obesity (Page 21)

You don’t need to smoke pot to get high?all you need to do is exercise! We recently wrote about how you can exercise adequately in just 6 minutes a week. But be sure to lots of sleep afterwards: women who don’t get enough sleep tend to get fat.

In LiveScience.com, Robin Lloyd interviews exercise expert Debbie Mandel, who explains why exercise makes us feel so good. Cortisol is a hormone produced under the stress of everyday life and it is damaging to the body. Exercise produces endorphins, which counteract the negative effects of cortisol. This is why exercise not only makes us healthier, it makes us happier as well. Endorphins are natural tranquilizers that have been compared to morphine and opium.
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If you’re too fat, you need to figure out why before you can lose weight successfully. Scientists have discovered that stress makes us eat too much?especially sugar. It’s actually another form of addiction, just like being addicted to gambling, cigarettes, drugs or alcohol.
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Our genes determine how what shape we are, as well as how fat we get. Scientists can now take a DNA sample from you and tell?without even looking at your body?whether you’re an hourglass or a pear-shape. Harvard’s Ronald Kahn says, “By looking at your genes, we can tell how fat you are and how your body fat will be distributed.”

This means that the current obesity epidemic can be linked not just to an excess of fast food and sugary sodas, it can also be traced to our genes. But no matter what shape we’re destined to be, it’s important to lose weight, because obesity leads to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. People who are apple-shaped are at much higher risk for contracting Type II diabetes, the kind you get from being overweight.
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Whether or not you will die in a car crash may depend on whether or not you are too fat or too thin?but only if you’re a man.

Researchers have found that being obese increases male drivers’ risk of dying in a car crash, as does being very slim. However, being moderately overweight may be a good thing, since it cushions the blow. They also found that obesity did not affect women’s risk of death from the same kinds of crashes.
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