I browse through a lot of health and fitness related news every day in order to try and find things that can help our readers here improve their lives. In doing so I come across a fair number of unusual topics, but more often than not most of the things I read tend to get repetitive. That’s why, when I opened up my reader this morning, I darn near spewed a mouthful of coffee all over my dual monitor setup after I saw one of the headlines.
steveb_ohio via flickr
It isn’t easy to achieve or maintain a healthy weight. If it was there would be no such thing as a multi-billion dollar weight loss industry. While we contend here at ShrinkGeek that the only tried and true method of losing weight is to eat less and exercise, we concede that there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution on the best way to get there. The struggle to find the combination of diet and exercise that works best for your particular personality and physiology is probably the hardest part about losing weight, and frustration over finding out what you can and can not live with can be a potentially crippling road block to your progress.
Many people chose to rely on “natural” dietary supplements to aid in their weight-loss efforts, and with good reason. The ability to consume a product that can help you lose weight without introducing any man made chemicals into your system is pretty appealing! Unfortunately, it appears as though a lot of people who use these products are getting considerably more than they bargain for.
Kusty the Clown (c) Fox Media
Most of us probably have variously weird things our parents told us to get us to eat stuff we weren’t too keen on. For some reason, these were always things that didn’t seem all that appealing. Heck, we even had Popeye and his freakish forearms, which were magically matched by his biceps after an emergency infusion of iron-rich spinach. [Note: whoever came up with the branding for that was a frigging genius.]
My folks, for instance, insisted that eating bread crust would make our hair curly. My sisters, neither of whom were big crust consumers, both had long, curly locks. I, on the other hand, who would usually scavenge said crusts, had dead straight hair, other than one hell of a cowlick. At this point, they both still have their hair. I, on the other hand… oh, shut up. (Thanks to the, er, miracles of Facebook, I have recently been reminded of some of the less-awesome ways I looked with long hair. I’m going back to my rose-tinted nostalgia hut now, thank you very much.)
However, it looks like there is some honest-to-dog good nutrition to be had in that bread crust, in the world of anti-oxidants.
Advertising Fail courtesy of the Fail Blog
If you’ve watched television at all in the last 10 years or so you are most likely familiar with the name Jared Fogel, and if not you’d likely recognize him if you saw a picture. Jared is “the Subway guy.” For those of you who are not familiar with his admittedly impressive story, the Reader’s Digest version is that back in 1997 Jared lost an incredible amount of weight by following what he termed “The Subway Diet.” The diet program in and of itself was pretty simple. Jared, who had been consuming what he estimates as nearly 10,000 calories a day, replaced two of his meals with six inch sandwiches from Subway’s “7 under 6″ menu (sandwiches with a total of less than six grams of fat). He also walked pretty much everywhere and added other types of exercise on top of that. In the end he managed to lose over 240 pounds, and when the advertising executives at Subway caught wind of his success they hired him as a spokesman. That move turned out to be a smashing success for the restaurant chain, and Jared has been associated with them ever since.
While many restaurants have tried to duplicate the success that Subway had marketing themselves as a diet-friendly fast food alternative there is little doubt that Subway has remained the uncontested king of the healthy lifestyle hill. So far they’ve managed to fight off all other pretenders to their throne, but it looks like they may be facing a new challenge from a fairly unlikely source.
Mugging: You're doing it right, Scott.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,it is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning; it is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
Naturally, once we’ve started down the road to blaspheming Dune, the corollary to this becomes all but self-evident:
It looks like the coffee folks have a few more arrows in their quiver when it comes to feeling good about their beverage of choice. New research suggests that not only does the mean bean help stave off Alzheimer’s Disease, it may also help prevent Type-2 Diabetes. Yes, even my preferred abomination in Mike’s eyes – decaf. This also appears to be true for certain types of tea as well, so it’s not just coffee drinkers who are reaping the benefits – our own resident tea fiend, Scott, is also in luck.
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