Posts Tagged ‘exercise’

The tremendous growth in understanding obesity as a metabolic disease makes it easy to lose track of the physical aspects of this chronic, debilitating disease — but not for the people who suffer from it. The fact is that severe obesity extracts a terrible toll of physical pain and impaired mobility. So it’s great to […]

Sneaky bias has an annoyingly persistent way of creeping into obesity research. A case in point appears in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in a study that we reported last week. Though we mocked the proposition that only 3% of Americans have a healthy lifestyle, we did not call out the flaw in the study that led to this […]

While talk about health, fitness, and obesity have not done much to stem the rise in obesity rates, it seems that it has created a buoyant fashion trend: athleisure. Katie Smith at Edited sums up the situation pretty well: Consumers are prioritising health and wellbeing, with the internet aiding the knowledge share. We may not […]

It’s hard to tell whether fitness trackers will turn out to be high tech placebos or coaches. Everything you read talks about promise and short-term outcomes — along with tech companies jostling for a competitive advantage. It’s pretty clear that physical activity monitoring technology offers plenty of promise and plenty of unfinished business. A research letter published […]

File it under news you can use: apparently we’re all toast. Well, maybe 3% of us who actually have healthy lifestyles will be OK. But the rest of us can forget it. In a new study published by Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Paul Loprinzi and colleagues found that 97% of Americans cannot meet four simple criteria for […]

Another study is adding to the evidence that bariatric surgery is probably the best bet we have for diabetes remission. In a randomized, controlled clinical trial, David Cummings and colleagues found that surgery beats diet and exercise for remission of type 2 diabetes. In this relatively small, well-controlled study, 60% of surgery patients had remission of […]

How much weight loss, if any, is essential to good clinical care for obesity? This question consumes an incredible amount of energy, in our opinion, for relatively little in return. A pair of recent studies and a new commentary in Obesity add to the volumes that have been written on this subject. With a commentary in Obesity, Robert […]

The blurry line between accountability and punishment is quite important to long-term outcomes in obesity. The difference between the two is substantial, but easily confused. Where accountability empowers people, punishment does the opposite. Punishment is imposed. Accountability flows from engagement. Though people understand that punishment is an ineffective strategy for behavior change in obesity, the […]

First it was employers. Now universities are joining the trend. Folks who want to enforce physical activity goals are increasingly looking to Fitbit and other activity trackers to serve as electronic leashes. Oral Roberts University now requires all freshmen to wear a Fitbit to prove they are meeting the school’s requirements for 10,000 daily steps […]

On many levels, the phenomenon of activity trackers can be quite a challenge to track. Presenting yesterday to the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions of the Institute of Medicine, Gary Bennett of Duke University and Kimberly Warner of Fitbit presented a compelling picture for the potential of this technology. Despite the fact that the data on […]