Drinking 8 Glasses Of Water A Day Is 'Nonsense,' Doc Says

I drink water all day long; I am rarely seen without a bottle in my hand. Will this article change that? No way! I love water and I think it helps my body to drink it throughout the day. Maybe my body is just used to having a lot so I feel like it needs it. This article just proves how people can be manipulated into doing, or not doing, just about anything because it's been published as "fact". We need to listen to our bodies more often and maybe we can decide for ourselves what works and what doesn't.

Something else to think about---stop listening to your friends for advice about YOUR body! Nobody knows how your body works better than you do. If you have no idea where to start, perhaps you could speak to a professional; a doctor or a nutritionist may be able to shed some light on your specific needs. Your friends have different genes, they may forget to mention that the reason they lost so much weight on the "insert fad diet here," was because they also worked out five days a week and gave up alcohol for six months. You just never know how well something will work for you until you start listening to your own body.

The same goes for fitness routines. I don't really like to run but I know it helps take the weight off faster than any other exercise I've tried. When my back gets strong enough, I'll have to get back into running to help get this weight off. For now, I know it's important for me to workout in my target heart rate zone for fat burning or cardio, if I want to see results on the scale. For my body, the elliptical machine (minus the arms for now) gets me there fast and I have no problem (with my back) maintaining a consistent heart rate. I enjoy interval training to help break up the 45 minute work out and when I see my recovery heart rate in between sprints,  I get excited knowing my fitness level is still quite good considering the two-month hiatus due to back surgery.

Q: What is recovery heart rate?

A: This is the heart rate that our body will decrease to after an exercise session. For example, you exercise for a 1/2 hour at 155. Two minutes after you stop exercising, your heart rate decreases to 95. The 95 would be your recovery heart rate. It is used to evaluate your fitness level after exercise. It is good to set a two minute time frame and see how many beats you recover in that time frame. Compare this recover heart rate between exercise sessions.

The following information is courtesy of Huffingtonpost.com:

The health recommendation to drink six to eight glasses of water a day is "thoroughly debunked nonsense," a doctor wrote this week in a commentary in the British Medical Journal.

Many health departments and organizations tout the need to drink that much water every day, but there is no high-quality scientific evidence to support the recommendation, wrote Dr. Margaret McCartney, a general practitioner based in Scotland.

Some organizations backed by bottled-water makers-- such as Hydration for Health, created by the makers of Volvic and Evian -- say that it's important to drink 1.5 to 2 liters (about 6 to 8 cups) of water a day, and that being even mildly dehydrated plays a role in disease development, McCartney wrote.

However, no such claims have ever been confirmed in studies, she said, and drinking too much water can actually be dangerous by causing low blood sodium levels (a condition called hyponatraemia) and exposing people to pollutants in the water.

"People still think that we're all going to die or our kidneys will shrivel up if we don't drink eight cups of water a day," McCartney told Postmedia News. "From what I can see, there's never been any evidence in the medical literature about it."

From The Guardian: Drinking extra water is said to reduce urinary tract infections, improve skin tone, help with weight loss (fill up with water first), reduce headaches and fatigue, eliminate constipation and improve concentration. There's no robust evidence for any of this. The kidneys are wonderful things (that don't need flushing with lots of water) and will make concentrated urine to save water.


Not all doctors are on board with McCartney's commentary. The commentary wasn't peer-reviewed, one doctor from King's College London pointed out, and it's especially important for the very young and the very old to be appropriately hydrated, particularly by drinking water, the Los Angeles Timesreported.

The Mayo Clinic acknowledges that most doctors recommend drinking eight to nine cups of water a day, but said that people need to drink as much water as is necessary to replace water that is lost throughout the day.

In addition, drinking enough to produce about 6.3 cups of clear or slightly yellow urine a day means your fluid intake is probably sufficient, the Mayo Clinic said.


Click here to read the entire article on Huffington Post

10 Fad Diets To Never Try

Sadly, there are more 'diets' out there than I could count. Some of them such as Weight Watchers, or Jenny Craig have really helped hundred or thousands of people lose the weight, and keep it off. Most of the fad diets out there do more harm than good...the sad thing is, I've tried most of them. No wonder why I'm still over weight!

Over the last few months there has been a lot of talk about the best diet. (Check out U.S. News' evaluation of 20 popular diets, for instance -- the DASH diet came out on top.) But what about those diets that didn't make the cut ... by a longshot?

While it's great to know what we should be doing to make healthy eating choices (especially since 66 percent of adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese), it's clear that societal pressures to look a certain way (read: thin) push people to look for quick fixes to their weighty woes.

"[Sometimes] people are desperate. And that's a case in point," says Cheryl Forberg, R.D. and resident nutritionist for NBC's "The Biggest Loser." This desperation may contribute to the proliferation of "fad diets" -- those weight loss plans that spur news headlines, but do little for your health -- in the U.S.

Founding director of Yale University's Prevention Research Center and HuffPost Blogger, David Katz, M.D., M.P.H., FACPM, FACP, has a rule of thumb when it comes to assessing the validity of a diet: "If it's not something a parent can share with a child, it is apt to be a very questionable approach."

We spoke to some experts to put together a list of 10 diets that decidedly break Dr. Katz's golden rule. Are there any other diets that you think we should have included?

Here are a couple I've tried for myself...with little to no luck with long term weight loss.

The Cabbage Soup Diet is a quick fix -- you can only follow the diet plan for seven days at a time. During that week, you can only eat fruits, vegetables and, of course, cabbage soup (staying true to the diet's moniker).

Although followers of this diet often do lose weight, according to Forberg, most of that loss consists of water weight. Not only will the pounds come back on easily, but ultimately, who wants to eat cabbage soup for a week?

Although it's been around since the 1950s, the HCG Diet has received quite a bit of press over the past year. Requiring dieters to take in only 500 calories a day -- while the lowest intake recommended by the U.S. Committee on Dietary Allowance is 1,200 calories -- HCG couples caloric restriction with injections of the human choriogonadotropin (HCG) hormone. The hormone is supposed to stimulate weight loss. However, the FDA has approved the hormone treatment for women having fertility issues at this point, but not for weight loss.

Although some experts, such as Dr. Oz, have stated that the diet plan should be researched further, others argue that it is wholly dangerous. "[The HCG diet] features hormone injections ... that are as useful as Dumbo's feather, but that justify a very high cost. The real reason for weight loss is a starvation diet ... which can, in fact, be lethal," says Dr. Katz.

Forberg cautions against trying any diet where the caloric intake is so low that exercise is inadvisable. "You don't want to lose your muscle," she says.


To read the entire article go to Huffington Post

My 29th birthday

Today is my 29th birthday; I live in Germany and I am married to the most incredible man. What more can I ask for?

I wish I had more money than I knew what to do with. I wish I had a super brain and I could solve the world's problems. I wish my family members all got along...all the time. I wish my parents were in better health. I wish my grandparents were in MUCH better health. I wish I lived so close to the ocean that I could see it from my bedroom window. I wish my bedroom had a balcony. I wish America wasn't in debt. I wish there were no hungry people in the world. I wish I had control of time. I wish I had the "perfect" body. I wish my husband had a better relationship with his family. I wish I could wear a bikini on the beaches of Spain and feel sexy. I wish I had a great tan all year long without worrying about skin cancer. I wish I had taken the time to build better relationships with the women in my life. I wish I had a PhD.

Maybe some of these wishes are silly. Perhaps some are quite attainable. I can sit around and wish for what I don't have, or I can get up and do something about the ones I can achieve all on my own. In 365 days, I will turn 30. I've had some rough times in the past ten years and I'm ready to do what it takes to succeed in the next decade of my life. 

By this time next year, I will be wearing a bikini, on the beaches of Spain, and I will feel SUPER SEXY!

Day 1: 

Weight: 163.4 lbs (Height: 5'2'')

Ten weeks post-op (lower back surgery)

Robert Frost
Time and Tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of thirty.