Fatty Fatty Two by Four!

Summer is comming and so is swimsuit season! Are you ready?

If you're like me every winter seems to add a few pounds and each year they get harder to take off so the Perspective research department has looked at dozens of diets and from all the information presented has come up with these simple tips to get back into shape!

We consulted health and fitness experts, the latest scientific studies and real-life men and women who are taking off pounds to find 20 quick weight-loss strategies that work.

Add one to your routine today and watch the scale go down!

Change your clothes
If you exercise after dinner, put your workout gear on before you get to the gym. You're less likely to veer off to the couch, says Karen Bridson, a Toronto fitness trainer.

Start with salad
Jennie Wilson of Toronto loads up her plate with a luscious salad before she has her main course, a strategy that's helped the 29-year-old lose 40 pounds in two years. It packs a double-punch: you meet your veggie quota and take the edge off your hunger with filling fibre before diving into the higher-cal entree.

Work out with a cheerleader
A Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania study found that participants who received frequent positive feedback during exercise worked harder than those who received infrequent encouragement or none at all. Click here to find a fitness buddy in the Chatelaine Fitness & sport forum.

Sip green tea
In a study on mice, Japanese researchers found that green tea extract helps endurance during exercise. You may see a similar effect from drinking four cups(1L)of green tea daily.

Talk on the move
Use a cordless phone at home so you can walk laps and do stairs while you chat. Every step counts!

Identify the emotion
"If you find yourself craving something or wanting to overeat, ask yourself why," advises Nancy Saunders, a registered dietitian in Ormstown, Que. Take the time to figure out what's going on – chances are you'll discover a bag of cookies isn't what you really need

Go green
Arrange individual green grapes on a cookie sheet and pop them into the freezer. After they freeze, put them into a container and leave them in the freezer to munch on the next time you want a quick sweet snack. It's a favourite trick of Denise Hargrove, a registered dietitian in Kingston, Ont.

Open a can
A ton of fast and tasty recipes call for beans and legumes, which are naturally high fibre, high protein and low fat. Give Quick Lentils with Coriander and Mint a try.

Schedule in fitness
Jennie Wilson sits down and plans out her workouts week by week. "Thinking about workouts ahead of time helps me make them part of my day," she says. Tight on time this week? Work in a workout with our fast fitness exercise plan.

Do the hand jive (no joke)
Control portion sizes with this no-fail guide: a serving of meat is about the size of the palm of your hand, and a fist equals about a cup(250 mL)of fruit, vegetables or grains. Your thumb is the size of about one ounce(30 g)of cheese.

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://Allans-Perspective.blogspot.com

News from the scientific front!

If you thought that ADHD (Attention Deficite Hyperactivity Disorder) in kids is becoming more common you're right. I suffer from it myself and at times........
....sorry, I got sidetracked. Where was I? Oh yea. We didn't hear as much about ADHD fifty or a hundred years ago for a good reason.

There wasn't as much of it!

For every hour a day that children under three watched violent child-oriented entertainment on TV, their risk doubled for attention problems five years later, according to the study released Monday in November's issue of the journal of Pediatrics.

The University of Washington researchers called a show violent if it involved fighting, hitting people, threats or other violence that was central to the plot or a main character.

Shows listed included Power Rangers, Lion King and Scooby Doo.

Even non-violent shows like Rugrats and The Flintstones carried a still substantial —although slightly lower — risk for attention problems, according to the researchers.

On the other hand, educational shows, including Arthur, Barney and Sesame Street had no association with future attention problems.

The researchers said the risks only seemed to occur in children under three, perhaps because that is a particularly crucial period of brain development. Those results echo a different study in October that suggested TV-watching has less impact on older children's behaviour than on toddlers.

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On a different note we have news for all you fubby chuckers out there. Australian scientists have found how to switch hunger on and off using a molecule that targets the brain -- a discovery which could stop weight loss in terminally ill patients or produce weight loss in the morbidly obese.

The molecule, known as MIC-1, is produced by common cancers and targets receptors in the brain that switch off appetite. But Australian researchers found that by using antibodies against MIC-1 they were able to switch appetite back on.

When normal and obese mice were treated with MIC-1 they ate less and lost a lot of weight, suggesting that MIC-1 may also be used to treat severe obesity, said the Sydney researchers in a statement received on Tuesday.

"This work has given us a better understanding of the part of the brain that regulates appetite," said Herbert Herzog, director of neuroscience research at the Garvan Institute in Sydney.

"Our bodies send complex chemical signals to our brains, which interpret them and send back responses, in this case eat or don't eat. Our research indicated that MIC-1 is a previously unrecognized molecule sending a don't eat signal to the brain," Herzog said.

The researchers said it was hoped that in the near future, the MIC-1 findings will prevent a sizeable proportion of advanced cancer patients from "literally wasting away."

Sam Breit at St Vincent's Centre for Immunology, who originally cloned the MIC-1 gene, said he believed the findings could have a significant impact on a range of appetite-related disorders.

"Injecting mice with MIC-1 protein also made them stop eating, suggesting that it may be possible to use this to advantage for treating patients with severe obesity," he said.

The MIC-1 findings were published in the latest Nature Medicine magazine and the team of researchers led by St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney hope to develop a human antibody and run clinical trials in the next few years.

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And finaly a subject with which I am quite familiar since my wife has Lymphoma and takes this drug/spice daily for its medicinal properties.

Scientists in Japan have created two synthetic versions of an ingredient in curry that is noted for its potential to fight cancer.

Some studies have suggested that curcumin, the yellowish component in turmeric that gives curry its flavor, can suppress tumors and that people who eat lots of curry may be less prone to the disease. However, curcumin loses its anti-cancer attributes quickly when ingested.

The scientists wrote in the latest issue of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics that they had synthesized two variations -- GO-Y030 and GO-Y031 -- which have proved more potent and lasting than natural curcumin.

They tested them in mice with colorectal cancer and found that they worked far better.

"Our new analogues (synthetic versions) have enhanced growth suppressive abilities against colorectal cancer cell lines, up to 30 times greater than natural curcumin," said Hiroyuki Shibata, associate professor at Tohoku University's Institute of Development, Ageing and Cancer.

"In a mouse model for colorectal cancer, mice fed with five milligrams of GO-Y030 or GO-Y031 fared 42 and 51 percent better, respectively, than did mice in the control group."

Like curcumin, the two synthetic versions may be able to fight other cancers, such as gastric cancer and cancer of the breast, pancreas and lung, they added.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com and the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Another weapon in the battle against obesity!

The hormone that tells us we are full also regulates our desire for certain foods, researchers said on Thursday, in a finding that sheds light on why people gain weight and could lead to new treatments for obesity.

The study showed that patients with a rare genetic disorder who lacked the hormone called leptin ate less after receiving injections of the hormone, said I.S. Farooqi, a researcher at Cambridge University who led the study.

In the study, published in the journal Science, researchers searched for "circuits" in the brain that signal when a person is hungry or full and found that they were linked to areas involved in determining the enjoyment of food.

Previous research has shown the hormone does not help people with normal leptin levels lose weight, but scientists still do not completely understand how it works, Farooqi said.

"By studying patients who have no leptin and then treating them with leptin, we can tell what it is doing," Farooqi said in a telephone interview. "It gives a clear look at how leptin operates in the brain."

To see how the hormone worked, the researchers showed the patients pictures of different types of food, ranging from tasty fare like chocolate cake and pizza to blander choices such as cauliflower and broccoli.

The patients with the genetic disorder -- of which there are about a dozen known types in the world -- liked all types of food, ate excessively and were obese, the researchers said.

Knowing how leptin, which is produced by fat cells, triggers different parts of the brain could lead to new drugs that target obesity and help dangerously overweight people take pounds off.

"If you find those molecules that leptin triggers then you can manipulate or target them with drugs to treat obesity," Farooqi said.
"The first step is to work out what leptin does and how it does it."

After the patients received leptin injections, the areas that had previously shown activity all the time at the sight of food were only active if the people had not eaten the night before, which was a normal response, Farooqi said.

It showed desire for food is driven by biology -- not greed -- which causes overeating and obesity, Farooqi said.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com