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This Simple Exercise Triples Weight Loss

Around one-third of people over 65 are overweight or obese.

Bursts of short, high-intensity exercise can triple weight loss, research finds.

Known as ‘interval training’, or HIIT, the exercise can burn off more calories in a shorter period of time.

The exercises involved do not require any special equipment and can all be done at home in less than half an hour.

They include things like ‘jumping jacks’, squats, step ups and push ups.

Common types of interval training involve 30-second bursts going “all out” followed by four minutes of recovery at a much lower intensity.

Interval training can also be done on a bicycle, by running, jogging, speed walking or with a variety of other exercises.

The study included 36 people aged 70 with visceral (belly) fat exceeding 1 pound in women and 4 pounds in men.

They followed a 10-week course of interval training.

The interval training started at just 18 minutes per day, three times per week.

It involved 40 seconds of work, followed by 20 seconds of rest.

Over the 10 weeks of the study, they worked up to 36-minute workouts per day.

The results showed that the interval training tripled the losses in belly fat, in comparison to a control group who did not exercise.

The effects of exercise were stronger for men than for women in this study.

The study’s authors conclude:

“In conclusion, the main finding of this trial is that 10 weeks of progressive vigorous interval training decreased total FM [fat mass] by almost threefold compared to the control group while increasing muscle mass.

These outcomes are previously known to be associated with improved cardiometabolic health and decreased risk of CVDs.”

Around one-third of people over 65 are overweight or obese.

Obesity increases the risk of a range of diseases, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and osteoarthritis.

About the author

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology.

He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. 

The study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (Ballin et al., 2019).

 

weight-loss

 

15 Things You Don’t Realize
May Be Sabotaging Your Weight Loss

Over-emphasizing health food

Start with the fact that there are plenty of unhealthy foods that masquerade as healthy. Although choosing healthy foods are the correct path, they can’t be consumed without keeping portions in check. “My patients often report eating low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets full of healthful foods like quinoa, green leafy vegetables and berries, but they are eating too much of these foods,” says Gillian Goddard, MD, an endocrinologist and certified nutrition support clinician in New York City. “What makes foods healthy is their nutrient content. This does not mean we can eat them in limitless quantities.” For example, a half cup of quinoa has 111 calories. “Most people are eating two or three cups of quinoa in a sitting which can come in at 400-600 calories. That doesn’t include, the nuts, cheese and olive oil they’re adding,” adds Dr. Goddard.

Failing to understand cravings

They’re not easy to deal with. Julia Ross, author of the new book, The Craving Cure: Identify Your Craving Type to Activate Your Natural Appetite Control, says that when it comes to eating, the brain’s directives are all-powerful. Unfortunately, she says, the brain is telling most of us to eat sweets, fried foods, and starchy pastas and breads. Instead she advises not to skip meals and to make better choices to ward off bad choices. “Increase your protein at each meal and include some red meat along with poultry and fish. This kind of dense protein, eaten regularly, is the most effective food for turning off cravings for sweet and starchy ‘treats,'” Ross continues. 

Treating weight loss as punishment

Finding the willpower to shed pounds is tough enough. If you consider your weight-loss efforts as punishment, you’ll start to resent your diet—especially in social situations. “You’re staring down the bread basket or considering dessert,” says fitness instructor Jenna Bergen Southerland in an article in Prevention. Your thought process may be that everyone else is getting to eat those things, and you can’t.
Southerland says to not look at it as deprivation. “Food, in general, is certainly a necessity. But a brownie? So the next time this thought whispers across your brain, take a step back and ask yourself two questions: Am I really depriving myself of a necessity? If I don’t change my eating habits, what am I really depriving myself of? The answer: A healthier, happier life. Keep that in mind and you’ll happily pass up the junk.”

Not watching liquid calories

Even healthy drinks like fruit juice or smoothies have a ton of calories and sugar. When you’re trying to lose weight these drinks can seem like a sensible tactic, but if you have too much it can seriously undermine your success, points out, Yvonne Sanders, U.S. head of operations, with Slimming World, an online weight-loss food optimization platform based in Dallas. 

Not snacking strategically

When people go more than three hours between meals they can become too hungry and then overeat whatever comes their way, explains Dafna Chazin, RDN, a dietitian at a weight loss practice in Voorhees, New Jersey. “Most people need two snacks in the afternoon hours, spaced out and protein-rich, to curb hunger and reduce impulsive eating.” Some good snack choices include Greek yogurt, hard-boiled egg, cottage cheese, fruit, and nuts, she says. 

Relying on calorie counting

Many weight-loss experts still claim that a calorie is a calorie—but that’s flat out wrong. “A 100-calorie pack of cookies is not going to provide the same nutritional value as something like a green smoothie,” says Lindsey Smith, author of the forthcoming book, Eat Your Feelings: The Food Mood Girl’s Guide to Transforming Your Emotional Eating. “While the green smoothie may have more calories, it also has way more nutrients that can help your body lose weight, keep it off, and feel mentally and physically healthy.”

Cutting out fat

Saying fat will make you fat is so 1990s, quips Smith. “You need it to keep hunger away for hours, to think clearly, and to make good decisions and function throughout the day,” Smith says. “Plus, most items that claim they are ‘low-fat’ are usually packed with sugar or other chemicals to make up for the flavour loss, and they can actually lead to more weight gain.” She also advises to incorporate healthy choices such as avocados, coconut oil, fish, nuts and seeds. 

Skipping meals

“It’s almost logical to think that if you skip meals or cut your food intake drastically, you’ll cut out more calories over the course of the day, but it rarely works that way,” says Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD, CSOWM, FAND, and director of worldwide nutrition education and training Herbalife Nutrition in Los Angeles. “Skipping meals and cutting back invariably leads to uncontrollable hunger and overeating.”
Instead, she advises to plan out how you can distribute your daily calories over three meals and one or two snacks. “It’s easier to practice portion control when you know you’ll be eating every few hours, and you’ll help to break the ‘starve-then-binge’ habit,” Bowerman says. Gearing up for holiday cheese platters?

Rewarding exercise with food

Many people fool themselves into thinking they’ve burned off a lot more calories during exercise than they actually have, and they use that as an excuse to indulge, Bowerman says. “Be aware of how many calories you actually burn when you exercise (you can find lots of resources online), and compare that to the calories you’re tempted to take in afterwards.” Also, keep a log of the type of exercise you do and the amount of time you spend doing it. This journaling can keep track of what you’re taking in and what you’re burning. 

Negative self-talk

Don’t be so hard on yourself, Bowerman says. “If you think you should be perfect—that you’ll always exercise every morning or never eat another piece of candy—you’re setting the bar awfully high,” she says. The fix here is to practice positive self-talk. “Offer the same support to yourself as you would to a friend. You wouldn’t tell your friend who’s struggling with weight, ‘You just don’t have the willpower. I guess you’ll just be fat for the rest of your life.’ So, why do you say that to yourself?” 

Not enough water

Many people fail to drink enough water, and this is a big factor in blocking weight loss progress, says Sean McCaffrey, DC, a chiropractor who operates McCaffrey Family Health in Springfield, Illinois, where he offers a weight-loss clinic. “Water makes you feel full, which helps to curb appetite,” he says, plus it’s necessary for digestion and to prevent dehydration.
Also, a proper supply of water is needed to help the body burn fat. “Six to eight, eight-ounce glasses are recommended but some people need more or less, depending on the climate they live in, their overall health and how much exercise they do,” McCaffrey adds. 

Taking weekends off

It isn’t hard to undo a week of careful eating with just a few indulgences over the weekend. “Your weight isn’t going to budge if you’re constantly taking two steps forward and two steps back,” Bowerman says. To keep on the right track, do your weekly weigh-in on Friday mornings rather than Mondays. “If you’ve had a good week, it will show on the scale and will help keep you motivated throughout the weekend. You can also ‘bank’ a few calories during the week to spend on the weekend,” Bowerman says. “But be careful and know the calorie content of your indulgences. A margarita and a basket of chips could set you back several hundred calories.”

Too much protein

While protein is an important part of a healthy diet, too much of a good thing can block your weight-loss success. “If it runs, jumps, swims or flies, it tends to be good protein,” Dr. McCaffrey adds. He cautions relying on protein powders or shakes. “They often have lots of sugar and other additives. Under certain circumstances, these may be appropriate to use but most people can easily get adequate protein through their diet,” he says.

Not enough sleep

Rebecca Lewis, RD, in-house dietitian at HelloFresh, says even just a single night of poor sleep can make you feel hungrier than usual the next day. “Instead, make sure you are getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night. Start by turning down lights and powering down your electronics about an hour before bed,” she says. 

Eating too fast

Slow down as you eat your meals, as it takes time for the signal from your stomach to get to your brain that you’ve just eaten, says Lewis. “Without that signal, we’re inclined to keep eating until we are full—and then end up stuffed. Instead, slow down, put your fork down between bites, try to stretch your meal to be a full 20 minutes, and stop eating when you’re medium-full.”

Erica Lamberg 
 
 
stress-eat

 

 

Weight Loss:
Research Reveals An Easy Way
To Shed Pounds

 
Surprisingly, weight loss was achieved without making other changes to diet or lifestyle.
 
Small changes to meal times could lead to a doubling in weight loss, research finds.
 
Consuming more of the day’s calories earlier can help to reduce belly fat and double weight loss, scientists have found.
 
Higher quality sleep — which is linked to eating earlier — may be one of the reasons that weight loss is improved.
 
The study included 31 obese and overweight people who were following a weight loss diet.
 
Their sleep and movements were tracked using wearable activity monitors.
 
The results of the study showed that those who had more of their calories earlier in the day ended up lowering their body mass index more and they had lower body fat.
 
Those that ate earlier also went to sleep earlier.
 
Late night snacking is known to be one of the great enemies of weight loss and good quality sleep.
 
Dr Adnin Zaman, the study’s first author, said:
“We used a novel set of methods for simultaneous measurement of daily sleep, physical activity, and meal timing patterns that could be used to identify persons at risk for increased weight gain.
Given that wearable activity monitors and smartphones are now ubiquitous in our modern society, it may soon be possible to consider the timing of behaviors across 24 hours in how we approach the prevention and treatment of obesity.”
Eating earlier in the day is not the only approach involving shifting meals that works.
 
Another approach is to move meals more towards the middle of the day — in other words eat breakfast later and supper earlier.
 
Participants in one study who ate breakfast 90 minutes later and supper 90 minutes earlier doubled their weight loss.
 
Surprisingly, this was without making other changes to diet or lifestyle.
 
September 29, 2020
 
About the author
Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology.
He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. 
 
The study was presented at ENDO 2019, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in New Orleans, La.
 
source: Psyblog


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If Losing Your Job To The Pandemic Destroyed Your Identity, Here’s How To Find It

        “If I’m not (insert job title here), then who am I?”

This is the type of question some adults are asking themselves as they struggle through the darkness of losing a job to the pandemic.

Some never realized how tied their identities were to their careers until they lost them. They feel lost mentally and emotionally, as if they’re experiencing a bad breakup. The present is surreal, the future is uncertain, and they’re unsure how to define themselves.

Christa Black, a freelance copywriter from Ashland, Kentucky, said her work shaped her identity.

“I finally felt like a ‘real’ writer, because after several years of trying, I was actually being paid to do what I enjoyed and was good at,” she said. “I started to feel less like an artist and more like ‘a professional.'”

But when the pandemic hit, the work faded away. Black’s income decreased to little to none. She soon felt that she had lost her identity, that she was no longer a professional and that she didn’t fit in with the creative community from which she had come.

That might be because sudden unemployment is a threat to “narrative identity,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor of psychology who specializes in identity and narrative psychology at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts.

“Identity is the story of our lives that weaves together the way we reconstruct our past, make sense of the present and anticipate our future,” he said.

That narrative identity is the confluence of you and the culture in which you live. We grow up in a sea of stories about what a typical life’s journey looks like and what moments we’re supposed to hold onto, Adler said, so we take the templates available to us and tailor our experiences to those master narratives.

“We use our stories as the foundation for everything else that we do,” Adler said. “So when you rock the foundation, everything else on top of that crumbles.”

Through some inner work, however, you can take back your worth.

How our identities influence our jobs

For some, jobs provide merely a paycheck. For others, occupations also supply a sense of meaning that holds weight when they think about their sense of selves.

Our perpetually “on the grind” culture defines who we are by what we do for work.

“The first thing we ask when we meet a new person is, ‘What do you do for a living?'” said Nicole Hind, an Australia-based psychotherapist behind the online community, blog and practice Unveiled Stories.

“It’s as though we equate ‘goodness’ with ‘work’ when in fact goodness is so much more than that. It’s important to note that this is particular to our modern industrialized society: the idea that work is all of who we are and that we are not worthy humans if we don’t work.”

Additionally, people who feel motivated and engaged by and passionate about their work might have experienced psychological benefits from finding their calling, Adler said.

In the idealized college-job-promotion-passion trajectory, becoming unemployed isn’t part of the vision. “All of a sudden the end is totally open and uncertain,” Adler said.

Our narrative identities serve two additional functions that make us feel good. They provide a sense of unity, so that we feel we are the same people over time. They also provide a sense of purpose, so we know the meaning of what we’re doing and what our lives are about.

People suddenly faced with job loss are now challenged by a story with a cliffhanger and interrupted senses of unity and purpose — all of which can lead to anxiety, depression and anger.

 

mirror

What to do about it

Finding your identity begins with questioning yourself about three themes that construct life stories and tend to be the strongest predictors of well-being, Adler said.

“It’s not so much what happens to you [that matters]; it’s how you tell the story of what happens to you,” Adler said.

The first is agency, a characteristic of the main character in your story (which is you). Maybe your effectiveness at your job provided your sense of agency. Though no one is in complete control, how much are you in the driver’s seat of your life versus batted around by the whims of external forces?

Give yourself the space to grieve the losses, Hind instructed.

Don’t rush into proclaiming why you’re stronger because of it. Instead, acknowledge what you’re feeling physically, emotionally and mentally. Recall positive moments, too: the times when you advocated for what you believed in or hit a goal.

Summer internships have dried up because of the pandemic. Here’s how to get ahead without one

“People who do what’s called exploratory processing — which means deeply trying to make sense of their experience before creating a redemption sequence at the end — actually do better than the people who just do redemption without exploring the challenge,” Adler said.

Then find something else to prioritize, like a new venture or hobby. Revisit your core values and what really matters: What parts of your job were important to you? What fueled your passion? How can you express those during this period?

You can stay invested in those values whether you’re employed or not, Adler said.

For example, Black, the freelance copywriter, has found her roots again in creative writing. “It has helped me get back in touch with my creativity and given me something enjoyable to focus on while I emotionally recover from everything that came along with the pandemic and its fallout,” she said.

In this way, the underlying value of her job might be fulfilled.

Figure out your own definition of success, Hind said. What do you admire about your role models? Is it their “success” or their skills, compassion, kindness or wisdom?

And our stories aren’t just about ourselves. Communion, secondly, entails a sense of being connected to, nurturing and feeling cared for by quality relationships. Engage with the connections that matter to you.

“Step away from ‘job’ as being the only and step towards appreciating [yourself] and others for everything: the way you take care of someone or the meal you cooked today,” Hind said. “What [do] my everyday life, my interactions and my values say about who I am?”

Taking action and finding community foster the growth leading to redemption — stories that start out bad but end well.

“There’s a lot of research on the theme of redemption. It’s sort of a classic American master narrative,” Adler said. “We have the Puritan settlers finding freedom. We have ex-slaves’ narratives about liberation. We have the rags to riches stories.”

The outcome of finding yourself

Reclaiming your identity requires both a quick shift in mindset and a journey of changing your thought patterns and behaviors — just like setting an intention to lose weight, Adler said.

“That’s something that takes place over time, but it actually happens every moment of every day. You can’t just diet and exercise on the weekends,” he explained. “Changing your narrative identity is like that — it’s a cumulative process that builds up over time, but the intention … is something you do in the here and now every day.”

When we’re focused only on work as a measure of success and what defines us, we lose touch with many other areas, Hind said.

We might devalue our contributions to our families or forget to be present with them, ourselves, pets and other sources of joy. We say we “don’t have time” for leisure and then wonder why we’re so anxious all the time or need a drink to unwind. Then we wonder why we’re unhappy, Hind said.
Just as a threatened identity might have upended every area of your life, a solid identity can also flow into different domains and increase your confidence.

By Kristen Rogers       June 18, 2020
source: www.cnn.com