That's Fit

I've said before that I wish there was a way to ration myself a handful of M&Ms or a small serving of something sweet a day. But I can't keep that stuff in the house because when it comes to chocolate, I just don't have enough self-control. So (perhaps sadly), I can get behind the idea of the Chococlock.

Every hour on the hour, the clock offers up a piece of chocolate. You've got 30 seconds to grab it, then it's gone until the next hour. The fatal flaw with this product, however, is the cheat button. Doesn't anyone understand how a chocoholic works? I'd have that cheat button worn out in no time.

Thankfully, there's a free way to keep a handle on overdoing the sweets. Leave them at the store. Studies show that if you leave tempting food in your line of sight, you're far more likely to eat it. When I want a treat, I go out and buy one, but control my cravings by only buying a single serving every time.

How to you keep your cravings for your favorite treats under control?

It's still pretty summery in most places but soon enough fall and winter will be here, which means instead of cranking the A/C on your way to work you'll be hitting the seat-warmer switch.

Or maybe you'll want to think twice about that...

A recent study in Germany found that the heated seats found in more and more vehicles as a luxury option are not only heating people's chilly bums but they're also essentially cooking men's privates and causing them to have significantly lower sperm counts.

Of course this is really only an issue for guys who are trying to have a baby, in which case experts recommend wearing loose undies, making frequent stops on long trips, and trying to use the heated seats as little as possible.

Via Autoblog

Strokes can be debilitating at best, deadly at worst. But for those who've survived a stroke, new research shows that there is one important thing they can do to help their brain facilitate positive changes: Exercise. And we're not talking about running weekly marathons here--walking on the treadmill as little as three times a week can significantly improve mobility and physical conditioning.

What's more, patients don't need to start an exercise regime immediately after their stroke -- Starting a workout program any time after a stroke was beneficial. In fact, one patient showed improvement after exercising 20 years after his stroke.

Man, is there anything a good workout can't do?

CancerProject.org recently put out an ad about the connection between colon cancer and processed meats. The ad (which you can watch below) depicts school kids announcing that they have colon cancer, interspersed with images of hot dogs, pizza, and sliced ham, which are all common hot lunch offerings. Studies show that adults who frequently eat processed meats have an increased risk of developing colon cancer.

Critics point out that the children in the ad don't actually have cancer, something some may find misleading. They also say that studies have been done on adults, not children, and that an occasional hot dog hasn't been implicated in an increased risk of the disease.

But here's my argument. Kids who eat hot lunch every day AREN'T getting an occasional serving of processed meat. They're eating them every day. The menu at our school reads like this: hot dog, pizza, meat gravy, chicken nuggets, sliced ham... all with french fries or mashed potatoes. Every week. Though there might not be a direct link between these kinds of meals and colon cancer, this is obviously poor nutrition, and we're serving it to millions of school kids every day.

I'm not sure how I feel about this ad, but I do think our hot lunch programs need a serious overhaul. What do you think?

One of the more common pieces of weight loss advice out there is, "Use a smaller plate." The idea is that your plate will look fuller, and you'll eat fewer calories. (I actually think this is a really good piece of advice. My current dishware includes some GIGANTIC dinner plates which look really bare, even when "full" of the proper amount of food.) Two authors have taken this idea and created a diet out of it, to be shared in the upcoming book "The 9-Inch Diet."

Since you don't need to read an entire book to understand how using a smaller plate may reduce your portion sizes, there has to be more to the diet than that. According to the book description, "Bogusky and Porter run what is arguably the most creative advertising agency in the country, if not the world. With years of experience manipulating the masses, two of the best tricksters in the industry explain how you as a consumer are being duped, and how you are actually a part of the conspiracy to make you fat."

I'm intrigued. (How ironic is an ad man named Bogusky?) It might be worth a read just to find out how we're being duped into overeating, but I can't imagine that, as far as diet advice goes, they've got anything new to share. Have you tried using a smaller plate or bowl? Did it work for you?

(via Diet-Blog)

You exercise, you eat right, you get a good night's sleep, and you try to stay organized; you're doing everything you can to manage your own stress. But what if you work with someone who isn't managing stress well?

Regardless of where you might work, there are a lot of reasons for stress in today's workplace -- threats of layoff, increased workload due to reduced staffing, and so on. When you add in all the non-work-related causes of stress, it's no wonder some people aren't managing the pressure well. And, no matter how well you handle stress, when a co-worker is stressing you'll be affected by it.

So what can you do to help a stressed out co-worker? As long as you don't take on the reasons for their stress (e.g. taking their workload), it's a good thing to help out. And, if you happen to be the boss, it's imperative that you do so in order to maintain a positive workplace and to prevent productivity from slipping. Some ideas:

Prenuptial agreements are traditionally drawn up to protect parties in the case the marriage fails and they need to divide their assets. But according to Michelle Andrews, over at U.S. News & World Report, lawyers are increasingly seeing prenups that include clauses related to health.

Some potential spouses want to be assured their betrothed won't gain weight or pick up smoking. Others want a guarantee on how many times a week they'll have sex or, in one case, put a weight restriction on physical intimacy. Of course, these clauses aren't legally enforceable, but I suppose if your fiance asks you to agree to them, then you know up front exactly what you're getting into.

We all want our spouses and partners to take good care of themselves. But putting healthy habits on a legal contract? That feels controlling and manipulative to me, not emotions you want to feel when you're saying "I do, till death to us part." I'd have run, far and fast, if my husband had approached me with one of these.

What about you? Are you willing to put your health requirements on paper? Or does this give you the same icky feeling it does me?

I used to be vigilant about exercising every morning... and it felt great. I started my day out with energy and a sense of accomplishment. After adopting my son, however, my schedule has changed and my morning exercise has become sporadic at best. I've vowed to get back on the bandwagon when he returns to school next week, though. Our schedule will be changing naturally -- so it's a good time for me to get my morning self in gear again.

Divine Caroline offers some great inspiration with five reasons to start the day with a workout:

• Better performance at work.
  
• A metabolism boost throughout the day.
• A better night's sleep.
• Increased likelihood to stick with it.
• A happier outlook.

Check out the original article for details. Then, set that alarm clock a little bit earlier and get your move on in the am.

Welcome to the Good, the Fat and the Hungry. I'm Karla and I have been -- or am -- all those things. Here, I will share with you my lifelong struggle with my weight and I hope you'll follow along on with my determined attempt to lose nearly 40 pounds. I promise to tell you every win and setback along the way every Tuesday and Friday.

Rejection made me fat.

I was accused of cheating and having an adult help me write an essay in a contest to be MC at the 2nd and 3rd grade talent show. The essay in the words of my principal was, "too good to come from the mind of a seven-year-old." But I did write it. On all I love, I promise I wrote it with no help at all. My parents fought tooth and nail but to no avail. My essay was disqualified.

This was my first taste of rejection. It is also the first binge incited by pain that I can recall. It was the opening of the hole in me that would get deeper, blacker and wider. My attempts to eat the pain away and fill this hole with food added stress, pounds and an insecurity that would keep me from loving anyone, including me.

Thirty years later and down in the hole along with the essay pain were failed relationships, credit denials, car repossessions, promotions I didn't get, a stillborn and a thousand other pieces of rejection. The hole had become me. I got fatter, the hole got bigger and I ate more. As I got fatter, the hole got deeper, and I ate even more.

(Enter gastric bypass from stage left.)

We've been told that sandwiches may not be the best meal choice. Often slathered in fatty condiments like mayonnaise, or piled with enough servings of salty deli meat, laden with nitrites, to feed your entire family, they just don't seem to make much sense in a health-conscious world.

You don't have to give up eating sandwiches if you want to eat healthily -- really! You can make your sandwich and eat it, too... with a few alterations.

• Try sprouted grain bread, like Food for Life's Ezekiel Bread. The live grains make it a better source of protein and more digestible than most breads.
• Choose your portions wisely. Your sandwich doesn't have to look like something Joey from Friends would eat; start by using 80% of the fillings you would normally use, and cut down from there depending on your hunger.
• Use whole foods inside your sandwich: fresh veggies, naturally raised meats without preservatives (try Applegate Farms) and condiments like guacamole, salsa, mustard, even plain yogurt, in lieu of the mayonnaise.

Jennifer Love Hewitt might have a body that many of us envy, but she sees a big difference between her body now and when she was younger. She even went so far as to say she wishes she had been nude from 12 to 28!

Pregnancy is tough on all bodies, and Laila Ali had a concern that many moms to be experience -- she was afraid that, since she was already a "big girl," that pregnancy would make her huge! That's not exactly the case, though -- check out how she's handling pregnancy right here.

If you're not watching Burn Notice on Thursday nights, you're missing out. Not just because it's action-packed and witty, but because Gabrielle Anwar plays one kick-ass character. To get ready for the role, she made a few changes to her diet, and many other celebs have made similar dietary changes.

Should your apple sparkle like a diamond before you take a bite or should you remove commercial grade wax added by apple packers before that delectable crunch?

Except for apple pie and applesauce, I always eat the peel. So what about that wax ... is it trapping pesticides? Is it necessary? Why wax in the first place?

According to Julie's Health Club, the U.S. Apple Association and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), here are a few apple wax facts:

• Used on fruits/veggies since the 1920s, different waxes applied to produce are allegedly safe to eat, says the FDA.
  
• Apples possess a natural wax, which is mostly lost after post-harvest cleaning methods.
• Waxing apples facilitates earlier harvest and longer storage, but earlier picking also means fewer vitamins/minerals.
  
• One expert shares that to scrub wax off -- and any pesticides lurking beneath -- add a tablespoon of lemon juice and a tablespoon of baking soda to a sinkful of water. But watch out, that germ-ridden kitchen sink is the worst place to set fruit before washing it!
  
• Scrub apples under lukewarm water with a vegetable brush, says the U.S. Apple Association.
• The FDA also offers a set of recommendations on how to wash, scrub and dry various produce before eating.

Apple wax on or wax off? Let us know in the poll below. At the very least, elbow grease burns calories.

We all have body fat. It's necessary for proper body function. While a healthy percentage of body fat varies greatly, according to the American College of Sports Medicine a healthy range for women under 40 is 20-35%, for men 8-22%. (The ranges change for those over 40 and for fitness standards.)

But a recent study reveals that one fat cell isn't necessarily like another. In obese people, fat cells appear "sick."

Compared to fat cells taken from lean people, the fat cells from obese people were deficient in several ways. For example, the endoplasmic reticulum -- which helps cells synthesize proteins -- was stressed in the fat cells of obese people. This stress of the endoplasmic reticulum could inhibit or change the body's production of protein and could lead to insulin resistance (a contributing factor for obesity).

I don't know how celebrities do it, how they drop loads of baby weight in no time at all. Wasn't so easy for me to melt away my 50 and then 42 pounds. Somehow, though, it seems effortless for people like Jessica Alba, whose trainer is sharing the secret to her 25-pound post-baby weight loss.

It took just two months for Alba to shed 25 pounds after giving birth to daughter Honor Marie. Two months to go from a size eight to a size four, thanks to a low-fat, low-carb diet. Trainer Ramona Braganza calls it her 321 Baby Bulge Be Gone plan and in addition to a healthy diet, Alba is sweating a lot. The 27-year-old is using an elliptical machine and treadmill at home and keeps a regular routine of core exercises and circuit training.

Six days a week Alba is working out. Maybe that's how she's made such great progress in a very short time. And why I didn't -- there's no way I could have devoted six days to hard-core fitness, with fussy newborns, sleepless nights, and my full-time mommy job. I'm good now, though -- seven years after I had my first baby. Patience, my friends. Patience.

We finally cleaned out our garage the other day and dug out from piles of debris a bunch of workout equipment. My husband bought it all not long ago, we used it for a bit, and then it somehow got buried. Boxes sat on the weight bench. Swimming towels hung from the pull-up bar. And the weights, well, they were painted with a layer of dust. No more is this the case, though. Nope, our garage looks more like a gym now than it does a storage unit and all four of us Donaldson folks are pretty inspired by the fitness potential lurking just outside our kitchen door.

Strength training has always been my weakness when it comes to exercise. I love to run, walk, and swim but I typically lack motivation for building muscle. Our new home gym is helping. Today, I ran a 3.5-mile loop around town and topped things off with a mini-garage workout. Did the same yesterday after my swim. Plan to keep on doing it. My husband, somehow lean and fit without much purposeful exercise, was out in the garage last night. I caught him doing loads of pull-ups -- how does he do them so effortlessly? -- and after his full routine, he was drenched in sweat. The most promising effect of our garage renovation, though, is how it's got our kids pumped up about pumping up. Five-year-old Danny tells us he wants to be a wrestler when he grows up. "That's why I'm working out," he says. And Joey, seven years old and a master at a perfect push-up, is working pretty hard too. His dad spots him on pull-ups, and I saw him cranking out some bench press reps last night too.

We're thinking evenings will be our family workout time, when we're all home and can work on a productive -- and healthy -- goal together. If this sounds like fun to you, why not clean out your garage? Oh, and be careful if you're including kids in your fitness follies. Our boys have rules. Number one: They can't touch any equipment without mom or dad present to assist them.