Tag: mindset
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Walk Right for Your Blood Type
One of the odder diet claims out there is that there is an optimal way to eat depending on blood type. It makes no scientific sense, and there is no evidence to support it. It was bundled up with some claims about exercise, also with no support. There are a few ways to “walk right,”…
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Is Breakfast the Most Important Meal of the Day?
Over the last few decades, claims have grown up around breakfast — notably that people who eat “a good breakfast” have all kinds of good outcomes, like easier weight control and better metabolic function. There isn’t a lot of great science on this, because studies are notoriously bad at food tracking, but there’s also no…
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“I’ll start, just not right now.”
It’s easy to get overwhelmed or tired or frustrated, to wonder if you’re doing the right thing, and wait until you have the perfect plan and plenty of time to focus on it. Don’t. Do something small. Once a week, if that’s all you can manage for now. A glass of water when you were…
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Rude Treadmills
Dr Lahiri of The Mindy Project is offended when the treadmill asks her how much she weighs, but it thinks it has a good reason. It’s planning to use that information to estimate calories burned during the session. Unfortunately, calorie burn varies so much from person to person that the simple physics-based calculations gym machines…
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Life Hacks and To-Do Lists
“Life hacks” entered the language around a decade ago when Danny O’Brien talked about them in the context of programming. In programming a hack is “a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix.” This idea has exploded in popularity and has inspired contrarians, who deride life hacking as…
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How Do I Get My Partner to Exercise?
Johns Hopkins has presented data for a large group of middle-aged couples, who were asked about exercise habits at two medical visits conducted roughly six years apart. If one was getting at least the recommended amount of exercise each week at the first of those two visits, it was quite likely the other would be,…
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How to Think About New Studies in Medicine
One of the big disconnects in the way we share information comes between the general-audience publication (newspapers, magazines) and the scholarly journal article. News outlets want to report the news — information that is new — and business considerations often conspire to make them do that in a shallow way, without devoting space to helping…
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Orthorexia and Other Imbalances
Orthorexia is a term recently coined (by physician Steven Bratman, who has since reconsidered his original message) to refer, most simply, to people whose rigid dietary rules are harmful to them. People with orthorexia may be preoccupied with the purity of their food (or of their bodies). Depending on the extent of their rules, they…
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Losing Weight Is Not Enough
In “Weight Loss Doesn’t Always Lead to Happiness,” Ed Cara gives a nice overview of some of the challenges around the weight-loss experience and the efforts of healthcare providers and others to persuade people to exercise more and eat better. Weight loss isn’t magic, but if you keep getting bombarded with messages that it is,…