Category: health

How closing your eyes and counting before meals may aid weight loss – Business Insider

Nutritionists have recently come to an exciting find in a new study on eating habits, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

According to the study’s findings, small rituals prior to meals could assist us in eating more consciously and with more discipline.

Comprised of six rounds of assessment on 1800 participants, the study was conducted by assistant professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Allen Ding Tian.

How closing your eyes and counting before meals may aid weight loss – Business Insider

Children Who Get Less Screen Time Think Better, Study Finds

Keeping your kid’s mind sharp might involve making sure they don’t spend all day on their smartphone or other screen devices, suggests yet more research published this week.

Canadian researchers looked at the first bits of data from a 10-year-long U.S. project meant to study how children’s brains develop over time, called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (or more cleverly, the ABCD study).

As part of the project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers across the U.S. interviewed children and their parents about their lifestyle habits. That included how much time they spent exercising, sleeping, and watching screens on an average day. The children also took questionnaires, provided spit samples, and completed puzzles that measured their cognitive functions.

Children Who Get Less Screen Time Think Better, Study Finds

After Surgery in Germany, I Wanted Vicodin, Not Herbal Tea – The New York Times

I recently had a hysterectomy here in Munich, where we moved from California four years ago for my husband’s job. Even though his job ended a year ago, we decided to stay while he tries to start a business. Thanks to the German health care system, our insurance remained in force. This, however, is not a story about the benefits of universal health care.

Thanks to modern medicine, my hysterectomy was performed laparoscopically, without an overnight hospital stay. My only concern about this early release was pain management. The fibroids that necessitated the surgery were particularly large and painful, and the procedure would be more complicated.

I brought up the subject of painkillers with my gynecologist weeks before my surgery. She said that I would be given ibuprofen. “Is that it?” I asked. “That’s what I take if I have a headache. The removal of an organ certainly deserves more.”

“That’s all you will need,” she said, with the body confidence that comes from a lifetime of skiing in crisp, Alpine air.

I decided to pursue the topic with the surgeon.

After Surgery in Germany, I Wanted Vicodin, Not Herbal Tea – The New York Times

Is everything you think you know about depression wrong? | Society | The Guardian

n the 1970s, a truth was accidentally discovered about depression – one that was quickly swept aside, because its implications were too inconvenient, and too explosive. American psychiatrists had produced a book that would lay out, in detail, all the symptoms of different mental illnesses, so they could be identified and treated in the same way across the United States. It was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In the latest edition, they laid out nine symptoms that a patient has to show to be diagnosed with depression – like, for example, decreased interest in pleasure or persistent low mood. For a doctor to conclude you were depressed, you had to show five of these symptoms over several weeks.

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The manual was sent out to doctors across the US and they began to use it to diagnose people. However, after a while they came back to the authors and pointed out something that was bothering them. If they followed this guide, they had to diagnose every grieving person who came to them as depressed and start giving them medical treatment. If you lose someone, it turns out that these symptoms will come to you automatically. So, the doctors wanted to know, are we supposed to start drugging all the bereaved people in America?

The authors conferred, and they decided that there would be a special clause added to the list of symptoms of depression. None of this applies, they said, if you have lost somebody you love in the past year. In that situation, all these symptoms are natural, and not a disorder. It was called “the grief exception”, and it seemed to resolve the problem.

Is everything you think you know about depression wrong? | Society | The Guardian

Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian

The opening photo in Half, Julia Kozerski’s series of naked self-portraits, is actually the bookend to a sequence of earlier photos. In those, she appeared unhappily in her wedding dress in a changing room cubicle, more than 300lb (21 stone) and mortified. Here, she appears in the dress again, standing sideways on to the camera, to show how much of the dress is unoccupied. Over the course of a year, Kozerski lost half her body weight, and you might expect the resulting photos to conform to the glib narrative of before and after. Instead, the 28-year-old took pains to show “what real is, what raw is” – in this case stretchmarks, skin folds, contours like sand dunes. Raw is Kozerski naked, and frequently crying.

Nudity is an overused gesture in photography, particularly when it purports to “celebrate” the “ordinary”. You can’t turn on the TV (Lena Dunham), go to a gallery (Spencer Tunick) or, if you’re in San Francisco, enter a civic building these days without tripping over someone getting their kit off in the name of corporeal democracy. That Kozerski still manages to be shocking and interesting is testament to her ideas and her courage. The question most people ask on seeing the photos – after “Why don’t you get surgery to remove the extra skin?” – is “How did you get the weight off?” which she thinks misses the point. Losing the weight was tough, she says: “I had no idea who I was, and while I went through all that I was lost.” But what came after was tougher. Contrary to media everywhere, being thin isn’t enough of an identity to go on. “This is it!” she thought, when she finally got her weight down, and then: “Now what do I do?”

Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian

Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age – The New York Times

Weight Watchers saw all this happening and concluded that people didn’t have faith in diets. The company decided that what it offered was not a diet program but a lifestyle program. It was a behavior-modification program. (For the sake of expediency here, I will call its program a diet because it prescribes amounts of food.) When Deb Benovitz returned from her travels with news of dieting’s new language changes, the company realized that something had to change more than its marketing approach.

Weight Watchers’ chief science officer is Gary Foster, a psychologist — the first in that position, which previously had been held by dietitians. What he and his team realized from Benovitz’s research was that dieters wanted a holistic approach to eating, one that helped really change their bodies, yes, but in a way that was sustainable and positive. He got to work creating a new approach that would become known as Beyond the Scale: He used all available mind-body research to try to figure out a way for members to appreciate benefits of the program besides weight loss. This would help them stay on the program during setbacks and beyond their weight-loss period and allow the program to infiltrate their lives beyond mealtime and beyond plain old eating suggestions.

The company would move away from giving its members goal weights. It expanded its cognitive-behavioral strategies, which taught members to challenge unhelpful thinking and to respond to their emotions with reason, as opposed to with food or despair. It developed workshops that used meditation and qigong and didn’t once mention food or weight. It updated its apps and introduced a social-media program, Connect. It became as holistic-minded as the people told Benovitz they wanted a program to be.

But Weight Watchers was still a company called Weight Watchers, and it had to figure out a way to communicate all of this change to the public. People had too many associations with the brand. It needed someone other than the usual celebrity spokesdieter, a fat famous person who could be paid somewhere between $250,000 and $2 million to do the talk show circuit and People covers for a year. It needed someone who could fast-track the message that it was worth taking a new look at Weight Watchers.

Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age – The New York Times

Exercise ‘keeps the mind sharp’ in over-50s, study finds – BBC News

Doing moderate exercise several times a week is the best way to keep the mind sharp if you’re over 50, research suggests.
Thinking and memory skills were most improved when people exercised the heart and muscles on a regular basis, a review of 39 studies found.
This remained true in those who already showed signs of cognitive decline.
Taking up exercise at any age was worthwhile for the mind and body, the Australian researchers said.
Exercises such as T’ai Chi were recommended for people over the age of 50 who couldn’t manage other more challenging forms of exercise, the study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine said.

Exercise ‘keeps the mind sharp’ in over-50s, study finds – BBC News

How climate change will threaten mental health – CNN.com

“One of the major health effects of flooding seems to be the mental health aspects,” said James Rubin, a psychologist at Kings College London whose recent research looked into the psychological impact of people both directly and indirectly effected by floods. “There are a whole host of stressors around it,” he said.
These types of natural disasters are expected to rise in frequency due to climate change, and Rubin feels that the mental health aspect deserves more attention.
“Preventing (climate change) from happening, from worsening and intervening is really important,” he said.
Climate change is predicted to bring more than just floods: There could be heat waves, sea level rises causing loss of land, and forced migration and droughts affecting agriculture and the farmers producing it. And with these concerns comes a plethora of issues plaguing the human mind, such as depression, worry, anxiety, substance abuse, aggression and even suicide among those who cannot cope.
“If you don’t resolve them, these conditions don’t necessarily go away,” Rubin said.
To find out the extent of this psychological burden, he focused in on flooding and sent surveys to more than 8,000 people living in areas affected by floods in 2013-14, looking for signs of conditions such as depression and anxiety.
How climate change will threaten mental health – CNN.com

What really happens to your body when you stop drinking alcohol?

There are plenty of reasons to quit drinking alcohol. Perhaps you can’t party as hard as you once did, and the hangovers are getting worse. Maybe you’ve developed a beer belly. Possibly, there’s a deeper issue at play and you don’t want your drinking to get out of hand before it’s a problem—unless it already is and you just don’t realize it. Whatever your circumstances are, you’re here, and you’re ready to kick the sauce. Let’s breakdown what happens to your body once you quit drinking.

What really happens to your body when you stop drinking alcohol?

This Is Your Brain on Nature

When you head out to the desert, David Strayer is the kind of man you want behind the wheel. He never texts or talks on the phone while driving. He doesn’t even approve of eating in the car. A cognitive psychologist at the University of Utah who specializes in attention, Strayer knows our brains are prone to mistakes, especially when we’re multitasking and dodging distractions. Among other things, his research has shown that using a cell phone impairs most drivers as much as drinking alcohol does.

Strayer is in a unique position to understand what modern life does to us. An avid backpacker, he thinks he knows the antidote: Nature.

National Geographic