The arrival of spring in our area has brought warmer weather, blooming flowers, green grass, and, for many, seasonal allergies. If you suffer from seasonal allergies, you may want to know if it is safe to exercise outdoors. The short answer is yes, provided you take the right precautions. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged allergies, antihistamines, asthma, exercise, exercise induced asthma, pollen
February is American Heart Month, with a focus on encouraging all of us to make heart-healthy choices to reduce cardiovascular disease risk. I thought that sharing some information about the heart, how it works, and how to keep it healthy would be an appropriate way to celebrate. This is also the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Valentine’s Day is this week, so you may be the lucky recipient of a box of chocolates. Hopefully you enjoy it! Of course, eating too many sweets, including chocolate, isn’t a good idea. But eating certain types of chocolate has been linked to some health benefits.
The idea that chocolate may be healthy is no doubt welcome news for chocoholics. But it may leave you wondering if eating chocolate really is healthy. The answer depends on what you mean by chocolate and what you mean by healthy. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged antioxidants, cacao, candy, chocolate, healthy eating, nutrition, sugar, Valentine's Day
Heart disease, sometimes called coronary artery disease, is caused by atherosclerosis, a process which involves the accumulation of cholesterol plaques in the arteries that supply blood to the heart. These plaques can narrow the blood vessels and reduce blood and oxygen delivery to the heart, leading to symptoms like chest pain (ischemia). The plaques can also rupture and form a blood clot, blocking oxygen delivery and causing a myocardial infarction—a heart attack.
If you have purchased new pants recently they may have an adjustable or expandable waist. Some men’s pants include up to two extra inches to allow you to “flex” or “move more freely.” Women’s pants might have elastic hidden in the waist band for extra “stretch.” While these pants are designed to be comfortable, they could be making you fat!
This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Most people gain weight as they age, typically a slow process that may not be immediately noticeable. If you have pants with a two-inch expandable waist you could easily gain weight while still wearing the same pants size. In fact, you could gain two inches of fat around your waist before you noticed. For many people, tight-fitting pants are a signal that they may have gained a few pounds. If you miss that cue you could easily gain significant weight, which requires a significant effort to fix.
This might sound like a minor issue, but external cues like this are important to help us recognize weight gain. In a classic example, a man puts on his favorite suit for the first time in over a year to find that the pants are too tight. Immediately he realizes that he has gained weight since he last wore the suit. Imagine, though, if his suit pants stretched to accommodate his larger waist. He might still think that, since the pants still fit, he hasn’t gained any weight.
This is important since people typically gain weight little by little over time, which may not be appreciated without these external cues. One way to prevent surprise weight gain is to weigh yourself regularly so that you can make adjustments to your diet and activity to prevent further weight gain. In fact, one common characteristic of the “successful losers” in the National Weight Control Registry is that they weigh themselves at least once a week. This is important because it’s easier to make adjustments to lose weight that’s gained in a week versus weight that is gained over a month or more.
This is also why people who lose weight should get rid of their “fat clothes.” Typically, these clothes get pushed to the back of the closet. But they are still readily available, so when the person regains some of the weight, it is easy to reach for a larger size. If those clothes had been packed away in a box in the attic, retrieving and unpacking them would be a noticeable sign that they had gained weight and may motivate them to get back on track.
Even small changes to our diet and activity patterns can lead to weight gain over time. Since this weight gain can often go unnoticed, it is important that we pay attention to external cues. The way our clothes fit is one such reminder, but there are others. Do you notice that you feel more out of breath doing routine activities, like climbing a flight of stairs? Is it more difficult to bend over and tie your shoes? These are both signs that your fitness may be declining and that it is time to start exercising.
These cues are easy to ignore, but they are important signs that it is time to make changes to your diet and activity habits. It is even easier to prevent weight gain or to stay fit than it is to lose weight or get in shape. So, don’t let your pants trick you! Pay attention to how your clothes fit and how you feel and use these cues to guide you to maintain good health.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Many people are trying to create a healthier lifestyle by eating healthier, making time for exercise or other activity, and reducing stress. Frequently, the focus is on what they can do at home, from prepping meals to joining a gym or going to yoga class.
But many people spend a major part of their day at work, where healthy options are often limited. From the box of donuts at a morning meeting to a quick fast food lunch, eating well at work can be difficult. And for people who have office jobs, it also likely means lots of time sitting at a desk.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to make your time at work a little less damaging to your health. Even better, these steps can also make you more productive and feel better throughout the day. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Posted in Health & Fitness
Tagged desk stretches, exercise, healthy eating, nutrition, office exercise, physical activity
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a time to celebrate the birthday and reflect on the accomplishments and legacy of Mr. King. It is also a on which people are encouraged to use their day off from work and school to volunteer in their community. Individuals and groups across the country participate in community service, with some making this their first-time volunteer effort and many more continuing a year-round commitment to service.
You can maximize your impact in community service activities by being fit and healthy. To be sure, there are ways that people of physical abilities can contribute, but many service opportunities require a baseline level of fitness to participate. And it is certainly more enjoyable to volunteer if you aren’t being pushed to your limits. In fact, some service activities are similar in exertion to many forms of exercise and some may be consistent with maximal exercise. Unfortunately, the common pattern of inactivity and obesity can limit people’s ability to function optimally at school, work, or in leisure-time activities, including community service.This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Photo by tear cordez from Pexels
Comments Off on Fitness for community service
Posted in Health & Fitness
Maybe you set a goal to eat healthier in the new year. You already know that what you eat is an essential part of achieving and maintaining good health. What you may not know is that when and how you eat can be just as important. This is especially true if your goal is to lose weight. Here are two ways to change the way you eat to help you lose weight and keep it off. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com
First, eating more slowly can help limit the amount of food you eat. Perhaps your mother admonished you to “slow down” at meals when you were young. This was good advice, for both practical and physiological reasons.
As an aside, your mother may also have told you to “chew your food.” too. This was probably to remind you to eat more slowly. Almost 100 years ago Horace Fletcher recommended a process that involved chewing each bite of food 100 times. “Fletcherizing,” as it was called, was a way to reduce how much people ate, among other more dubious health claims.
Your appetite is regulated by a host of factors, including the presence of food in your stomach. As you eat, your stomach fills, triggering the release of hormones that signal your brain to reduce your appetite. The result is that as your stomach fills, you feel less hungry. Eating quickly, like many of us do, allows you to take in lots of calories before your brain gets the message that you are full.
Practically, eating slower means you will eat fewer calories during mealtime. If you slow down at meals, you start to feel full before you eat as much. Research shows that this can lead to lower calorie intake during the meal. In addition to controlling how much food you consume, eating more slowly is a good way to enjoy meals, both the food and the company, more fully.
Second, extending the time between meals or limiting eating to fewer hours per day may affect your metabolism in ways that may help with weight control. There are two main ways to incorporate fasting into your diet. Intermittent fasting involves having some days on which you don’t eat. An example is the 5:2 program, in which you include two water-only fasting days per week. While this is effective for modest weight loss and improved glucose and lipid metabolism, it isn’t easy to do.
Time-restricted feeding, in which you limit your eating to a 4 to 8 hour period each day with a 16–20 hour fast, may be easier to follow. the concept of not eating between meals, especially between dinner and breakfast, isn’t new, but research shows that having a longer fasting period each day may help you lose weight, even without counting calories.
According to a one study, people who followed a time-restricted feeding schedule in which they were allowed to eat anything they wanted for 8 hours each day for 12 weeks. They were compared to a group that could eat whenever they wanted but were instructed to maintain their weight.
After 12 weeks, the time-restricted feeding group ate about 300 fewer calories per day, leading to a modest six-pound weight loss. By contrast, the participants who were supposed to maintain their weight did just that, with no changes in calories consumed.
This suggests that limiting eating time without focusing on calories or the specific foods eaten can lead to some weight loss. One of the biggest problems people have with changing their diet to lose weight is figuring out what to eat to reduce calorie consumption. While making dietary changes is an essential part of weight loss and weight maintenance, a good first step might be to simply limit eating time to fewer hours per day.
Even without this evidence, adopting a fasting period between dinner and breakfast, which should be about 12 hours, seems prudent. At the very least, it will keep you from snacking in the evening, which almost certainly involves unhealthy choices. And as you try to make healthier food choices, consider eating more slowly and making dinner the end of your eating day.
Have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet? If not, there is still time. Among the most common resolutions are changes to improve health, including quitting smoking, losing weight, and starting an exercise program. Making a resolution is one way to get yourself started on a journey toward better health.
However, it’s important to approach your resolutions with a clear and realistic mindset, as this can increase the chances of success and make the process more enjoyable. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
Here are seven tips for sticking to your New Year’s resolutions:
Making healthy New Year’s resolutions is a great way to improve your overall well-being and quality of life. By setting specific, achievable goals, making a plan, starting small, and seeking support, you can increase your chances of success and make the process more enjoyable. Remember to be kind to yourself and stay motivated, and you’ll be well on your way to a healthier new year!
Wearable fitness devices make great holiday gifts, so maybe you are getting started with a new gadget or app. From activity trackers and heart rate monitors to devices that do both and more, the newest “wearables” are sophisticated tools for recording your steps per day, distance you run, and calories you burn. But using these devices to help you get fit, lose weight, or otherwise improve your health requires that you use that information wisely. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.
This is especially true when it comes to losing weight. Thanks to a host of wearable devices and mobile apps, counting calories has never been easier. This matters because losing weight almost always means reducing the calories that you eat and increasing the calories that you burn. This concept of “eat less, move more” is the foundation of nearly every effective weight loss program and explains why some diets and exercise programs seem to work better than others, at least for some people.
Modern wearable devices and mobile apps allow you to track your weight, what you eat, and your activity fairly accurately. Many apps can measure the intensity of exercise by using the GPS and accelerometer features of your phone itself and some include heart rate to make the estimates even more precise. Using this technology, you can count steps, measure how many miles you walk or run, and estimate how many calories you burn.
Other apps can help you track what you eat. Whether you are counting calories or concerned about your protein intake, dietary analysis apps can show you what you are really eating. Most require you to enter the foods you eat and the app calculates calories, nutrients, sugar, salt, and water intake based on standard databases. In order to get accurate results, it is important to estimate portion sizes accurately, something that is challenging even for experts. That said, these apps can be useful for tracking what you eat to help you learn about your eating patterns to develop healthier habits or meet specific goals, such as eliminating added sugar from your diet.
Activity trackers and exercise apps are especially popular for improving fitness and promoting weight loss. Both the physical activity that you do throughout the day and dedicated exercise are important for good health, physical fitness, and weight control. This technology can help you know what to do, when to do it, and how much you did at the end of the day.
While these tools can be helpful, it is important to emphasize the importance of developing healthy habits in order to improve fitness, lose weight, or keep it off. A focus on “micromanaging” steps or calories may cause you to lose sight of the “big picture” changes you want to make. For example, you should strive to be as active as you can throughout the day, even if you have already met your step or calorie goal.
Keep in mind that there are very few people who fail to meet their fitness or weight loss goal because they didn’t have the latest activity tracker or fitness app. Real success comes from making lifestyle changes to incorporate healthy eating and activity habits that you can maintain without constant reminders. While technology can help you make those changes, it does not replace the dedication needed to develop lasting eating and activity habits to promote good health. Finally, make sure to pick the device that meets your needs… and your budget, as they can get expensive!
Posted in Health & Fitness
Dr Parr Says... 