RAQ Training

Last week, while going to the gym to workout, I was listening to the radio and came across a program that had Dr. Ian Smith, the celebrity doctor who has teamed up with State Farm for the 50 Million Pound Challenge. He was talking on the subject of childhood obesity and the epidemic that we are facing in this country and abroad. I went home and while writing yesterday post, I came across some disturbing news which I think whoever is reading this will find interesting and alarming. This entry is taken from the Los Angeles Times November 12, 2008. This article was originally posted on the TakePart.com blog http://www.takepart.com. Enjoy and take heed!!

Many overweight children and teenagers could have severe cardiovascular disease in their 20s and 30s, causing a healthcare crisis. Early identification of the problem is a key.

The arteries of many obese children and teenagers are as thick and stiff as those of 45-year-olds, a sign that such children could have severe cardiovascular disease at a much younger age than their parents unless their condition is reversed, researchers said Tuesday.

“It’s possible that they will have heart disease in their 20s and 30s,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who led the study presented at a New Orleans meeting of the American Heart Assn.
“There’s a saying that ‘you’re as old as your arteries,’ meaning that the state of your arteries is more important than your actual age in the evolution of heart disease and stroke,” she said. “We found that the state of the arteries of these children is more typical of a 45-year-old than of someone their own age.”

Experts did not find the results surprising, but they did view it as “alarming.”

“We’re facing an epidemic of childhood obesity,” said Dr. Michael Schloss, co-director of the lipid treatment program at the New York University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “We are raising a generation of children that are going to have a significant increase in vascular disease as they get older.”

A May study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 16.3% of U.S. children and teenagers are obese and an additional 15.6% are overweight.

Raghuveer runs a preventive cardiology clinic for children who have high cholesterol levels, obesity and a family history of cardiac deaths. She and her colleagues used ultrasound imaging to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries on 70 children considered at risk.

The carotid arteries supply blood to the brain, and the thickness of their inner walls is routinely used as a surrogate for the condition of the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart.

The children all had abnormalities in one or more types of cholesterol, and 40 of them had a body mass index, or BMI — a calculation of weight and height routinely used as a measure of obesity — in the 95th percentile.

Because the researchers did not have access to healthy children for comparison, they compared the measured values to readily available data for 45-year-olds, using an arbitrary cutoff value of the 25th percentile, Raghuveer said. They found that three-quarters of the children had artery thickness above this level.

The artery thickening was most advanced in patients who were the most obese and had the highest levels of a type of cholesterol known as triglycerides, so that combination “should be a red flag to the doctor that a child is at high risk of heart disease,” she said. Their long-term prospects “are not good” unless they can reverse the condition.

The findings suggest the potential for “a major public health problem” down the road, said Dr. Albert Bove of the Temple University School of Medicine, president-elect of the American College of Cardiology, who was not involved in the study.

“If we begin to see people disabled in their 30s and 40s because of heart disease, we could lose a significant fraction of the workforce,” Bove said.

But there is some hope.

“If we can identify the condition early and start modifying triglycerides, we can probably prevent progression and perhaps even promote regression,” said Dr. John P. Kennedy, director of prevention cardiology at Marina del Rey Hospital.

Maugh is a Times staff writer.

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

It’s kind of like running into a wall - that feeling you get when, after a few months on a weight-loss program, you suddenly stop seeing results.

This is called hitting a plateau and it is not uncommon. In fact, unless you continually update your program to reflect the changes your body has already experienced, you can almost be guaranteed to plateau at some point along your journey toward reaching your goal weight.

Weight-loss woes

The first thing you should do upon hitting a plateau is try to determine the cause. Could you be eating more calories than you think?

Research shows that most people underreport the number of calories they eat - it’s not that they’re lying, they just don’t know how to make an accurate assessment of how much they’re eating. And even if you’re eating less calories than before you lost the weight, you could be eating just enough to maintain your current weight at your current activity level.

It is important to keep in mind that as you lose weight, your metabolism slows down because there is less of you to fuel, both at rest and during activity. So, while a diet of 1,800 calories per day helped you lose a certain amount of weight, if you’ve hit a plateau, it could be that 1,800 calories is the exact amount you need to stay at your current weight.

Exercise your options

This leaves you with two options: Lower your caloric intake further or increase the amount of time you spend being physically active.

The first option is less desirable because you may not be able to get sufficient nutrients from a diet that is very low in calories, and it is difficult to stick to it for very long. It is much better to moderately reduce calories to a level that you can sustain when you reach your goal weight.

The same is true for exercise. Trying to exercise for several hours per day to burn more calories is a good way to set yourself up for failure. Not only does this type of regimen require an enormous time commitment, it is hard on the body, making you more susceptible to injury and overuse syndromes.

To help balance the intake with the expenditure, a good rule of thumb is to multiply your goal weight by 10 calories per pound, and add more calories according to how active you are. Again, be realistic. Don’t attempt too much in an effort to burn more calories.

Instead, aim for 30 minutes of moderate activity most of the days of the week and, as you become more fit, gradually increase the intensity and duration of your exercise sessions. Choose activities that you find enjoyable, whether that be in-line skating, step classes or even mall walking.

Another means for getting you off the plateau is strength training, which has been shown to be very effective in helping people manage their weight because the added muscle helps to offset the metabolism-lowering effect of dieting and losing weight.

Muscle is much more metabolically active than fat; therefore, the more muscle you can add, the higher your metabolism will be.

Get off the plateau

If you’ve stopped losing weight, the key to getting off the plateau is to vary your program. The human body is an amazing piece of machinery, capable of adapting to just about any circumstance or stimulus.

By shaking things up a bit and varying your program by introducing some new elements, you’ll likely find yourself off the plateau and back on the road to progress in no time.

taken from Ace Fitness

Emotional eating happens when we eat because of how we are feeling emotionally, rather than as a response to physical hunger. There are different types of emotional eating:

Hypnosis can help with boredom and comfort eating
Boredom eating tends to be more habit-based, when we eat to give ourselves something to do and fill in time
Comfort eating is when we use food to assuage feelings, cope with stress or ‘relax’
Binge eating involves gorging on food, often as a result of yo-yo dieting where we deprive ourselves of certain foods, or of low self esteem*

All these responses to food can become pattern forming, when we associate feeling a certain way with eating. In all these examples, it is often the act of eating itself that becomes important, rather than thinking about and appreciating what we are eating. Habits of eating like this are negative and over time can lead to weight gain and other problems, as we are overriding and ignoring our body’s innate ability to tell us when and what it needs to function.

Breaking bad eating habits with hypnotherapy
Hypnosis can help to overcome negative eating behaviours by refocusing the mind on what it really wants, and using an analytical approach to investigate the reasons why you are eating in this way. A hypnotherapist can help you to build positive habits and eating patterns, and show you how to use your imagination to visualise a happy, confident you who has a healthy relationship with food.

Hypnosis Downloads produces a number of cost effective products which can help with specific eating problems, such as Boredom Eating, Comfort Eating, Stop Binge Eating and Stop Emotional Eating. Download them straightaway from home and discover how hypnosis can help you - click here.

*Binge eating could be a symptom of a more serious eating disorder. If you have concerns that you have an eating disorder, or if someone else has commented on this to you, then you seriously consider seeking professional help, from your doctor in the first instance.