Healthy Eating
There has been considerable interest in an approach to eating that is usually described as ‘intermittent fasting’. This may involve restricting eating to a window of, say, 6 or 8 hours each day. It might involve alternating days of very restricted eating with ‘normal eating’. It might just skipping or delaying breakfast. The idea is […]
Healthy Eating
There has been some recent interest, even in the mainstream media, in the practice of ‘intermittent fasting’. Essentially, this means going for extended periods of time without food. It comes in many different guises. Skipping of significantly delaying breakfast is one approach. Contracting the ‘window’ available for eating each day to, say, 6 or 8 […]
Brain and Behaviour
When people are in the process of actively losing weight, many of them will monitor their progress by weighing themselves (of course). One potential issue with this is that our weight is made up of things other than fat including muscle, glycogen (a storage fuel similar to starch) and water. So, changes in weight may […]
Healthy Eating
I’m a long-time advocate of diets that are generally lower in carbohydrate than those encouraged by most Governments, health agencies and health professionals. I’m not very prescriptive about it, and prefer not in my talks or writings to give specific carbohydrate ‘targets’ e.g. no more than 50 g of carbohydrate a day. I do, however, […]
Exercise and Activity
Obesity is essentially unknown in populations that live a traditional ‘hunter-gatherer’ way of life. As is well recognised, it’s different in Westernised populations. Why? Well, one theory, at least, is that hunter-gatherers are much more active, and are burning off more calories than their Western counterparts, which affords them the ability to maintain health weights. […]
Healthy Eating
Last week, one of my blog posts featured a letter which highlighted the relationship between television viewing, sleep and body weight. Television viewing is associated with increased risk of obesity, and this association may be due to the tendency for people to eat more as a result of falling prey to TV advertising as well […]
Exercise and Activity
A few weeks back I wrote about a study regarding what is often termed ‘high intensity intermittent exercise’ (HIIE). As it names suggests, this form of activity involves blasts of explosive exercise (such as sprinting or cycling) interspersed with periods of much less intense effort. The study I wrote about revealed HIIE to improve running speed in […]
Sleep
Six years ago I decided to dramatically reduce the amount of time I spent watching TV, and this single intervention (I believe) had a dramatic effect on my life. It liberated a significant amount of time that I could devote to perhaps more useful and rewarding pursuits. You may be thinking that I’m referring to […]
Food and Medical Politics
I’m a bit cynical about the food industry’s attempts to help us lower our weight and trim our waistlines through tactics such as giving us smaller portion sizes or taking some fat out of a highly processed foods to replace it with sugar or something else of dubious value. I recently wrote about this here after […]
Healthy Eating
Last Friday I was invited on to the BBC Radio 4 consumer programme You and Yours to discuss the UK Government’s scheme to shave off 5 billion calories from our daily intake (about 83 calories a person, apparently), and the role the food industry has here. You can listen to the broadcast here (starts at […]