Awesome Tips For Losing Weight Quickly: 06/24/16

Friday, June 24, 2016

Why Your Random Eating Schedule Is Risky for Your Health

Do you ever postpone dinner because you’re in the middle of a project? Or skip breakfast because you overslept? As long as you avoid binging later on, it’s no big deal, right?

Well, maybe not.

Two new papers published in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society suggest that it’s not just what you eat, but when you eat that affects your health. Having irregular meals may set you up for obesity, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes—regardless of how many total calories you’re consuming.

One of the reviews examined international eating patterns and found a possible link between obesity and eating more calories in the evening. The other paper concluded that people who consistently ate six meals a day had better cholesterol and insulin levels than those who ate meals with variable frequency—in this case, anywhere from three to nine meals a day.

“We found that adults consuming calories during regular meals—at similar times from one day to [the] next—were less obese than people who have irregular meals, despite consuming more calories overall,” says Gerda Pot, PhD, a visiting lecturer in the Diabetes and Nutritional Sciences Division at King’s College London who worked on both papers.

Really? While it doesn't seem to make sense that meal timing could affect your health that much, the studies are part of an emerging field called chrononutrition, in which researchers are exploring the link between metabolism and circadian rhythms.

Many metabolic processes in the body—such as appetite, digestion, and the metabolism of fat, cholesterol, and glucose—follow patterns that repeat every 24 hours, explains Pot. “Eating inconsistently may affect our internal body clock,” she says. And that disruption might lead to weight gain and other health risks.

But just how significant is the effect of varying your meal times?

“This is a really important and valid question which we unfortunately cannot answer yet,” says Pot. “It would be of great interest to fully understand how much impact disruptions in our circadian rhythms could have on [our] obesity risk.”

So for now, it seems like a good idea to eat at the same times every day if you can. But if you can't, there are plenty of other ways to stay healthy, too.

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This Weight Loss Device to Treat Obesity Looks Insane—But Is It, Really?

Unless you’ve been avoiding cable news and Twitter lately (in which case we're jealous), you’ve probably heard about AspireAssist, the controversial new obesity treatment that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last week.

Basically, it’s a tube that’s surgically inserted into a person’s stomach, and allows them to drain some of the food they’ve just eaten through a port valve and into a toilet. Approved for folks with a BMI between 35 and 55 (a BMI over 30 is classified as obese), the AspireAssist can prevent the body from absorbing nearly a third of a meal’s calories. (Here’s a video that shows how it works.)

Now, before we go any further, let’s just admit that our knee-jerk reaction was that this device this sounds totally bonkers. We weren’t alone, either. The media dubbed it a "bulimia machine." Stephen Colbert explained it as "machine-assisted abdominal vomiting."

But is this opinion fair? Probably not.

“It’s not society’s job to judge [the AspireAssist] based on whether they think it’s morally okay or not,” says Yoni Freedhoff, MD, author of The Diet Fix and the director of the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, Canada. (For the record, he’s unaffiliated with the device.) “Our opinions should be based on evidence and results.”

And, he says, the data behind the AspireAssist is actually pretty good. A year-long trial followed 111 people who used the AspireAssist and compared them to 60 people who didn’t have the device. Both groups received dietary and lifestyle advice along the way. After 52 weeks, those who were using the AspireAssist lost 12.1% of their body weight, while the other group lost only 3.6%.

As for the criticism that the device mimics bulimia, it’s not approved for people with that very serious eating disorder. It’s not approved for anyone with binge eating disorder or nighttime eating disorder either.

There has also been concern that the device will encourage gluttony, or that people who opt for the AspireAssist will eat whatever they want, with a 30% discount on calories. (It almost sounds unfair, right?)

Only, that’s not what happened in the study, says Louis Aronne, MD, director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian, and a researcher who was involved in the clinical trials of the device. “People didn’t keep eating,” he says. “They felt full.”

“People assume that [obesity] is under a person’s control,” says Dr. Arrone. “They think, ‘[That person] should stop eating as much.” But in fact, it’s more complicated than willpower alone.

When we eat, our brains produce hormones that eventually tell us we’re full, he says. But as time goes on and we gain weight, that “you’re full” signal may become blunted. He suspects that may explain why the AspireAssist can help people: They get the food they need to stay full, minus about one-third of the calories.

If it still seems like a quick-fix solution, keep in mind that the device needs to be surgically implanted, and you have to spend about 5 to 10 minutes after every meal draining your stomach. “[The AspireAssist] doesn’t sound like the easy way out,” says Dr. Freedhoff. “It sounds incredibly involved.”

Dr. Freedhoff said he was personally shocked by how many people have reached out to him and expressed negative reactions to the device. “I’ve never seen something more raked over the coals,” he says.

It might be because we tend to think people who can’t lose weight are “lazy, slothful, and gluttonous,” he says. Never mind the fact that obesity is a complicated mix of genetics and our environment—or that weight loss is pretty freaking hard for plenty of people.

“We only moralize about obesity, which is always fair-game in our society—from Saturday morning cartoons to late-night comedy shows,” says Dr. Freedhoff.

Regardless of how people feel about this particular device, it’s time for all that to change, he says.

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A Standing Desk Won’t Help You Slim Down—But Doing This Will

If you think standing at your desk will keep your waistline trimmer than sitting at your desk, think again. According to research appearing in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health, standing only burns another 2 or 3 calories than sitting over the course of 15 minutes, "not a very significant increase," points out study lead author Seth Creasy.

Walking, on the other hand, burned up almost three times that much, even at a leisurely pace of only 2.5 or 3 miles per hour. And that may be your ticket to a trimmer you.

Some research has suggested that standing burns more calories than sitting, which may explain why you've seen more standing desks around your office. Most of that research looked at each activity (sitting and standing) in isolation. The current research team reasoned that most people are doing a combination of activities, or the activities in different orders and decided that merited a look.

To that end, they recruited 74 young, healthy volunteers to participate in a series of carefully choreographed experiments. The participants were divided into four groups and directed to sit, stand, or walk in different sequences.

The first group sat at a computer and typed for 15 minutes, then stood. The second sat while watching TV for 15 minutes, then walked on treadmills. The third group stood then sat, while the fourth group walked before sitting. Each activity was separated by a 3-minute "transition" period during which the person was "seated at rest, not fidgeting, just relaxing," explains Creasy.

Participants burned about 20 calories during a quarter hour of sitting, regardless of whether it was at a computer or a television. Standing ate up another two calories.

"From strictly an energy expenditure point of view, standing and sitting would be pretty much the same," says Creasy, who is a doctoral candidate in the department of health and physical activity of the Physical Activity and Weight Management Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh. "It makes sense. You're not really exerting yourself if you're standing."

Walking, though, used up almost three times as many calories which, over the course of an hour, could add up to as many as 130 calories. On a daily basis, that could be enough to stave off the dreaded middle-aged spread, which seems to be creeping up earlier and earlier.

If you want to avoid aches and pains, standing may still be better than crunched down in your seat, fingers hammering away at a keyboard. But if you want to lose—or maintain—weight, walk as often as you can, up and down stairs, to the water cooler, from the far reaches of the parking lot.

RELATED: 10 Ways to Walk Off Fat Faster

"Incorporating walking breaks (say for 5-10 minutes every hour) adds up and will help individuals increase their energy expenditure compared to just sitting," says Kelly Pritchett, PhD, RD, a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and assistant professor of nutrition and exercise science at Central Washington University in Ellensburg.

"We know that 150 minutes a week or more of moderate intensity exercise . . . is necessary for health benefits. So , if you are someone who has a hard time meeting these recommendations, short walking breaks may be helpful for meeting these goals," she adds.

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