Health & Fitness Beyond 40

How To Get Money Back For Skechers, In Lieu Of A Tight Butt

Guest — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:44:28 +0000

Eight months after Reebok agreed to pay $25 million to customers who bought toning shoes that don’t actually tighten butts, Skechers has pulled out its checkbook. The Los Angeles Times reports that the company has agreed to pay $40 million to hopeful consumers who bought rocker-bottom shoes in the hope of having a booty like Kim Kardashian. How to collect? Go to www.skecherssettlement.com and fill out online forms. The Times reports that anyone who bought Shape-Up shoes, Resistance Runners, Tone-ups or Toners is entitled to a partial refund whether they have proof of purchase or not. Good luck with that.

Original post by Art Jahnke

Volunteering at the Austin Humane Shelter: Part 10

Guest — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:42:31 +0000

I would note that I often joked with other volunteers that I often came to the shelter to get a break from my two crazy dogs at home. Because although there were lots of them and a lot of yellow dogs specifically at the shelter, there was the advantage that, after I worked with them, I could put them back. Mine, I didn’t have that luxury. Anyhow, this is probably as good a segue as I’m going to get to talk about yellow dogs in a bit more detail.

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The Benefits Of Eating Less Often

Guest — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:33:23 +0000

It turns out that the difference between being fat and not being fat is not just about what you eat, it’s about when you eat, as in how often you eat. The Salk Institute for Biological Science reports that researchers there have learned that mice limited to eating during an 8-hour period are healthier than mice that eat freely throughout the day, regardless of the quality and content of their diet. The scientists fed two sets of mice a diet comprising 60 percent of its calories from fat (like eating potato chips and ice-cream for all your meals). One group of mice could eat whenever they wanted, and the other group was restricted to eating for only eight hours every night–fasting for about 16 hours a day. Two control groups ate a standard diet with about 13 percent of calories from fat. What did they find? After [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Volunteering at the Austin Humane Shelter: Part 9

Guest — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:14:34 +0000

So having talked fairly generally about what was going on at the Austin Humane Shelter during 2012 (with some comments about my involvement), I want to switch gears into self-indulgent prattling mode and talk about how it was (or wasn’t) affecting me personally. Some of this will detail my time at the shelter, some of it will tie in with stuff about my own dogs ALFIE and NORMAN, who I have written about in their own article series.

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High-Fructose Sweeteners Make You Stupid

Guest — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:36:40 +0000

If you’re not born stupid, you’re not out of the woods. You can always become stupid, and researchers at UCLA are now suggesting that high-fructose sweeteners can help. PsychCentral reports that scientists at the school put high-fructose corn syrup, which is commonly added to processed foods from soft drinks to baby food, in the water of two groups of rats. One of the groups was also fed omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). After six weeks, the high-fructose fed rats who did not get omega-3s navigated a maze much slower than the omega-3 rats, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity. The omega-3 deprived rats also developed signs of resistance to insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar and regulates synaptic function in the brain. The moral of the story? If you’re going to drink beverages with high-fructose [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Sports That Don’t Break Your Bones Make Them Stronger

Guest — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:34:45 +0000

What doesn’t break your bones makes them stronger. Especially if what doesn’t break your bones is a load-bearing sport like basketball or volleyball. How to we know? Because when researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden measured the bone mass of more than 800 young men and studied their exercise habits, they found that after five years, the men who did a lot of load-bearing activities at the start of the study and those who increased their amounts of exercise during the five years had a better chance of building bone than those who weren’t as active, according to a recent report in HealthDay. And now the numbers: The researchers found that men who played load-bearing sports for four hours a week or more had an average 1.3 percent increase in hip-bone density, while who remained sedentary over the five years had an average 2.1 percent [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Volunteering at the Austin Humane Shelter: Part 8

Guest — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:38:03 +0000

Yup, Bastrop again. Because between the drought and the heat and everything else, Austin can become a tinderbox and shit sometimes burst into flames. And there was a really horrible fire out in Bastrop. Like weeks of land burning and people losing their houses kinds of fires.

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NYTimes Says 20-Minute Workout Works Fine

Guest — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:15:23 +0000

In the video bellow, New York Times’ Phys Ed columnist Gretchen Reynolds talks with Martin Gibala, chair of the kinesiology department at McMaster University, who has good news for time-strapped people who don’t want to be health strapped: 20 minutes a day three times a week will do it, if that 20 minutes is spent doing high intensity interval training, or HIIT. You know, one minute ON, one minute OFF..

Original post by Art Jahnke

Lifting Weights: Lighter Is Just As Good

Guest — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:13:20 +0000

The good news is, you don’t need the weight, of your weights, that is. Researchers at McMaster University have learned that doing more repetitions with less weight builds muscle and increases strength just as effectively as training with heavy weights. HealthDay reports on the study, which looked at how different combinations of weight and repetitions affected the leg muscles of young men. The men trained three times a week for 10 weeks doing one of three resistance training regimens: one set at 80 percent of maximum load; three sets at 80 percent of maximum load; or three sets at 30 percent of maximum load. A set, in this case, meant doing as many reps as possible, typically eight to 12 times a set at the heaviest weights and 25 to 30 times a set at the lowest weights. HealthDay reports that heavy weights and light weights built [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Volunteering at the Austin Humane Shelter: Part 7

Guest — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:50:42 +0000

So last time in Volunteeering at the Austin Humane Shelter: Part 6, I talked about my move up to blue BRATT and the start of the year’s craziness which was that Bastrop Hoarding Event. And while that one event would have been enough to exhaust anyone, it was just the start of the absolute craziness that was 2011. We continue with the next big shelter drama, a rare occurrence but one that caused a lot of problems.

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