Writing It Down

From a Good Housekeeping article posted on WebMD -

"When researchers from Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research followed more than 2,000 dieters who were encouraged to record meals and snacks, they found that the single best predictor of whether a participant would drop weight was whether the person kept a food diary. It trumped exercise habits, age, and body mass index. The number of pounds people lost was directly related to the number of days they wrote in their log. (It's no coincidence that Weight Watchers, one of the most successful diet programs, asks participants to track what they eat.)"

Calorie Counting

New York City's Board of Health is pushing for restaurants with 15 or more locations to display the caloric content of menu items. The reason is that most people have no idea how many calories are in many of the things they regularly eat.

Restaurants associations, of course, don't want people to eat less. They don't want people to be dissuaded from eating rich, salty, mmm rich and salty, where was I? Oh yeah, restaurants and their associations would rather people be kept in the dark and continue to eat regularly meals that they should have only once in a while. I've mentioned Cheesecake Factory as a prime offender, where single menu items often contain an entire day's worth of calories and even more fat, and whose management refuses to list nutritional information for the food it serves.

"'Most people underestimate calorie content by a lot,' said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, adding that he considered the rules a potent weapon in the crusade against rising obesity rates. 'Even dietitians get a lot of it wrong.'"

Ten Commandments of Personal Finance

I thought this was a concise list of some basic rules to follow.

1. Create a Savings Plan
2. Do Not Spend More Than You Make
3. Do Not Try to Keep up with the Joneses
4. Limit the Amount of Debt on Your Credit Card Bills
5. Pay Monthly Bills on Time
6. Avoid Get Rich Quick Schemes
7. Protect Yourself Against Risk
8. Teach Your Children to Handle Money Wisely
9. Plan for Retirement
10. Legally Protect Yourself and Your Family

Check out the entire article here.

Whealth

"If you have not consciously made the decision to be rich, excellent, and healthy, then you have unconsciously made the decision to be poor, mediocre, and unhealthy."

-Wallace D. Wattles, self-help author

One of the things I like about HSAs and high deductible health plans is that they make consumers more conscious of health care issues and spending.

There's Some Good News and There's Some Bad News

Well, the good news is that I had a delicious sandwich for lunch. The bad news is that there was bacon on that sandwich, and if someday that contributes to my having a heart attack, I'm not too encouraged by the trends in emergency room care.

Emergency room waiting times are up to an average 30 minutes! And up to 25% of heart attack patients wait 50 minutes or more. Less than 20% of visitors to emergency rooms are thought to be in need of immediate care, by the way. Wow, people sure are stupid!

It turns out that ERs are closing as usage is rising. There just isn't room for patients. Resources and time are used moving patients around when they are needed treating sick people.

Dr. Art Kellermann, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, uses the analogy of an airport having planes parked all over the runway, but it's more like airports having planes parked all over their runways as airports are shutting down across the country.

So, if you think about how terrible it is to fly now, just remember that it'll be like that if you need emergency care, but it's like an airport where people go and clog up the lines and have keys and change in their pockets when they go through the metal detector and they sit in the seats at the terminal and they stand in the way as you try to board the plane, and they even fly sometimes, even if they weren't really going anywhere. Plus people who are flying to Hawaii pay the same as those flying to the next state over. AND you're pants are open in the back so everyone can see your butt.

Read the depressing article in Forbes, if you really want to.

Cold Fighting Techniques

Some of these are obvious, but I think worth the read:

1.) Soap and Water
2.) Probiotics
3.) Exercise
4.) Fruits and Veggies
5.) Avoid Germs
6.) Vitamin C
7.) Echinacea
8.) Green Tea
9.) Zinc
10.) Sleep

Read the whole article here.

14 Years! 14. Years!

This is not very surprising, but maybe if people keep hearing this stuff they'll make some changes-

"People with four healthy lifestyle behaviors -- not smoking, physical activity, moderate alcohol consumption, and eating five servings of fruit or vegetables a day -- live an average of 14 years longer than people with none of those behaviors, a new British study contends."

Read the entire article in U.S. News & World Report.

Lose Weight by Eating More

Gotta love those Top Ten Lists. My brother forwarded me this one from Men's Health about how to lose weight (fat) and increase muscle mass. A diet of protein and vegetables is a pretty easy way to avoid the junk that this list points out. Barry's rule has been sabotaged in my own house by gifts of cookies and boxes of candy. If you don't have it in your house, you don't eat it. There are lots of other interesting lists on the left hand side of the page you can check out if you want to spend even more time on the Internet than you already do.

The Pursuit of Happiness

No big surprise here. If you're happy, you're healthy. There's a lot of talk these days about inflammation being a cause of many ailments. Being unhappy can lead to that. Here's some news from a study of 3,000 people in Britain.

"In the study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, women who reported more positive emotions had lower blood levels of two proteins that indicate widespread inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation is believed to contribute to a range of ills over time, including heart disease and cancer."

Part of effective preventive medicine is addressing people's happiness.

"We need to help people to recognize the things that make them feel good and truly satisfied with their lives, so that they spend more time doing these things."

Old Lame Song

I guess "Auld Lang Syne" means something like "times gone by" in old Scottish. Here are the lyrics you'll never remember -

Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind
Should old acquaintance be forgot
And days of Auld Lang Syne

I decided, for the first time (I think), to write down some 2008 resolutions. I like to challenge and improve myself throughout the year, but why not take yet another opportunity to do just that?

Writing things down is a great way to focus on them and make sure that they happen. I have made it a habit of mine to write down movies I would like to see, music I should buy, places I want to visit around Miami (where I now live), restaurants that have been recommended to me by others, etc.

So, make a list on your Blackberry, or write down some goals on a piece of paper and stick it in your wallet. You might be surprised how much it helps to look at those goals. I'm really hoping "Be more PUNCTUAL" will help me. I know what you're thinking, "more" punctual doesn't make sense. You're either punctual or you're late. Hey, people, I'm trying. Let's work our way up to full-blown punctual.