5 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism and Lose Weight

Magnesium, interval training, and other tricks to burn more calories
by Ross Weale

Health magazine contributor Samantha Heller shows how to burn more calories, during an interview on the Today show, March 10.



SAMANTHA HELLER

Samantha Heller, RD, is the nutrition coordinator at the Fairfield Connecticut YMCA. A certified dietitian/nutritionist and exercise physiologist, Heller earned her master's degree in nutrition and applied physiology from Teachers’ College, Columbia University. She served as the senior clinical nutritionist and exercise physiologist at NYU Medical center in New York City for almost a decade and created and ran the outpatient nutrition program for the NYU Cardiac Rehabilitation Program. She has also been a fitness instructor for 15 years. Heller specializes in nutrition, wellness, stress management, and fitness for people who are fighting heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

A contributing editor to Health magazine, her writing has also appeared in numerous other magazines, including Men’s Fitness, Men’s Health, and Glamour, as well as sites such as Fitness.com.

Born to Be Obese?

(HealthDay News) -- The brain circuitry that controls appetite might be wired differently in some people, and that could predispose them to obesity, California researchers suggest.

The study was conducted in rats, not humans, and yet it could ultimately lead to novel obesity treatments, said Philip Smith, director of the Office of Obesity Research at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

"It is not just about drugs that modify short-term appetite," he said, "there may be drugs that stimulate development of the appropriate neural pathways. So, it is an exciting, but very early, time in this field."

The study was published in the February issue of Cell Metabolism.

Sebastien Bouret, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and his colleagues examined neural circuits emanating from the appetite, hunger and body-weight control center of the brain -- the so-called arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus (ARH) -- in a series of rats bred to be either prone to, or resistant to, obesity.

The team found fewer neural connections projecting from the ARH in obesity-prone animals than in their leaner counterparts. Surprisingly, Bouret said, this deficiency developed very early in life, before the animals became obese, and appeared to extend into adulthood.

"Somehow, these animals are programmed to become obese," Bouret said. "The obesity is hard-wired into the brain."

When the researchers then looked at why the brains of obese rats differed from their normal-weight counterparts, they found that the neurons from obesity-prone animals were less responsive to leptin, a hormone that controls the development of these circuits, and which also signals the body's energy status and controls metabolic rate.

"This paper presumes to say, these animals must be leptin-resistant, and that is why the pathways are not developing," said Smith.

But that doesn't mean they are doomed to a life of severe obesity, said Dr. Barbara Kahn, chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston. How they live their lives also matters.

"It is important not to 'blame' the obese person or imply that he/she is responsible for being obese," Kahn noted. "Having said that, reasonable, healthy caloric restriction and a safe and sustainable program of physical activity can help limit weight gain and often bring about some degree of weight loss. In addition, healthy eating and regular exercise can reduce the complications of obesity such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease."

At the same time, she added, not everyone can wear a size 4.

"There is a certain aspect of genetics that sets somebody in a certain range of possible body weights, and then how that person lives his or her life will determine whether they are at the bottom or top of the range," she explained.

Human obesity has both genetic and environmental roots. The rats used in this study, like most humans, developed obesity when fed a high-energy diet. On a normal diet, they were heavier than normal rats, but not yet obese.

"This is quite an exciting paper," said Smith, "because it links more closely to human behavior than most rodent models we have seen."

The findings also suggest a possible therapeutic approach to combating human obesity. If drugs could be designed to influence the formation of neural circuits during development and targeted to at-risk pregnancies, Smith said, "there is a good likelihood we could have successful interventions that improve the health of the mother, and which have a major impact on disease risk for the infant, during pregnancy."

A related study from Boston University researchers in the same journal found that bulking up muscle mass can lead to a general metabolic improvement in obese individuals. "Interventions designed to increase skeletal muscle mass in at-risk human populations may prove to be critical weapons in the fight against obesity and obesity-related comorbidities, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, hypertension and cancer," an accompanying editorial stated.

More information
For more on obesity, visit the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Schools Should Boost Kids' Daily Exercise

(HealthDay News) -- Citing "alarming health trends" on kids' obesity, the Top of Form

American Heart Association (AHA) is calling on schools to aggressively promote physical education throughout the academic day.
The organization is proposing nine practical steps that elementary schools, high schools, child development centers, colleges, universities, school districts and states can all take to provide opportunities for elementary and high school kids to exercise.

"Kids spend a lot of time in the schools for a lot of years, and in order for them to be as physically active as they need in order to be healthy, schools are going to have to take the initiative," said Russell Pate, chairman of the group that drafted the recommendations, and a profFueling the concern, the AHA said, is the dramatically rising obesity rates among American children over the past two decades: About 16 percent of kids aged 6 to 19 are now considered overweight.
And a 2003 survey showed that more than one third of the students spend no more than 20 minutes a day on vigorous activity, while their time in front of the TV is up to three hours daily, the AHA added.

The AHA statement, published this week in Circulation, calls for:
Schools to establish a daily minimum of 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity during school hours, and set up health education programs that encourage exercise and discourage sedentary behavior;

Schools to establish optional exercise programs outside school hours, provide extracurricular sports clubs, and promote safe walking and biking routes to school;

States to ensure that physical education (PE) programs are taught by certified and highly qualified teachers, and to hold schools accountable for the adequacy of such programs and for ensuring they are part of a core curriculum;

Child development centers and elementary schools to ensure at least 30 minutes of daily recess for exercise;

Higher education groups to establish programs that produce highly qualified PE and health education teachers.

The AHA statement cites a host of statistics that suggest that school exercise is sorely lacking.
Between 1991 and 2003, the percentage of high school students taking PE classes dropped from more than 41 percent to little more than 28 percent.

Between 6 percent and 8 percent of schools at all grade levels offer PE at the recommended levels of between 150 and 225 minutes a week, depending on student age.

Fewer than 33 percent of those kids who live within a mile of their school get there by walking or biking. That figure drops to just 3 percent for kids residing within two miles of their school.
With exercise getting such failing grades, one expert applauds the effort to prioritize PE.

However, Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at the Yale University School of Medicine, cautions that schools are currently caught between a rock and a hard place.
"I support the statement, and I think every parent and school should support it," he said. "But while it's well and good for the AHA to say that schools should promote physical activity, we can't just leave it at that, because they will ask us to help make it possible at a time when we've actually been making it more and more difficult for them to do so."

In that regard, Katz highlighted the impact that the 2002 passage of the federal "No Child Left Behind Act" (NCLB) has had on school curricula.

Emphasizing "core" subjects such as math and reading, the law has dramatically increased pressure to allocate more time for standardized test preparation, he noted.

As a result, Katz suggested that PE programs and even recess breaks are being pushed to the national backburner, where cutbacks and even elimination have become the trend.

"I've said that NCLB is leaving far too many children on their behinds," said Katz, a father of five. "So while I agree that schools have an obligation to cultivate the physical, as well as mental, well-being of children, we can't impose an additional burden without offering empowering and creative strategies."

To that end, Katz suggests that educators take a fresh and practical look at how PE could perhaps be integrated directly into classroom studies -- so that mental and physical activities aren't forced to compete for time and money.

On that point, Pate agreed.

"He's right about that, and our view is that it doesn't have to be an either-or situation," he said. "We think the schools can deliver both excellent academic programs and the physical activity students need during the school day."

More information
For more on exercise and children, visit the American Heart Association.
By Alan MozesHealthDay Reporteressor of exercise science at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia.

Study: Weight contributes to illness

Overweight Americans are sicker late in life than normal-weight people and die prematurely, a new study shows.

Researchers at Columbia University in New York found that overweight and obese women spend an average of three more years in ill health than normal-weight women. Heavy men, on average, are sicker one more year than their thinner counterparts.

Heavy people are more likely to suffer from pain, arthritis, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses that may affect their ability to perform daily tasks such as bathing and getting dressed, the research shows.

The researchers looked at the medical expenditure records of 13,600 people from 2000 and the death certificates of 84,000 people from the 1990s.

The findings in September's American Journal of Public Health showed that even overweight women under 45 have many more medical issues, such as depression, than do normal-weight women.

Heavy women "are bombarded with negative messages by friends, relatives and advertisements, which might be causing them to become stressed, depressed and sick," says lead study author Peter Muennig, assistant professor of health policy at Columbia.

If obesity trends in this country continue, life expectancy might eventually fall because of the high rates of obesity among children, Muennig says.

About 136 million U.S. adults are overweight or obese, according to government data. Health experts consider a person obese if he or she is 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight; overweight is 1 to 29 pounds over that standard. About a third of children and teens, or 25 million kids, are overweight or at risk of becoming so.

Obesity can make people feel years older than their age, says Roland Sturm, a senior economist with the RAND Corp. who has done several studies on obesity's impact on quality of life.
"An obese 30-year-old has as many chronic conditions as a normal-weight 50-year-old and reports quality of life that is worse than a 50-year-old," he says.

Eric Finkelstein, a health economist with non-profit research firm RTI International, says heavy people may resist efforts to slim down.

"Clearly, obesity causes health problems. However, losing weight and maintaining it has its own costs because you have to diet and exercise. And the reality is that many people may not want to pay that price."

Adds Sturm: "Maybe we should start by trying to create an environment that prevents obesity in the first place, especially for children."
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