The research is stupid because this is for women NOT cutting calories.

So, stay with me, a women who eats whatever she wants is the type to exercise for one hour a day.

It’s stupid, stupid, stupid.

Weight loss is 75% diet, 25% exercise. As my firm has been saying for years,

“You Cannot Out Train A Bad Diet.”

it just doesn’t work and only leads to injury and then the weight REALLY piles on.

Jim

No Matter What, We Pay for Others’ Bad Habits
By SANDEEP JAUHAR, M.D.
Published: March 29, 2010

“I’m tired of paying for everyone else’s stupidity,” is a comment I read on the Internet last week after the health care bill was passed. It summed up the views of many Americans worried about shelling out higher premiums and taxes to cover the uninsured. Why should we pick up the tab when so much disease in our country stems from unhealthy behavior like smoking and overeating?

In fact, the majority of Americans say it is fair to ask people with unhealthy lifestyles to pay more for health insurance. We believe in the concept of personal responsibility. You hear it in doctors’ lounges and in coffee shops, among the white collar and blue collar alike. Even President Obama has said, “We’ve got to have the American people doing something about their own care.”

But personal responsibility is a complex notion, especially when it comes to health. Individual choices always take place within a broader, messy context. When people advocate the need for personal accountability, they presuppose more control over health and sickness than really exists.

Unhealthy habits are one factor in disease, but so are social status, income, family dynamics, education and genetics. Patient noncompliance with medical recommendations undoubtedly contributes to poor health, but it is as much a function of poor communication, medication costs and side effects, cultural barriers and inadequate resources as it is of willful disregard of a doctor’s advice.

A few years ago surgeons in Melbourne, Australia, were refusing to provide heart and lung surgeries to smokers, even those who needed the operations to stay alive. “Why should taxpayers pay for it?” said one surgeon quoted in media reports at the time. “It is consuming resources for someone who is contributing to their own demise.”

Though some were outraged by this stance — the Australian Medical Association called it “unconscionable” to ration services based on personal habits — many doctors agreed with it. Like the majority of Americans, they saw nothing wrong with patients paying for the consequences of their actions.

The problem is that punitive measures to force healthy behavior do not usually work. In 2006, West Virginia started rewarding Medicaid patients who signed a pledge to enroll in a wellness plan and to follow their doctors’ orders with special benefits, including unlimited prescription-drug coverage, programs to help them quit smoking and nutrition counseling. Those who did not sign up were enrolled in a more restrictive plan that, among other things, limited drug coverage to only four prescriptions a month.

The program, by many accounts, is failing. As of August 2009, only 15 percent of 160,000 eligible patients had signed up. Patients with limited transportation options were having a hard time committing to regular office visits. And experts say there is no evidence that restricting benefits for non compliant patients has promoted healthy behaviors.

As a cardiology fellow, I once took care of a young man with severe congestive heart failure. We were supposed to start him on a blood thinner early in his hospitalization, but it got overlooked. Fed up with the delays in getting his blood sufficiently thinned, he left the hospital against medical advice. He said he had to go home to care for his toddler.

He came to the clinic a week later looking very embarrassed. He had left without prescriptions, so he had been taking no medications since he left, leaving him short of breath. To compound the problem, he had been eating cold cuts, cheap and readily available, which made his condition even worse. But the attending physician refused to give him prescriptions. She said that he had to go to a walk-in clinic. She said he had to learn personal responsibility.

Healthy living should be encouraged, but punishing patients who make poor health choices clearly oversimplifies a very complex issue. We should be focusing on public health campaigns: encouraging exercise, smoking cessation and so on. Of course, this will require a change in how we live, how we plan our communities.

“It’s the context of people’s lives that determines their health,” said a World Health Organization report on health disparities. “So blaming individuals for poor health or crediting them for good health is inappropriate.”

I must admit I often feel like my colleagues who grouse about spending all day treating patients who do not seem to care about their health and then demand a quick fix. I do not relish paying more taxes to treat patients who engage in unhealthy habits. But then I remind myself that we all engage in socially irresponsible behavior that others pay for. I try to eat right and get enough exercise. But then I also sometimes send text messages when I drive.

The whole point of insurance is to reduce risk. When people inveigh against the lack of personal responsibility in health care, they are really demanding a different model, one based on actual risk, not just on spreading costs evenly through society. Sick people, they are really saying, should pay more. Which model we eventually adopt in this country will say a lot about the kind of society we want to live in.

Sandeep Jauhar is a cardiologist and the author of “’Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation.”

If you can believe it, the average woman USED to weigh 144 in the 1970s.

Now, she weighs 164 pounds.

That would all be reversed by eating 500 less calories a day.

It’s a lot easier than you think. Just cut out:

1. Liquid calories
2. Oil
3. Excessive processed carbs
4. Virtually all fast food

Try it and you will see and feel the difference.

Jim

Take a look at the paragraph from an article today in the “New York Times:”

The statistical evidence has been clear for years, but it bears repeating. Studies show that 50 percent to 70 percent of the nation’s health care costs are preventable. Much of that expense goes to treat a few chronic conditions that are closely linked to behavior, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer. Bad genes and bad luck matter, of course. But behavior — exercise and choice of diet — matters most.

That’s a pretty staggering statistic and a good reason to get all the wrong food out of your home, office, church, temple, community, etc.

Jim

I’m getting a lot of comments on and off this site on the issue of sitting all day.

Since we are on the subject, here are my personal travel rules, since I am on the road so often:

1. NO escalators, elevators or moving walkways. I have to climb and walk all the time, and since I travel with rolling carry on, it’s not a big deal.

2. No sitting for more than 5 minutes in the Red Carpet lounge or gate. I have to stand and walk around and talk on the phone, return emails, etc.

3. No eating anything but fruit, veggies and cheese in the lounge. If I start on even the Baked Chips, i go into carb “hell” and don’t want to do that.

4. I have to drink at least 5 cups of tea, and since they have many varieties, I try to drink ones that I don’t have at home or in my office.

5. On the plane, I always put a pillow behind my back and belt myself in tightly for lumbar support. My back “speaks” to me every now and then, and I find that travel days can be the worst.

Just wanted to share.

Jim

I just calculated the difference between standing and sitting at work for a woman 130lbs. I’m sharing this with you because I think there should be more standing work stations in offices!!!

Sitting for 8 hours: 496 calories

Standing for 8 hours: 560 calories

The difference in calories burned in one day is only 64 calories. However, multiply that out by 5 days a week and 52 weeks a year…you get 16640 calories – or 4.75 pounds!

How many women do you know that sit all day at the office/home and wonder why they gain a little weight each year…not to mention lower bone density in the hips and lower back issues due to weak gluts!!!

Jim

Shocking story in a past “New York Times” about children receiving bypass and lap bands for obesity.

When you hear what they are eating, you would understand why they are so overweight, and most of them came from overweight or obese parents.

This is unacceptable. NO person under the age of 21, at least, should be a candidate for this surgery.

And from the celebs we know have done the surgery, it generally doesn’t work. Just look at Carnie Wilson. She’s huge and the spokesperson for surgery.

Over time, overweight people go back to overeating and find ways, even with a smaller stomach, to take in way too many calories.

Did anyone say Ben & Jerry’s!

Jim

A recent study found that people who drank three or more cups a day are biologically younger than their actual age by about 5 years. I drink at least 5 cups a day, either hot or cold. it’s easy, it counts toward your water balance, tea helps reduce inflammation and tastes GOOD!

Jim

Women who ate with other women ate 800 calories at a meal.

Women who ate with men only ate 550.

That’s a 250 calorie difference. That’s HUGE!

Jim

Current issue of the “Nutrition Action Newsletter” talk about the HUGE benefits of reducing sodium content in our foods, even if you don’t currently suffer from high blood pressure. It appears to greatly reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease (the #1 killer) later in life.

If you are eating any fast or processed foods, odds are you are consuming an enormous amount of sodium.

Drinking lots of water and consuming more fruits and vegetables would help out a lot.

Once I stopped eating ANY salty foods for one week. When I went back to eating some of the things I did in the past, which included water packed tuna, I was shocked at how much I tasted the sodium.

So read labels and see how much is in some of the things you are eating. I bet you will be shocked.

Jim