I apologize, but today’s post is just for me to read. I’ll have something for you in a few days most likely, but today I need to talk to my own bad self. Sorry about that, but you really need to leave now.

Scoot.

Depart!

Sherika.

Sherika. Shrek. Shrek.

You had your fun and then some, but now’s the time for you to stop acting like you don’t know any better and start bringing the intensity to this journey again. It’s time to stop not working out, finding “more” important things to do (that’s not really important at all)!

Here are some inconvenient truth’s that you seem to have forgotten, my friend…

Sherika, making time for exercise is the most important thing you can do, especially when every single person in your family has dropped dead from heart disease. Exercise helps your crazy neurotic brain settle down and helps you sleep. It’s a well known fact: exercise makes me nicer. I better get to it before Jay leaves and takes the lazy cats.

Fidget. Studies show that lean people fidget for about 150 minutes a day more than obese people do. That kind of low-grade activity (tapping feet and fingers, twirling hair, gesturing while speaking, etc.) can burn 350 calories a day, which translates into 10-30 pounds a year!  It’s called Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), which is basically any movement that isn’t intended as exercise. You can burn an extra 100-150 calories an hour by increasing NEAT.  Here are some ideas:

Reach for the caffeine, pass on the sugar and cream. Caffeine tends to increase the number of calories you burn, probably because they stimulate thermogenesis — one way your body generates heat and energy from digesting food and because the boost in energy means you move around more (which means more calories burned). Having 250 milligrams of caffeine with a meal can increase the calories spent metabolizing the meal by 10%. Green tea, in particular, seems to be especially conducive to burning calories.

So instead of having soda or any other calorie-laden drink with your meals, go for an unsweetened cup of coffee or tea. Skip the sugar, milk, cream, or any other caloric enhancements so that you don’t replace the extra calories you’re burning. Drinking coffee or tea plain will take some getting used to, but purchasing high-quality beans or tea leaves will certainly help.

Drink lemon juice in lukewarm water. This formulation gets more effective when done on an empty stomach.

Drink ice water. The colder the water you drink, the more calories you burn, since your body expends more energy warming up the water. If you have 8 glasses (64 oz) of ice-cold water in a day, you’ll burn 70 more calories than if you drank 8 glasses of a body temperature beverage. In fact, this principle will work with any calorie-free beverage, as long as it’s ice cold, so you might want to ice up that coffee and tea mentioned earlier for cumulative calorie-burning effects. Keep in mind, however, that the weight loss impact of this one particular practice isn’t drastic: It would take 435 glasses of ice water (about two months, assuming 8 glasses a day) to lose one pound. And, don’t go overboard. There’s such a thing as water toxicity. Follow the guidelines in How to Drink More Water Every Day.

Chill out. Shivering burns calories, so if you can spend more time outside when it’s cold, you’ll crank up the calorie furnace. Even if you don’t shiver, though, you can get a 3-7% increase in calorie burn just from your body warming itself (similar to the principle at work when you drink ice water).  Just don’t run away with this idea and get yourself sick!

My first thought about Health Care Reform was: I will refuse to comply. I’ve read the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and nowhere in that document do I find that the federal government has the power to force me to purchase for-profit insurance products from private companies.

Then I thought about my own private insurance, an exorbitant premium that basically seems to multiply itself every year. Services cut in half and copays doubled.

How is that legal? Obviously, change was desperately needed.

No doubt Obama needed to step in, but how about an in between reform? I’m barely college educated and is therefore, ahem, no scholar, but I find it highly offensive that my own government would threaten me with a financial penalty if I refuse to pay money to such a racket. It’s much like being forced to pay a “protection fee” to the mob.

But, enough of my rant. I read this article in the NYTimes and wanted to share.

From NYTIMES — By SANDEEP JAUHAR, M.D.

“I’m tired of paying for everyone else’s stupidity,” is a comment I read on the Internet last week after the health care bill was passed. It summed up the views of many Americans worried about shelling out higher premiums and taxes to cover the uninsured. Why should we pick up the tab when so much disease in our country stems from unhealthy behavior like smoking and overeating?

In fact, the majority of Americans say it is fair to ask people with unhealthy lifestyles to pay more for health insurance. We believe in the concept of personal responsibility. You hear it in doctors’ lounges and in coffee shops, among the white collar and blue collar alike. Even President Obama has said, “We’ve got to have the American people doing something about their own care.”

But personal responsibility is a complex notion, especially when it comes to health. Individual choices always take place within a broader, messy context. When people advocate the need for personal accountability, they presuppose more control over health and sickness than really exists.

Unhealthy habits are one factor in disease, but so are social status, income, family dynamics, education and genetics. Patient noncompliance with medical recommendations undoubtedly contributes to poor health, but it is as much a function of poor communication, medication costs and side effects, cultural barriers and inadequate resources as it is of willful disregard of a doctor’s advice.

A few years ago surgeons in Melbourne, Australia, were refusing to provide heart and lung surgeries to smokers, even those who needed the operations to stay alive. “Why should taxpayers pay for it?” said one surgeon quoted in media reports at the time. “It is consuming resources for someone who is contributing to their own demise.”

Though some were outraged by this stance — the Australian Medical Association called it “unconscionable” to ration services based on personal habits — many doctors agreed with it. Like the majority of Americans, they saw nothing wrong with patients paying for the consequences of their actions.

The problem is that punitive measures to force healthy behavior do not usually work. In 2006, West Virginia started rewarding Medicaid patients who signed a pledge to enroll in a wellness plan and to follow their doctors’ orders with special benefits, including unlimited prescription-drug coverage, programs to help them quit smoking and nutrition counseling. Those who did not sign up were enrolled in a more restrictive plan that, among other things, limited drug coverage to only four prescriptions a month.

The program, by many accounts, is failing. As of August 2009, only 15 percent of 160,000 eligible patients had signed up. Patients with limited transportation options were having a hard time committing to regular office visits. And experts say there is no evidence that restricting benefits for noncompliant patients has promoted healthy behaviors.

As a cardiology fellow, I once took care of a young man with severe congestive heart failure. We were supposed to start him on a blood thinner early in his hospitalization, but it got overlooked. Fed up with the delays in getting his blood sufficiently thinned, he left the hospital against medical advice. He said he had to go home to care for his toddler.

He came to the clinic a week later looking very embarrassed. He had left without prescriptions, so he had been taking no medications since he left, leaving him short of breath. To compound the problem, he had been eating cold cuts, cheap and readily available, which made his condition even worse. But the attending physician refused to give him prescriptions. She said that he had to go to a walk-in clinic. She said he had to learn personal responsibility.

Healthy living should be encouraged, but punishing patients who make poor health choices clearly oversimplifies a very complex issue. We should be focusing on public health campaigns: encouraging exercise, smoking cessation and so on. Of course, this will require a change in how we live, how we plan our communities.

“It’s the context of people’s lives that determines their health,” said a World Health Organization report on health disparities. “So blaming individuals for poor health or crediting them for good health is inappropriate.”

I must admit I often feel like my colleagues who grouse about spending all day treating patients who do not seem to care about their health and then demand a quick fix. I do not relish paying more taxes to treat patients who engage in unhealthy habits. But then I remind myself that we all engage in socially irresponsible behavior that others pay for. I try to eat right and get enough exercise. But then I also sometimes send text messages when I drive.

The whole point of insurance is to reduce risk. When people inveigh against the lack of personal responsibility in health care, they are really demanding a different model, one based on actual risk, not just on spreading costs evenly through society. Sick people, they are really saying, should pay more. Which model we eventually adopt in this country will say a lot about the kind of society we want to live in.

Funny lady Chelsea Handler may love her cocktails, but that hasn’t stopped her from looking positively smashing on the April cover of Shape. The comedian, 35, is candid about her long road to a fit lifestyle (”I was born with a French fry in my mouth”), but says today she is healthier than ever. After years of yo-yo dieting and jumping from workout to workout, Chelsea shares that she’s finally found a fitness regimen that she can stick to. Here are the interview highlights:

Courtesy: Fit Sugar

Slap Chop promises that “you’re gonna be in a great mood all day because you’re gonna be slapping your troubles away.”

It’s true. It made me happy. I loved it!

The Slap Chop’s rotating blades easily dispatch potatoes, nuts, cookies and tuna. Unlike other similar tools, the Slap Chop opens butterfly-style for easy cleaning.

You can mince vegetables, onions and garlic with the skin still attached. I agree with Slap Chop’s philosophy: “We’re gonna make America skinny again, one slap at a time.”

First Lady Michelle Obama officially kicked off a national campaign to combat childhood obesity on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 in Washington D.C. Dubbed “Let’s Move,” the project also received a presidential nod of support, to be backed up with as much as $1 billion a year in federal funds for 10 years. Earlier in the day, in the Oval Office, President Obama signed a formal memorandum establishing for the first time a national task force on childhood obesity — one that draws from the departments of the Interior, Health and Human Services, Agriculture and Education and is charged with turning the first lady’s ambitious list of proposals into action. The initiative concentrates on improved school lunches, increased physical activity, and more available nutritional education. Michelle spoke about the four key components of the nation-wide program (www.letsmove.gov):

1. Improve the information and the tools that parents need to make the changes that are desired in their families.

2. Improve the quality of foods in the schools.

3. Improve access and affordability of healthy foods, and

4. Increase physical education for our kids.

“This isn’t about trying to turn the clock back to when we were kids or preparing five-course meals from scratch every night. No one has time for that,” the first lady said in her remarks. “And it’s not about being 100 percent perfect, 100 percent of the time. Lord knows I’m not. There’s a place for cookies and ice cream, burgers and fries — that’s part of the fun of childhood.”

The dangers and statistics related to childhood obesity speak to the importance of Michelle’s concerns. She has noted that a whopping one in three children in the U.S. is overweight or obese. In her interview on Larry King Live, the First Lady noted that “we’re already seeing high cholesterol in young kids, high blood pressure, asthma that is preventable, and type 2 diabetes which is the most troubling.”
The core of the program is “about the quality of life of our kids … it’s about fitness and its about overall nutrition … We need to change how we eat,” states Michelle Obama.

And the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports will be revamped so that it no longer focuses on how many sit-ups and push-ups a child can do — or how long they can hang, batlike, from a high bar. Instead of focusing on athleticism or stupid human tricks, it will address health and well-being.

The first lady has decided to take up that fight and to make it her signature issue while in the White House. One in three children in this country is either overweight or obese, Obama said Tuesday. If that trend continues, this generation of children will not live as long as their parents. Obama has said she would like her fight against obesity to be her legacy as first lady. But it will be impossible to measure success — at least by her standards — until long after she’s left the White House. Because her goal, she said, is to see that “children who are born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.”

A guy rings his boss and says “I can’t come to work today.” The boss asks why and the guy says “it’s my eyes.” “What’s wrong with your eyes?” asks the boss. “I just can’t see myself coming to work, so I’m going fishing instead…”

A plethora of recent studies continue to emphasize the usefulness of fish oil containing omega-3 fatty acids in addressing issues of brain health, cognition and mood disorders.

Use of omega-3 fatty acids were shown to decrease the risk of developing psychotic disorders including schizophrenia in those patients that demonstrated sub threshold psychotic states, according to one study.

Another study demonstrated that use of EPA, a major component of fish oil, improved memory and reduced the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. As we age, the production of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine declines. EPA was shown to slow the reduction of acetylcholine release and its synthesis.

Also, in a small study, omega-3 fatty acid use yielded positive results in 8 of 9 children with autism.

As if.

As if you were sitting around asking just that question.

Boosting the metabolism is the holy grail of weight watchers everywhere, but how fast your body burns calories depends on several factors. Some people inherit a speedy metabolism. Not me, and my existent mini-muffin top is proof. Men tend to burn more calories than women, even while resting. And for most people, metabolism slows steadily after age 40. Although you can’t control your age, gender, or genetics, there are other ways to get a boost. Let me help you rev it up.

1. Build some muscle. Our bodies constantly burn calories, even when we’re doing nothing. This resting metabolic rate is much higher in people with more muscle. Every pound of muscle uses about 6 calories a day just to sustain itself, while each pound of fat burns only 2 calories daily. That small difference can add up over time. In addition, after a bout of resistance training, muscles are activated all over your body, increasing your average daily metabolic rate.

2. Kick your workout up a notch. Aerobic exercise may not build big muscles, but it can rev up your metabolism in the hours after a workout. The key is to push yourself. High-intensity exercise delivers a bigger, longer increase in resting metabolic rate than low- or moderate workouts. To get the benefits, try a more intense class at the gym or include short bursts of jogging during your regular walk.

3. Drink more water. The body needs water to process calories. If you are even mildly dehydrated, your metabolism may slow down. In one study, adults who drank eight or more glasses of water a day burned more calories than those who drank four. To stay hydrated, drink a glass of water or other unsweetened beverage before every meal and snack. In addition, try munching on fresh fruits and vegetables, which are full of fluid, rather than pretzels or chips.

4. Eat more often. Eating more really can help you lose weight — eating more often, that is. When you eat large meals with many hours in between, you train your metabolism to slow down. Having a small meal or snack every 3 to 4 hours keeps your metabolism cranking, so you burn more calories over the course of a day. Several studies have also shown that people who snack regularly eat less at meal time.

5. Eat more protein. The body burns up to twice as many calories digesting protein as it uses for fat or carbohydrates. Although you want to eat a balanced diet, replacing some carbs with lean, protein-rich foods can jump-start the metabolism at mealtime. Healthy sources of protein include lean beef and pork, fish, white meat chicken, tofu, nuts, beans, eggs, and low-fat dairy products.

1. Photographing my cats. Yes, I know — weird.

2. Flannel. Wear with clear heels and you will suddenly feel much sexier. Just don’t tell anyone.

3. Don’t diet. Ever. I hate “no”. I get rebellious, and I really don’t like challenging myself to stay away from Buttercup Bakery. I think the cookies must get lonely, begging for a belly to love them. The best part? Learning to love the badass exercise session the day after—a different kind of high that burns off the frosting and keeps me and my body in check. Plus, cupcakes makes me much nicer and easier for others to love me.

4. Getting up today, feeling achy, too tired to move. By evening, total running euphoria, muscles nice and pliable, thanks to exercise.

5. More Running. I covet being a gazelle, so running for speed and beating previous times/miles is important to my training. I continue to challenge myself by perfecting my stride, but my darn lower back can keep up. I still practice…being sweaty makes me feel good.

6. Walking around NYC with the confidence in your stride knowing that you strong enough to resist a push or pull.

What are your 6 things?

Jillian Michaels wants you to write down your weight loss goals. She needs to shut it.

For some reason, I’ve always been resistant to things like writing down goals because it feels so motivational speaker affirm-y to me, like I’m some 80’s go-getter in a power suit trying to scramble my way up the corporate ladder, or a New-Age-y lady in flowing pants determined to find my myself via the spirit of a monkey.

But I am open minded enough to see how writing down goals might be a very sensible thing to do, as it makes what you want more concrete in your mind and gives you some direction and all that. I just don’t get it when it comes to weight loss goals. And I don’t understand how it’s any different than say, your everyday to-do list.

Do you want to know what I never hear when I talk to fat person, a skinny person, a man or woman?

When I started exercising, back when I gained 20 pounds boozing my ass off, my list would have said this: Lose 20 pounds

When I lost the 20 pounds, I would make a new list and it would say: Lose 5 pounds

When I talk to someone that’s super thin about their exercise goals, I get this answer:
Lose weight

Like them, I didn’t give a sh*t about healthier or stronger. Those words were never in my vocabulary. I just wanted to wear my skinny-pants again. I wanted to lose weight.

So here we are, 7 years later. I got so much more out of exercise that “just weight loss”. The jiggles disappeared, I could run much faster, I was three times stronger, my muscles were defined, and I gained the baseline fitness level and confidence to try anything physical.

Listen, I love Julian, she is amazing at what she does. However, there is now a responsibility to our fatter-than-ever society: it’s not just about being thin, the other factors are way more important. Weight-loss should be a side product of exercise, not quite a goal.

From this day on, instead of starving yourself thin or getting your colon washed out with that crap they stick up there, try getting on the treadmill for half-hour. If you don’t feel better, email me and we can talk through it.