As you go about your weekend, here’s something to think about from page 35 of Barry Popkin’s “The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race”:
“The average American Adult consumes 115 calories more per day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday than they consume on weekdays.”
Tuesday morning I was at a Brains & Bodies workshop conducted by Advocates for Health in Action, a consortium of local public and private sector groups “shaping a community where healthful eating and physical activity are the way of life.” Brains & Bodies is a program of the Wake County PTA designed to encourage healthy habits in our schools. Healthy habits such as PTA fundraisers that eschew cookie dough sales in favor of fun runs. That kind of thing.
Wondering what you can do as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program to stop the super-sizing of our kids? If you have preschoolers, you can do three things according to a study to be published in the March Pediatrics.
According to a survey of parents of 8,550 4-year-olds, kids who adhered to the above three practices were 40 percent less likely to be obese than their slacker counterparts who sucked down their mac & cheese in front of a dusk-to-dawn Dora marathon.
The joke at our house (at least I think it’s funny) is that when the latest “O” arrives, I exclaim with mock surprise, “Oh, look! Oprah’s on the cover.”
This morning, the February 2010 issue showed up on the kitchen table. I was waiting for the coffee to finish, I didn’t feel like going out in the rain to fetch the Sunday paper, so I started thumbing through. Here’s what I learned:
Yesterday, we chatted with dietician Kara Mitchell about the importance of knowing your Resting Metabolic Rate, the number of calories your body needs to carry on such basic functions as breathing, pumping blood, growing new cells. Go below that number and your body will think it’s in trouble, switch into survival mode and burn fewer calories to perform such tasks.