Quit Worrying about Your Health

wosnes · Post by **wosnes** » Tue Jan 05, 2010 11:32 am

I saw this book this article is about. So, relax and don't worry so much!

And here's an article from Redbook magazine about the book.

mrsj · Post by **mrsj** » Wed Jan 06, 2010 7:50 am

Thanks for posting this. Takes some of the pressure off. I especially liked the sub article from Redbook What Excersize Won't Do For You.

It all boils down to good old fashioned common sense-just lik No S!

Blithe Morning · Post by **Blithe Morning** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 2:02 am

I clicked through and looked it up. Ironically, the article published before it was about a study which found single women were less heavy than married women by 11 lbs and less heavy by married women with children by 15 lbs. Some expert (a Dr. Dobson from Australia.; not the Focus on the Family Dr. Dobson) said this study showed that women should be cautious during times of transition so that they don't gain weight.

I prefer Dr. Love's recommendation. Really, if the choice was between lighter with no DH and kids and heavier with a family, I pick the family.

Grammy G · Post by **Grammy G** » Fri Jan 08, 2010 12:59 am

Just saw these two authors on one of the morning shows today.. along w/Dr. Nancy Snyderman(spelling??) and Ann Curry. It was very interesting w/ Dr. Snyderman admitting she has been part of the hype that has caused us to think we are going to hell in a handbasket if we don't eat/drink/rest/exercise by the numbers. All agreed there is a wide range of "OK" and most of us fit into that range. Didn't WE always suspect that?? Could the tide be changing and will the powers that be ease off the pressure to be perfect?? We should all stay tuned.....

wosnes · Post by **wosnes** » Fri Jan 08, 2010 11:52 am

I'll have to go look at todayshow.com. It was pre-empted in our area today due to weather conditions. Sheesh, you'd think 6" is a LOT of snow or something. A lot of it was updating road conditions and I hope that those who were on the road weren't watching TV.

Well, anyway...I've long suspected that many of the things we've been told are stretching the truth and sometimes just outright lies. I've also thought that we're being told some things and being made to believe that they're bad, when it's just the way the body reacts to this, that or the next thing. I'm not at all sure that basing everything on science is a good thing!

Here's a link to the video, and here's a short excerpt.

When Meredith mentioned not eating her blueberries, it reminded me of something. I've quoted Dr. Fuhrman a lot, but I recall seeing a video of his and thinking, "Whaaaaaaaat?" He was saying that now that food is shipped all over the world, we finally have the ability to eat a truly healthy diet because nutrient dense foods are available to us all year round. While I understand what he's saying, I don't believe it's necessary. But I know a number of people who believe it.

cab54 · Post by **cab54** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 9:21 pm

You know, I think about this all the time. I am 55, and can remember when I was a kid/teenager/young adult, and NO ONE was all into all of this health fright stuff.

People just ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner (thank you, Reinhard, for reminding us), and did a lot of physical things in their everyday lives without thinking about it as 'exercise'. I can remember all of us grandkids taking a walk with my grandfather after dinner, but it was more of a stroll, and we did it just to be with him and as he said 'to digest our food'.

You never saw a magazine chock FULL of eating info, diets, exercise advice, goofy ideas about certain foods, and how you should be worried about your cholesterol and all.

Recently, my local paper had an article about the evils of milk for children, and then 2 days later, the same paper had an article about getting enough milk into your children's diet.

Huh?

Now, people feel guilty about everything they do or don't do, and everything they eat. I am SURE that is what contributes to overeating, constant snacking, and even obese kids. When a person is told they can't have something, or feels guilty about it, they are going to go into overload eventually on it....as in overeating.

Instead of just doing our housework, our jobs, lawn work, and the occasional stroll, or backyard football game, now we feel pushed into 'formal exercise' routines, and if we don't do that, there is all of this anxiety about not joining the world in the 'health' obsession. I don't know about you all, but that can send me to the fridge to overload, or make me sit on the couch in protest.

Tiggycat · Post by **Tiggycat** » Sun Aug 22, 2010 8:00 pm

What I hate about magazines is there is a 'starve yourself and lose 50 pounds a week' type of article on one page and recipes for 'death by chocolate cake' on the next!

I definitely gained weight when I got married, because I started eating the same things as my husband (instead of a salad or something that I would have had when I was single) and started drinking wine with supper which I never did before.

cab54 - I'm 54 and I remember my family eating like you reminded us - and doing physical housework (we had a wringer washer, hung clothes out to dry and ironed everything - now I move the clothes from the washer to the dryer and we don't buy anything that has to be ironed). I walked to school (and walked home for lunch and back again!) - I don't know anyone whose children do that, they all go to specialized or private schools and get dropped off by their parents or picked up by bus.

wosnes · Post by **wosnes** » Tue Aug 24, 2010 10:47 am

Each of the little changes in our diets and level of activity don't mean much. But when they're all combined and totaled, it means a lot of extra weight -- and implications for our health as well.

Over43 · Post by **Over43** » Sun Nov 28, 2010 4:57 am

In his book 50 Ways to a Healthy Heart Christiaan Barnard stated that we often do more damage to ourselves worrying about our diet and health. It was an interesting book.

wosnes · Post by **wosnes** » Sun Nov 28, 2010 5:43 pm

Over43 wrote:In his book 50 Ways to a Healthy Heart Christiaan Barnard stated that we often do more damage to ourselves worrying about our diet and health. It was an interesting book.

From Michael Pollan's "Our National Eating Disorder":

'Worrying about food is not good for your health,'' Rozin concludes -- a deeply un-American view. He and Fischler suggest that our anxious eating itself may be part of the American problem with food, and that a more relaxed and social approach toward eating could go a long way toward breaking our unhealthy habit of bingeing and fad-dieting. ''We could eat less and actually enjoy it more,'' suggests Rozin. Of course this is easier said than done. It's so much simpler to alter the menu or nutrient profile of a meal than to change the social and psychological context in which it is eaten. (There's also a lot more money to be made fiddling with ingredients and supersizing portions.) And yet what a wonderful prospect, to discover that the relationship of pleasure and health in eating is not, as we've been hearing for a hundred years, necessarily one of strife, but that the two might again be married at the table.

gettheweightoff · Post by **gettheweightoff** » Wed Jan 12, 2011 7:35 pm

I know for me that I have spent too much money and time trying to "be healthy" and never felt all that much better to be perfectly honest and if I did lose any weight I certainly couldn't maintain it.

Every day Dr. Oz for example is talking about a different health problem, weight loss and super food. I'm just sick of hearing about it already you know?

I think we spend far too much time worrying about trying to be healthy and feeling guilty for not doing things we "should be doing" such as excercise, drinking water, eating brown foods.

Sometimes it's better to take the focus off of something and just live. When we were kids we didn't worry about all of this crap so why should we now.

I only started realizing this once I started No-S.

amake616 · Post by **amake616** » Fri Jan 14, 2011 3:43 pm

Culturally we certainly seem to be far more interested in "health" and "nutrition" than before but are ironically less healthy. I've always wondered if all that harping on tv, in magazines, in conversation about weight, health, and nutrition doesn't just exacerbate the problem. I know personally hearing about all the reasons I should never eat masaman or brownies again simply makes me want to go out and eat lots of masaman and brownies because it feels like no matter what you do you'll never achieve "optimal health" anyway.

wosnes · Post by **wosnes** » Sun Jan 16, 2011 1:17 am

gettheweightoff wrote:
Every day Dr. Oz for example is talking about a different health problem, weight loss and super food. I'm just sick of hearing about it already you know?

I'll watch Oz on occasion, but usually I change the channel before he comes on -- and watch reruns of The Cosby Show!

Culturally we certainly seem to be far more interested in "health" and "nutrition" than before but are ironically less healthy. I've always wondered if all that harping on tv, in magazines, in conversation about weight, health, and nutrition doesn't just exacerbate the problem. I know personally hearing about all the reasons I should never eat masaman or brownies again simply makes me want to go out and eat lots of masaman and brownies because it feels like no matter what you do you'll never achieve "optimal health" anyway.

This reminds me of something Michael Pollan said:

...it does seem to me a symptom of our present confusion about food that people would feel the need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or doctor or government food pyramid, on so basic a question about the conduct of our everyday lives. I mean, what other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat? True, as omnivores -- creatures that can eat just about anything nature has to offer and that in fact need to eat a wide variety of different things in order to be healthy -- the "What to eat?" question is somewhat more complicated for us than it is for, say, cows. Yet for most of human history, humans have navigated the question without expert advice. To guide us we had, instead Culture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how much of it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and when and with whom have for most of human history been a set of questions long settled and passed down from parents to children without a lot of fuss or controversy.

...You may well, and rightly, wonder who am I to tell you how to eat? Here I am advising you to reject the advice of science and industry -- and then blithely go on to offer my own advice. So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.