GetFit.com.au

A bulging midriff could indicate an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Forget bathroom scales and body-fat monitors. One of the best gauges of weight gain or loss is in every wardrobe - the waistband of a skirt or pair of pants that fits too snugly when your waist gets wider.

For the past few years, our love of low-slung jeans has made it easy to ignore an expanding waistline. But with winter fashion putting belts back where they used to be, some of us may find we've become wider around the middle.

There's always the camouflage option - such as Empire-line tops with gathers of fabric to mask a midriff bulge - but losing the weight is a smarter option. Carrying an excess around the middle is a potential health problem and can indicate you have a troublesome type of fat called visceral fat.

Unlike the fat under your skin, visceral fat is buried under the abdominal muscles and behaves differently. It produces inflammatory chemicals that can damage arteries, raise cholesterol levels, increase the risk of diabetes and, according to US research, may even be linked to the development of Alzheimer's disease.

"You can tell a lot about a woman's health by looking at where she carries extra weight," says Susie Burrell, an accredited practising dietitian in Sydney. Storing excess weight around the middle rather than on the hips and thighs, she says, can be a sign of insulin resistance - a major risk factor for developing diabetes.

She's not just talking about middle-aged spread. Burrell estimates that about 75 per cent of the young women she sees at her practice or at the Children's Hospital at Westmead, where she helps children and adolescents with weight management, have insulin resistance.

Being overweight and inactive can cause insulin resistance, yet the condition itself can make it harder to lose weight, Burrell says. Put simply, insulin resistance means your insulin doesn't work properly. This forces the pancreas to pump out more insulin, increasing diabetes risk and influencing body fat stores.

"Having difficulty losing weight can be a sign of insulin resistance," she says. Watching where people lose weight from can be another clue. "If it's hard to shift excess weight from around the waist area, that may be a sign too."

As well as increasing the risk of diabetes, insulin resistance can increase the risk of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), an under-recognised problem that affects 5 to 10 per cent of women of reproductive age.

The high levels of insulin caused by insulin resistance affect the ovaries, causing hormonal imbalances and triggering problems such as acne, excess hair, irregular periods and disrupted ovulation. A Melbourne study published last year found that women with insulin resistance and PCOS also have evidence of premature blood vessel damage that could lead to heart disease.

"Although the average age of the women in the study was about 30, they already had higher levels of blood fats and cholesterol and some stiffening in their arteries," says Professor Helena Teede, the director of research at the Jean Hailes Foundation for Women's Health, which did the study.

PCOS is thought to be genetic, although lifestyle factors - including diet but especially inactivity - usually allow it to develop. About 70 per cent of women with PCOS struggle with excess weight and many are inactive, according to the Jean Hailes Foundation.

"If you're putting on extra weight that's concentrated around the waist, it means you're at increased risk of having insulin resistance, PCOS and diabetes, and may be accelerating damage to your blood vessels as well," says Teede.

You can be tested for impaired sugar metabolism caused by insulin resistance, she says.

"It's important to have an oral glucose tolerance test that tests blood sugar levels over two hours - just having a single simple blood sugar test isn't accurate enough."

The University of Sydney is conducting a dietary study for women with PCOS. If you are aged 18-40 with PCOS and are not taking the pill or trying to conceive, contact pcosdietstudy@nnd.com.au for more details.

EAT AND EXERCISE FOR A HEALTHIER WAIST

EAT THE BEST CARBS- Susie Burrell suggests you eat a wholegrain breakfast cereal, such as rolled oats or muesli, dense linseed or cape seed bread and sweet potato rather than regular potato. All are low glycaemic index carbohydrates that help keep blood sugar levels stable and promote long-term weight loss. For women with insulin resistance, she also recommends smaller serves of unrefined carbohydrates - eating smaller slices of wholegrain bread, for instance. "Bringing their intake of carbohydrates down reduces the need to produce as much insulin," she says.

AVOID SATURATED FAT- Research from the Johns Hopkins University suggests eating saturated fat encourages deposits of visceral fat. But eating more polyunsaturated fats (found in fish, walnuts and linseed) can help the body burn fat more efficiently, Burrell says.

WALK AT SPEED - A 30-minute brisk walk is more effective for weight loss than three one-hour strolls, she says.

STRENGTH TRAINING- Increasing muscle mass helps you burn fat more efficiently, helps keep blood sugar levels healthy and may help reduce visceral fat.

By Paula Goodyer
May 25, 2006- SMH

Posted by Dean at 03:51 PM | Permalink

Couch potatoes can lower their risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and other health conditions, if they start spending as much time exercising as they previously spent being inactive, new study findings suggest.

In the study, men and women whose health and fitness deteriorated when they volunteered to be physically inactive for six months, had a complete reversal of most of the subsequent deterioration in health measures when they increased their activity level during the next six months.

"Inactivity is worse than we thought," study co-author Jennifer L. Robbins, an exercise physiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, said. Yet, she said, "a little bit of activity can make a big difference."

Robbins presented her team's findings during last week's annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, held in Denver, Colorado.

"Although exercise is known to enhance health and wellness, the extent to which one can reverse the debilitating effects of physical inactivity is unknown," Robbins and her associates note in materials provided at the meeting.

To look into that issue, they studied mildly overweight but otherwise healthy individuals who had been assigned to a comparison group of a previous exercise study, in which they were instructed to not make any changes in their diet or exercise level - i.e. to continue their normal pattern of inactivity - for a six-month period. These participants afterwards elected to follow the study's exercise program for an additional six months.

During their period of inactivity, the men and women experienced deterioration in 12 of the 17 variables studied, including their waist size, how quickly they became exhausted while using a treadmill, and their visceral fat, or the amount of fat surrounding their internal organs -- a known predictor of cardiovascular disease.

After six months of exercise, however, the 33 study participants decreased their waist size, lost weight, exercised longer before becoming exhausted on a treadmill, lowered their cholesterol and otherwise improved in 13 of the 17 variables studied, according to Robbins and her team.

The exercise returned these variables to "normal" - i.e. to the levels measured before the initial study began - or even led to improvements beyond those initial levels.

"It's promising to know with a similar period of activity, health parameters can be reversed," Robbins said.
What's more, study participants who fared the worst during the sedentary period also experienced the greatest improvement during the exercise program, the researchers note.

This is good news for men and women who recently gained weight, according to Robbins. "They may indeed be the ones who have the most benefit" from increasing their level of physical activity, she said.

The study findings indicate that "it only takes a small amount of activity to make a difference and to keep cardiovascular risk factors at a manageable level," Robbins said.

"Something's better than nothing and more is better than less, generally," she added.

The research was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

- Reuters

Posted by Dean at 03:48 PM | Permalink

Take off at least one day a week and alternating hard days with moderate-to-light days can assist recovery.
By John Briley, Washington Post
June 5, 2006

We know what happens when you don't get enough exercise — muscles get weak, energy droops, mood and sleep patterns go haywire and flab creeps in. But what happens when you get too much physical activity? Re-read the first sentence of this paragraph.

Overtraining can produce many of the symptoms of under-exercising (aside from the excess fat). But how do you know if you're pushing it too hard, especially when people are telling you to work out regularly and with some intensity?

That question was raised last week by a 61-year-old woman who worried about the safety of her running regimen — an hour a day, five days a week. A trainer told her such a cardio schedule was likely degrading, not improving, her health and fitness.

If she feels good and has no injuries, her running routine is not excessive, says William O. Roberts, an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a past president of the American College of Sports Medicine.

Overtraining is difficult to do, Roberts says, but it can happen. People who tend toward vigorous exercise, he advises, should take off at least one day a week and should alternate hard days with moderate-to-light days.

Because exercise tolerance varies so widely from person to person, Roberts and other experts decline to set time, frequency or intensity limits for training. But there are clear symptoms of overtraining to watch for, according to Roberts and the American Council on Exercise's Personal Training Manual:

• A consistently elevated resting heart rate. (Recognizing this, of course, requires that you know your historical rate for comparison.) The best time to measure your rate is first thing in the morning, before your heart rate starts fluctuating. "If you are 10 to 15 beats per minute higher than normal, take the day off," Roberts says. The higher rate could be your heart's working overtime to get oxygen to muscles insufficiently recovered from training abuse.

• Chronic fatigue or soreness in an overworked muscle, tendon, ligament or joint.

• Disruptions in sleep patterns and mood.

• Loss of weight or appetite.

• Propensity for overuse injuries, such as repeatedly tearing cartilage or pulling muscles.

"If your workout feels bad, don't assume you need more (exercise) to make it better," Roberts says. "Some people have bad workouts and feel they need to do more, when more isn't always better."

The biggest mistake he sees in intense exercisers is failure to adequately recover from one workout before hitting it hard again.

And though it's clear that youthful bodies can take and recover from a pounding better than riper musculoskeletal frames, Roberts says the general rule holds regardless of age: If exercise feels good, keep it up; if not, cut it out.

Posted by Dean at 12:32 AM | Permalink

The "super-size" deals at fast-food restaurants aren't such a bargain once the costs of weight gain are considered, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that while the average "upsized" fast-food meal costs a mere 67 cents more than a regular meal, those bonus calories could translate into substantial daily costs due to weight gain.

When people put on weight, the study authors say, their grocery bills, healthcare costs and even gasoline expenses climb as well.

"These calculated costs exceed the value of upsized meals and may provide motivation to some consumers not to upsize their meals," Rachel N. Close and Dr Dale A. Schoeller write in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.

Based on their estimates, each fast-food "value" meal would cost an adult 5 cents more in fuel expenses - as heavier passengers reduce a car's fuel efficiency - and about 35 cents in overall food costs, since heavier people need more calories.

Add to that the healthcare cost per super-size meal - which ranges from 82 cents to $6.64 - and these fast-food deals are no deal at all, Close and Schoeller assert.

"In essence," they write, "the more a person overeats, the greater the financial cost."

About one third of American adults are considered obese, and critics have long accused the fast-food industry of helping to fuel the problem with their swelling portion sizes. The new study took a different tack and sought to highlight the potential financial effects of voluminous fast-food meals.

"This is another way to present the costs associated with weight gain, and might help convince people that upsizing a meal is no bargain at all," Close said in a statement.

Using nutrition information from several major fast-food chains, the researchers estimated that super-sizing a soda and fries costs consumers only 67 cents, on average. But those cents buy about 400 extra calories, which may carry their own price tag.

For every 100 calories a person eats beyond his daily needs, Close and Schoeller calculate, the price in terms of food, medical care and gasoline rises anywhere from 48 cents to nearly $2. The heavier a person is, the greater the cost.

So while there may be immediate savings in choosing a super-size meal, the researchers conclude, consumers should be aware of the potential "hidden costs" that they will pay later.

- Reuters

SOURCE: Journal of the American College of Nutrition, June 2006.

Posted by Dean at 12:18 AM | Permalink