This year in Japan, the government started regulating the size of people’s waistlines. Really.
Without that kind of incentive in Orange County, how do the countless people (including Oprah) make good on their resolutions to drop pounds in 2009?
Here are some of our tips and resources for keeping off the fat. Read on for some other interesting weight-related news in 2008. And just so you know you’re not alone, read about Oprah’s resolution.
Resources:
- Discovery Health National Body Challenge: This free online fitness and weight-loss challenge provides the tools and online support to get in shape. Participants receive customized meal plans, fitness regimen, an online support community, weight and fitness trackers and interactive and video tools for losing weight.
- New York Times health blogger Tara Parker-Pope recommends web resources that help people lose weight, including search engines that will help you find healthy recipes and sites that can help track your weight goals.
- I love Hungry Girl’s blog for low-calorie recipes. The blog offers great suggestions for substituting low-fat and low-calorie ingredients in your favorite recipes.
Tips:
- Eating healthy can be tough when finances are tight and picking up a bean and cheese burrito from Taco Bell is a lot cheaper than grabbing a salad at Baja Fresh. The website Divine Caroline offers a list of the 20 healthiest foods for less than $1. The list includes oats, spinach, coffee and kale, among others. But preparing the foods on the list is going to take a little longer than a couple minutes through a drive-through window.
- Stay away from gimmicks and too-good-to-be-true weight loss products. Register Columnist Jane Glenn Haas writes about some of the most egregious products in this week’s column. Among the worst offenders on her list: Kevin Trudeau infomercials. ( He was fined more than $7 million for deceptive infomercials on his weight loss book). Skineez jeans ($139) that supposedly release “medication” through friction and that reduces cellulite. AbGONE, with drug-like claims that it increases “fat metabolism and calorie burn.” Also, stay tuned throughout the year to our Human Lab Rat feature, in which we review health products. Coming up later this week — a cream that’s supposed to melt away fat.
- Stick to the basics. Eating right and exercising is a time-tested way to keep off the pounds.
- If you’re trying to help someone else shed weight, Register reporter Courtney Perkes suggests a good approach.
There’s plenty of research published every year about staying fit and losing weight. But we thought these reports were particularly interesting.
- Cash incentives help dieters to lose weight: A study published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that when people are offered cash incentives to shed pounds, they are more likely to achieve their weight loss goals. The amount of cash is less important to impacting weight loss than the immediacy of the payoff, shows the study by Kevin G. Volpp, MD, PhD, director for health incentives at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, and colleagues. And when participants were weighed again three months after the cash flow stopped, many of the dieters had begun to regain the weight. So according to a WebMD article about the study, more research is needed into the long term effects of cash-incentive dieting.
- The downfalls of dieting. A study published earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine followed a group of moderately obese people over two years in which some followed a low-carb diet and others reduced their calorie and fat consumption. The study was co-sponsored by the Adkins Research Foundation and was supposed to prove that low-carb diets are better than low-fat ones. But the more interesting results showed that dieting was a lot of trouble for not much payoff — participants only lost an average of six to 10 pounds.
- The best way to determine who’s at a higher risk for hypertension, diabetes and elevated cholesterol? Waist size. That’s according to an analysis published in March in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in March. So earlier this year, Japan set a national law limiting the girth of its residents’ waistlines. According to a New York Times article, men must measure in at less than 33.5 inches, women at less than 35.4 inches.
How cash and kale can help you (and Oprah) lose weight in 2009 is a post from: Healthy Living - The Orange County Register
