Showing posts with label Overweight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Overweight. Show all posts

Friday, December 4, 2009

Unemployment and weight

Let's start with the downside. You picked up the dreaded pink slip. This did not do wonders for your self-esteem. You then looked around the job market and found precisely no jobs. It seems every employer has given up the idea of expansion. They are all hunkered down waiting for the recession to end. Only when all we consumers get back out into the malls and start spending again will the wheels of manufacturing and commerce start turning again. Until then, it's the survival of the fittest - my apologies for mentioning Darwin, but it seems appropriate when applied the the species of employer. So with self-esteem on the floor and depression lurking in the corner of your mind wondering whether it should come out and join the party, it's all too easy to slip into really bad habits. You become one of the dreaded couch potatoes, suddenly fascinated by the offerings of daytime TV. With nothing else to occupy yourself, you snack and hit the soda bottles. The results show in the first month. With a job and all the exercise of getting out of the house and running round to earn a living, you were reasonably thin. Now you are unoccupied, you find your waist growing and everything else starting to sag. It occurs to you that this may not help you find another job when the market improves. There's a lot of discrimination out there and, with a choice between thinner and fatter candidates for a job, employers tend to pick the thinner ones because they are less likely to have health problems.


So let's turn this around. Now you are unemployed, you have the time to do something about those extra pounds. When you were working full time, the work was always a convenient excuse. There were just not enough hours in the day. You were tired when you got home. You needed the weekend for quality time with the family. We have all played this game. Well, no more! This is your chance to begin a daily routine of exercise. If you have a gym membership, start working out. Talk to the trainers and get them to devise a good set of programs to help you lose some of that weight. If the cost of gym membership is too much, do not let this be another excuse. Outside your home there is an endless supply of exercise equipment. It's called the sidewalk. Dress appropriately and start walking. Find slopes and then hills. Never mind the strange and pitying looks you get from drivers. Walking is one of the best all-round forms of exercise.


This should go hand-in-hand with a calorie-controlled diet. You defeat the purpose if you exercise, feel hungry and then eat more. Put smaller portions of healthy food on your plate. Cut out snacks and stop drinking soda altogether. Remember why you are doing this. It's your chance to finally lose some weight and get really healthy. It will lift your mood and, more importantly, help you find another job. If hunger is a problem, use phentermine. This is the best appetite suppressant on the market. With those hunger pangs banished, it's easy to keep the motivation going. The pounds will steadily disappear and a new, more confident you will emerge. Buy phentermine online and get your weight loss program underway. Unemployment is too good a chance to miss.


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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Why are we so fat?

Put boldly like this as the title to the article, this is close to being politically incorrect. We are not supposed to talk about people who are overweight. This intrudes into their privacy. We are being discriminatory in some way. Yet, when you come to the hard statistics collected by the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there is absolutely no doubt about the national trend. The CDC has been producing the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys for decades. It's the CDC's way of keeping its finger on the pulse of the average American. The first study was done almost sixty years ago. At that time, about one quarter of all Americans were overweight, i.e. had a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 27. This was the steady result as time passed until the Survey results came in the 1980's. Suddenly, one third of the population was overweight. In just ten years, millions of Americans switched their eating habits from moderate to excessive. If you could be persuaded to think of this as being like the spread of a disease, this would be an epidemic. And, just like a disease, it has continued to spread. Now more than twelve million adults have a BMI of 40 or more. In everyday terms, this has meant the replacement of the routine things we use in public places. Revolving doors are now bigger. Chairs are wider and strengthened. Even coffins have had to be enlarged.


So what changed and why? The answer is rooted in evolution. For survival purposes, we are hard-wired to eat during the years of plenty so we can live through the inevitable famine. Except, in modern times, no famine appears. This just leaves us with the appetite for high calorie foods to build up fat. Worse, as hunter gatherers, we had to run after our food to catch and kill it, or endlessly dig in the field to grow it. Now we drive down to the convenience store. Our lifestyles changed from active to sedentary. The final nail in the coffin was price. Before we applied technology to agriculture, food was quite expensive but, over the last forty years, the real price of food has been falling fast. Now we can all afford to overeat.


So to lose weight, we have to fight evolution. Just as our brains keep telling our bodies to eat more fat to store up energy, we have to tell ourselves to eat less and exercise more to burn off the fat. One of the key weapons to use in this fight is phentermine. This is a chemical designed to work in our brains. Instead of our stomach having a clear line of communication to our heads with the message that our stomachs are empty, this drug blocks the message. So, when some people start feeling hungry and automatically reach for the cookie jar, the phentermine user does not feel like eating snacks between meals. It kills the hunger pangs and makes it easier to keep to a diet. Now when we tell ourselves to exercise alongside the diet, there is more likelihood we will burn off some of these unwanted pounds and start looking and feeling more healthy.


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