The Alliance for a Healthier Generation, sponsored by the American Heart Association and William J. Clinton Foundation and dedicated to battling childhood obesity, has issued eight ways families can get fit together. We list those eight ways below and go one step further, suggesting specific ways you can make this happen NOW! Meaning this week now. Take a walk. Stroll together after a family meal or walk around the mall…

Happy holidays! Here’s hoping you survive them! If you’re looking for a time of year that’s hardest on your body, you’d be hard-pressed to beat the one that kicked off with pants-unbuckling Thanksgiving and ends with a cold pack on your head New Year’s Day. Think about the damage alone done by the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Thanksgiving: overeating. Estimates place the typical holiday meal at 3,000-plus…

When most people think of interval training — if they think of it at all — they think of an intense regimen reserved for competitive types. Distance runners heading to the track once a week to work on speed (evidenced by the Swedish fartlek approach that came into vogue here in the 1970s), cyclists working 30-second county-line sprints into their 3-hour rides, swimmers who periodically inject a speed lap into…

Who better to listen to when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off than people who have lost weight and kept it off. The National Weight Control Registry was started in 1994 to identify adults who have lost weight and kept it off. Specifically, the registry’s 6,000-plus members have lost at least 30 pounds and kept if off for at least a year. Recently, they were asked how…

The following is a expanded version, with links, of a story I wrote that originally appeared in yesterday’s (Feb. 1) The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer. You’re a month into your new fitness program and you’re not seeing the results you expected: You are not alone. And yet, you are. “Every person is different,” says Sue Dissinger, Health and Wellness Director for the YMCA of Greater Charlotte. Your age,…

When I write for newspapers I inevitably wind up with far more information than I can fit into a 600-word lead. Such was the case with a story I wrote for the Observers (Charlotte and News &), scheduled to run in both publications Tuesday. The story is about not getting discouraged if, a month into your new fitness program, you aren’t seeing the results you expected. In the course of…

Does obesity breed obesity? A 2007 study out of Harvard University found that hanging out with fat people increase your chances of being fat. Now, based on the result of that study comes a new study from the Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology predicting obesity rates in the U.S. will slowly climb for another 40 years, at which point 42 percent of the population will…

Sunday, I returned from Colorado where I noticed more people riding bikes, more people hiking and walking than they do here in North Carolina. I also noticed that there was a whole let less of the people there than there is of the folks here. Hmm, I wondered. Is there a connection? Why, yes, it turns out. There is. It may be no-duh research, but it demands repeating because so…

From the research world comes more incentive to stay active — or become so — as you age. From the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University comes “preliminary evidence” that keeping your brain sharp can help you physically. Einstein researchers took a group of 20 “frail” seniors (age 70 or older who walk less than a meter per second) and divided them into two groups. Ten went about…

Move more, lose weight, so goes the conventional wisdom, right? Well … . A curious finding comes out of a four-year study of 212 kids at 54 schools in the town of Plymouth, U.K. This latest finding from the 11-year-old EarlyBird Diabetes Study being conducted by the Peninsula Medical School finds that physical activity may not play much — or any — role in helping kids lose weight. The finding…