Eating For Health

Want to lose a few pounds before swimsuit season starts?   If so, losing fat, not muscle should be the goal.   Many fad diets proclaim losing 5 or more pounds in one week.   Yes, that may be possible but along with some fat loss you will be losing some muscle and a lot of water.   Often people find when they go off the crash diet, the weight piles back on.   And losing muscles means you slow your metabolism as muscle burns more calories than fat.   So, how can you drop some pounds with more of the loss being fat and not the muscle you want to keep?   An article on “ 4 Rules for Losing Fat, Not Muscle ” has some suggestions.        1.    Cut the calories but do it gradually To lose weight you do have to cut back on calories in versus calories out.   But cutting back on too many calories at once can slow your metabolism, make it hard to get the nutrients you need, and cause you to lose muscle mass along with s...

Exercise.   Who has time to fit exercise into their day during the holiday season?   And what are the guidelines for how much exercise we should get each day?   A frequently asked question from my students is “How much exercise do I need each day?”   Well, recently, November 2018 to be precise, the federal guidelines on physical activity were updated.   So, what are the latest recommendations and who sets those guidelines anyway? Who sets the guidelines for exercise? The federal government sets guidelines for what we should eat at MyPlate.   A number of federal agencies worked together to update the physical activity guidelines including:   Centers for Disease Control, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, National Institutes of Health and the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.   The guidelines were first issued in 2008 and November, 2018 is the first time the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans h...