shefaly

It seems we in Britain cannot make up our minds about food and exercise. A survey of 2000 British adults, conducted by YouGov for supermarket Tesco, has found that one in three adults in the UK is now on a permanent diet. It also found that the over-55s - the so-called Silver Slimmers - were most likely to go on a diet at some stage every month and 15% of them - twice as many in any other age group - restrict their calorie intake every day. About 15% of adults spend between 30 minutes and... Read Full Story

Friends often ask me how they could make sense of conflicting advice on diets and exercise in the media. In this dilemma, they have plenty of company. I have written earlier about how nearly half the British adults report food advice overload and confusion due to soi-disant experts disagreeing amongst themselves. Nowhere is this confusion more obvious than in exercise related discussions . In the UK, government guidelines seem to bear little relationship with what is perceived by the wider... Read Full Story

Happy New Year, Readers. If I make one commitment for this year, it is to this blog. There will be more posts and more effort to promote the blog. What about you? It is just the 3rd day of the year, and already we have several obesity related headlines clamouring for our attention. On new year’s day, the ban on junk food commercials aired during programmes for under-16s came into force in the UK, over a full year after being proposed (this old post also covers more details about the ban... Read Full Story

Over on the Rudd Sound Bites blog , I found that activists such as Meme Roth are taking exception to Santa’s tubby shape. Not just Meme Roth , the US Surgeon General, Steven Galson, also thinks that Santa sets a bad example by being morbidly obese and must really slim down. To most believers-in-Santa, this is blasphemy! They say Santa is not the right person to be chosen to lead a campaign against childhood obesity. Besides, don’t we all know that Santa has always been fat and wears a red... Read Full Story

A friend recently wrote me and asked why the posts on this blog are infrequent. Here is the long answer. We all read the news and presumably click on the ‘health’ tabs on our favourite news channels. We do not need someone to regurgitate the headlines. One of the most difficult things to do on this blog is tell a story which can be related to real life and real life issues to do with weight gain, weight loss and weight management. Finding a story to tell requires that even as I itch to... Read Full Story

The British Fertility Society’s new guidelines on fertility treatment of women suggest that their weight be taken into account before treatment is offered to obese women with a BMI in excess of 35. The summary - from the BFS website - is as follows: Obesity has a significant adverse effect on female reproductive health. Being obese decreases the chances of natural conception, reduces the likelihood of the success of the fertility treatment and increases the risk of miscarriage... Read Full Story

( Long post alert! ) A friend warned me that with the submission of the thesis , my interest in obesity will wane and the blog will suffer. On the contrary, like a crazed fan, I notice my former object of desire - not for myself, you understand - everywhere I look. This weekend was full of gems, which are worth sharing. I only share the ones in the media and not my observations, because this promises to be a long post already. The consumer organisation, Which?, reports that the ban on... Read Full Story

Research released earlier this week discussed the relationship between sleep and weight gain in children. Both clinical and epidemiological data have helped establish the link between central obesity and sleep apnoea , although the causal pathway is not clear. Sleep apnoea is a sleep disturbance resulting from breathing difficulties at night, and consequent sleepiness observed in the subject during the day. Work done by researchers from Northwestern University and Evanston Northwestern... Read Full Story

The British Medical Journal has published the results of a cohort study to examine the relationship between BMI and the incidence of and mortality due to cancer in 1.2 M women in the UK. These women were aged 50-64 during 1996-2001, and were followed up, on average, for 5.4 years for cancer incidence and 7.0 years for cancer mortality. It was found that increasing BMI - manifest in overweight and obesity - was associated with increased incidence of - and mortality due to - several kinds of... Read Full Story

Much research in the past - discussed earlier on this blog here and here - has suggested a link between lack of sleep and weight gain. Lack of sleep is known to trigger hormonal changes which lead to increased appetite and weight gain. Newly published research in Pediatrics adds to this body of knowledge. The analysis used data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development . Amongst the original aims of this developmental... Read Full Story