Strange Poll Results on Weight

When you look at yourself in a mirror, or sit down to eat a meal, what is it that you really see? If you're active and eat well most of the time, why are you doing that? Is it because you want to lose weight and get in shape and look better, or is it because you want to lead a healthy lifestyle to ward off sickness and other ailments? Or is it a little bit of a combination of both?

I've been meaning to blog on this story for awhile but I had to read it a number of different times because I found it somewhat confusing.

It involves a poll conducted by AP and Ivillage and here are some of the findings:

Half don't like their weight, even 26 percent of those whose body mass index or BMI — a measure of weight for height — is in the normal range. But just a third don't like their physical condition, even though being overweight and sedentary are big risk factors for Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other ailments.

I've read that paragraph a half dozen times and it still doesn't make sense to me. Half don't like the weight that they are at and a third don't like their physical condition. I guess it depends on how you're defining "physical condition" because it seems to be that if half don't like their weight, that those same people don't like their physical condition.

More from the article:

"People can't see the damage that's being done inside their body," says Goldberg. "If you increase your fitness but don't lose as much weight, you still have a lower heart disease risk than someone who is obese and sedentary."

Okay fine, being overweight but continuing to exercise is going to reduce your risk of heart disease but, it would reduce it even more if the excess weight was taken off (yes, I know that might be easier said then done but, it's doable).

Now here's a quote that really bothered me:

"Someone who is fat or even overweight can be healthy if they have a balanced diet and are physically active," Kwan says. "Our culture really does put a lot of pressure on women to look a certain way," taking precedence over health measures.

Maybe I'm just not looking at this correctly but, if our culture puts a lot of pressure on women to look a certain way (skinny, model type), then why are two-thirds of women overweight or obese? I remember that was the common theory back 10-20 years ago (and earlier), but does it really hold today, in 2009? Beauty pageants that involved women that were so skinny if they turned sideways you probably wouldn't know they were even there, have lost a lot of popularity over the last decade to the point that they aren't even shown on the major networks anymore.

If anything, I think what people have started to realize (and the article states as much) is that getting to a point where you look like this:



Not only looks better (and even men will tell you as such), but is more healthier than looking like this:



But again, I just don't see how there's that much pressure out there anymore to even look like either of those two pictures due to the fact that two-thirds of us are not even close to being able to see our abs.

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Smokers: Stop Being So Mad

I've never smoked a cigarette in my life. From time to time I'll have a cigar, but the next morning, I regret it with that awful taste in my mouth.

When talking with smokers about why is it that they smoke and what benefit it gives them, one of the most common answers is that it relaxes them.

This article talks about a study that found that one solution to get people to stop smoking could be anger management classes.

The study states that when smokers were playing a video game and not wearing a nicotine patch, they were more likely to be aggressive in a task they could do after completing a round of the game compared to when they were wearing a nicotine patch and were less aggressive.

Which I think leads to the question: Are smokers just more angry compared to the rest of the population as a whole or, are non-smokers just finding different ways of releasing the aggression without smoking?

If I had to guess, I'd have to say it's the latter. For smokers, maybe having a cigarette was the first variable that they encountered when they started going through stress as a teen, and have basically just stuck with it. Maybe others that never smoked (but more than likely have gone through just a much stress as the normal smoking population) had other ways of managing that stress and aggression.

Or maybe there is something more to this that smokers in general are just a more aggressive group and their only outlet is a drag (is that term even used anymore?)

Oh, by the way, one activity that is a GREAT stress reliever and aggression killer is exercise...

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7 Dont's of Exercise

This is a pretty good article on the don't of exercise and I agree with most of them. Although there is one I'm not in total agreement with.

This advice is the one I don't completely agree with. I agree with the part about finding a particular weight to lift and then progressively increasing from workout to workout. I don't agree that it's not good to go to failure. I don't think going to failure is good all the time but, I do think that lifting to the point that you just can't lift another repetition is good from time to time.

BUT, if you are doing an exercise like a squat, bench press, shoulder press, basically anything where the weight is above your body, make sure before you go to failure that you have a spotter.

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