YOWZA ! --- --- 12 foods that pack on pounds

Twelve Foods that PACK on POUNDS!!!

12. Butter (Food just tastes better with the reaL Thing)
Dairy foods like butter and cheese, exception: yogurt. People who ate a lot of it were less likely to put on weight,
People who ate a lot of butter gained about 0.30 pound every four years.

11. Fruit Juice (Tastes great, but it's 100% sugar)
Drinking juice daily added 0.31 pound of extra body weight every four years

10. Fried foods (Like French Fried Potatoes?)
Eating fried foods at home added  0.36 pound every four years. Eating lots of fried food out at restaurants added 0.28 pound every four years.

9. Refined grains (Like Rice?, Love Rice!!)
Daily servings of refined grains added 0.39 pound every four years.

8. Sweets and Desserts (Like, Duh!)
Eating sweets daily added 0.41 pound every four years.

7. Potatoes (French fries, with Catsup)
A daily fix of potatoes added 0.57 pound of weight every four years, with or without butter and sour cream?

6. Trans fats (Oh!)
Eating trans fats added on 0.65 pound of weight every four years

5. Processed meat (Bacon, Bacon, and more Bacon!)
Cold cuts and hot dogs, eating lots of processed meats tacked on 0.93 pound every four years.

4. Unprocessed RED meat (Processed vs Unprocessed? Can't throw out the meat)
Eating lots of red meat contributed to a weight gain of 0.95 pound every four years.

3. Sugar-sweetened soda (OK, I don't drink my calories anyway, unless it's got alcohol in it.)
Daily consumption of sugary drinks added exactly one pound every four years, according to the study.

2. Potato chips (Potatoes again)
Daily chip eating brought a 1.69 pound weight gain every four years.

1. French fries (More Potatoes, Cajun Fries!!!)
People who ate lots of fries gained more than three pounds of body weight every four years. Over the study's 20-year-period, that meant people who ate more fries put on more than 16 extra pounds from this food alone.

OK, lets do the math and look in a mirror.
That's 10.56 POUNDS every 4 years, or 2.64 POUNDS, each year. Times your age, and very little exercise, lately!
It all comes back to haunt you.

Have a great summer.


DON'T BE BLUE

Wonder Why Your New Year's Resolution Is Already Behind You?

U.S. was always a bit pound-foolish
By Lauran Neergaard, The Associated Press
Posted: 01/24/2011 07:43:02 PM PST

WASHINGTON - Before there was Dr. Atkins, there was William Banting. He invented the low-carb diet of 1863. Even then Americans were trying out advice that urged fish, mutton or "any meat except pork" for breakfast, lunch and dinner - hold the potatoes, please.

It turns out our obsession with weight and how to lose it dates back at least 150 years. And while now we say "overweight" instead of "corpulent" - and now that obesity has become epidemic - a look back at dieting history shows what hasn't changed is the quest for an easy fix.

"We grossly, grossly underestimate" the difficulty of changing behaviors that fuel obesity, says Clemson University sociologist Ellen Granberg, who examined archives at the Library of Congress. She believes it's important to show "we're not dealing with some brand-new, scary phenomenon we've never dealt with before."

Indeed, the aging documents are eerily familiar.

Consider Englishman William Banting's account of losing almost 50 pounds in a year. He did it by shunning "bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes, which had been the main (and I thought innocent) elements of my existence" in favor of loads of meat.

His pamphlet, "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public," quickly crossed the Atlantic and become so popular here that "banting" became slang for dieting, Granberg says.

While obesity has rapidly surged in the last few decades, we first changed from a nation where being
plump was desirable into a nation of on-again, off-again dieters around the end of the 19th century, Granberg says.

Before then, people figured a little extra weight might help withstand infectious diseases that vaccines and antibiotics later would tame. It also was a sign of prosperity.

But just as doctors today bemoan a high-tech, immobile society, the emergence of trolleys, cars and other machinery in the late 19th century scaled back the sheer number of calories people once burned, Granberg explains. Increasing prosperity meant easier access to food.

"An excess of flesh is to be looked upon as one of the most objectionable forms of disease," the Philadelphia Cookbook declared in 1900. Low-cal cookbooks hadn't arrived yet; the calorie wasn't quite in vogue.

By 1903, La Parle obesity soap that "never fails to reduce flesh" was selling at a pricey $1 a bar. The Luisenbad Reduction Salt pledged to "wash away your fat." Soon came an exercise machine, the Graybar Stimulator to jiggle the pounds. Bile Beans promoted a laxative approach.

As the government prepares to update U.S. dietary guidelines next week, February 2011, the Library of Congress culled its archives and, with Weight Watchers International, gathered experts recently to discuss this country's history of weight loss.

Granberg recounted how real nutrition science was born.

The government's first advice to balance proteins, carbohydrates and fat came in 1894. A few years later, life insurance companies reported that being overweight raised the risk of death. In 1916, the Department of Agriculture came up with the five food groups. Around World War II, charts showing ideal weight- for-height emerged, surprisingly close to what today is considered a healthy body mass index.

Diet foods quickly followed, as did weight loss support groups like Overeaters Anonymous and Weight Watchers - putting today's diet infrastructure in place by 1970, Granberg says.

Yet fast-forward and two- thirds of Americans today are either overweight or obese, and childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades. Weight-loss surgery is skyrocketing. Diet pills have been pulled from the market for deadly side effects, with only a few possible new ones in the pipeline.

More and more, specialists question how our society and culture fuel overeating.

"Should it be socially desirable to walk down the street with a 30-ounce Big Gulp?" asks Patrick O'Neill, president- elect of The Obesity Society and weight-management director at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Negotiating a weight-loss menu for a family with different food preferences is a minefield that affects how people feel about themselves and their relationships with loved ones, adds Clemson's Granberg, who began studying the sociology of obesity after losing 120 pounds herself.

"If what you need is a nutritionally sound, healthful weight- loss plan, you can get (hundreds) of them," she says. "That, we have figured out in the last 100 years. It's how to do all this other stuff that I think is the real challenge."

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http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-modern-way-to-get-a-better-body-2186891.html

Boot camps
Outdoor military training sessions have been growing in prominence during the past few years, but are set to soar in 2011. At the end of 2010, the American College of Sports Medicine, the largest sports medicine and exercise science organisation in the world, announced its projected top 20 fitness trends worldwide for the coming year. It predicted the growing popularity of boot camp workouts, modelled after military-style training that includes cardiovascular, strength, endurance, and flexibility exercises.

"I expect more and more people will be going to boot camps," Miller says. "We're not quite sure why men haven't latched on to it so much. I suppose women like someone authoritative telling them what to do and they like to be instructed; they like to be shouted at (and men, not so much, they're more like loners). It's a quick workout, you go there, you're put through your paces and then you're out of there. It's outdoors as well and you're working with the natural elements. You can have a laugh with everyone else there: you all tend to support each other because you're all in it together." (maybe a couple of sexist statements)

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Interesting that Weight Watchers is now counting carbohydrates higher in points and looking more like Atkins.

It's still ~ BURN more calories than you take in ~ exercise ~ exercise ~ exercise ~~~ OR ~~

 GO WORK ON A FARM

DON'T BE BLUE

More on the Games people play and the reasons they play them.

OK, it's super bowl time and another great excuse to have a party. Well, Friday is a good excuse also, but not as sociologically or psychologically of the same importance.
I've heard this before, but never paid than much attention to it. The world we live in is populated by a natural and inbred mentality to survive, expand hunting and living areas and to protect them. This has usually resulted in fights, skirmishes, and other acts of war. We are and always will be a warring species.

For the most part, constant acts of protecting your territory have been subdued in most countries populated by any type if civility. There are some countries that cannot escape that mentality, and don't want to. As much as we would like to believe that people will refrain from their basic instincts and live in peace, that will never happen, as long is there is one person out the billions that inhabit this planet that feels the need to protect what they have or want more.

We, in the civilized parts of the world, have replaced those acts of aggression with sports. Most sporting endeavors have grown from exhibitions that demonstrated the abilities needed for being a warrior and most civilized people are no longer warriors, so we play sports.

We play sports and root for our favorite sports teams. Sports teams have people who are fanatics about how their team prospers. Some are more than fanatics; their whole world revolves around their adopted team, or mentally; their country, their warriors, and their king. There are still areas of the country so mezmorized by their national or city team that they are so violent after a loss that they destroy parts of their city or cause harm and injury to the sports officials, not to mention the person who caused them to lose. And of course there's hockey.

The games are their battles that lead to their own version of a World War, every year or every 2 years or every 4 years, in the form of Championships and worldly contests like the Olympics.

And we need these replacements of acts of war, to allow us to escape, when we can, from the realities of the real acts of war going on every day and the fact that there are bad people who want to do bad things. Out of the billions of people on this planet, there will always be at least one bad person and they will always let you think there is a chance they will become passive. They never will, but will use that hope to accomplish their goals.

Everyone needs something to channel mankind’s natural instincts into. Play sports, root for your team, compete in something that develops your mind, or play poker. All of these activities require some form of aggression, and mankind is nothing if not aggressive, even in it's yearn for pacifism.

DON'T BE BLUE