BalogBlog: exercise

Showing posts with label exercise. Show all posts

Thursday, October 7, 2021

10 Proven Ways How to Lose Weight Without Exercise

Popsci.com

10. Get enough sleep to help lose weight without exercise

Insufficient sleep is associated with reduced leptin and elevated ghrelin, two opposing hormones involved in the regulation of appetite. Leptin decreases your appetite and ghrelin increases appetite. These differences in leptin and ghrelin caused by lack of sleep are likely to increase your appetite.[22]

What can you do? Make sure you are getting 8 hours of sleep every night to keep your hunger hormones in balance.

9. Drink more water to help lose weight without exercise

Increasing your water intake to a liter (34 oz) or more every day without making any other changes to your lifestyle can help you lose weight.[20]

Your amazing brain in clear, everyday language

Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and Development

“Easy to read. Difficult to put down.”--Micheal J. Colucciello, Jr., NY State pharmaceutical researcher, retired.

“David Balog takes a subject fraught with difficulty and makes it simple and accessible to everyone. The book goes a long way in helping one understand how and why and in what ways stress affects how we live and cope. Invaluable.”--Jessica Hudson, former president, National Association of Former Foster Children

Drinking half a liter (17 oz) of water before a meal can help boost your weight loss efforts

[What can you do? Replace sugary drinks with water to give your weight loss efforts even more of a boost. If you don’t like drinking plain water, make yourself some infused water, there are many recipes available on the Internet.

8. Make smart alcohol choices to help lose weight without exercise

Ideally, alcohol should be eliminated for maximum weight loss results. But if you do choose to drink alcohol, drink in moderation. Research has shown that moderate alcohol consumption has health benefits. Moderate alcohol consumption of about a drink a day is linked to a 14-25% reduction in heart disease risk compared to no alcohol at all.[18]

Your choice of alcohol can have a significant impact on your calorie intake. Cocktails and other sugar filled alcoholic drinks are the worst calorie culprits. And unfortunately those yummy craft beers are also packed with calories, so if you have to drink beer, light beers are the better option. Although straight shots or on the rocks drinks have the least calories, the ellagic acid in red wine helps to delay the growth of fat cells while slowing the development of new fat cells.[19]

What can you do? Eliminate alcohol or drink in moderation. Avoid sweetened drinks, the sweeter a drink is, the more calories it has. Switch to red wine.

7. Drink green tea to help lose weight without exercise

Several studies have shown that green tea can help with weight and fat reduction by helping to increase energy expenditure.[14][15][16][17] This is mostly due to a phytochemical compound in green tea called EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate).

What can you do? Look for a green tea that has a high catechin content. Research has also shown that green tea steeped in bottled water contains more antioxidants in comparison to tea steeped in tap water.[1] The green tea had almost twice the amount of the EGCG antioxidant when steeped in bottled water, making it more bitter compared to tea steeped in tap water. If you do not enjoy drinking green tea, try an EGCG extract, which is available as a dietary supplement

Your amazing brain in clear, everyday language

Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and Development

“Easy to read. Difficult to put down.”--Micheal J. Colucciello, Jr., NY State pharmaceutical researcher, retired.

6. Increase your protein intake to help lose weight without exercise

Increasing your daily protein intake can help you consume less total daily calories. A 15% to 30% dietary protein increase at a constant carbohydrate intake helped study participants eat 441 less calories a day and lose 11 lbs in 12 weeks.[12]

Starting your day with a protein rich breakfast can help to reduce hunger cravings during the day.[13]

5. Cut out sugary drinks to help lose weight without exercise

Research has proven that sugary drinks increase the risk of obesity,[9] as well as heart disease, diabetes, and gout. A typical 20-ounce soda contains 240 calories or more. These calories do not give a feeling of fullness, so you will not eat any less. Replacing sugary drinks with non-sugary drinks can result in an average weight loss of 2% to 2.5%.[10]

Beware of artificially sweetened drinks, artificial sweeteners can increase appetite.

4. Increase your baseline activity to help lose weight without exercise

Baseline activity is your day to day activity, the usual light or sedentary activities of daily living such as walking, household chores, etc. These activities generally don’t burn up a lot of calories, but increasing your baseline activity can help increase your energy expenditure. Study results suggest that any increase in physical activity can help reduce belly fat and body weight and is useful for preventing chronic diseases.[8]

What can you do? Adjust your daily routine to allow for at least one baseline activity to be increased, e.g. get into the habit of taking the stairs instead of the escalator/elevator. Engage in more recreational physical activities

Choosing healthy snacks is important. Avoid junk food snacks and snack instead on nuts like pistachios and low calorie fruit such as apples, which contain a soluble fiber called pectin. Pectin promotes satiety (the feeling of fullness), and helps to slow down digestion.[7]

Your amazing brain in clear, everyday language

Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and Development

“Easy to read. Difficult to put down.”--Micheal J. Colucciello, Jr., NY State pharmaceutical researcher, retired.

2. Weigh yourself every day to help lose weight without exercise

A four year study involving 875 participants revealed that those who used their smart scales the most lost more weight.[4] Men lost an additional 2.5 lbs and women lost 2 lbs in 1 year.

Research has shown that more or less 40% of weight lost by any means is regained in 1 year, and close on 100% of weight lost is regained after 5 years.

1. Use smaller plates to help lose weight without exercise

Dinner plate sizes have increased on average by 23% since 1900.[1] Using bigger plates can result in you serving 9% to 31% bigger portions than you usually would.[2] Larger portions encourage you to eat more, and will inevitably lead to an increase in weight gain.

In one study, participants who were offered a larger portion increased their calorie intake by 30% compared to those offered a smaller portion.[3]

If the plate or bowl size encourages you to eat only 50 more calories a day, your increase in weight would be about 5 pounds a year.

What can you do? Invest in smaller plates and either get rid of all bigger plates and bowls or store them so that they cannot be used. Use disposable portion control plates for eating on the go.

Crefit: https://www.shape-able.com/

Friday, June 11, 2021

One lifestyle may hold a key to slowing down aging

Your amazing brain in clear language.

Tsimane people are unique for their healthy brains that age more slowly

Date:

May 26, 2021

Source:

University of Southern California

Summary:

The Tsimane indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon experience less brain atrophy than their American and European peers. The decrease in their brain volumes with age is 70% slower than in Western populations.

FULL STORY

A team of international researchers has found that the Tsimane indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon experience less brain atrophy than their American and European peers. The decrease in their brain volumes with age is 70% slower than in Western populations. Accelerated brain volume loss can be a sign of dementia.

The study was published May 26, 2021 in the Journal of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

Although people in industrialized nations have access to modern medical care, they are more sedentary and eat a diet high in saturated fats. In contrast, the Tsimane have little or no access to health care but are extremely physically active and consume a high-fiber diet that includes vegetables, fish and lean meat.

"The Tsimane have provided us with an amazing natural experiment on the potentially detrimental effects of modern lifestyles on our health," said study author Andrei Irimia, an assistant professor of gerontology, neuroscience and biomedical engineering at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. "These findings suggest that brain atrophy may be slowed substantially by the same lifestyle factors associated with very low risk of heart disease."

Your amazing brain in clear language.

The researchers enrolled 746 Tsimane adults, ages 40 to 94, in their study. To acquire brain scans, they provided transportation for the participants from their remote villages to Trinidad, Bolivia, the closest town with CT scanning equipment. That journey could last as long as two full days with travel by river and road.

The team used the scans to calculate brain volumes and then examined their association with age for Tsimane. Next, they compared these results to those in three industrialized populations in the U.S. and Europe.

The scientists found that the difference in brain volumes between middle age and old age is 70% smaller in Tsimane than in Western populations. This suggests that the Tsimane's brains likely experience far less brain atrophy than Westerners as they age; atrophy is correlated with risk of cognitive impairment, functional decline and dementia.

The researchers note that the Tsimane have high levels of inflammation, which is typically associated with brain atrophy in Westerners. But their study suggests that high inflammation does not have a pronounced effect upon Tsimane brains.

According to the study authors, the Tsimane's low cardiovascular risks may outweigh their infection-driven inflammatory risk, raising new questions about the causes of dementia. One possible reason is that, in Westerners, inflammation is associated with obesity and metabolic causes whereas, in the Tsimane, it is driven by respiratory, gastrointestinal, and parasitic infections. Infectious diseases are the most prominent cause of death among the Tsimane.

"Our sedentary lifestyle and diet rich in sugars and fats may be accelerating the loss of brain tissue with age and making us more vulnerable to diseases such as Alzheimer's," said study author Hillard Kaplan, a professor of health economics and anthropology at Chapman University who has studied the Tsimane for nearly two decades. "The Tsimane can serve as a baseline for healthy brain aging."

Healthier hearts and -- new research shows -- healthier brains

The indigenous Tsimane people captured scientists' -- and the world's -- attention when an earlier study found them to have extraordinarily healthy hearts in older age. That prior study, published by the Lancet in 2017, showed that Tsimane have the lowest prevalence of coronary atherosclerosis of any population known to science and that they have few cardiovascular disease risk factors. The very low rate of heart disease among the roughly 16,000 Tsimane is very likely related to their pre-industrial subsistence lifestyle of hunting, gathering, fishing, and farming.

"This study demonstrates that the Tsimane stand out not only in terms of heart health, but brain health as well," Kaplan said. "The findings suggest ample opportunities for interventions to improve brain health, even in populations with high levels of inflammation."

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Southern California. Original written by Jenesse Miller. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Your amazing brain in clear language.

Monday, July 22, 2019

Short exercise boosts memory

Researchers discover a gene in mice that's activated by brief periods of exercise

Date: July 2, 2019

Source:

Oregon Health & Science University

Summary:

Neuroscientists, working with mice, have discovered that a short burst of exercise directly boosts the function of a gene that increases connections between neurons in the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory.

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FULL STORY

Neuroscientists at OHSU in Portland, Oregon, working with mice, have discovered that a short burst of exercise directly boosts the function of a gene that increases connections between neurons in the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory.

The research is published online in the journal eLife.

"Exercise is cheap, and you don't necessarily need a fancy gym membership or have to run 10 miles a day," said co-senior author Gary Westbrook, M.D., senior scientist at the OHSU Vollum Institute and Dixon Professor of Neurology in the OHSU School of Medicine.

Previous research in animals and in people shows that regular exercise promotes general brain health. However, it's hard to untangle the overall benefits of exercise to the heart, liver and muscles from the specific effect on the brain. For example, a healthy heart oxygenates the whole body, including the brain.

"Previous studies of exercise almost all focus on sustained exercise," Westbrook said. "As neuroscientists, it's not that we don't care about the benefits on the heart and muscles but we wanted to know the brain-specific benefit of exercise."

So the scientists designed a study in mice that specifically measured the brain's response to single bouts of exercise in otherwise sedentary mice that were placed for short periods on running wheels. The mice ran a few kilometers in two hours.

The study found that short-term bursts of exercise -- the human equivalent of a weekly game of pickup basketball, or 4,000 steps -- promoted an increase in synapses in the hippocampus. Scientists made the key discovery by analyzing genes that were increased in single neurons activated during exercise.