Can't shake your sweet tooth? Blame the clock for bad behaviors? Quit it!
Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.comExcuses, excuses: 11 health cop-outs that hold you back
Seeded on Sun Oct 31, 2010 1:36 PM EDT (msnbc.com)
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This article is why people don't get to the gym.
1. I can't shake my sweet tooth Don't eat high fructose corn syrup (good). Make this recipe instead (bad). Better: Eat a protein meal bar. They taste better than they used to, in fact I prefer them over an old fashioned candy bar.
2. I don't have time to exercise Start with mini-workouts (bad). Are people going to clock into the gym for a 10 minute work out? Just ignore the time to drive there, check in, change, (10 minute work out here), shower, dress, and go back to your life. Better: Instead of driving, walk or ride a bike to do your not time critical errands. The usual advice is to work out 2 or 3 times a week. And if you don't you must be a slacker. This advice results in lots of gym memberships going unused because people give up if they can't "do it right." Forget it. Work out once a week and stick to that.
3. Sorry, but exercise just is not fun Replace stair step with mountain biking. Get off the weight machines and use free weights. An element of danger adds interest and improves alertness and coordination.
4. I'm afraid I'll fail Either there is no such thing as fail, or I fail every time I exercise. The only thing that matters is improvement or keeping what you have. Not exercising will certainly fail. Moderately sore muscles mean success because this is your body rebuilding itself. Studies have shown that moderate wight training once a week with 8 repetitions per exercise markedly reduces chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is a driver of old age dementia. This could be why people who remain active retain mental function more.
5. It's too late to start something new This is your body telling you it doesn't like change.
6. I don't have the willpower Wait to exercise the next time you are bored or depressed. At that time one may be more able to earn the benefit of exercise. Exercise helps lift depression, can change psychology and take you outside of your problems.
7. I nosh when I'm depressed. Or bored. Fit and fat is better than unfit and fat.
Greg, your post is very self congratulatory. My wife and i are both long distance runners. I do alpine climbing as a hobby. My kids are fit too......so what.
Your wrote six paragraphs of nothing but praise for you and your family. Im afraid that you are going to break your arm in an effort to pat yourself on the back. The article isnt about you. It is about people who are stuggling with health issues. Get off your high horse.
Do you work 10 hrs a day, six days a week, and have time to do all this. Must be nice.
Hey superman....everyone is busy, jobs, kids volunteer work, extended family etc. Mental condition akin to bulimia?...please provide related information. You might also research narcissism. Could help you gain a little self awareness.
No Greg, your original post was the one that was attacking. No sympathy at all for people who struggle with weight issues. No helpful ideas or suggestions regarding how to get into an excercise routine ir change habit. What you did provide was a long celebratory list of your and your family's accomplishments. Then you made a snide reference to me having mental illness.
Looks like coalbear above had the same reaction i did.
Greg in Oceanside - you fail to realize that you are as much a blog troll as you accuse 11madness of being. Your self-congratulatory post does not contribute to a meaningful dialog on this discussion. No one cares about how great you think you and your family are.
BTW, instead of spending 12 hours on a hike with a buddy and two days recovering from the hike, why weren't you doing something with your kids or helping your wife with some of the chores that need to be done around the house?
Greg in Oceanside - I don't need to say anything more. You've done an excellent job of showing all of us exactly what kind of person you are.
ACK!! Watch it! The authors are incompetant nutritionists. High-fructose corn syrup is made of of EXACTLY the same two sugar fragments as ordinary sugar! Metabloism is identical.
Actually, I would claim that it's BETTER for you than ordinary sugar. Why? It's sweeter, so for the same sweetnes in a drink, they use LESS of the sweetener, and it has FEWER calories! (But not by a lot).
Aside from that, the comments about getting people to give up all the sweet stuff and work out, are reasonable. Anything that works along those lines is worthwhile, and these suggestions are as good as anything else.
Sorry, Dr. J, but you need to check your chemistry. Table sugar (sucrose) is made from sugar cane and beets basically by extracting the syrup and evaporating off the water. Sucrose is a disaccharide that is composed of one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose linked by a chemical bond. The proportion of glucose to fructose in sugar is one-to-one. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is produced from cornstarch through an enzymatic process that coverts some of its glucose to fructose. Although it also contains glucose and fructose, the same monosaccahrides that form the disaccharide sucrose, the proportion of one to the other varies depending on the manufacturing process. The metabolism of glucose and frustose might be the same regardless of their source, but fructose is present in a greater amount than glucose in HFCS. It is the increased consumption of fructose that has been linked with obesity and insulin resistance.
You are buying into the Corn Refiners Association's aggressive advertising campaign claiming that high-fructose corn syrup "is natural" and "has the same natural sweeteners as table sugar". There is nothing "natural" about HRCS. What they don't want you to know is that HFCS contains mercury and is up to 10 times richer in harmful carbonyl compounds as a result of the manufacturing process. Carbonyl compounds are elevated in people with diabetes and are blamed for causing diabetic complications such as foot ulcers and eye and nerve damage. Also, rats fed with HFCS had higher triglyceride levels than rats fed sucrose.
BTW, you can blame our wonderful government for the increased use of HFCS in the USA as a result of governmental production quotas of domestic sugar, subsidies of U.S. corn, and an import tariff on foreign sugar. Due to government intervention, the price of sugar (sucrose) in the USA is higher than in the rest of the world, which makes HFCS more cost-effective for many sweetener applications. Once again, the use of our taxpayer dollars (to subsidize corn crops) is counterproductive to the welfare of our citizens, and it isn't going to get any better due to lobbying by the Corn Refiners Association.
Virtually everything has HFCS in it (all sodas, most juice cocktails and mixes, store brand soups, etc), and that is SO horrible for you! It's too bad more people don't realize that and try to avoid it. Also, hypothryoidism doesn't just affect people over 50. I was in my late 20's and my thyroid crashed completely.
"Virtually everything has HFCS in it. It's too bad more people don't try to avoid it."
The fact that HFCS is nearly ubiquitous is the reason that people can't avoid it. It's not that they don't want to avoid it. Even if we cook most of our meals at home, many of the basic ingredients that we use have HFCS. For example, ketchup. Most of us don't have the time to make our own ketchup, but try to find a brand that doesn't have HFCS.
In my opinion, food manufacturers have slowly increased the amount of sweeteners in food much like salt has been increased by restaurants because the extra sweetness or saltiness "hooks" people to their product. My grandmother used to make a delicious meat loaf using Kraft Original Barbecue Sauce. I recently tried making one using her recipe. It was so sweet that I could hardly eat it. We usually don't expect our meat loaves to be sweet. When I checked the label on the bottle, I found that HFCS is the first ingredient listed. Now, barbecue sauce is something that I can make at home and will start doing so in order to avoid the HFCS.
So, HFCS metabolizes differently in the body than other sweeteners then the commercial on TV is false advertisement and should be removed. You now the one that says your body can't tell the difference.
Shawn - fructose and glucose are the same chemical compound regardless of whether they come from cane sugar (sucrose) or HFCS. Therefore, the body doesn't know the difference between fructose that comes from sugar and fructose that comes from HFCS. The difference is that sucrose enters the body as a disaccharide, which consists of one fructose unit and one glucose unit connected by a chemical bond. For every fructose unit in cane sugar, there is one glucose unit, thus a one-to-one ratio. However, fructose and glucose in HFCS enter the body as monosaccharides, which are single molecules of fructose and glucose that are not connected by a chemical bond. Manufacturers can control the percentage of fructose and glucose present in HFCS. The ratios of each are not one-to-one in HFCS, but vary depending on what the manufacturer wants to make. One type of HFCS that is manufactured is 90% fructose. In a diet composed of HFCS, the body receives more fructose than glucose. It is the increased consumption of fructose that has been linked with obesity and insulin resistance, not to mention the other impurities that are introduced into HFCS through the manufacturing process.
The commercials paid for by the Corn Refiners Association are correct in saying that HFCS has the same subunits as cane sugar, that is, they both contain fructose and glucose, and they are correct in saying that the body metabolizes both in the same way. What they are not telling you is that sugar and HFCS enter the body as different compound...sugar as a disaccharide composed of one fructose subunit and one glucose subunit connected by a chemical bond; HFCS as single molecules (monosaccharides) of fructose and glucose that are not connected by a chemical bond. They also are not telling you that HFCS has a higher percentage of fructose than sugar does, nor are they telling you that it's the increased consumption of fructose that is linked with diabetes.
As usual, big corporations with enough money can get away with anything in this country, and the regulations for advertising leave enough gray areas to allow them to get away with lying by omission.
These are all fine subtle psychological hints, but if you'd just avoid meat products (or derivatives - milk, cheese, eggs) MORE than you do now, you'll see immediate results. Short and sweet.
So why don't people do it more than they do? They're deniers. (I want to get healthy but - I don't want to get healthy!)
(Don't believe the research on this - it's all rigged in favor of corporations)
Cop-out is putting it mildly. Most people lack many qualities that can improve their overall lives. Excuses after excuses only show the weak side of most individual, when you are weak, your life will only spin out of control and become stale. By improving some human skills can lead to a change in your life. A majority of people lack discipline. Discipline is what give people drive and staying power, whether at work or losing weight. Time management is another skill that is overlooked. Most people don't have time to complete a task or exercise because they have no time management skills, you have 24 hours in a day, you should account for each minute. Dedication is the most important of human skills. When one is dedicated, they make commitments, follow through, don't give up and understand the importance of a project, their position and loyality. Finally I find most people lack honor. Honor is what gives people their moral graditude. Too many people show disrespect to others and only care about themselves. Nothing is about yourself, its about everything but yourself. Making these few changes in your life will bring, successes, accomplishment, results and sense of being.
Why be such a jerk.
It's not being a jerk, it's straight talk. I believe the apt phrase here would be "inconvenient truth". Just because it's hard doesn't make it wrong.
Pretty judgmental.
Good article, but very high level. Truth is people need to commit to changing their lifestyles, and its very difficult to do. I recently started a diet and exercise program and have since begun to notice how much of American culture is saturated with poor food messaging. Everything from Chili cook-offs, to all you can eat pork, to pizza sponsored everything, to blue angels shows with nothing to eat by burgers, hot dogs and nachos, to baseball games with cotton candy, hot dogs and beer, to church functions with pot luck apple pie and meat loaf. Everywhere we go is some type of advertising for 1500 calorie burgers or 1200 calorie pasta dishes. You can't exercise enough to tolerate a 1500 calorie burger every day in addition to other meals unless you exercise for over 2 hours at high intensity. Until we as consumers decide to change our eating habits and boycott such nasty food, we'll continue to get fatter, not thinner.
I am so sick of all the skinny people referring to themselves as "fit"- most of the ones I've seen look, and are, sickly. There's a HUGE difference between skinny and healthy! My brother has always been lean & trim and recently discovered that he has horrible health problems because of hereditary factors. I have always been the "fat" one whose "fit" mother had her on a diet from the age of 5 and is STILL overweight at the age of 35..but guess what? I'm healthier than my mother & brother both!
I am sooo tired of hearing "trim" people pass judgement on people like me because they assume that I am lazy or an overeater or only eat junk just because I'm not built like a 12 year old boy! I eat healthier than most "trim" people I know, and consume 1/2 the calories that they do. All you idiots that think "there's no excuse to be fat" can kiss my ENTIRE a** because there ARE weight issues that people deal with that have nothing to do with activity levels or eating habits. God you people are so full of yourselves!
I know exactly what you mean. But you can look at it this way. If we have a disaster in the US, guess who is going to die first. Those lean people that can eat anything are NOT survivors. They will starve because they have to eat 2 or 3 times the food we do just to maintain what weight they have. I know its not much comfort when we are constantly bullied and spit on but it's something. I have weighed 250 since I was 15. I now eat about 1500 to 2000 cals a day and work in construction. I tried to lose weight a few years ago and dropped to 500 cals a day. After losing 20 lbs I flat lined. Whats a guy to do.
Hear, hear!
"Diet"comments all interesting. If you REALLY want to work at it, GET RID OF THE WORD "diet". Food plan; modification, whatever. Exercise is a part of it but one can walk around the house or the office or the yard or wherever. Carry that UNOPENED soda can in one hand and lift it up and down and take it in the other hand and do the same. Put your hands on the wall and move your feet back and do presses. Bend over and wipe up the spots on the kitchen floor. You are NEVER too old. I won state, national, and world championships in the bench press AFTER a major car accident (head-on collision) and started at the gym when I was still wearing a brace on my leg that had been broken in the accident---this at age 60. I am heavier than I SHOULD be---but also--I am now darned close to 76 and, unlike all the comtemporaries in my family, I take NO MEDS OF ANY KIND. I don't always eat healthy and I like my cocktails. Fortunately--for me-- I live alone (except for my 2 cats) and love it. I make lots of soups that are healthy (and well known by my family and friends that get to share them) and ALWAYS have healthy choices available but just don't always take advantage. I LOVE BEANS and cook them often--one of nature's most healthy foods--add a little corn or corn tortillas or brown rice or QUINOA and have complete protein.
'Nuff said.
You go Greg-- I don't think you are being 'self congratulatory' at all...just sharing the truth...seems as if SOMEONE is intimidated.