather to lose weight.
Trimming the Tummy Fat
Click here for the Health Tip link. Last week we talked about how stress, which triggers cortisol production, plays a role in accumulating tummy fat. But of course other factors are involved. Some you can fix, others you pretty much have to live with. For example: • Menopause changes metabolism, predisposing you to weight gain. […]
Where Did This Tummy Fat Come From?
Click here for the Health Tip link. Now that the swine flu appears to be playing itself out, we can take up a health concern that I am asked about at least ten times a week, always by women and always with various degrees of desperation in their voices. “I never had this before!,” she’ll […]
Chitosan
The shells of crabs, lobsters, and other crustaceans contain a nondigestible fiber called chitosan. Extracted and taken in supplement form with meals, chitosan reportedly encourages weight loss by binding to fat molecules in the digestive tract, preventing the body from absorbing the fat.
Weight Loss
On some days, dealing with problems of excessive weight seems to represent the (pardon the pun) bulk of patient complaints. Some of these concerns are genuine: Real obesity does predispose you to a variety of health risks. Understanding the whole issue of being overweight is more complicated than you’d think. Genetics play a part, as does individual metabolism. And don’t forget your environment. There’s no question that for some of us losing weight is hard–and frustrating. We live in a land abundant with good things to eat and everywhere we go, someone is snacking on something.
Something New for Weight Loss
Click here for the original post. Even though I’m a doctor who specializes in nutritional medicine, the article in The Journal of Nutrition was a technically difficult read. It discussed how combining the antioxidant resveratrol (the compound found in grapes, purple grape juice, red wine, peanuts, and certain berries) with genistein (a soy isoflavone) reduced […]
Obesity by Infection
Here’s a topic I suspect you’ll be reading more about during the next year. For some overweight people (though certainly not all), the villain is not overeating, or even eating the wrong foods, but rather certain bacteria or viruses in the intestines that change the way food is absorbed.