Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Emotional Eating and Obesity

I came across this article online (on a bulimia treatment site in the USA, hence not including the web address).  But it is a simplified summary to a scholarly article from the British Psychological Society which I've cut down to a manageable size (whole report is 132 pages!) and will also disseminate via email.


Key points:  emotional eating (not just our obesogenic environment) leads to obesity.  Coping styles influence emotional eating behaviour.  What useful (and more direct) ways of dealing with emotions can look like.


Enjoy.  text is below.  


I know the blog has been quiet of late....apologies but it takes a lot of time to think up (or find) these pearls of wisdom!  



WHEN EMOTIONAL EATING SABOTAGES WEIGHT LOSS EFFORTS

For many people, the biggest obstacle to shedding extra pounds or eating more healthfully is emotion-based eating. Emotional eating can sabotage even your most well-intentioned efforts.
According to the American Dietetic Association, many people eat for emotional reasons. "Emotional eating," typically triggered by stress and anxiety, too often leads to overeating and/or making poor food choices. One recent study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders compares the daily journals kept by a group of normal-weight women, half of whom were binge-eaters. Those who engaged in binge-eating rated daily hassles as significantly more stressful than those who did not.
A key influence on emotional eating, however, is not just negative or stressful events, but rather it's people's response to them. People who are typically less thrown off by stress tend to focus on how they want to constructively deal with a negative situation or they simply put it aside and move on. Those who tend to experience more disruption due to negative situations are more inclined to stay focused on the problem, mentally replaying a distressing situation over and over and over again.

HOW DO YOU COPE WITH STRESS?

Experts say that people whose healthy-eating goals are often disrupted by emotions can benefit from finding new strategies to help them respond more effectively to stressful situations. A study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology found that people gave in to eating temptations every time they didn't have a strategy to deal with stressful situations. But when they responded with some form of either positive thoughts or actions, they were able to beat those temptations 50% to 60% of the time.
Research indicates that individuals who respond to a negative situation with both positive thoughts and constructive action are able to avoid emotion-based eating 85% of the time. Examples of positive thinking include reminding yourself that the problem is not really as big as it seems, that you can handle it, or by brainstorming different approaches to the problem to find the most effective solution. Action responses might include attempts to fix a problem by asking a friend, family member, or associate for their advice, or through calming and soothing yourself by taking a walk, listening to music, or deep breathing.

WHAT'S BEHIND THE HUNGER?

Nutritionists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, in their book Intuitive Hunger, note that many people use food as a means to distract themselves from emotions ranging from simple boredom to frustration to elevated anxiety. Tribole and Resch recommend differentiating between biological hunger and other urges to eat, and trying to identify the feelings and needs behind non-hunger urges to eat. For example, sometimes an unmet need for nurturing can be satisfied by spending time with a friend, playing with a pet, or soaking in a tub.
Tribole and Resch emphasize that taking time out to eat is often more socially acceptable than taking time out simply because we need a break. They suggest learning to acknowledge that simply taking a break is quite appropriate when we need rest or distraction or refreshing relief from routine. If you're not hungry, use breaks to read, nap, take a walk, or telephone a friend.

CURB EMOTIONAL EATING HABITS AND LIVE A LONGER, HEALTHIER LIFE

Research shows that emotional eating can be a significant source of excess calories. Excess calories can result in overweight or obesity, which can increase the risk for several forms of cancer as well as diabetes and other serious health problems. The American Institute for Cancer Research emphasizes the need to choose portions appropriate to our individual needs and to avoid popular "super-sized" foods. But remember, emotional eating is controlled not only with healthier foods or smaller portions, but by getting whatever help and support you need to learn how to handle non-hunger urges to eat without actually turning to food for temporary solace.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Oh how true this is!

Don't weigh in on obese people, study says

April 22, 2011 - 8:53AM  The Age
Obese people are more likely to avoid the exercise they need to fight the battle if their loved ones tease and criticism them, a new study shows.
The study, published this month in the journal Obesity, surveyed 111 obese adult men and women about weight discrimination and how it influenced their motivation to exercise.
"This idea that we can use a tough love approach, it just doesn't seem to work," Dr Lenny Vartanian, a researcher from the University of NSW and lead author of the study said.
"In fact it appears to backfire, making people less likely to exercise."
Dr Lenny Vartanian, who studies the psychology of body image and weight discrimination, said one reason for this could be the embarrassment felt by overweight people when others "stare, laugh or make negative comments".
"When we exercise this mostly takes place in public, like in a gym," he said.
"So if someone gets negative comments it makes people want to avoid being in those public situations."
Almost half of those surveyed reported experiencing some form of weight stigma at least once a week, whether it be hearing negative comments or missing out on a job because of their weight.
Respondents said the most hurtful comments came from spouses, family members and doctors.
Dr Vartanian said public policy should also focus on lessening discrimination against fat people.
"We have certain policies in place to guard against all those groups who have been historically marginalised, whether due to race or religion," he added.
"Fat stigma is really the last remaining acceptable form of discrimination."

Weighing the evidence on exercise

by Gretchen Reynolds (New York Times)



How exercise affects body weight is one of the more intriguing and vexing issues in physiology. Exercise burns calories, no one doubts that, and so it should, in theory, produce weight loss, a fact that has prompted countless people to undertake exercise programs to shed pounds. Without significantly changing their diets, few succeed. “Anecdotally, all of us have been cornered by people claiming to have spent hours each week walking, running, stair-stepping, etc., and are displeased with the results on the scale or in the mirror,” wrote Barry Braun, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in the American College of Sports Medicine’s February newsletter.
But a growing body of science suggests that exercise does have an important role in weight loss. That role, however, is different from what many people expect and probably wish. The newest science suggests that exercise alone will not make you thin, but it may determine whether you stay thin, if you can achieve that state. Until recently, the bodily mechanisms involved were mysterious. But scientists are slowly teasing out exercise’s impact on metabolism, appetite and body composition, though the consequences of exercise can vary. Women’s bodies, for instance, seem to react differently than men’s bodies to the metabolic effects of exercise. None of which is a reason to abandon exercise as a weight-loss tool. You just have to understand what exercise can and cannot do.
“In general, exercise by itself is pretty useless for weight loss,” says Eric Ravussin, a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and an expert on weight loss. It’s especially useless because people often end up consuming more calories when they exercise. The mathematics of weight loss is, in fact, quite simple, involving only subtraction. “Take in fewer calories than you burn, put yourself in negative energy balance, lose weight,” says Braun, who has been studying exercise and weight loss for years. The deficit in calories can result from cutting back your food intake or from increasing your energy output — the amount of exercise you complete — or both. When researchers affiliated with the Pennington center had volunteers reduce their energy balance for a study last year by either cutting their calorie intakes by 25 percent or increasing their daily exercise by 12.5 percent and cutting their calories by 12.5 percent, everyone involved lost weight. They all lost about the same amount of weight too ­— about a pound a week. But in the exercising group, the dose of exercise required was nearly an hour a day of moderate-intensity activity, what the federal government currently recommends for weight loss but “a lot more than what many people would be able or willing to do,” Ravussin says.
At the same time, as many people have found after starting a new exercise regimen, working out can have a significant effect on appetite. The mechanisms that control appetite and energy balance in the human body are elegantly calibrated. “The body aims for homeostasis,” Braun says. It likes to remain at whatever weight it’s used to. So even small changes in energy balance can produce rapid changes in certain hormones associated with appetite, particularly acylated ghrelin, which is known to increase the desire for food, as well as insulin and leptin, hormones that affect how the body burns fuel.
The effects of exercise on the appetite and energy systems, however, are by no means consistent. In one study presented last year at the annual conference of the American College of Sports Medicine, when healthy young men ran for an hour and a half on a treadmill at a fairly high intensity, their blood concentrations of acylated ghrelin fell, and food held little appeal for the rest of that day. Exercise blunted their appetites. A study that Braun oversaw and that was published last year by The American Journal of Physiology had a slightly different outcome. In it, 18 overweight men and women walked on treadmills in multiple sessions while either eating enough that day to replace the calories burned during exercise or not. Afterward, the men displayed little or no changes in their energy-regulating hormones or their appetites, much as in the other study. But the women uniformly had increased blood concentrations of acylated ghrelin and decreased concentrations of insulin after the sessions in which they had eaten less than they had burned. Their bodies were directing them to replace the lost calories. In physiological terms, the results “are consistent with the paradigm that mechanisms to maintain body fat are more effective in women,” Braun and his colleagues wrote. In practical terms, the results are scientific proof that life is unfair. Female bodies, inspired almost certainly “by a biological need to maintain energy stores for reproduction,” Braun says, fight hard to hold on to every ounce of fat. Exercise for many women (and for some men) increases the desire to eat.
Thankfully there has lately been some more encouraging news about exercise and weight loss, including for women. In a study published late last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from Harvard University looked at the weight-change histories of more than 34,000 participants in a women’s health study. The women began the study middle-aged (at an average of about 54 years) and were followed for 13 years. During that time, the women gained, on average, six pounds. Some packed on considerably more. But a small subset gained far less, coming close to maintaining the body size with which they started the study. Those were the women who reported exercising almost every day for an hour or so. The exercise involved was not strenuous. “It was the equivalent of brisk walking,” says I-Min Lee, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the lead author of the study. But it was consistently engaged in over the years. “It wasn’t something the women started and stopped,” Lee says. “It was something they’d been doing for years.” The women who exercised also tended to have lower body weights to start with. All began the study with a body-mass index below 25, the high end of normal weight. “We didn’t look at this, but it’s probably safe to speculate that it’s easier and more pleasant to exercise if you’re not already heavy,” Lee says.
On the other hand, if you can somehow pry off the pounds, exercise may be the most important element in keeping the weight off. “When you look at the results in the National Weight Control Registry,” Braun says, “you see over and over that exercise is one constant among people who’ve maintained their weight loss.” About 90 percent of the people in the registry who have shed pounds and kept them at bay worked out, a result also seen in recent studies. In one representative experiment from last year, 97 healthy, slightly overweight women were put on an 800-calorie diet until they lost an average of about 27 pounds each. Some of the women were then assigned to a walking program, some were put on a weight-training regimen and others were assigned no exercise; all returned to their old eating habits. Those who stuck with either of the exercise programs regained less weight than those who didn’t exercise and, even more striking, did not regain weight around their middles. The women who didn’t exercise regained their weight and preferentially packed on these new pounds around their abdomens. It’s well known that abdominal fat is particularly unhealthful, contributing significantly to metabolic disruptions and heart disease.
Scientists are “not really sure yet” just how and why exercise is so important in maintaining weight loss in people, Braun says. But in animal experiments, exercise seems to remodel the metabolic pathways that determine how the body stores and utilizes food. For a study published last summer, scientists at the University of Colorado at Denver fattened a group of male rats. The animals already had an inbred propensity to gain weight and, thanks to a high-fat diet laid out for them, they fulfilled that genetic destiny. After 16 weeks of eating as much as they wanted and lolling around in their cages, all were rotund. The scientists then switched them to a calorie-controlled, low-fat diet. The animals shed weight, dropping an average of about 14 percent of their corpulence.
Afterward the animals were put on a weight-maintenance diet. At the same time, half of them were required to run on a treadmill for about 30 minutes most days. The other half remained sedentary. For eight weeks, the rats were kept at their lower weights in order to establish a new base-line weight.
Then the fun began. For the final eight weeks of the experiment, the rats were allowed to relapse, to eat as much food as they wanted. The rats that had not been running on the treadmill fell upon the food eagerly. Most regained the weight they lost and then some.
But the exercising rats metabolized calories differently. They tended to burn fat immediately after their meals, while the sedentary rats’ bodies preferentially burned carbohydrates and sent the fat off to be stored in fat cells. The running rats’ bodies, meanwhile, also produced signals suggesting that they were satiated and didn’t need more kibble. Although the treadmill exercisers regained some weight, their relapses were not as extreme. Exercise “re-established the homeostatic steady state between intake and expenditure to defend a lower body weight,” the study authors concluded. Running had remade the rats’ bodies so that they ate less.
Streaming through much of the science and advice about exercise and weight loss is a certain Puritan streak, a sense that exercise, to be effective in keeping you slim, must be of almost medicinal dosage — an hour a day, every day; plenty of brisk walking; frequent long runs on the treadmill. But the very latest science about exercise and weight loss has a gentler tone and a more achievable goal. “Emerging evidence suggests that ­unlike bouts of moderate-vigorous activity, low-intensity ambulation, standing, etc., may contribute to daily energy expenditure without triggering the caloric compensation effect,” Braun wrote in the American College of Sports Medicine newsletter.
In a completed but unpublished study conducted in his energy-metabolism lab, Braun and his colleagues had a group of volunteers spend an entire day sitting. If they needed to visit the bathroom or any other location, they spun over in a wheelchair. Meanwhile, in a second session, the same volunteers stood all day, “not doing anything in particular,” Braun says, “just standing.” The difference in energy expenditure was remarkable, representing “hundreds of calories,” Braun says, but with no increase among the upright in their blood levels of ghrelin or other appetite hormones. Standing, for both men and women, burned multiple calories but did not ignite hunger. One thing is going to become clear in the coming years, Braun says: if you want to lose weight, you don’t necessarily have to go for a long run. “Just get rid of your chair.”
Gretchen Reynolds writes the Phys Ed column for the magazine. She is writing a book about the frontiers of fitness.
Ladies, apologies for the length of time between blogs.  First my laptop died, then I spent a month nursing a bad cold/flu.

This will not be an in depth musing on the meaning of life.  Rather, the blogs to come today will copy you on some recent articles that may be of interest.

I saw this recently and found it quite profound.

The definition of success is continuously improving your circumstances.

Enjoy and happy easter/anzac day.

Friday, February 4, 2011

You are (still) what you eat - nothing's changed.

As if we needed more evidence.  Here it is in black and white.  Lifestyle changes could prevent a huge amount of cancers.  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41426537/ns/health-aging/

This means eating healthier food, drinking less alcohol and being more physically active.  So how appealing does that quadruple cheese and bacon lardburger sound - when it could be the very burger that triggers the first cancerous cell in your body that survives to multiply???

We don't have to be as physically fit as an Olympic marathoner, nor a strict low fat vegan (which is, incidentally, the gold standard of healthy eating), or as sober as a judge.  That would be an all-or-nothing definition e.g. "I can't become a marathon running, non-drinking vegan, so I won't even bother trying".  ANY steps you take towards the more health-supporting end of the spectrum will do you good.

So get off your rear, step away from the laptop and take a walk around the block. Then eat an apple. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Salt, Sugar And Fat Preferred By Preschool Kids

OMG!!!  Don't wait until your children start school before they learn about nutrition.  Kids as young as three years old already have food preferences related to "junk" and can actually name products.  See

If your kids are fussy eaters, keep trying with whatever strategies you can to engage them in healthy eating.  I know they can scream the house down when they don't get their Happy Meal but seek help from a dietician, or a book like "More Peas, Please" by Kate Di Prima and Julie Cichero.  See

The habits that form in these early years are the ones that lead to childhood obesity and all its inherent problems such as diabetes and hypertension.  As a parent, you'd probably give your life for your child's (e.g. stop a bullet aimed at them).  Well, you may need to wage warfare against the combination of fat, salt and sugar in order to save your child's life.  Yes, its that serious.


Monday, January 24, 2011

Yes, it can be done.

Came across a book at the local library, written by an Australian gal who is now living in Scotland.  Called "The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl" its based on a blog she wrote during the years she reduced in size from 25 stone (160kg) to 12.5 stone (79 kg).  WOW!  

If you think you can't lose your 20, 50 or 70 kg because it's just too daunting, have a read of this book and see that Shauna Reid had plenty of ups and downs on her journey and still got to her destination.

How to you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.

How do you lose excess weight?  One kilo at a time (or one less bite at a time!)

Thursday, January 20, 2011

K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, sweetheart)

And the Pritikin Center does.  A two point list (easier to "digest" than a ten point list) on how to best lose weight permanently.

1.  Exercise
2.  Get more satiety out of your calories.  i.e. have the calories you consume fill you up more.

How do you make item 2 happen?  Well, this is what they say.

1.  Reduce the calorie density of the foods you eat.
2.  Increase your consumption of foods with a greater volume.
3.  Eat only when you're hungry, and don't stuff yourself.
4.  Avoid liquid calories.
5.  Avoid foods high in fat, sugar or refined grains.
6.  Increase the amount of fibre you get per calorie.

Not complex, not rocket science, short and sweet.  I like things simple, what about you?

http://pritikin.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1718:top-two-tips-for-permanent-weight-loss&catid=107:nutrition&Itemid=74

Happy Friday all.

Monday, January 3, 2011

The Power of Habits

Found an interesting article online about the power of eating habits and it includes some very important tips for creating new habits.  This is especially important in relation to the frustration caused by how strong a pull unhealthy habits can have.

Bad habits may be hard to extinguish and lapses are common.  It is not about character strength (even though you really LOVE to blame yourself!) ...it's much more about chemicals in the brain, especially dopamine.  So set up the process of change correctly - you don't want it to be any harder than it needs to be!

So the key points are - 
Rrepetition is important. Repeat the new habit over and over.  Lifelong habits don't change overnight...but they do change.  
Reward (esp. non food reward) is motivating.  
Expect stress to cause lapses but remember, forewarned is forearmed.  
And all types of change and novelty in our lives increases our ability to be flexible in our habits.

Enjoy.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40893205/ns/health-behavior/


The wonderful world of blogging

I have just spent about an hour trying to work out how to send out email alerts when I post to the blog.  WELL! was that a complex process or what?

Anyhoo, done successfully.  Please subscribe via email and then you won't need to remember to check the blog....the blog will come to you!

Saturday, January 1, 2011

A new year...a fresh start

I have been pondering for days what sort of earth-shatteringly important message I should convey at the start of a new year and the end of a decade.  In fact I've been so intent on finding exactly the right message, that the new year is already two days old!  

Anyway, all the things I wanted to say are more than a blog long, so I shall be sending messages throughout January about (hopefully) interesting and important things.

Sufficed to say, this is the time of year for New Year's Resolutions.  These are often hugely ambitious and more in the line of wishful thinking ("if I only had a magic wand" type of stuff).  Lose 100kg, turn my life around, exercise every day, never eat chocolate again and so on.  They're usually very black and white, i.e. if its not a complete success, it's a total failure.  Losing 99kg would be a failure, under these rules.

Think instead of what you can DO, rather than what you WISH would happen.  

Example:  I started to keep a food diary again and have specified a calorie limit (not very low I might add, but less than I've been consuming recently).  I went over the calorie limit yesterday but didn't break into a sweat and a tirade of self-loathing.  This is not because I am perfect (although parts of me are excellent - tee hee!) but because I am understanding that plus or minus 10% around that calorie limit is not going to make any difference at all in the long run.  So it's actually the mid-point in a range, not an absolute limit.  Remember, it's not the food that makes you fat.  Its the guilt, shame and self-loathing which causes you to eat more that makes you fat.  

Example:  I bought 20 visits to the local gym at the end of August 2010.  I am probably going to my first session tomorrow, January 3rd.  YES, really!  I signed up and just could not force myself to go.  And I enjoy lifting weights.  Strange.... Rather than smacking myself upside the head and finding solace at the bottom of a bag of something greasy, I asked myself why?  What was the blockage?  And I eventually realised that I was totally burnt out from my paid employment, hating every day I spent doing that work and really needed to make a major decision.  I cut that work commitment in half, and that didn't fix things....it just gave me a bit of breathing space.  Fast forward to December and I made the decision to completely eliminate that stressor from my life.  I knew that, during these last few months, the best I could manage exercise-wise was to walk the dogs.  Once again, no guilt, shame and self-loathing attached to this postponement of commencing weight training.  

Clients often think that if they are not tough on themselves they will just continue to balloon and eventually need a crane to remove them from their house.  Not so. This is not a carte blanche to continue to indulge in unhealthy practices and unhelpful coping strategies.  Treating yourself with kindness, understanding, respect never is.  You probably wouldn't be as mean to your worst enemy as you are to yourself at times.  That inner critical voice probably helped you write those new year's resolutions.  Tell that voice "thank you for your input" but I've decided to focus on what's possible, not what's perfect.  And go rewrite that list in a S.M.A.R.T.er way.  That is

SPECIFIC - no vagueness e.g. I want to be slim - what's that?
MEASURABLE - in kilos, pounds, inches, dress size, running for buses, reducing cholesterol by x points.
ACHIEVABLE - this is the biggie - NO ONE loses 100kg in a year and keeps it off.
RELEVANT - don't sign up for singing lessons if you want to lose weight
TIME FRAMED - so that you can plan what you need to be doing this week in order to get where you want to be in 3 months time.

So this is actually a lot longer post that I intended it to be, which means that when I sit down and get thinking in front of the keyboard, stuff happens.  And now with kindness, compassion, understanding and respect I will acknowledge this piece of learning and resolve to do the same thing next time I want to blog.  But right now the dogs need walking.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!