Hello, ladies: Here are links to my most recent guest posts for shesafitchick.com.

On Feb. 3 I published “Seven reasons your workout is a drag,” covering some common causes of gym ennui—and what you can do about them.

On Jan. 27 my topic was “Why the first 10 minutes in the gym are the most important.” Can you guess the reason?

You can read all of my fitchick guest posts here.

Yeah, lose weight with Facebook, you have read that correctly.

In my quest to be better and shift 50 lbs of weight by June 2012 I have been looking into how to keep track (aside from these blog posts) of the weight loss that is taking place. Facebook have brought in the new timeline and one of the features of it is you can record milestones and events in your life, including weight loss.

Watch out, Weight Watchers—there is a new kid in town, and he’s eating all the pies.

As you can see from my aptly captioned image, you have a range of options for the information that you share. I am not a photo person, so I won’t be uploading any images. You can also tag people who are participating in your weight loss journey. Do you tag all your fat friends to make them feel good?

You can also add a little story about your reasons for losing weight. Example: Ate dodgy quarterpounder, got food poisoning, and lost 2 stone (28 lbs) in a weekend. Inbox me for restaurant details.

You can even share the information with people on certain Facebook lists. Great if you are doing the weight loss thing with a group of people or with a fat-to-fit coach like Mary. Not sure I want my dieting antics in my public stream of consciousness, it’s bad enough with the kids having their Castleville info there.

My progress:

As I type this it’s fast approaching Christmas eve (you are, luckily for me, not reading this in real time).

I have started my exercise regime. My goal for this week is not to lose weight but to stay the same. We have roast goose for dinner and lots of chocolate etc. around the place.

Oh, and my all time fave food—Christmas cake. I love Christmas cake more than any other food. More than prawn cocktail, more than chicken curry, more than chocolate. Christmas cake is the best food in the world.

It’s tough.

Good news… you can get rid of double chins fast

In one of Mary’s articles (“Will kick-backs get rid of my upper-arm flab?”) she explains that when on the elliptical machine you can burn a few hundred calories but the weight loss comes from all different places, and one of those places can be your face or your stomach rather than the place you are specifically looking to lose weight from. Excellent, I shall be one chin less by the New Year.

I am doing 15 mins a day on my elliptical exercise machine, and I am not going to go mad on the food front. It’ll be tough—Christmas is the one time of year I used to be able to relax, and now I am on my guard.

But it will be worth it to have lost 50 lbs by the time I get to New York and hopefully I will have a lot less chins and arm flab.

Mary here, adding her two cents

As usual, Sarah is way ahead of me when it comes to knowing what’s new in social media. I haven’t even activated my Facebook timeline yet and had no idea you could use FB to track weight loss.

And tracking can be extremely helpful. Dailyburn.com is a tool I frequently recommend (for tracking calories in and out, nutrients, workouts), but if FB works, go for it. Fat loss is a rewarding process, but it ain’t easy. Noticing and celebrating small wins can help us keep going during the difficult times.

I like the idea that dieters (hate the word diet, but I don’t know another word than dieters to describe “people working to lose fat”) can use FB to share their experiences and offer one another support. Accountability can make a huge difference.

In this post Sarah talks about not losing fat but maintaining over the Christmas holidays. That’s perfectly reasonable. In fact, taking a periodic planned diet break–during which the goal is maintenance, not fat loss–is an excellent strategy.

Sarah’s off to a great start, but I have a lot of questions:

• How many calories is she eating per day? So important not to go too low.
• What does her typically daily food plan look like? In other words, how is she “spending” those calories?
• Is she getting enough protein?
• How many days a week is she exercising? (I know she says “15 minutes a day,” but does that mean “every day” or “most days”?)
• Has she begun to increase the amount of exercise time? As she becomes more fit, that 15 minutes needs to grow into at least 30 minutes.
• Is she doing any strength training? I suspect not . . . and I could offer some suggestions on body-weight moves she can do at home.
• Is she tracking body-fat percentage? That’s the real story–not just scale weight.

And so on.

These aren’t meant to discourage. I want Sarah to have every advantage to help her succeed. I’d like to use what I know to give her an edge.

Finally, I’m proud of Sarah for putting her fat-loss program out there in the public eye. She’s got courage!

It’s all the rage to speak of “clean eating.” We’ve got cookbooks, magazine series, and blogs devoted to the topic. So what could be wrong with the idea of eating clean? Plenty.

It encourages food obsession.

If some food is clean, with that word’s connotations of purity, goodness, and virtue, other food must be dirty, unclean, impure, and vile.

Is that rational talk? Does it even make sense?

No and no.

No, it’s not rational because it assigns moral virtues to food. And by extension, it encourages us to think that we are virtuous and good by eating “clean.” So if we’ve sworn we’ll eat clean and then we go out and enjoy burritos and beer (I’m assuming they qualify as dirty), doesn’t that mean we’ve fallen from grace and become unclean?

Women have enough food issues without that sort of sophistry.

No, it doesn’t make sense because food can’t be clean or unclean (and I’m not talking about what happens when, for example, you drop your apple slices on the sidewalk) but only somewhere on a continuum of nutrient quality.

Assigning value judgments to food encourages us to think about food in irrational ways. Food is just fuel. It provides calories and nutrients and yes, pleasure.

Some kinds of food are more nutrient dense than others, and we can compare foods in an objective way. X has more protein than Y but fewer vitamins. A has more monosaturated fat, whereas B is a better source of complex carbohydrates. But which is “cleaner”? Who can say?

It’s purely a matter of opinion.

Your “clean” might be my “dirty.” As I posted on Facebook recently, I’d read a blog post in which the author praised the virtues of some form of “natural” brown sugar and said that brownies prepared with it would be “clean,” whereas conventional brownies made with white sugar wouldn’t be.

Oh please.

Sucrose is sucrose is sucrose, with apologies to Gertrude Stein. The brown sugar may have minuscule traces of vitamins and be minimally less processed, but all sucrose—whether it’s white sugar, brown sugar, or “turbinado” sugar (the fallaciously named “raw” sugar that was a favorite of health nuts during my youth)—is metabolized in exactly the same way.

Eating a certain amount of sugar isn’t going to kill anyone, but let’s not tell ourselves silly stories about the supposed virtues of “clean” desserts.

It doesn’t take food quantity into account.

Often discussions of “clean” eating take place in the context of fat loss. And plenty of women have the mistaken notion that eating “clean” automatically causes fat loss. Nope, sorry.

Ten years ago I was one of those deluded people. I knew better, but I had persuaded myself that counting calories would be too much work. My food choices were all certifiably “clean,” yet my weight had plateaued.

After a good long period (many months) of complete frustration, I began tracking my intake and discovered that, lo and behold, I was eating enough “clean” calories to maintain my weight.

Once I began eating the same foods but at a moderate caloric deficit, the fat began to burn.

Just something to think about if you’re wondering why “clean” eating isn’t making you leaner.

Now that I’ve had my rant, let me clarify that I’m not saying we shouldn’t eat nutritiously. Of course we should. If we want to achieve good health as well as leanness, most of our calories should pull their weight, pardon the pun.

You know what we need: sufficient protein, vegetables and fruits, whole grains, fats that aren’t hydrogenated—and in the proper amounts and proportions.

I’d just like to see us focus on what can be quantified: as in, this meal contains 450 calories, 20 grams of high-quality protein, three servings of vegetables, eight grams of fiber, and so on.

And if there’s room in the caloric budget, sure, we can have a serving of ice cream too or some butter on our brown rice.

So what do you think? Have I opened a can of worms? (Now, that would be a dirty food.)

Mary here: Let me introduce you to my friend Sarah. Sarah, meet the PrimeFit crew. Crew, meet Sarah. Sarah, take it away!

2012 is a year of change for me. I’ll be 40 in November, and I am determined to be fit. Not fitter. Fit.

I have always been an active person, but after a severe bout of postnatal depression, I lost the urge to move about and gained the urge to stuff my face with food. I was fortunate enough to be able to afford bigger clothes every few weeks-until a week after my 39th birthday, I realized I had a wardrobe full of tracksuit bottoms, and I had become, for want of a better word, a slob.

The big event.

I realized that I needed to lose 9 stone (approximately 100 pounds) to be anywhere near fighting fit, and it hurt. It hurt the kind of pain only a Krispy Kreme can cure. I have a landmark-my daughter’s 18th birthday. I want to be a UK size 12 (US 16), and I want to look good in the family photos of the big event. I don’t want to look like I do now.

Fit into forty.

I know Mary from a few places online, and we have had some incredible conversations and one of them evolved from dieting alone. I say you can diet on your own, do exercise and get fit. Mary disagrees, and all her qualifications and experience mean nothing, because let’s face it, my willpower is stronger than Mary’s expertise I have a weird sense of humour, but I am sure we’ll get used to each other.

The gauntlet.

We agreed to disagree, and then in a fit of madness I said, I’ll prove I am right. So here I am, one of the sad fat women typing about how she is going to lose weight and get fit, with no plan. Oh and I’m going to blog about it too, so I am going to be accountable publicly. I have no idea why I suggested that, as to be perfectly honest my fat-to-fit regime is a private business.

What if I fail? I’ll humiliate myself in a way that only Krispy Kremes can comfort. Many of my friends are online, and they know me for my blogging efforts, and my reputation will be shot . . . one of those pipe dreams . . . all because I couldn’t stop shovelling food into my gob even after I had publicly stated that I would.

I have agreed that I will upload my outcomes in the form of a blog post, and Mary can add her feedback and suggestions to the post after I have done my part. The first time I will see Mary’s advice will be after the post is published. That’s ok because I don’t need it, right? I can do this all by myself. Now is not the time to mention slimming clubs that women attend as a group to support and motivate each other; they’ve never appealed to me.

Meeting Mary.

The icing on the cake is I get to meet Mary in June, in New York. So I have six months to shift 50 pounds so I don’t have to buy two seats on the plane. That’s 10 lbs a month with some room for error. There are talks of runs around Central Park and right now I’d need a rocket up my backside just to step into the park. On the positive side of things, I’ll have enough tracksuit bottoms to wear.

So there we have it, a fit-into-forty journal semi-live blogged as it takes place.

I hope you will join me and leave me some encouragement, share your tips and help me motivated.

Of course you are welcome to come and meet us in New York. I’ll be the slimmer one in track suit bottoms.

Sarah

Mary’s response

I can completely empathize with what Sarah says about how her depression led to weight gain. I’ve been through that too (depression + Krispy Kremes = more body fat), and I suspect many of you have had the same experience.

My first response to her Fit into forty initiative is a rousing cheer. It takes guts and motivation to make major lifestyle changes, and I think Sarah’s reached the point where the pain of staying where she exceeds the pain of changing.

And there will be pain. I never sugarcoat the effort involved in becoming fit. But I do emphasize the rewards, and I know that body transformation can be a path to major life transformation.

But Sarah’s my friend, and I’m worried too. I don’t like her calling herself a slob, even though I know she says it semi-humorously. It doesn’t help when we judge ourselves because of our weight.

Take an honest assessment of our status? Absolutely. But without any snide comments, OK?

“Here’s what I weigh; here’s my body-fat percentage; here are my goals.” No name-calling, no self-hatred.

Hmmmm. Sarah wants to do this on her own. I do understand that she’s allergic to slimming clubs like Weight Watchers. Honestly, I am too.

But one of the most important ingredients in successfully doing this fat-loss thing is social support.

It doesn’t have to come from a club: it can come from a close friend or family member who will genuinely support you (that is, not tempt you to go out for pizza and beer); an online forum such as the ones you find at dailyburn.com, sparkpeople.com, and burnthefatinnercircle.com; a “professional” friend such as a coach or therapist; an individual exercise buddy; or the members of an exercise class who are going to glare at you if you don’t show up for Zumba on Tuesday evening.

Think about it this way: you’re changing the way you eat and the way you spend your leisure time, which means making adjustments to, frankly, your entire life. But your family, friends, and co-workers are going to be the same people they’ve always been. Eating the same crap and living the same sedentary life as before. Wondering why you are no longer interested in devouring an entire cheesecake with them and why you insist on spending time exercising rather than socializing with them.

You’re going to experience pressure to “change back” from people who feel threatened by your desire to live differently. You’re going to need at least one person in your corner whom you can complain to, exult with, and receive support from.

I’m not going to say that Sarah can’t do it alone. It’s just that I want her to succeed, so I want her to have every possible advantage, including social support.

I’ll close by saying that 10 pounds a month is a very ambitious fat-loss goal and one that could be quite difficult to sustain. Not because she won’t be working hard. But because life has a funny way of intervening. Not every meal will be perfect; not every day will include the exercise time she’s planning on. A more modest goal (one to two pounds a week) would be easier to achieve, and each small success leads to more small successes.

Stay tuned. I’m hoping for the best.

Bad news for overeaters who prefer their treats in the form of carbs and fat (cake, French fries, and chips come to mind). And good news for those who’d rather indulge with a nice steak.

Last week a fascinating study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reported what had happened to the bodies of healthy adults who were overfed to the tune of 1,000 extra calories a day for 10 to 12 weeks. Oh—and they performed no exercise during this time.

Well, obviously they gained weight. But what they gained—how much muscle and how much fat—had everything to do with how much protein they consumed.

Let me give you the high points. People were divided into a low-protein group (6 percent of daily calories from protein), a normal-protein group (15 percent), and a high-protein group (26 percent). Carbohydrates were held more or less steady among the three groups, at 41 to 42 percent. The low-protein people ate quite a lot of fat—52 percent of daily calories; the others ate 44 and 33 percent fat, respectively.

Just FYI, the high-protein guys and gals were on something pretty close to the nutrient ratios favored by lots of bodybuilders and strength athletes.

So here’s the really interesting bit. The low-protein group gained much less weight. This gives me a chance to drive home the point I’m always making about why we should care about body fat, not weight.

Yup, they gained less “weight.” And what they gained was all fat.

In the meantime, they actually lost lean body mass—about .7 kilograms (1.5 pounds) on average. Why do we care about that? Because every ounce of lean mass (muscle) lost means a slower metabolism.

Let me give you a point-by-point summary of the results for all three groups:

Low-protein diet

• average weight gain of 3.16 kg
• average loss of .7 kg lean mass
• no increase of resting energy expenditure (amount of calories burned on a daily basis)

Summary: They gained fat and lost muscle. As the study authors put it, “the failure to increase lean body mass in the low-protein group accounted for their smaller weight gain.” Note that since they gained 3.16 kg of “weight” yet lost .7 kg of muscle, their total fat gain was an average of 3.86 kg. That’s a greater fat gain than the other two groups.

Moderate-protein diet

• average weight gain of 6.05 kg
• 3.18 kg of the weight gain was fat, 2.87 kg was lean mass
• increase in resting energy expenditure was 160 calories per day

Summary: These subjects gained both fat and muscle—about half and half.

High-protein diet

• average weight gain of 6.51 kg
• 3.33 kg of the gain was fat, 3.18 kg was lean mass
• increase in resting energy expenditure was 227 calories per day

Summary: Like the moderate-protein group, the high-protein group gained about equal amounts of fat and muscle.

Now, if people on a low-protein diet can lose lean mass (a metabolic disaster) even when they’re overeating by a significant amount, how much more likely is it that eating too little protein can cause a loss of lean mass when dieting? How much more likely when we’re over-dieting and slashing calories too dramatically?

It’s something I preach about a lot (you can see a recent sermon here) because women tend to be notorious undereaters of protein and—when dieting—under-consumers of calories.

My challenge to you: Given your daily caloric intake (if you’re not sure what it should be, use this calculator), figure out what 15 percent of calories from protein would be.

Let’s say your total daily energy expenditure is 2,000 calories. Multiply 2,000 x .15, and you get 300 calories.

Protein has four calories per gram. So if I divide 300 by 4, I get 75. That’s how many grams of protein you need per day if you’re shooting for a moderate-protein diet.

If your current intake provides less than 15 percent protein, consider beefing it up (pun intended) to get closer to that percentage.

Those who lift weights regularly and are committed to adding more muscle tissue (atta girl!), might consider 25 percent of daily calories from protein.

Added benefit: whether you’re dieting or maintaining weight, protein keeps you satisfied longer than either carbohydrates or fat. But that’s a post for another day.

Note: You can read the full study report here.

Flickr photo by artfulgourmetnyc

If I asked you to shout out–quick!–one word that summarizes your body goals, what would it be?

You might say healthy, lively, or energetic. You might say fit, sexy, or muscular. You could say just about anything, and I’d be fine with it. But if your answer is skinny, I have a problem.

Maybe it’s just a semantic overreaction on my part (it wouldn’t be the first time), but I intensely dislike the word skinny when applied to human beings. I have no issue with a skinny latte (I’ve consumed many of them) or skinny jeans or skinny as an adjective describing a low-calorie recipe.

But please, ladies, let’s not aspire to have skinny bodies. Let’s work to become lean and strong–special emphasis on the word strong.

What’s the difference?

Skinny conjures up images of Twiggy (if you’re as old as I am, you’ll remember this waiflike model of the late 1960s), of the half-starved children employed in American workhouses of the 1920s, of the frail arms or legs revealed when a cast is cut away after weeks of immobility.

Skinny means weak, starved, frail, bony, and small.

Strong, on the other hand, connotes being capable, vigorous, energetic, and fit. Sexy too, in my opinion.

Are we so terrified of our own muscles that we’d really rather be skinny than strong?

I got to thinking about this after reading an excellent post by registered dietitian Janet Helm on webmd.com.

She leads off by saying

I recently heard a radio commercial for a diet pill that promised to get you “high school skinny.” It just struck me how often I’m hearing the word “skinny” these days. When did skinny become the new ideal?

A bit further down, she quotes another dietitian, Marsha Hudnall, who says, “This is a pursuit of an unrealistic ideal that leads to loss of productivity and ultimately ill health, whether from attempts to reach this unrealistic ideal or just from the stress of it all and the unhappiness it generates.”

You know I’m all about healthy fat loss, but for some of us, leanness is a goal that’s going to take a whole lot of doing. We can’t all get lean in a short period of time.

But we can all get stronger–and pretty quickly–presuming we have the use of at least some of our limbs.

My challenge to you today is this: Can you start playing with the idea of valuing strength over skinniness? The inherent reward is that if you can embrace that mind shift, you can also begin to enjoy the daily process of living a stronger life.

Why delay gratification until you reach a state of “skinniness”? You can start valuing your strength-and your muscles–right now.

If you want to be discouraged about losing fat and keeping it off, by all means read “The Fat Trap,” published in The New York Times Magazine on Dec. 28. If you’re curious, here’s the link.

The article—very well-written, by the way—summarizes the thinking of a number of scientists who believe the evidence indicates that almost no one who loses fat can keep it off. I haven’t had my head in the sand for the past several decades, so I am well aware of these research threads as well as the empirical evidence that most people who lose fat eventually regain most or all of it.

But I am not discouraged about your chances or my chances of getting lean or staying lean for life, and I’m going to tell you why.

First, let’s look at one of the key studies and experts cited in the NYT article.

Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne, Australia, says that his patients, despite being highly motivated, “inevitably, gradually . . . regain the weight.”

What sort of food plan was used to help these patients lose fat? Ten weeks on a VLCD, or “very low calorie diet,” of about 500 to 550 calories a day.

In other words, medically supervised near-starvation. I’ve written about Dr. Proietto’s research before, and I have several unanswered questions about the study’s conclusions. (Here’s the article I published on Oct. 29, 2011, on the topic.)

My primary burning question: would a much more moderate caloric-restriction plan (involving cutting something like 250 to 500 calories a day) have achieved a different result?

And although no such studies are cited, another expert quoted by the NYT says “the pace of weight loss is unlikely to make a difference because the body’s warning system is based solely on how much fat a person loses, not how quickly he or she loses it.”

Well, based on what research? No supporting facts are given.

Apparently Dr. Proietto is currently looking at the effects of slower fat-loss methods. That sounds promising, and I will be eager to learn what he discovers.

Question 2: How much muscle mass did the study participants lose during their 10-week diet? (Probably quite a lot, given their VLCD.) How much muscle would they have lost on a moderately restrictive diet? (Loss of muscle mass = reduced metabolic rate. Read my two-part series on increasing your metabolism here and here.)

Question 3: When the participants stopped dieting after 10 weeks, how did their eating habits change? Did they begin to eat at maintenance level? Or did they return to their old habits immediately or eventually (meaning, did they start consuming more calories than they needed, which is how they gained weight in the first place)? Was anyone monitoring them?

Question 4: Were they taught how to maintain their weight with a calorie-controlled food plan and exercise?

Question 5: Would the results have been different (I suspect yes) if they had been engaged in resistance training in order to build muscle, which would have increased their metabolic rate and thus helped them keep the fat off?

Everyone agrees that the best way to lose fat is with a combination of caloric restriction (“dieting”) and exercise. And the best—really, the only—way to maintain that fat loss is to continue to exercise and to eat at maintenance level (consuming just as many calories as the body burns daily).

Where are the studies that examine whether people who do these things regain or not? There’s one very intriguing project that does track these people, and it’s the National Weight Control Registry.

If you are a successful “loser” who has lost at least 30 pounds and maintained the loss for at least one year, you are a candidate to join the registry. Here’s a blurb from the website:

The National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), established in 1994 by Rena Wing, Ph.D., from Brown Medical School, and James O. Hill, Ph.D., from the University of Colorado, is the largest prospective investigation of long-term successful weight loss maintenance. Given the prevailing belief that few individuals succeed at long-term weight loss, the NWCR was developed to identify and investigate the characteristics of individuals who have succeeded at long-term weight loss. The NWCR is tracking over 10,000 individuals who have lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off for long periods of time. Detailed questionnaires and annual follow-up surveys are used to examine the behavioral and psychological characteristics of weight maintainers, as well as the strategies they use to maintaining their weight losses.

How do they do it? Visit the website for details, but these successful maintainers eat breakfast, control food portions, and exercise daily, among other things. That’s what maintenance takes: permanent lifestyle change.

It’s not impossible lifestyle change, and as one of the women quoted in the NYT piece says, it requires constant vigilance.

You have to decide whether a life of health and high energy is worth vigilance. It is to me.

It’s worth the effort to recovering alcoholics or drug addicts or former smokers. They too have to be vigilant. But I don’t see a lot of NYT articles discussing how stopping drinking, drugging, or smoking is nearly impossible.

Yes, we live in an obesigenic culture, and there are about a million reasons why it’s easier now to get fat than ever before in history. Yes, it’s very difficult to lose fat and keep it off. I will never sugar-coat the work involved.

But I hate like hell when the media use science to discourage the very people who desperately need to believe they can achieve their fat-loss goals.

I know you can. And I believe in you because I believe human beings were meant for challenge, struggle, and mastery.

Fat loss and maintenance are very hard work indeed. And absolutely worth the effort.

Question: When does 500 calories not fill you up?

Answer: When it’s 500 calories of your favorite trigger foods.

Yesterday the administrative assistants at my office had a cookie swap. (How come nobody ever has a fruit swap?) It was certainly not because there has been any lack of sweets at work. For weeks I’ve been avoiding the office kitchen, simply because there are bound to be all manner of sugary, gooey things on the counters.

It’s not that I never eat sweets. I just don’t need or want them in my face on a constant basis. Out of sight, out of mind–and that’s the way I like it.

But Monday, when a co-worker brought about seven kinds of cookies back to our room, I decided to eat some. Sure enough, proximity plays a big role in eating behavior.

For example, a highly popularized study showed that the less effort we have to expend to get to the food, the more likely we are to eat it. We eat more candy when the dish is on our desk and less when it’s across the room. So yeah, yesterday I proved to be an ordinary human being who ate the cookies because they were within reach.

Here’s why I’m writing about it.

Many nutritional experts talk about the wisdom of allowing oneself small quantities of “forbidden” foods in order to prevent feelings of deprivation that can lead to a binge. If you love pizza, the logic goes, enjoy a single slice. Dark chocolate? Have one small square of the good stuff on a daily basis. And so on.

I think this makes a lot of sense for some people–but perhaps not for everyone and not all the time.

I say this because some foods serve as triggers for overeating. And if you’re a person for whom pizza is a trigger, you may find it easier to avoid it altogether (or make your own super-healthy, low-fat version) than to eat one piece of a typical pie.

I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve got portion control down pretty well, and I almost always that find moderate servings of my normal foods are satisfying.

But when I began to eat cookies the other day–and I probably had five or six–each one seemed to make me feel hungrier.

Those cookies served as a trigger for me. That sugar and fat wasn’t satiating. Exactly the opposite. Once I started, I wanted more.

There’s also quite a bit of research indicating that given many food choices, we eat more. (This is why when you’re eating out, you’re safer ordering from the menu than visiting the buffet. See my post “Surviving the buffet of death.”) If there had been one kind of cookie available, I might have stopped at two.

But there were lemon cookies, chocolate-chip-and-oatmeal cookies, fudgy chocolate balls rolled in powdered sugar, Rice Krispy treats, and more.

My point: if you can eat one or two cookies in the aftermath of a cookie swap, you’re probably not triggered by sweets. If, like me, you find yourself getting hungrier as you go, you might find you do better by cutting trigger foods out entirely–at least when you’re confronted by an abundance of goodies and circumstances make it easy to overeat.

For years I’ve believed that the best way to stop craving sweets is to stop eating them altogether. I know it works for me.

Postscript: I don’t feel too bad about those cookies, knowing there was a time when I would certainly have eaten twice as many!

So what’s your experience? Has this ever happened to you? Please comment!

stock.xchng photo by alexbruda

Most Americans gain close to a pound every year during the holiday season. That doesn’t sound like much, but after 10 or 20 years of putting on a pound a year, you end up in clothes one or two sizes larger. I’ve put together some survival strategies to help you minimize the damage, and you can read them here: “10 tips to stop holiday weight gain.”

Flickr photo by Lehigh Valley, PA

Quick—what’s the No. 1 reason you either don’t exercise or don’t log as many workouts as you’d like?

Most women I know will say “not enough time!” I say it too. We’re all overscheduled, with so many more commitments than our calendars can hold.

But here’s yet another study (among many) suggesting that brief, intense exercise provides fabulous benefits. OK, so maybe you’re not getting the 30 minutes, five days a week that major health organizations recommend. Can you squeeze in 75 minutes a week, warm-ups and cool-downs included? 

One of the advantages of exercise is the positive effect it has on blood sugar levels. Your muscles’ preferred fuel is glucose (blood sugar), so any form of muscular movement consumes glucose and thus reduces its level in your blood. When you exercise, your body is also able to use insulin more effectively, and that too results in greater “consumption” of blood glucose.

As you can imagine, this is great for diabetics. But it has positive implications for others too.

A study published in the December 2011 Journal of Applied Physiology looked at eight people with diabetes who used an exercise bike to perform 10 one-minute bouts of work at 90 percent of their maximal heart rate, with each bout followed by a minute of rest. That’s working very, very hard, and you can bet they were under medical supervision during these sessions.

They weren’t spring chickens either, with an average age of 63. Their average body mass index was 32, which is obese.

Just two weeks of this regime, three times weekly, resulted in a 13 percent drop in their average 24-hour blood-glucose level. That’s pretty significant, and you’d hope that the results would be even better over time and with longer sessions. You can read the study’s abstract here.

High-intensity training isn’t just for diabetics. It’s for anyone who wants to get a terrific cardio workout in a hurry.

Aerobic fitness is measured by how much oxygen your body can consume during intense exercise, or your V02 max. The traditional exercise prescription for improving oxygen uptake is simply to perform lots of cardio, typically at moderate intensity. But we now know that high-intensity intervals (like the ones used in the study described above) greatly improve V02 max, and in a hurry.

Interval training also provides another truly major goodie: excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). In translation, that means we consume more oxygen than usual—and thus burn more calories than usual—for quite a while after performing high-intensity training. So even if you’re sitting on the couch a few hours after doing your intervals, you’re using more energy than you typically do while sedentary.

One caveat about high-intensity exercise: It’s not for those who are starting from square one. You need to build a fitness foundation before embarking on intervals.

If you belong to a gym, ask the trainers for advice on getting started with intervals. Or see your doctor to get medical clearance.