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I really liked Steve Pavlina's way of realizing how much extra weight you are carrying:
Go to the gym, pick up two 25-lb dumbbells, walk around with them, and ask yourself if you really want to carry that burdensome weight 24/7 for another year.
(His post is about setting your year's goal, not about losing weight in particular.)
While trying to figure out what color eyes and hair our baby would have, I discovered it wasn't nearly as straight forward as they taught me in middle school. I used to think it was brown eyes and blue eyes and brown was dominant, so you built your square, divided it into 4 and put Bb or bb or whatever across the top. So if my mom had brown eyes and my dad had blue eyes, I would be Bb and since Frank has blue eyes, he'd be bb, so there'd be a 50% chance our kids would have blue eyes.
|
|
B |
b |
|
b |
Bb (Brown) |
bb (blue) |
|
b |
Bb (Brown) |
bb (blue) |
Well it turns out it's not so simple. For a taste of the new knowledge about eye color genetics, read Genetics of eye colour unlocked.
And I really, really want to know if our son will have red hair (Frank's hair is red) so I went online to find out how you can tell if your kid will have red hair. (I only learned about blond and brown in middle school science class.) Turns out that hair is controlled by the amount of two different pigaments, eumelanin and phomelanin, that you have. Instead of thinking blond or brown, think more like how much black am I going to put into this mix. Eumelanin controls the blond to black aspect. Phomelanin controls the how much red aspect. Because the gene that causes you to have lots of red pigment is "recessive" your family can carry it and yet not have any red heads but to have a red haired child, both parents must carry that gene. Here's the best article I found to describe it.
Here's a great humorous post on what a coke does to you. It talks about the effects of the sugar, the caffeine and the phophoric acid. What Happens To Your Body If You Drink A Coke Right Now? But it's not accurate.
Too much phosphorus can cause you to excrete calcium. However, a can of coke only has 41 milligrams of phosphorus - the daily recommended intake of phosphorus is 700 mg for a woman. To put it in perspective, a glass of skim milk has 235 milligrams! For more information, see this Tufts article. So it's highly unlikely that coke is causing you to lose bone mass unless you are drinking a case a day.
My favorite site for looking up medical information is a government site from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health called MedlinePlus. They've changed the search results - their information is always listed under "Medical Encylopedia." When you search you usually have to scroll down to find the "Medical Encylopedia" section but it's worth it as it's usually concise and very consistent. The medical encylopedia information always contains the following sections:
I highly recommend it as a starting point for any medical problem you may be curious about.
The Atkins diet is a low carbohydrate diet. The theory is that if you eat only protein and fat and very little carbohydrates, that you will force your body to make carbohydrates from the fat in your body.
I've known several people that have lost a lot of weight following the Atkins plan. (Not any of them have kept it off long term though!) My personal theory is that they've lost lots of weight on Atkins because they've eaten a lot fewer calories. Seriously, how much steak can you eat? And if you aren't eating carbs, then you are eating just steak, no baked potato, no bread, no sour cream, no beer, ... you are eating a lot less! Also, there a lot fewer temptations during the day. You might see a bowl of candy (a no-no on Atkins) or a jar of cookies but how often do you see a plate of jerky sitting around? I think Atkins works because you don't feel deprived - you are allowed to eat as much as you want - but you eat a lot less because how much steak are you going to eat, seriously?
I think people lose weight on Atkins but have a hard time keeping it off because it's really hard to avoid carbohydrates in everyday living. Could you order a cheeseburger, hold the burger, hold the fries everyday?
Bring up muscle to most people concerned with weightloss and they'll immediately say "muscle weighs more than fat." That's true, but the pound of muscle is more compact than a pound of fat, so you'll look better. A few might say "muscle helps burn fat." That's true too. A pound of muscle takes 50 calories a day to maintan. A pound of fat takes less than 5 calories a day to maintain. That means to maintain one pound of muscle for a year, your body needs 18250 calories just to keep that muscle - that's a lot of food. If you didn't have a pound of muscle demanding that food, your body would convert those 18250 calories into 5 pounds of fat! (And remember, your body is always worried about having energy available so it wants to store extra calories!) So if you were going to eat that food anyway, at the end of the year would you rather have that one pound of muscle or the five pounds of fat?
So why does our body convert extra calories into fat instead of muscle? Because our bodies are very efficient. They are always preparing for that time when the food is going to be scarse. Muscle is expensive to keep in caloric terms, 50 calories a day! And it doesn't provide much energy to the body. If the body needs energy, that pound of muscle will only give it 500 calories. On the other hand, fat is cheap storage. It costs very little a day to maintain and it stores a whopping 3500 calories! So your body would much rather store fat than muscle. It's concerned about you starving someday!
What does that mean to you? If you want to build or maintain muscle, you have to use it. Your body will keep around any muscle that it thinks you need. Anything else will be converted into energy to use and if you don't need that energy, it'll store it as fat. So while your body doesn't actually turn muscle into fat, it will get rid of any extra muscle and store any extra energy as fat, so it looks like muscle is being converted into fat. Your body will only keep muscle it thinks you need. Luckily it can't distinguish between chopping wood and lifting weights in the gym. So if you want to lose weight or keep it off, lifting weights will build muscle that will use a lot of those calories you eat to maintain itself.
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Type of tissue |
Calories to maintain for a day |
Calories it’s worth (if used to fuel exercise, for example) |
|
Muscle |
50 |
500 |
|
Fat |
5 |
3500 |
So you can see that your body would rather keep around extra fat than extra muscle because it's worried about starvation. However, if you want to lose weight, you'll want to keep around more muscle than fat and you'll have to trick the body into thinking you need that muscle by using it everyday. And each pound of muscle you have is five pounds less of fat you'll have at the end of the year!
If the key to losing weight is tracking what you eat, then here are a few tools to help you do it.
well as purchased foods as well as homemade food. You type a few letters and it shows you all the matching options. For the foods you select, it shows you food ingredients and composition. Adding custom foods or common meals is extremely easy. In addition it has some nice graphing capabilities - you can visually track calories in and calories out. Or you can track percent carbs vs protein vs fat. Or any other combination of the data it tracks. It's available to download for $29.
Track what you eat for best weight loss success!
Study after study has shown that people that lose weight and keep it off write down what they eat. Writing down what you eat makes you aware of what you eat. There are too many opportunities in today's world to consume calories without even noticing. The piece of candy as you leave the restaurant, a couple of chips before dinner, a cookie from the cookie jar at the office, the handful of M&Ms from the receptionist's desk. They all add up. Just 11 M&M's a day would be a pound a month - that's 12 pounds a year!
Writing down everything you eat will help you realize how many calories you consume without even noticing.
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