Fat Skunk Put on Diet
A skunk named Mr. Bumble was turned over to the RSPCA when his owners could no longer handle him. The skunk, who loves bacon sandwiches, weighed in at 14 pounds! Mr. Bumble is now at Tropiquaria Animal Park in Watchet, England and is on a weight-loss regimen.
Park owner Chris Noisier told the BBC: “We’re now working on dieting him down to what he should be and clearly bacon butties are not a normal part of a skunk’s diet in the wild.
“We’re putting him on the vegetarian option at the moment. It’s very much like a human weight watching issue.
“He is getting to meet lots of new people so there’s lots going on in his life and I suspect it’s making up for the lack of his old favourite food.”
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Midnight Snacks Will Make You Fat
How much weight you gain may depend on when you eat, according to a new study that looked at the timing of meals in mice. Scientists at Northwestern University fed two groups of mice the same amount of high fat food, but one group ate during regular waking time, while the other ate during what would normally be their sleeping period. The second group gained twice as much weight as the first group!
“For a long time we questioned whether or not eating patterns had anything to do with gaining weight,” says obesity expert Dr. Louis Aronne of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He points to previous observational research suggesting that people who skip breakfast in favor of massive meals in the evening hours tend to be overweight. “We had no proof that it’s a real problem,” says Aronne, who was not involved in the study. “If an experiment like this is replicated in humans, it might clarify for us just how much time of day matters when it comes to obesity.”
It is not yet clear whether the difference is due to hormone production or the disruption of sleep patterns. Link -via Digg
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Calorie Restriction Leads to Longer, Healthier Life
Results from a 20 year study on monkeys and their diets show that eating fewer calories can help you live longer. Animals with a restricted diet of 30% were shown to outlive those that were given the freedom to eat what when and how much they wanted. The monkeys also had improved chances of avoiding age related diseases, cancer, diabetes and brain atrophy.
In terms of overall animal health, Weindruch notes, the restricted diet leads to longer lifespan and improved quality of life in old age. “There is a major effect of caloric restriction in increasing survival if you look at deaths due to the diseases of aging,” he says.
The incidence of cancerous tumors and cardiovascular disease in animals on a restricted diet was less than half that seen in animals permitted to eat freely. Remarkably, while diabetes or impaired glucose regulation is common in monkeys that can eat all they want, it has yet to be observed in any animal on a restricted diet. “So far, we’ve seen the complete prevention of diabetes,” says Weindruch.
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410 Pound Weight Loss
At 650 pounds, David Smith contemplated suicide. But then he decided to lose the weight, and dropped 410 pounds in a little over two years.
“I decided that the best way to get over my fear was to destroy it … and the best way to be seen is on television,” he wrote. So he contacted KTVK, a local television station that had a feature hosted by fitness and nutrition guru Chris Powell. After some initial hesitation, Powell took Smith on.
Now 240 pounds, Smith is a certified trainer. The documentary is called “The 650-pound Virgin” and will air Sunday night on TLC. Link (with video) -via Digg
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Imaginary Gastric Band Helps Woman to Lose Weight
A gastric band (the LAP-Band) is a restrictive band placed around the patient’s stomach that gives the sensation of a full stomach after eating smaller portions of food, thus letting the patient eat less and lose weight without going hungry.
But fitting the band requires surgery, with potential side effects – so here’s a novel idea: making obese patients believe that they have an "imaginary" gastric band through hypnosis!
A therapist convinced Marion Corns, 35, she had had surgery to fit the band by talking her through the procedure while in a trance.
Hospital smells were even pumped into the room to boost the effect.
Housewife Marion, who has slimmed from 15st 6lb to 11st 7lb, said: “Bizarrely I can even ‘remember’ being wheeled into theatre, the clink of the surgeon’s knife and smell of the anaesthetic.”
She spent £780 on five sessions with a therapist at the Elite Clinic in Marbella after her weight ballooned despite trying numerous diet aids.
Afterwards Marion felt her stomach had tightened and she was full up on just a small portion of food.
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Why Men Are Better Dieters Than Women
We know that men have an easier time losing weight than women do. Why this is so is the subject of a recent study. Nuclear-medicine specialist Dr. Gene-Jack Wang of the Brookhaven National Laboratory conducted a rather sadistic experiment using 23 male and female volunteers. First, they fasted for 17 hours. Then they were presented with a large amount of their favorite food and told to think about something else to reduce their cravings. Meanwhile, they had been injected with a dye and scanned to see what areas of the brain were most active.
When the scans were studied and the results were tallied, it appeared that both sexes were actually able to lower the overall sensation of hunger. In most people, the brain may grow partially habituated to an empty belly over time, and all of Wang’s volunteers did a good job of hastening that desensitization. What the men could do that the women couldn’t was quit ruminating on food, successfully suppressing — if only temporarily — the conscious desire to eat. The women continued experiencing emotional cravings even if their hunger had subsided.
Wang suspects hormone may play a part in the difference. Link -Thanks, Freshome!
(image credit: Ansgar/zefa/Corbis)
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How To Lose Belly Fat
To paraphrase Animal Farm, “some fats are more equal than others”.
While putting on weight in general can have negative effects on your health, abdominal weight gain (visceral fat) is particularly unhealthy. Since visceral fat is buried deep in your abdomen, it may seem like a difficult target for spot reduction. But this fat is actually quite sensitive to exercise and calorie reduction.
In addition to diet and exercise for reducing overall fat, eMedExpert Blog has five tips for reducing belly fat in particular. Link -Thanks, Karen!
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New Study Reveals that Exercise Won't Make You Thin
Uh oh, here comes another study that will surely add confusion to how exactly one should go about losing weight: exercise won’t make you slim.
Researchers from Loyola University Health System and other centers compared African American women in metropolitan Chicago with women in rural Nigeria. On average, the Chicago women weighed 184 pounds and the Nigerian women weighed 127 pounds.
Researchers had expected to find that the slimmer Nigerian women would be more physically active. To their surprise, they found no significant difference between the two groups in the amount of calories burned during physical activity.
"Decreased physical activity may not be the primary driver of the obesity epidemic," said Loyola nutritionist Amy Luke, a member of the study team. [...]
Diet is a more likely explanation than physical activity expenditure for why Chicago women weigh more than Nigerian women, Luke said. She noted the Nigerian diet is high in fiber and carbohydrates and low in fat and animal protein. By contrast, the Chicago diet is 40 percent to 45 percent fat and high in processed foods.
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300 Calorie Food Picture Gallery
Karen at HealthAssist measured and photographed amounts of food that have 300 calories. Each is pictured with a $10 bill for scale, and the cost of the amount is also noted. If you are counting calories, this is good news in that 300 calories of the most nutritious foods will fill you up. The sad news is that the cost of 300 calories in breads, pasta, and sweets is so much cheaper than fresh fruits and vegetables. Link -Thanks, Karen!
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