Category Archives: blog

Is drinking extra water good for your skin?

Uncategorized

Is drinking extra water good for your skin?

2013-01-21

The idea that you’ll have a better complexion if you stay hydrated is so commonplace it’s surprising to discover the lack of evidence to back this up.

If you yearn for smooth skin that glows with youth, the chances are that at some point you will have heard the exhortation to drink lots of water in order to flush out those evil toxins and keep your skin healthy.

The exact amount people suggest varies. US-based advice tends to recommend eight glasses a day, while in hotter climates people are advised to drink more to compensate for higher rates of sweating. But regardless of the exact volume of water suggested, the principle behind the advice remains the same – taking extra water on board will keep your skin hydrated. In other words, water acts like a moisturiser, but from the inside out.

This is such a common idea you might be surprised at the lack of evidence to back this up. You might expect there to be countless studies where people are separated into two groups, one assigned to sip water all day, the other to drink a normal amount. Then the smoothness of the skin could be assessed a month or so later to establish whether sipping more led to smoother skin.

In fact such studies are rare, partly because water can’t be patented, so it is hard to find anyone to fund such research when there will be no new medication or cosmetic to sell that could repay the costs. A review by the dermatologist Ronni Wolf at the Kaplan Medical Centre in Israel found just one study looking at the effect of long-term water intake on the skin. But the results were contradictory. After four weeks, the group who drank extra mineral water showed a decrease in skin density, which some believe suggests the skin is retaining more moisture, while those who drank tap water showed an increase in skin density. But regardless of the type of water they drank, it made no difference to their wrinkles or to the smoothness of their skin.

That’s not to say that dehydration has no effect on skin. We can measure some effect through the assessment of skin turgor. This is a measure of how fast it takes the skin to return to normal if you pinch some skin and lift it up. If you are dehydrated your skin will take longer to get its shape back.

But it doesn’t follow that because drinking too little water is bad for the skin, drinking above average quantities is good. It would be like saying that because a lack of food leads to malnutrition, overeating must be good for us. Or as Wolf puts it, it’s like saying a car needs petrol, therefore the more petrol the better.

Mystery advice

Another common belief is that if you drink extra water the body will somehow store it. But it depends on how fast you drink it. Drink several glasses within a fifteen-minute period and you will just pass extra urine. If you spend more than two hours sipping the same amount, more liquid is retained.

There is one study suggesting that drinking 500ml of water increases the blood flow through the capillaries in the skin. But the skin was only evaluated thirty minutes after drinking the water, and what we don’t know is whether this in turn improves skin tone.

One counterargument is that skin contains up to 30% water, and this helps it to look plump. This may be true, but the skin’s youthful appearance is affected more by factors such as genetics, exposure to the sun and damage from smoking.

So the mystery is where the eight-glasses-a-day recommendation for good skin comes from. Few of the official guidelines even refer to the skin. Water is undoubtedly the most important nutrient for the body. Without it we die in a matter of days, and there are of course other health benefits from staying hydrated. A review in 2010 found good evidence that it reduces the recurrence of kidney stones in those who have already had them, but evidence for other specific benefits is weaker.

Arguments rage over the eight glasses a day rule, with disputes over how much is needed to clear the kidneys of toxins and whether or not water helps curb the appetite. It depends on how high the ambient temperature is and how much you are exerting yourself. It’s also a myth that other liquids don’t count. It doesn’t have to be water. Even food contains more liquid than you might expect. Pizza is 40-49% water, for instance. The percentage of water we derive from food in the diet depends on where you live. In the US it’s 22%. In Greece, where people eat more fruit and vegetables it is much higher.

So the problem is a general lack of evidence that drinking more water makes any difference to your skin. We can’t say it definitely doesn’t work, but there’s no evidence that it does. Which leaves the question of how much water you should drink. Since it depends on the weather and what you are doing, then there is a very good internal guideline we all have that can help. And that’s thirst.

If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

You can hear more Medical Myths on Health Check on the BBC World Service.

When the holidays turn depressing By Dr. Charles Raison

Psycological Health

When the holidays turn depressing By Dr. Charles Raison

When the holidays bring heartache instead of joy, I think they do so because they stand as an unforgiving yardstick against which we measure our losses and troubles.

If no one reminds us, we can sometimes overlook the fact that loved ones are gone, or that our lives are filled with painful conflict in exactly the intimate areas that should be sources of strength and comfort for us. But then along come the holidays, imposing upon us once again a template for what happiness and interpersonal success is expected to look like.

It can be hard to measure up. It is far easier to overlook the death of loved ones when you don’t have to stare across the holiday table at their empty places. It is far easier to pretend that family trauma or conflict don’t exist when you are far away and on your own.

But the holidays force us to either return to painful family interactions or to fully own our isolation and spend the season alone.

It is a terrible choice. I’ve treated many patients over the years who reliably became depressed during the holidays out of dread of having to interact with their families. On the other hand, the silence of Christmas morning on one’s own carries its own unique pain.

I never cease to be amazed at how often both emotional well-being and mental illness hinge on how we negotiate these types of impossible choices. Because the choices really are often insoluble and the losses are often so actual, we in the mental health professions frequently try to find “a third way” to help people cope. In the end, these “third way” approaches usually come down to helping people reframe their issues so they that seem less hopeless and painful. Or we provide people with medications such as antidepressants to make their brains and bodies less reactive to stress. Or we do both.

Reframing

I’ve given many interviews over the years regarding strategies for helping people cope emotionally with the holidays. For people truly overwhelmed, I often recommend exploring ways to neutralize Christmas negativity by changing how they approach the holidays. For example, if someone develops a major depression every year before or after going home to see her family, I encourage her to explore what would happen if she abandoned this painful pattern and instead proactively planned a Christmas vacation somewhere beyond the reach of her memories and holiday associations that generate symptoms of depression.

Sometimes this type of strategy works beautifully. Often other family members are equally miserable and join the exodus, providing strength in numbers. Sometimes the person’s absence leads the family to re-evaluate itself and change in positive ways. But sometimes, the attempt to flee Christmas is met with such anger and guilt production from the family that the patient actually ends up doing worse. Everyone’s holiday situation is unique.

This type of approach toward reframing Christmas follows what I sometimes call the “who says” rule. Many times we torture ourselves with ideas of how things should be, or would be if we were somehow smarter, richer, different. To which I often ask, “Who says?” “Who says things have to be the way you think they should be?” “Who says you have to suffer over a painful fantasy of what you think Christmas ought to be?”

We cling tightly to our fantasies — good and bad. But sometimes when we can loosen their grip on us, we can see new possibilities for how to be at peace with our lives and find a little joy.

Medications

This holiday season I’ve been thinking a lot about Christmas 1987, because it was four days later, on December 29, that fluoxetine, better known by its brand name Prozac, received FDA approval for use in the United States. The approval of Prozac launched one of history’s greatest run of “third way” approaches to trauma and loss.

With Prozac came a growing belief that medicines might hold promise as the ultimate solution, not just to clinical depression, but perhaps to heartache more generally.

Having once believed this myself, I find that now, 25 years later, I am far more cautious in my appraisal of what the coming of Prozac actually meant for the world’s emotional well-being. I’ve seen repeatedly with my own eyes how modern antidepressants like Prozac can help depressed people get their lives back. And I’ve seen people who had struggled with negative thoughts and feelings for years find that they were different — and more successful — with the addition of an antidepressant in their lives.
Dr. Charles Raison
Dr. Charles Raison

But in the last several years it has become increasingly clear that antidepressants are not, and probably will never be, a cure-all for heartache, in any of its forms clinical or mundane. For one thing, our best current data suggest that antidepressants only work adequately for 40% to 60% of depressed people, with the percentages varying depending on what one thinks of as “adequate.”

More recent evidence suggests that antidepressants can actually worsen depressive symptoms in a sizable minority of people who take them. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. Chemotherapeutic agents that increase the probability of surviving cancer also increase the risk of developing a second cancer in the future. And yet despite this fact, and despite the dread we feel at the mere mention of the word “chemotherapy,” most of us embrace chemotherapeutic treatment when diagnosed with cancer, understanding that despite the manifold limitations and horrendous side effects, it’s the best that we’ve got.

Perhaps the most concerning recent debate in the antidepressant literature revolves around the question of whether taking these medications increases the risk of having a depression relapse when the antidepressant is discontinued. This issue is complex and hotly debated. But if the weight of the evidence eventually suggests that antidepressants carry this risk it will further complicate the clinician’s task. Still, as with chemotherapy, they’re the best that we’ve got.

Finding more solutions

This year, with Christmas upon us, I am more convinced than ever that we who work clinically or conduct research in the realm of mental health must redouble our efforts to find new and better “third ways” to help deal, not just with clinical depression, but also with the ubiquitous heartache and anxiety that are so prevalent in the modern world.

Although I personally research biological approaches to treating depression, I suspect that part of our movement forward will come from better integrating older ways of wisdom into our treatment protocols. Many wisdom traditions point toward the same thing — that full healing requires not just reframing or biology, but an inner transformation that embraces suffering itself as a means of escape from our suffering.

Thin is in, but fat might be better By Lisa O’Neill Hill

Uncategorized

Thin is in, but fat might be better By Lisa O’Neill Hill

2013-01-18

When Janet Servoss shops for clothes in Orange County, California, she sees plenty of selection in sizes 0, 2 and 4, but fewer in sizes 12 and 14.

“You’re bombarded by it daily,” she said of the message that thin is better. “It’s everywhere.”

But according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, being thin might not be in your best interest in the long run. The report is drawing strong reaction in the medical community, among proponents who hail its findings and among critics, one of whom dismisses it as “rubbish.”

The comprehensive study confirmed that obese people tend to die earlier than people of normal weight. But it also found that overweight people — those with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 to 30 — had a lower risk of dying than people of normal weight.
Study: Pleasantly plump may live longer
Study: Belly fat can weaken men’s bones
Obesity projections for America
Corner stores help clean up obesity

“If I were to look at this study and if it is shown to be true, I would think maybe I should be worrying less that I’m wearing a size 12 and focus on how I feel,” said Servoss, a 44-year-old nurse whose BMI fluctuates from 24 to 26.

Researchers analyzed nearly 100 studies that included more than 2.8 million people. While obese people had a higher risk of death — particularly those whose BMI was 35 or more — overweight people had a 6% lower risk of death than those of normal weight.

“Because this bias against weight has been so prevalent, it’s really been unquestioned, and I think this concept that thin is healthy and fat is not healthy is clearly not true,” said Michelle May, a physician and author of “Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat.”

Big deal: You can be fat and fit

Some thin people exercise excessively and don’t eat a balanced diet, and there are people in the overweight and obese categories who have good diets and are active, she said.

May said people need to focus on choices about eating and physical activity rather than be concerned about the numbers on a scale.

“I find it interesting that the reason they did this is because this is something that has shown up over and over again. It is challenging to shift a paradigm that has become so deeply entrenched, that being overweight by BMI category automatically puts you at high risk,” she said.

Americans overemphasize the importance of being thin, said professor Glenn Gaesser, author of “Big Fat Lies” and director of the Healthy Lifestyles Research Center at Arizona State University.

“We have had for decades now an obsession with thinness and an obsession with weight and how to lose it,” he said. “I think the forces in our culture — in fashion, in fitness, in health and wellness — all have been predicated on, ‘A thin body is a good body and a fat body is a bad body,’ and that’s wrong. I have always believed that a good, healthy body can come in many shapes and sizes.”

Fat, fit people tend to be better off healthwise than thin people who are unfit, Gaesser said, suggesting that being fit is far more important than being thin.

“I think in general, America is still not ready to accept this notion that fitness comes in many shapes and sizes,” he said. “It’s a good message, but I still think people would rather be thin.”

Exercise lengthens your life — even if you’re overweight

The study authors say it’s possible that overweight people live longer because they get better medical care and are tested for diabetes, heart problems and other diseases stemming from their weight. Heavier people might also be able to better survive infections or surgery.

While many say the findings make sense, some experts take issue with the way the research was conducted and express concern it will send wrong message.

“Of course, a lot of people would like to hear that it’s no problem that they are overweight or obese,” said Walter Willett, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chair of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition. “It causes a lot of confusion that’s completely unnecessary.”

He called the study “a pile of rubbish.”

Scientists often disagree, said Barry Graubard, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute and one of the authors of the study.

“We published our findings in the peer-reviewed scientific literature to invite discussion,” he said in an e-mail. “It is by engaging with our colleagues in this manner that science advances.”

BMI is one of three numbers people should watch, according to Willett.

“It’s also useful to look at weight change since age 20,” he said. “That’s going to primarily be fat. The third is your waistline. The vast majority of people will be best off if they do not increase their weight or waistline after age 20.”

Not smoking, eating a high-quality and healthful diet, not being overweight and being physically active all contribute to a person’s health, he said.

Memphis, most obese U.S. city, moving from fat to fit

While the majority of experts and scientists believe that excess weight is unhealthy, Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, professor of medicine and public health at the University of California, Irvine, takes a different stance. A black-and-white approach to obesity is inappropriate, he said.

“Most experts have problems with this sort of data,” he said. “It’s difficult to see that some of these principles are being questioned.”

Kalantar-Zadeh compares the lack of consensus about weight and fat to the evolution of thought about alcohol consumption.

Alcohol was thought to be detrimental to a person’s health, but studies started to show that alcohol consumption in moderation could have some health benefits, he said.

“The fat-is-bad principle is a very recent approach,” he said. “Body-stored fat has helped us for hundreds of thousands of years to survive hardships. That should tell us evolutionarily there was something good in that.”

A higher body mass index can be protective in certain situations, he said.

“Once you are in your 70s, 80s or 90s, or if you have chronic disease like heart failure, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic lung and kidney disease, a larger body size gives you longevity,” he said.

Not all fat is bad, but belly fat is more harmful than fat in the arms, legs or buttocks, he said.

Global report: Obesity bigger health crisis than hunger

Fitness expert John Siracuse said people shouldn’t get caught up with numbers.

“I always got people focused on their bodies rather than on a number and make them more aware of their muscle tissue, their shape,” he said. “Are they getting stronger? Faster? Can they pedal longer? If you listen to your body more, you will know the symptoms before your body starts to break down. We tend to forget about our bodies and that’s when we start getting fat.”

Servoss said she can see where a little bit of extra fat could be good for people facing a serious illness, but said the more weight you have, the harder it is on your joints. Excess weight also comes with numerous health challenges, including circulatory problems, high blood pressure and diabetes, she said.

“I think the numbers have their place,” she said. “They do give us some reference but it does ultimately come down to how you are feeling, your exercise tolerance, are you able to do the things you love to do without any difficulty?

“That’s the kind of thing I should be focusing more on, rather than that my jeans come from the back of the rack rather than the front,” she said.

Berries Linked to Lower Heart Disease Among Women

featured

Berries Linked to Lower Heart Disease Among Women

The benefits for the heart of eating strawberries and blueberries can build up over a lifetime, according to the latest research.

Bright-colored berries have long been a part of any healthy diet, owing mainly to the anthocyanins that give them their vibrant color and act as antioxidants to fight off damage to cells. Now a study published in the journal Circulation confirms and quantifies that benefit; women who ate three or more servings of blueberries and strawberries per week reduced their risk of heart attack by up to one third.

In the study, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of East Anglia in the U.K. analyzed data from 93,600 women ages 25 to 42 enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Study II. For 18 years, the women filled out surveys detailing their diets at four-year intervals.

(MORE: Study: Flavonoids May Help Protect Against Parkinson’s)

During the study the women experienced 405 heart attacks. But women who consumed the most blueberries and strawberries had a 32% reduced risk of heart attack compared with the women who ate berries once a month or less. The women who ate more berries also tended to eat healthier overall, consuming more vegetables and fruits than those who didn’t eat as many berries; but when the scientists broke down the women’s diets, they found that the highest consumers of berries even had a lower risk of heart attack compared with women who still ate plenty of fruits and vegetables but fewer berries. The effect remained even after the researchers adjusted for other things that can influence heart-disease risk, such as obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, low levels of physical activity and a family history of heart disease.

“These foods can be readily incorporated into diets, and simple dietary changes could have an impact in reducing risk of heart disease in younger women,” says study author Aedin Cassidy from the University of East Anglia. “This supports growing lab data showing that these compounds can help keep arteries healthy and flexible.”

So what is it about berries that help the heart? The researchers focused on blueberries and strawberries because these are the most widely consumed varieties in the U.S. Both berries contain high levels of anthocyanins, as well as other flavonoids, which fight the effects of stress and free-radical damage to cells as they age. They can also keep heart vessels more elastic and flexible, which helps combat the growth of plaques that can build up and rupture, causing heart attacks.

(MORE: Can Eating Fruits and Veggies Outwit Bad Heart Genes?)

The results are particularly encouraging because they showed that a change in diet could affect heart-disease risk for relatively young women. That means that regular consumption of berries might be a relatively easy way to lower a woman’s risk of having a heart attack later in life, possibly even insulating her from heart problems. “Although we know about the effects of antioxidants and flavonoids, and their effects in wine and chocolate, it is interesting to look at their effects in such a large group of women over a long period of time,” says Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, who was not involved in the study. “The take-home lesson is that even if you are eating these early in life, you’re getting benefits that last for life. When we’re making choices in our 20s, we may think that a burger and fries is great, but the message is that there are alternatives that make a difference for the rest of your life. It is a powerful message that we can prevent cardiovascular disease by what we eat.” Something worth remembering the next time you’re in the produce aisle.

Alexandra Sifferlin @acsifferlin

Alexandra Sifferlin is a writer and producer for TIME Healthland. She is a graduate from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism

Childhood Trauma Leaves Legacy of Brain Changes

Psycological Health

Childhood Trauma Leaves Legacy of Brain Changes

Painful experiences early in life can alter the brain in lasting ways.

A difficult reality for psychiatrists and counselors of child abuse is that young victims are at high risk of becoming offenders themselves one day, although it’s unclear why. But now a team of behavioral geneticists in Switzerland report a possible reason: early psychological trauma may actually cause lasting changes in the brain that promote aggressive behavior in adulthood.

Writing this week Translational Psychiatry, the researchers describe a series or experiments conducted in rats that led them to that conclusion. Animals placed in traumatic, fear-inducing situations around the time of puberty show high and sustained levels of aggression later in life. And while rats cannot substitute for humans, the scared rats also showed changes in hormone levels, brain activity, and genetic expression that appear very similar to traits observed among troubled and unusually violent people.

The main implication of the research, says study co-author Carmen Sandi, is that it links two previously observed phenomena: the higher rate of aggression among those experiencing early-life stress, and the blunted activation of a brain region known as the orbitofrontal cortex among people with pathological aggression. Social learning, it seems, may not be the only thing that makes abused kids more likely to grow up aggressive.

“This is a key finding which highlights the importance of not only developing social programs and politics, but also of reinforcing research that could offer valid [medical] treatments for individuals that have been victimized early in life,” says Sandi, the director of the Brain Mind Institute at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in an email discussing the study. “We need to understand the neurobiological mechanisms to offer better solutions to break ‘the cycle of violence.’”

In the study, Sandi and colleagues tested the rats for changes in specific regions of the brain following long periods of fear, and then tested a potential treatment to determine if it was possible to undo those brain changes.

They began by exposing about 40 pubescent male rats for a few minutes at a time over several days, to severe stress — which, for the rats was either the scent of a fox or being stranded on a brightly lit platform. Those rats immediately showed higher levels of stress hormones and later puberty onset than similar animals not exposed to those experiences.

As adults, the stressed rats showed greater aggression toward other males they met — even ones that were clearly not a threat because they were much smaller or even anesthetized. And the once-stressed animals also showed more signs of depression and anxiety, including a reduced interest in food, lower sociability, and a tendency to give up quickly when faced with a challenge.

Those behavioral changes were accompanied by neurobiological changes in the brain as well. Compared to normal rats, the once-fearful ones had higher levels of the hormone testosterone, which is linked to aggression. They also showed more activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for emotions such as fear and anxiety, and altered connectivity between the amygdala and a region of the brain involved in decision-making. These brain alterations were also correlated with enhanced expression of the gene for an enzyme known as monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, providing the scientists with a potential way to reverse the effects of the early traumas. Indeed, treating the rats with an MAOA inhibitor helped to restore normal social behavior and reduce aggression in the formerly stressed animals.

It turns out that the MAOA gene is also related to aggressive behavior in people, and certain inherited variants of the gene have also been linked to aggressive tendencies. Because the new study showed that MAOA inhibitors were effective in treating pathological aggression in rats, Sandi says the findings might suggest a similar drug treatment for humans, too, to complement behavioral therapy.

“What we show in our study is that, regardless of the genetic background, exposure to early life trauma can on its own affect the expression levels of this molecule in the brain,” Sandi says. “Our work is novel in many ways, particularly because it provides concrete neurobiological pathways that link early trauma with pathological aggression.”

Why would early traumatic experiences crave permanent changes in the brain? Evolutionarily, such brain changes may have helped us to survive a harsh and cruel environment, by keeping us on edge and ready to confront any possible threats, Sandi says. Today, however, those same changes may do more harm than good, leading some victims of abuse to slip into a vicious cycle, seeing threats where none exist, and overreacting to situations, often with violence. It’s possible that some people may be genetically more sensitive to the changes triggered by painful experiences, and therefore more likely to benefit from treatments that can address those genetic differences. Better understanding of why vicious cycles of violence exist may help researchers to find ways to break them.

Why You’re More Likely to Remember A Facebook Status Than a Face

Psycological Health

Why You’re More Likely to Remember A Facebook Status Than a Face

Remember a year ago, when the cousin of your college roommate posted a Facebook status that she got engaged? Sure you do. In fact, according to a recent study, you remember that Facebook status more than a line from a book or a stranger’s face.

Even if the quips are from complete strangers, new research published in the journal Memory & Cognition found these Facebook posts are about one and a half times more memorable than sentences in books and two and a half times more memorable than faces.

To understand how we process information absorbed from social media, researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Scranton asked 280 undergraduates to read 100 sentences pulled from Facebook pages, 100 sentences extracted from books — none of which were more than 25 words long — and a series of pictures of human faces. The participants were then prompted with the same phrases and pictures and asked to recall which ones they had seen previously. Which were more memorable? The students remembered more of the Facebook posts than either the reading passages or the faces.

And because the scientists removed extraneous punctuation, leaving only words, the sharper recall wasn’t due to smiley emoticons, writing in all caps or those ubiquitous multiple explanation points to “I’m having the BEST day EVER!!!!!” that pepper Facebook writings.

Instead, the researchers speculate that Facebook posts’ unforgetableness could be related to their coherency and “gossipy” tone. It’s easier to recall a chatty or witty post about the antics of someone’s cat, for example, than it is to remember a line from Great Expectations. To test this, the research team repeated the experiment using news headlines from CNN, lines from CNN stories about either breaking news or entertainment, and reader comments. The headlines were recalled better than random sentences from the stories, and entertainment headlines were more memorable than those from news stories.

But of all the bits of text, what the participants remembered the most were the readers’ comments, suggesting that our brains are more likely to recall patterns of speech that fall in line with our spontaneous thought processes.

“Not only is the Facebook memory effect strong, but we replicated the effect each time,” says study author Laura Mickes, a visiting scholar at UCSD and senior research fellow at the University of Warwick. “One would not expect posts written casually to be remembered better than words penned by professional authors and edited by professional editors, but that is exactly what we found, repeatedly.”

The authors suggest that causally written and unedited posts are more “mind-ready,” meaning that natural wording sticks in our mind because it’s how we speak day-to-day. The authors write:

It seems that, with the growth of blogging, text messaging, and the like, written language has moved closer to natural speech, with less editing and contemplation than was needed not only when writing was done by monks with goose-feather quills or by Gutenberg with moveable type, but even when it is done by authors sitting patiently at their own keyboards.

“This is surprising, and gives us a glimpse into how memory works and has implications for how we learn, advertise and generally communicate,” says Mickes.

Does that mean the written word is becoming more colloquial? The research wasn’t designed to answer that question, but the findings hint that some shift in how we write is certainly occurring in our online communications. And the results certainly show that everything we post on social media may live longer in the memory banks of our “friends” than we’d like.

Emotional Eating: The Toughest Part of Weight Loss

Psycological Health

Emotional Eating: The Toughest Part of Weight Loss

2013-01-16

Diet and exercise — sure, they can help you lose weight. But most people need to consider a third component to keep unwanted pounds from coming back: emotional eating. While we’ve all reached for the carton of ice cream or box of chocolate cookies when we’re blue, we don’t always know what emotional undercurrents are driving the urge to stand in front of the fridge, make poor food choices, or eat when we’re not hungry.

“From the time we’re little, we’re placated with food. If we’re upset about something that happened at school, we get a treat. If we trip and fall, we get a treat. We get into the mode of eating more food than we need to placate ourselves emotionally,” says Tracy Olgeaty Gensler, MS, RD, a nutritionist for The Best Life Diet. “Many times, people will say, ‘I feel empty inside and can’t explain it.’”

What’s Eating You?
Overeating may be a sign that something is missing in your life. When you discover what that is, you can start to make the changes that will help you lose weight and make positive, long-lasting improvements in your life. Here are some ideas for getting to that place.

Spell out happiness. Write down everything you consider part of a fulfilled life, such as family, good health, spirituality, watching sports, a job you love and financial security. Think about your childhood, the early days of your marriage, and present day as you draw up your list of things that you consider important to happiness and fulfillment. In The Best Life Diet, author Bob Greene calls this exercise the Circle of Life. Don’t try to write down everything in one sitting. Take time to reflect and really give the list some thought, says Olgeaty Gensler.

Look at the equation. When you’re all done, place a plus or minus sign next to everything on your list. A plus sign means you’re generally satisfied with this item, while a minus sign means you’re dissatisfied or it’s missing from your life. For example, you may be satisfied with your marriage but unhappy with the amount of sleep you get or with how little time you have for friends.

Focus on the minuses. Pay close attention to these areas — they are places in your life where something important is missing, according to Olgeaty Gensler. “These are areas where you may be looking to fulfill yourself emotionally with food,” she says. Identifying the minuses helps you get to the bottom of your emotional eating and allows you to be freer to focus on finding nonfood solutions.

Reap the benefits. Writing this list also helps you get organized and gives you permission to put yourself first for a change. It’s easy to come up with excuses for why we don’t have time for ourselves, and it’s more difficult to confront the things that are missing from our busy lives. But the payoff is huge.

“When you put yourself first, you become a better person, a better spouse, a better parent. You feel more energy and less deprived. You can be so much more productive when you take care of your needs,” says Olgeaty Gensler.

5 Ways Stress Can Affect Your Sex Life

Sexual Health

5 Ways Stress Can Affect Your Sex Life

Stress. I’m slightly on edge just writing the word. It brings up thoughts of all of the things I have yet to accomplish. Of all the resolutions I have (thought about) but not yet followed through with (and it hasn’t even been two weeks). After years of managing work, marriage, children and relatives, I can tell you that when I’m stressed, I’m not that pleasant to be around. And when it comes to sex, stress makes your sex life suffer. In fact, stress is one of those weird issues that can not only affect your sex life, but also be alleviated by having sex. So if you want to get rid of stress, why don’t you just go have sex? OK, that’s all.

You didn’t really think that I was going to leave it there, did you?

The effects of stress are insidious. It takes a toll on your physical, emotional and relationship health, probably more than you realize. Here are five ways stress can impact your sex life:

1. Stress contributes to a negative body image. Bad body image = bad sex.
The hormones produced in association with stress can impact our metabolism. If we feel sluggish or if we gain weight (unintentionally), it can make us feel badly about our physiques. If we don’t like our bodies, it is pretty difficult to find the desire to shed your clothes and jump into bed with your partner. Now, I am not suggesting that you should just get it over with, but it’s a vicious cycle. Lower self-image equals less sex and less sex creates relationship problems. Ideally, our relationship should enhance who we are, not make us feel more stressed. And one of the biggest stressors we can have is our relationship, if we don’t take the time to nurture it.

2. Stress takes a toll on our libido.
By now, we know that hormones affect our bodies in numerous ways from childhood to adolescence, pregnancy, menopause and beyond. Cortisol is one of the hormones produced by stress, and you might have heard of it if you’ve ever seen those late night diet pill commercials with the image of the pixelated woman gaining weight in her abdomen. Our bodies need this hormone, but in small doses for short bursts of time. If elevated levels of Cortisol are being produced for a prolonged period of time, they suppress our sex hormones. Lower quantity of sex hormones equals lower libido.

3. Stress makes us question our relationships and our partners.
As I mentioned earlier, when we are stressed, we are not that pleasant to be around — and vice versa. You don’t want a partner who flies off the handle and snaps at you because he or she is overwhelmed. And you don’t want to be the one who incites those feelings of frustration in someone that you love. Who wants to go to bed with an emotional monster? Relationships suffer when we are stressed, especially if we stop communicating. Or if our communication consists of rolling our eyes and grunting at a loved one.

4. Stress can lead to excessive drinking. Excessive drinking makes for bad sex.

It’s not a surprise that lots of people use alcohol to escape. I, like many women I know, have been known to long for happy hour — any happy hour. But this isn’t about a glass of wine, a bottle of beer or a drink with one of those smile-inducing hot pink umbrellas in them. This is about excessive, prolonged drinking. More than one or two drinks a day. (And we can even debate whether that is too much.) This is the type of drinking that you probably hide from friends. It may be the type of drinking that begins long before happy hour does and goes on far later. Or it may just be one drink beyond that early, feel-good buzz.

We know that men have difficulty getting an erection when they drink too much. But what about us? As it turns out, alcohol can dull sex, making it less pleasurable. Alcohol dehydrates us, making lubrication challenging. Without lubrication, sex is painful. Without lubrication and sufficient arousal, we can kiss the idea of orgasm (or pleasure in general) goodbye. After a number of pleasure-less or mildly painful sexual experiences, we are not going to want it. Would you?

5. Stress impacts our fertility and our menstrual cycle. When we are stressed, our hormones levels take a dive.

I mentioned stress as a factor in why our libidos suffer when we’re stressed. But who would have thought that fertility would be challenged, too? (Yes, I know what you’re thinking, if you’re not having sex, you’re probably not getting pregnant. You’re right, but there’s more to this — and besides, not all women are heterosexual, and they try to get pregnant, too.)

Stress can impact our pituitary gland, which controls the thyroid, adrenal glands and ovaries. If our ovaries aren’t functioning properly, your menstrual cycle is adversely affected. Our periods may become irregular or we may stop menstruating. (This is called amenorrhea and if stress-related, not a permanent condition.)

If you are trying to get pregnant, you need to decrease your stress. Which (as I know) can be difficult, because there are few things more stressful than trying to become pregnant and not being able to do so.

So it’s time to make some changes.
Exercise, relax, take a bath, drink one glass of wine (not four), masturbate (yes, I said masturbate), make out with your partner and delegate some responsibilities to others. It will make 2013 a lot less stressful… and hopefully, a lot more enjoyable.

So what will you do to alleviate stress in 2013?

Q&A: Willpower Expert Roy Baumeister on Staying in Control

Uncategorized

Q&A: Willpower Expert Roy Baumeister on Staying in Control

2013-01-15

It’s the third week of the new year, and many of us are realizing that those New Year’s resolutions are getting harder to keep. So TIME asked Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University and co-author of the bestselling book, Willpower for tips, gleaned from the latest scientific research, on how maximize self control, especially when you need it most.

What does energy and glucose — the fuel our bodies extract from food — have to do with willpower?

Self regulation depends on a limited energy supply. As you use it, [your willpower] gets temporarily depleted [as your energy stores fall], but if you use [willpower] a lot, your capacity improves [because you can change how you allocate your energy]. As the day wears on, people get worse and worse and more likely to give in to temptation. If you are spending a day at the beach, there may be no effect, but the accumulating demands of the day can really deplete you.

Is willpower in a sense finite, and its level dependent on energy? Or is there more to it than a biological process?

It’s more complicated than the early idea that it’s a matter of just how much [glucose] you had in your bloodstream. The body has a lot in storage and a number of other people are suggesting that it’s really more about allocating resources than about how much is active in the bloodstream.

There are a lot of things that can help you overcome [reduced willpower] when you are slightly depleted. Those who believe [that willpower is unlimited, for example] generally continue to perform well [in that situation].

But when people are more seriously depleted, belief in unlimited willpower actually may make things worse. A good analogy is physical tiredness. When you just start getting tired, believing you have unlimited strength or [that you] are superman can help you continue to perform well. But at some point, it really does catch up with you.

So if dieters are trying to avoid eating sugar, which turns into glucose, and self-control relies on glucose, are they doomed to fail?

Glucose doesn’t come just from sugar. Our advice for dieters is that it’s important to eat healthy foods first. That gives enough willpower to persist. If nothing else, it means you are somewhat full and even if you do eat some sweets, it’s not likely to be as bad.

You’ve found that making any type of decision— not just about whether or not to control a desired behavior— can sap your willpower.

Yes, after making a lot of decisions, your self control is lower and conversely, after exerting self control, your capacity for making decisions is lower. As you make a bunch of decisions, you gradually deplete the energy you have available and subsequent decisions are more passive and tend to go with the default option.

A study with Audi dealers [found that car buyers] were more effortful with their first few choices. [After that] they were more likely to take the default option, which can end up costing lot of money. They used up their energy deciding which of 200 interior fabrics they wanted and ended up buying lot of stuff they don’t need and spending extra money.

How do you conserve your willpower?

What you have to do is either save big decisions for when you are fresh— one piece of advice is don’t make big decisions on a Friday after a hard week. [Also] realize that you do deplete your energy and this changes your decision making process and realize how it changes. [There is] more avoidance, more taking the easy way out, more sticking with the default and status quo. All of those increase when people’s willpower is down.

MORE: How to Make New Year’s Resolutions Stick: Q&A with an Expert on Change

I read that President Obama only wears blue or grey suits so that deciding what to wear is one decision he doesn’t have to make. Is eliminating extra decisions a good strategy for improving willpower?

Yes. Obviously, the president has an exceptionally high number of decisions to make and needs to conserve his energy. Probably most people have set routines in the morning and that’s to conserve this energy. You don’t want to waste all your willpower making decisions about breakfast. That’s a good strategy and Obama is right: if you don’t have think about what to wear ever day, you don’t have to deplete your self control on that.

Does stress deplete willpower?

I have a research grant and am conducting a study right now. The assumption is that stress does deplete your willpower.

Are new tracking apps for fitness and diet useful in maintaining self control for dieting and exercise?

It’s very hard to regulate anything without keeping track of it. When the government wants to regulate something, it has to keep tabs on what [people or businesses are] doing. You could make a law but not look at whether [it’s being followed] but that probably will not produce as much compliance as if you audit and keep track.

Record-keeping itself is often a motivator. If you are trying to start exercising, it’s easy to say yeah I’ll exercise a lot. You don’t feel like doing it but you also don’t want to write down that you didn’t. You do that to make sure problems are recorded and to make sure you perform the behavior.

So how else can you maximize willpower?

In the short run, food and rest are the best things. In the long run, exercise seems to improve it.

And does it get better with practice?

Yes, metaphorically, it’s like a muscle.

Maia Szalavitz @maiasz

How Super Is Your Fruit?

featured

How Super Is Your Fruit?

2013-01-11

By Alexandra SifferlinJan. 10, 2013

Move over pomegranate, it’s pitaya time. A wave of exotic fruits exploding with nutrients and antioxidants is hitting produce shelves, and it’s worth getting to know them better. Varieties like ligonberry and schizandra berry are making their way into the market in hopes of becoming the next health hero, and others, including baobab, mangosteen, sea buckthorn berry aren’t far behind. Read more about these “superfruits” in this week’s TIME (available to subscribers here).

Since the mid-2000s, sales of superfruits have spiked on the heels of POM Wonderful’s success in making the relatively unknown pomegranate a household staple. And global superfruit launches grew by 6% in 2011 following a 10% boost between 2010 to 2011.

Celebrity and mass media exposure don’t hurt, either. “When The Dr. Oz Show featured goji berries, our phones lit up, our website crashed and grocery stores around the country simultaneously sold out at once,” says Eric Cutler, chief marketing officer of Sunfood, a bulk superfood supplier based in San Diego.

(MORE: Guide: The 31 Healthiest Foods of All Time (with Recipes))

And you don’t even have to chew them. More businesses are combining exotics fruits and the healthy juice trend to produce unique beverages that are tasty and nutritious. Even Starbucks is finding new ways to bask in on the glow of the superfruit juice halo. In November, 2011, the coffee company bought juice company Evolution Fresh, originally started by Naked Juice founder Jimmy Rosenberg, for $30 million. Starbucks sells bottled juices in select stores and has opened Evolution Fresh retail shops in the west coast that serve hand-blended, made-to-order juices.

Yet nutrition experts aren’t convinced that the trend will translate into positive benefits for America’s health. The term “superfruit,” for one, is a marketing term and not recognized by the Food and Drug Administration or US Department of Agriculture. “There’s an implication that if I eat one superfruit, it’s the equivalent of eating two fruits,” says Jeffrey Blumberg, director of the antioxidants research laboratory and professor of nutrition at Tufts University. “Americans already do not eat enough fruit. I have nothing against goji berries, I am sure they’re delicious and you should eat them often, but I am reluctant to say that’s all you need to do. Ordinary fruits like apples and bananas are good too.”

And regardless of whether you consider them to be “super” or not, nutritionists say you should aim to eat two to four servings a day, mostly as whole fruit. “I think every year we are going to see a new fruit or vegetable that’s the hot new thing,” says Jessica Kolko, Whole Foods Market’s Healthy Eating registered dietitian and culinary educator. “From my perspective as a dietitian, the more fruit you eat, the more super you are.”