Tag: weight loss

Does getting married help you to stay fit? Well it depends.

According to a study published in January 2014 titled, "Associations between relationship status and day-to-day health behaviors and weight among diverse young adults," it states, "Married women were more likely to eat breakfast greater than five times per week compared with women in other relationship categories."

The seed catalogs arrived two weeks ago. Today you got a mail order catalog featuring—horrors!—swimsuits. Hint, hint: It’s time to shape up for spring. In fact, it’s the perfect time. If you get started right now, you can lose those five to 10 pounds of extra winter padding by the time the first buttercups and tulips bloom.

Here are 10 fresh ways to trim down and shape up:

1. Change your ’tude. Change your mindset about the quality of your life. Imagine how life would be if you woke up feeling great, with a healthy glow and looking fantastic.

If you feel stressed out around the holidays, you are not alone. Recent research indicates 69 percent of Americans feel stressed by thoughts that they don’t have enough time and/or money. Almost a quarter of us report feeling "extreme stress" over the holidays. One study found that holiday shopping can raise heart rates 33 percent, similar to running a marathon.

The holidays are also a time when people are more susceptible to sadness and depression. We may overeat, overindulge, and take a holiday from healthy routines such as getting enough exercise and sleep. These changes, in turn, can make us more exhausted and emotionally fragile, and at greater risk of getting sick.

Obese people who feel stigmatized about their size are not only more likely to struggle with weight loss, they're also more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, a new study suggests.

In many cultures, people who are obese are viewed as stereotypically lazy, lacking in willpower, incompetent, unattractive and personally responsible for their excess weight, researchers note in the journal Obesity. These negative beliefs, known as weight bias, can cause obese people to experience discrimination, which is in turn associated with an increased risk of "internalizing disorders" like depression, anxiety and low self-esteem, previous research has found.

People who are already battling the bulge seem to really pack on the pounds when they experience stress. Jason Block, MD, whose Harvard research was published in The American Journal of Epidemiology, implicates stress as a trigger for weight gain. Apparently the stress response is gender specific. Men get stressed over workplace hierarchy, difficulty paying the bills, the inability to learn new skills along with workplace demands.

However, women have broader categories when they experience stress; they are hit hard by strained relationships and feeling limited by life’s circumstances, according to Dr. Block.