"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com

Apologies for the small size - click here for the full sized version.  Hat tip to fellow uOttawa grad student Jonathan Gravel for sending me link.

Travis

If you go to your physician's office and inquire about your weight status, he or she will measure your height and weight to derive your BMI (weight in kg divided by height in m squared). Then they will compare your BMI to that of established criteria to decide whether you are underweight (<18.5 kg/m2), normal weight (18.5-24.9 kg/m2), overweight (25-29.9 kg/m2), or obese (>30 kg/m2) . Often times, this measure alone determines whether or not you receive lifestyle treatment. But how useful is this measure anyways? What does it tell you about your health? And finally, how helpful is it to measure when assessing the effect of a lifestyle (diet/exercise) intervention?

For quite some time I have been meaning to discuss some of the issues of solely relying on BMI as a measure of obesity and health, and a nice nudge from our friend ERV was just the motivation  I needed to finally get to work.

Peter Janiszewski

I came across a very interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen this weekend, unpleasantly titled "For Canada's obese, exercise alone isn't going to cut it". The crux of the article is this - exercise will not help you lose weight. Every few months it seems that this issue pops up, including a cover article in TIME magazine last year, which Peter has previously dissected. This is a complicated issue, and given the sensational title, I wasn't expecting much from the Citizen article. But the article is actually very well written, and includes interviews with a number of excellent researchers (including Bob Ross, who supervised my MSc, and Tim Church, who has co-authored papers with both Peter and I), as well as physician Yoni Freedhoff of Weighty Matters. Since this issue comes up so frequently, and because of its public health importance, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to "weigh in" with my opinion.

So, does exercise reduce body weight? To be completely honest, it depends on the situation.

In this post we take a look at the top 10 worst gym personalities, as a means to help you clearly identify and classify inappropriate gym behavior, and to help you steer clear from inadvertently falling into one of these categories as you embark on your fitness journey.

In no particular order, here is a list of the most annoying gym goers that I have personally come across over the years. Many workouts have been ruined on their account, so please allow me to vent my pent up frustrations in the cathartic swell below.

1. The American Idol: It is increasingly popular that gym goers do their workouts while listening to their iPods. While I personally prefer not to, I have absolutely no problem with it. Many people swear that their music helps them get in the zone and increase the intensity of their workouts while reducing the perception of effort. All this is copacetic. The problem arises when people confuse the gym with a Karaoke bar. The American Idol has somehow arrived at the completely delusional conclusion that their tone-deaf interpretation of Thin Lizzy's "Boys are Back in Town" should be applauded by their fellow exercisers.

Hint: Stop It! When you get dirty looks from EVERYONE around you, it may be time to step off the stage and re-enter the reality of a gym.

The use of HCG to treat obesity was first suggested by ATW Simeons in a 1954 Lancet paper. He reported that injection of HCG resulted in rapid mobilization of body fat stores and induced feelings of well-being. He also claimed that HCG reduced weakness and hunger during very low calorie diets (500kcal/day) and that HCG treatment could be used to prevent the protein and vitamin deficiencies which are a frequent side-effect of such low caloric intake. Finally, he suggested that HCG could be used to successfully treat a range of ailments ranging from diabetes and gout to ulcers and skin diseases. However, it is important to note that no actual study was performed - these were just subjective observations. Naturally, Simeons' observations spurred actual research into HCG.

Unfortunately for Simeons' pet theory, the vast preponderance of studies examining the effectiveness of HCG in the treatment of obesity found absolutely no effect. For example, a 1976 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association performed a rigorously controlled, double-blind crossover study examining the effects of HCG on weight loss in obese individuals undergoing very low calorie diets. In a double-blind study, neither the patient, nor the physician, knows whether the patient is receiving HCG or a placebo. What were their results? Both groups lost a significant amount of weight (not surprising given subjects were only consuming 500 kcal/day), however there was no difference in weight loss between the HCG and placebo treatments.

Regardless of your shape or size, physical activity has been shown to add years to your life, and life to your years. But believe it or not, the benefits of physical activity are not restricted to exercise performed in the gym. In fact, one of the easiest ways to improve your health may be through increasing the amount of low intensity physical activity you perform throughout the day. For example, simply increasing the number of steps that you take each day is very likely to reduce your risk for diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. It's still uncertain if this light intensity physical activity can reduce body weight, but it is clear that individuals who engage in high amounts of light intensity physical activity are healthier than those who do not. In fact, there is good evidence to suggest that simply reducing the amount of time spent sitting each day may reduce risk of death independently of other lifestyle factors (for my recent post on this topic, click here).

Peter and I have discussed the importance of daily physical activity in several posts over the past few months, so today we have decided to offer some practical ways that you can incorporate physical activity into your daily life. These are tips that we have found work well for us, and we think they may work well for you as well. Try one or two, and once they've become part of your routine try a couple more. We would also love to hear your own tips in the comments section below.

Withour further ado, here are ten simple ways to become more physically active:

1. Take the stairs as often as possible.

This one is as simple as it sounds. If you have to go up two floors or less, opt for the stairs. Ditto if you have to go down three floors or less. If you have to go up or down a distance that is too great for you to walk at the moment, walk the first few flights, then take the elevator the rest of the way. Remember, every time you take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator, you are making a decision that will positively affect your long term health.

2. Drink plenty of water.

This sounds odd, but it's a trick that I've been using for years. If you are constantly sipping water throughout the day, you are going to have to pee at least once an hour. Every time you have to pee, you have a guilt-free excuse to go for a 5-minute walk to the washroom and back! To crank it up a notch, use a washroom in another part of your building, which may give you an opportunity to use the stairs as well. It's easy to forget to take a 5-minute walk-break every hour, but it's impossible to forget to go pee.

Added bonus - staying well hydrated may also reduce feelings of hunger, and can often reduce chronic back pain. So this is really a win-win-win.

As an obesity researcher, there is nothing that makes the blood boil more than an infomercial pedaling another fat-loss gimmick. The ridiculous claims made on such adverts have ruined many of my weekend mornings and were actually the impetus behind the development of this blog.

While eating my oatmeal and channel surfing on a fine Saturday morning, it took mere minutes before I was transfixed - jotting down notes on a pad of paper while enduring the mental torture of the 1 hour Slender Shaper infomercial (segments of which you can watch here). In short, according to the manufacturer, the Slender Shaper is "revolutionary total body shaping equipment [which] actually does the exercise for you!" It does the exercise for you - imagine that!

Obesity Panacea is written by two health physiology PhD students: Peter Janiszewski and myself, Travis Saunders.

While working together at Queen's University, Peter and I were constantly discussing, or more accurately, ranting about, the latest weight loss gimmick that we had seen on television, online or in print. While some of these gimmicks (like the Hawaii Chair) were hilarious and clearly ridiculous, we worried that these products were distracting people from the health behaviours that actually work. We had recently started reading the blogs of Dr Arya Sharma and Dr Yoni Freedhoff, two Canadian physicians working in the field of obesity, and decided that a blog would be a fun way for us to speak-out about about all of these gimmicks.

Obesity Panacea began as a way to educate people about the science (or lack thereof) behind popular weight loss products, and has grown to include discussions of the latest news and research regarding obesity, nutrition and physical activity. Previous posts have ranged from discussions of Acai Berry and Human Chorionic Gonadotropin to the links between breast size and diabetes risk and simple ways to incorporate physical activity into daily life. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation and social baggage surrounding obesity, nutrition, and physical activity (most of which is only exacerbated by mainstream news media), and as researchers who study these very topics we feel that it is our responsibility to bring scientific evidence to the public discourse.

We couldn't be more excited about joining the Scienceblogs community, and we're looking forward to getting to know all of you. We're hoping to eventually import our archives from our original site, but in the meantime we will be re-posting some of our favourite posts over the next few weeks so that you can get a feel for the topics we like to discuss. And finally we'd just like to say thanks to our friends like ERV, Scicurious, Dave Munger, and Bora, who have been extremely helpful to us and our blog in the past, and we're hoping to add to the community they have done such a great job in building.

We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to leave a note to say hi!

Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski