Fitness Apps

Sorry to be a bit late with this link to the January issue of the American Journal of Medicine; the issue got buried in a pile of cookbooks : ).

We have been repeatedly finding that smartphone applications can be very helpful for fitness and weight loss.  This article provides discussion and a handy table of recommended apps by name, type, features and cost.  Yes, it includes Zombies, Run! for those who need to run from something for proper motivation...

On the power of positive thinking

Texas Monthly's article describing the last hoodoo pharmacy in Texas is interesting to read in its own right.  As a bit of cultural history, it's a great read.  The article develops more into a discussion of positive thinking and visualization.

The part I found particularly interesting was the owner's response to whether or not she "believed" in what she was selling:

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Stephanie May has two degrees. In past lives, she’s worked in the restaurant business and as an oil and gas executive. A self-described “gun-totin’ liberal,” she’s also a Southern aristocrat—her ancestors owned thousands of acres of Arkansas plantation lands (and when not in Houston, she’s farming some of that same land today). All of that would make it seem unlikely that she was a true believer in hoodoo, and May says a TV reporter once asked her if she believed in the magic she was selling.
“I told her I believed in positive visualization,” she says. “If it takes lighting some incense, burning a candle, saying a prayer, wherever you find that positive energy, then yeah, I believe in it. We stopped counting after more than ten of our customers had won the lottery. We don’t sell Lotto tickets, but there’s not a convenience store in town that could tell you that. Now is it because all my customers play the lottery? I don’t know.”
The same principles May applies on her holistic farm in Arkansas also are at play in hoodoo. “It’s like the butterfly effect—everything you do affects the whole. The way your raise animals on the farm, your business, the way you live your life, you have to consider that your overarching goal is maybe to be happy and out of debt. Everything you do needs to march toward that goal. It’s the same way with the people who buy candles, herbs and incense here: they are attempting to achieve that goal, and it’s one more step in that direction.”
The successful practice of hoodoo is more about changing your path than merely performing a ritual or making a sacrifice, May believes. It’s also about positive thinking. “If you change yourself, amazingly everyone else around you changes too,” May says. “You change your attitude, the way you look at life, suddenly, the world changes. It’s so much easier to try to change yourself. But you wanna try to change someone else? I’ll happily take your money, but don’t expect it to be easy.”
She cites one timely example. A popular New Year’s hoodoo ritual: “Bayberry kit burned to the socket brings love to your life and gold to your pocket,” she recites. “The kit has the Psalm you read and a bayberry bubble bath and there’s a whole ritual you perform on New Year’s Eve. There’s a candle you burn every day for seven days to bring positive influences into your life. If you believe your life’s gonna be better this year, your life is gonna be better this year. If I spend the first week of the year thinking positive thoughts, it’s gonna help. And the fact that your house now smells awesome doesn’t hurt.”

Is eating more protein helpful in losing weight?

As usual, the answer is "it depends".

The Phys Ed column in the NY Times discusses a recent publication in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (abstracted here) examining very intensive exercise regimens coupled with 40% calorie reduced diets with high protein content.

As with many clinical studies, the idea is not that everyone should be doing this; rather, the idea is to use a somewhat extreme testing method to see what the role of high protein intake is during weight loss involving both diet and exercise.

We have long known that losing weight can be achieved by taking in less calories (eating less), and expending calories and increasing metabolic rate (exercising more).

However, what can happen is that both fat and lean muscle are lost which can result in lower metabolic rates and also more difficulty exercising.

It turns out that having a relatively high protein diet can prevent the loss of lean muscle when you reduce calorie intake and also exercise.  Again, the specific diet and exercise regimens were literally a "boot camp" testing method and not meant to be sustained over the long run. 

The take-home message is that if you are using an app to assess your diet's content of protein and find it be less than 10-15% of your total calorie intake, you might want to shift some of the fat calories to protein and also step up your weight training.