weight

Are All Calories Created Equal?

Posted on 06/14/2012 by Carole Carson | Fat to Fit | Comments

Personal HealthFor years, nutritionists told us that all calories are equal. A calorie is a measure, like an inch or a mile, and the measures are constant, even though the kind of food might vary. What we didn’t know until recently is that while the energy in food may be equal in calories, the impact on the human body varies. Calories are indeed equal, but some are utilized differently than others. Some calories are easily converted to fat and stored, while …

Do You Need a Wellness Coach?

Posted on 05/24/2012 by Carole Carson | Fat to Fit | Comments

Personal HealthWhen beginning my fitness makeoverseveral years ago, I was suffering from a torn hamstring. Knowing that I could easily reinjure myself with an overly aggressive exercise program or by undertaking the wrong kind of exercise, I hired a personal trainer. Until that point, I had considered personal trainers the exclusive province of the rich and famous. I was delighted to discover that personal trainers were affordable and available to work with ordinary persons like me. The use of personal trainers …

Backsliding or Thin for Life?

Posted on 05/17/2012 by Carole Carson | Fat to Fit | Comments

Personal HealthDon’t we all know someone who had lost 30 pounds, swore to never regain the weight and then regained that much and more? Or someone who had exercised regularly, suffered an injury and then became a weight-gaining couch potato? These stories worried me, especially when a back injury threw me off track. Unable to play tennis, work out at the gym or practice yoga, I was limited to therapeutic pool walking. Distressed and irritable with pain, I found it easy …

Defining Moments: The Beginning of the Thinning

Posted on 05/3/2012 by Carole Carson | Fat to Fit | Comments

Personal HealthPornography is difficult to describe but you know it when you see it. Similarly, a defining moment is hard to describe but you know it when you experience it. Defining moments are to human experience what the phenomena outliers are to researchers. Outliers are results that stand out because they are inconsistent with what has gone before and, given past events, seemingly inconsistent with what should have occurred. Like outlier statistics, defining moments are small events that change how you …

Four Lessons to Slim and Trim Your Body

Posted on 04/26/2012 by Carole Carson | Fat to Fit | Comments

Personal HealthIf we are to succeed in the lifelong quest to look and feel our best, we must become good students and learn from what others can teach us. Sometimes the instruction comes from the laboratory; other times, we learn from individuals who’ve achieved personal breakthroughs. Here are four lessons worth incorporating into your fitness program: Synthetic Fats Are Not Good for Weight Loss: A study conducted at Purdue University demonstrated that fat substitutes may cause dieters to gain weight. According …

Formula for Weight Loss: Support + Science = Success

Posted on 04/5/2012 by Carole Carson | Fat to Fit | Comments

Personal HealthThe novel notion that friends make friends fat made news when researchers analyzing data from the Framingham Heart Study found evidence that “clusters of friends appeared to ‘infect’ each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking.” At the same time, the researchers found that good habits, such as quitting smoking, being trim and being happy passed “from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.” These groundbreaking observations were based on a long-term study established in 1948 by the …