“Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness” is a recently published book that shows you not only how to create the perfect garden based on your needs but also how to do so in the safest possible way with minimal strain on your body while getting a good full-body workout in the process! Here is a Fitness Mantra Book Review of “Garden Your Way To Health And Fitness”. I am trying to standardize all future book reviews on Fitness Mantra and after referencing a lot of online examples and references, I have decided on this format. Please feel free to send me your comments and criticisms so I can improve on this.

Title: Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness
Author(s): Bunny Guinness and Jacqueline Knox
Publisher: Timber Press
ISBN: 978-0-88192-881-5
Price (10/24/2009): US $14.96
Preview: On Google Books
Subject: Gardening, Health and Fitness
Theme: Minimizing injury while gardening; achieving good health and fitness from a well-designed garden
Thesis: Stretching and balancing oneself beforehand and using the right tools in the correct fashion while gardening will minimize the risk of injury and allow you to enjoy a beautiful, well-planned garden that can be a personal sanctuary as well as a place to exercise, stay fit and grow ornamental flowers or sustainable fruits, vegetables, nuts and herbs.
Disclosure: I was sent one free copy of this book by the publishers to review. As always, please be assured of completely unbiased reviews on Fitness Mantra.

Review of Garden Your Way To Health And Fitness:

Bunny Guinness, a professional landscape designer and Jacqueline Knox, physiotherapist, come together to create a gardening book that also stresses the importance of ensuring correct posture and balance while in the garden.

The book begins with simple balancing techniques that one can perform even before beginning to garden and one can discern a lot of pilates movements in these exercises. Running the gamut from simple stretches to spine curls, side rolls and so called “diamond presses”, this eight-step routine is sure to get you in limber form before you begin your garden work. There’s even an aerobic section if you plan to do more strenuous gardening.

This is followed by a detailed chapter describing the virtually unlimited potential of a well-designed garden in giving you the workout you desire. The gardening-calorie-chart in the very begining of this chapter makes it clear: gardening work = calories-burned! Collecting grass or leaves for an hour? 260 calories. Chopping wood? 385! Interspersed with amazingly well-taken photographs, you are walked through dynamic workouts like squats, lunges and step-ups. You are also shown the proper techniques for various strengthening exercises.

From here, the authors shift to taking you to more “gardening oriented” material like choosing the optimal tools for safe work, maintaining proper posture while actually performig the various gardening procedures like trimming or moving a loaded wheel-barrow. Desiging the right kind of garden for your purposes follows with beautiful pictures of various functional elements you can think of adding: walkways, sleepers and even multiple-levels all come together to create the perfect environment for your garden.

There is even information on creating ornamental and productive (as in giving you things to consume!) gardens in the end that round up this concise, yet compelling, book.

If there’s one aspect of this book that tends to stand out, it’s the outstanding collection of photos and pictures throughout the book giving you the very correct impression that these authors are genuine experts in their respective fields. Their combined knowledge of gardening and fitnessshines through in these pages and if you have ever considered spending any significant portion of your time in your garden, especially with the idea of getting a good workout in the process and/or growing your own food organically, Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness will be an excellent reference in your endeavour and come highly recommended.

If you have read or benefited from this book, I am eager to hear your own thoughts about it especially if you have implemented some of the more functional aspects of their garden-designs that lean toward health and fitness. Also, I would like to know if this book-review format is to your liking and what, if any, changes you would like to see in it. Please feel free to sound off in the comments!

“Every bite you eat is an act of nourishment or an act of suicide.” – Dr. Bruce Bond

So, what do you choose? Good or bad? Fitness or Inactive Tiredness? Health or Disease?

Life or Death?

[Via Erica S on Twitter]

But seriously, BBC News Magazine reports that eating the same food and water combined together as a soup will help keep you full much longer than if you ate them separately. The secret lies in the way food passes from the stomach to the intestines:

After you eat a meal, the pyloric sphincter valve at the bottom of your stomach holds food back so that the digestive juices can get to work. Water, however, passes straight through the sphincter to your intestines, so drinking water does not contribute to “filling you up”.

When you eat the same meal as a soup, the whole mixture remains in the stomach, because the water and food are blended together. The scientists’ scans confirm that the stomach stays fuller for longer, staving off those hunger pangs. [BBC]

Ghrelin and the suppression of hunger:

Ghelin is a hormone released by the stomach walls when the stomach is empty. This hormone triggers a response in the brains hypothalamus region that causes us to “feel hungry” and we start to look for food. But when the stomach walls are stretched as a result of eating food, ghrelin production is stopped and we “feel full”. So one easy way to keep the feeling of fullness for longer periods of time is to eat foods that stay in eh stomach longer.

But as you saw eating food and drinking water separately causes the water to leave the stomach first and the food left behind is not there long enough to keep you satisfied. Soups on the other hand stay in the stomach in their entirety and are only slowly removed causing you to avoid the dreaded 3:00 p.m. snack craving.

What has been your own experience with soups? Have you ever felt full for a longer period of time when you drank soup for lunch? Do comment your thoughts  on this study and head on to BBC to read the entore article also.

[Via Lew Rockwell]

“Sky-high Calories In Some Restaurant Meals“, on WebMD explores this continuing phenomenon of ever-higher portion sizes. The Center For Science In The Public Interest (CSPI) studied the calorie and ingredient information for some of the popular meals from large restaurants and found saturated fat and sodium so high that it would be enough for three days!

Here are just a few of the major offenders:

• Chili’s Big Mouth Bites with French fries (four mini bacon cheeseburgers with fried onion strings): 2,350 calories, 38 grams saturated fat, 3,940 milligrams sodium.
• Olive Garden Tour of Italy, with lasagna, chicken parmigiana, and fettuccine alfredo: 1,450 calories, 33 grams saturated fat, 3,830 milligrams sodium.
• The Cheesecake Factory Fried Macaroni and Cheese: 1,570 calories, 69 grams saturated fat, 1,860 milligrams sodium. [WebMD]

Even an average meal at a restaurant can run close to 3000 calories when you realize that the entree, main course and dessert could each be close to a 1000 calories apiece. And some are just way worse than others:

Hurley believes diners don’t realize just how indulgent some items are. It’s a given that you’re splurging when you order Uno Chicago Grill’s Mega-Sized Deep Dish Sundae, a chocolate-chip cookie baked in a pizza pan and topped with ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce, she says.

“But how many people would guess there are 2,800 calories and 72 grams of saturated fat when that sundae hits the table?” [WebMD]

The CSPI is petitioning for a law requiring more easily available nutrition information on restaurat menus, menu boards etc. In the meantime, however, it’s upto the consumer to be wary of which dishes are high-calorie ad which ones are (relatively) more healthful.

For more examples of dishes-gone-wild and some tips on choosing good meals at restaurants head on to WebMD to read the entire new article.

Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness. -Edward Stanley

It’s a choice we make everyday: be healthy or not, stick to our diets or not, exercise or not. Well, whatever you choose, just know this: there are always consequences.

Today it is not far from the truth if I say salt is close to being public enemy #1. With the sodium content prominently displayed on all food-nutrition labels, salt is the bane of many a food-processor who just wants to preserve the food until it gets to you and wants to add some flavor while at it. Before you think I am all for excessive salt consumption, let me make it clear that anything in excess is bound to create an imbalance in our bodies that will then have to be taken care of, a process that uses up valuable resources and could lead to other complications. But to vilify one particular ingredient to the extent it is being done these days is overkill and probably incorrect as well.

“The neverending war on the white stuff” posted on Spiked-Online discusses the campaign against salt waged by the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA). By 2012, the FSA would like to bring the salt consumption of UK residents down to just 6g a day. Almost 80 categories of foods like bread and cereals have been affected by this new mandate.

As can be expected, the food manufacturers are up in arms over these new rules. Yes, the primary concern is that the foods being packaged with less salt will have a lot less appeal to consumers. But there is something else: the relationship between salt consumption and our health is not even conclusive! From Spiked:

When it comes to actual research on the effects of salt reduction, the results are inconsistent and any benefits are generally very small. A review in the British Medical Journal in 2002 concluded: ‘Intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programmes, provide only small reductions in blood pressure and sodium excretion, and effects on deaths and cardiovascular events are unclear. Advice to reduce sodium intake may help people on antihypertensive drugs to stop their medication while maintaining good blood pressure control.’ In other words, if you’ve already got high blood pressure, salt reduction might help, but for everyone else it is probably pointless. [Spiked]

And irrespective of what excessive salt could or could not do to our bodies, regular consumption of salt is not only OK, it is actually vital to our very survival. Our bodies are certainly capable or handling any little extra quantities of salt we might unknowingly consume (no one I know would consume spoonfuls of salt – our mouths pretty much makes sure we eat things in the right quantities and proportions). There is even a theory that our mouths react to salt in a favorable way because from an evolutionary point of view it was known to be good for health.

As the article concludes, while politicians try to “save us from ourselves” by giving us one mandate after another and invading our privacy with faulty research, it’s up to us to read more, get educated and not give into the hype.

[Via Lew Rockwell]

True, a healthful diet and frequent, well-planned exercise can help thwart the inevitable drop in metabolism, but for a few more specifics, you can turn to a recent health-item on the MSNBC Health site, Avoiding the midlife diet crisis.

Since this slowing metabolism is a slow process, the author claims you can stay one step ahead of it by making gradual changes yourself, as you age. Some fo the key points raised are:

• Reducing portion sizes: Did you know, on average, women need 100 fewer calories at age 40 than at age 20?
• Keep your brain sharp: Diet is key here with a focus on fruits and vegetables.

For more tips including ideas for keeping a stable blood sugar level and choosing the right kinds of beverages to keep you well-hydrated, check out the entire article and take those steps to stay young in mind and body!

WebMD reports on these findings. The problem is that moderate exercise, especially that doen for less than an hour, has little effect on the so called “24-hour oxidation of fat”:

“It’s not that exercise doesn’t burn fat,” Melanson says. “It’s just that we replace the calories. Exercise increases the capacity to burn more fat. But if you replace those calories, that is lost.” [WebMD]

To test the level of fat burning after exercise, Melnason’s team used 28 participants in a study. Of these, 10 were lean and endurance-trained, 10 were lean but untrained, while the remaining 8 were obese and untrained. Their exercise involved riding a stationary bike for about an hour burning 400 calories. After the exercise, while calories burned were indeed higher for all the test subjects, the 24-hour test revealed that instead of fat, it was carbohydrates that were being burned.

The reason for this, according to Melanson, is that what we eat after an exercise affects the kind of macro-nutrient our body uses first for fuel:

For instance, eating as little as 240 calories of carbohydrate during the hour before exercise can reduce fat burning during exercise, and the boost in fat burning during exercise can be “blunted” for up to six hours after eating a meal, says Melanson, citing other research. [WebMD]

These disappointing results are just for moderate exercisers who workout for an hour or less. High intensity exercisers or those practising interval training are bound to notice much better results. Still, the bottom line is simply this: if you are trying to lose weight, it’s dangerous to assume you can eat whatever you want or inwhatever quantity you want, simply because you have “done your exercises for the day”.

You cannot change the laws of science: take in more calories than you expend, and you will gain weight. No question about it.

During pregnancy, many women gain “substantially more than we would like,” IOM committee chairwoman Kathleen Rasmussen, ScD, PhD, tells WebMD. “It is important for women to gain within [the new guidelines] and if possible, it’s important for women to begin pregnancy at a good weight,” says Rasmussen, who is also a Cornell University nutrition professor. [WebMD]

The restrictions are strict enough, that the recommendations even include the advise to delay pregnancy until a healthy weight has been achieved. Overweight women have a greater tendency to suffer problems during pregnancy and complications during the actual birthing process (usually because of heavier babies):

“The risk for the baby is being born too large, which can result in birth injury for the baby or may result in a cesarean section for the mother,” Rasmussen says. “The risks for the mother of gaining beyond the guidelines are risk for cesarean section or risk for excessive weight retention postpartum.” [WebMD]

The original article contains a lot of specific numbers and guidelines and is bound to be useful either to you or someone you know. Do check it out.

According to the released weight-ranges, a woman of normal pre-pregnancy weight should gain just about  25-35 pounds for a single-baby and about 37-54 pounds for twins. Literally, the only condition that doctors don’t have is to lose weight during pregnancy which is always a no-no (even for women who were obese before pregnancy).

As for the whole “Eating for two” myth, the doctors in the group are quick to debunk it:

“I think people still feel like pregnancy is fair game,” Goist says. “You only need 300 extra calories per day to actually maintain a pregnancy.”

So if you think eating for two means doubling your calories, forget it.

“If you think about the normal diet of maybe 1,800-2,000 calories, depending on the size of the person, 300 extra calories is a sixth of that. So that’s barely like eating anything,” Goist says.[WebMD]

Almost 800 children were studied at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with an equal representation of boys and girls:

Child heights and weights were obtained at ages 4, 7 and 9 and changes in body mass index (BMI) were measured between 4-7 years and 7-9 years. Maternal feeding practices were measured at each age interval by asking mothers the question, “Do you let your child eat what he/she feels like eating?” [ScienceDaily]

Absolutely no relationship could be conclusively derived between maternal control of a child’s eating habits and the child’s actual weight gain although it was determined that mothers probably noticed a girl’s weight gain much more quickly than a similar weight gain by a boy.

While the actual form of control exercised could vary and the best way to enforce good eating habits is still widely debated, the study concluded there was nothing inherently wrong in this approach:

Based on these findings, the researchers say restrictive feeding practices may actually be necessary for some children to help regulate their food intake, promote healthier eating habits and limit excessive weight gain. “There has been some concern about the negative impact of restrictive feeding practices and that we should be more lax and let the child determine how much, when and what to eat. However, some degree of control may not be harmful and may actually help certain children maintain their weight,” [ScienceDaily]

So it looks like as far as the eating habits of children go, paretns still maintain primary responsibility in controlling the type and quantity of the food and such restrictions will not directly lead to obesity later on in the child’s life.