If you’re debating whether to go the extreme, quick-results road with your New Year’s Resolution (which started yesterday, remember) or adopt a healthy, lifelong lifestyle, check out a New York Times story this week on past contestants on NBC’s “The Biggest Loser.” As you might expect, the long-term impact for many of the contestants over the past eight years has not been good, starting with first season winner Ryan C. Benson, who started that season at 330 pounds, dropped 122 and is back up over 300. Good insight into the show and why strategies that cause you to lose 15 pounds a week or more not only don’t work in the long run, they can threaten your life.
Category Archives: Health
Happy New Year!
OK, so today isn’t the start of the new year, traditionally the time when we vow to change our slothful ways. It may not be the start of a new year, but you should think of it that way.
Starting today and continuing through the end of the year, our lives tend to change. This afternoon around 2, there’s the turkey, the dressing, the mashed potatoes, the sweet potatoes, the cranberry sauce, the pecan pie, the drooling, the nap. Repeat around 6 p.m. and again at 11. Figures very wildly on the total damage done on Thanksgiving Day, but the American Council on Exercise believes the typical American consumes 3,000 calories during the main meal and 4,500 calories over the course of the day. That’s more than twice the recommended daily caloric intake for the average American.
The common cold: Lace up or stay in bed?
Early on during a backpacking trip a couple weeks ago I felt a cold coming on. Pulling my clogged-up and sniffling self out of the tent the second morning into a mid-30 degree chill, I thought I was going to have to pull the plug on my adventure. “If I can just make it to Hot Springs,” I told myself, “I can make it back to the car.”
5Ks vs. candy for grades
OK, time for a current events quiz. What was the most disturbing aspect of a Goldsboro middle school principal’s decision to allow kids to earn grades by selling candy for a fundraiser. Was it:
a) That the parent advisory council that pitched the scheme felt so pressured to raise money to supplement programs once funded by the school district that they resorted to the candy-for-grades scheme?
Hikes You Can Do: Buckquarter Creek
Every Wednesday through Thanksgiving, GetGoingNC.com will feature a hike in North Carolina that just about anyone can do. It won’t be a long hike (though we may throw in a recommendation for going longer), it won’t be strenuous hike (there could be a hill-climb option as well). The hikes will be timed to coincide with the changing colors of fall. This week, the 1.5-mile Buckquarter Creek Trail in Eno River State Park.