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Little exercise can help smokers quit

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As little as five minutes of exercise could help smokers quit, says a new study.

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Research published in the international medical journal Addiction showed that moderate exercise, such as walking, significantly reduced the intensity of smokers’  nicotine withdrawal symptoms.

If we found the same effects in a drug, it would immediately be sold as an aid to help people quit smoking,  said Dr Adrian Taylor, the study’s lead author and professor of exercise and health at the University of Exeter.

Taylor and colleagues reviewed 12 papers looking at the connection between exercise and nicotine deprivation. They focused on exercises that could be done outside a gym, such as walking and isometrics, or the flexing and tensing of muscles.

According to their research, just five-minutes of exercise was often enough to help smokers overcome their immediate need for a nicotine fix.

After various types of moderate physical exertion, researchers asked people to rate their need for a cigarette. People who had exercised reported reduced a desire. “What’s surprising is the strength of the effect,” said Dr Robert West, professor of health psychology at University College London. West was not involved in the review.

“They found that the acute effects of exercise were as effective as a nicotine patch,” he said. West cautioned that it was unknown how long the effects of exercise would last. “You could in theory use exercise to deal with short bouts of nicotine cravings, but we don’t know if it would help in the longer term,   he said

Source:The Telegraph (Kolkata,India)

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Midlife Weight Gain

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As you progress through mid-life you will find your metabolism does slow down. You will need fewer calories to maintain the same weight–about 400-500 less by the time you are eighty. This and the tendency to decrease physical activity in mid-life contributes to weight gain. In addition, weight gain will tend to be concentrated more in the lower body–the lower abdomen, hips, buttocks and thighs. The average woman will gain one to two pounds per year……....click & see

But, weight gain is not inevitable. You can maintain a constant weight with an appropriate plan of diet and exercise. This is important, especially for women, as one study found that increased weight between the ages of thirty and fifty was the single greatest risk factor for breast cancer, later on in life.
In mid-life, how and when you eat may be as important as how much. One study showed that mid-life women who consumed their calories in about six small meals had faster metabolisms and lower weights than their counterparts who ate three large meals. Eating earlier in the day as opposed to later also allows you to consume the same amount of calories with less stored as fat. And, as always, if less of your calories are from fat, then you will tend to be thinner.

Regular aerobic exercise or yoga under the guidance of an expart is a way to boost your metabolic rate and counteract the slowing due to aging. It lowers your risk of heart disease, breast cancer, and osteoporosis, as well. Even if you haven’t had an exercise program up to now, you can benefit. While cardiovascular fitness will improve with as little as twenty minutes of aerobic exercise or yoga three times a week, forty-five minutes per day is necessary to make an impact on weight.

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Eating less, exercising more equally good

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 Eating less and exercising more are equally good at helping take off the pounds, US researchers said on Friday in a study that challenges many of the popular tenets of the multibillion dollar diet and fitness industry…..click & see

Tests on overweight people show that a calorie is just a calorie, whether lost by dieting or by running, they said.

They found there is no way to selectively lose belly fat, for instance, or trim thighs. And their carefully controlled study added to evidence that adding muscle mass does not somehow boost metabolism and help dieters take off even more weight.

“It’s all about the calories,”said Dr. Eric Ravussin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, part of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

“So long as the energy deficit is the same, body weight, fat weight, and abdominal fat will all decrease in the same way.”

Ravussin said the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism is one of the few done under controlled conditions that can actually show what happens to a human body while dieting and exercising.

Ravussin’s team has been testing volunteers for another reason — to see if taking in fewer calories helps people live longer.

Strict diets have been shown to help animals from worms to dogs live longer, but it takes longer to study monkeys and humans.

They tested 24 people, 12 who ate a calorie-restricted diet, and 12 who dieted and also exercised five times a week for six months.

The dieters ate 25% less than normal, while the exercisers reduced their calorie intake by 12.5% and increased their physical activity to lose an extra 12.5 in calories.

Another 10 volunteers acted as controls. All food was provided in carefully measured portions for most of the study.

The volunteers in both groups lost 10% of body weight, 24% of fat mass, and 27% of abdominal visceral fat. Visceral fat is packed in between the internal organs and is considered the most dangerous type of fat, linked with heart disease and diabetes.

The distribution of the fat on the body was not altered by either approach — helping prove that there is no such thing as “spot reducing”, Ravussin said in a telephone interview. This suggests that “individuals are genetically programmed for fat storage in a particular pattern and that this programming cannot easily be overcome”, he added.

Ravussin has published other studies that also dispute the idea that exercise builds muscle that helps people lose weight.

“If anything, highly trained people are highly efficient, so they burn fewer calories at rest,”Ravussin said. Dieting alone also did not appear to cause the volunteers to lose muscle mass along with fat, Ravussin’s team found.

“There is a concept that if you exercise, you are going to lose less of your muscle,”he said. But his team found no evidence this is true.

Source:The Times Of India

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Reading diet articles may harm health

 Magazine headlines entice teenage girls with promises: “Get the body you want” and “Hit your dream weight now!” But a new study suggests reading articles about diet and weight loss could have unhealthy consequences later.

Teenage girls who frequently read magazine articles about dieting were more likely five years later to practice extreme weight-loss measures such as vomiting than girls who never read such articles, the University of Minnesota study found.

It didn’t seem to matter whether the girls were overweight when they started reading about weight loss, nor whether they considered their weight important. After taking those factors into account, researchers still found reading articles about dieting predicted later unhealthy weight loss behaviour.

Girls who read dieting articles were twice as likely five years later to try to lose weight by fasting or smoking cigarettes, compared to girls who never read such articles. They were three times more likely to use measures such as vomiting or taking laxatives, the study found.

“The articles may be offering advice such as cutting out trans fats and soda, and those are good ideas for everybody,” said Alison Field of Harvard Medical School. “But the underlying messages these articles send are ‘You should be concerned about your weight and you should be doing something.‘”

Source:   The Times Of India

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Very Low Calorie Diets (VLCD)

Although Very Low Calorie Diets (VLCD) taken during drastic dieting can show some positive effect for short-term weight-loss, they are not satisfactory for long-term maintenance of body weight. In most cases, it becomes impossible to remain on VLCDs for long, so people tend to binge thus putting on weight or suffer from side-effects. Common complaints include fatigue, headaches, constipation, nausea and irritability……...click & see

On a more serious note are   Inflammation of intestine and pancreas, low BP, cardiac arrhythmias, kidney stones and if prolonged for a longer period can lead to death. Those with clinical complications like diabetes, cardiac ailments or metabolic disorders, should remember to avoid VLCDs as the consequences may be detrimental and aggravate their problems.

Source:The Telegraph (Kolkata,India)

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