Obesity

• “Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature heart attacks in the United States. Imagine that—overeating is worse for you than smoking a pack a day. We’ve forced the smokers out of our restaurants and onto the sidewalk to light up, and yet you can still order an appetizer off the menu that delivers a day’s worth of calories and enough grease to turn your colon into a Roman candle. Go figure.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker) Page xii
• “Sixty-seven percent of the population—142 million Americans—are overweight or obese. And a new forecast by University of Chicago researchers estimates that the number of Americans living with diabetes will nearly double in the next 25 years to 44.1 million people.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker) Page xii
• “Belly fat—the fat that pushes your waist out—is the most dangerous fat on your body. And it’s one of the reasons why the Abs Diet emphasizes losing belly fat—because doing so means you’ll live longer. Belly fat is classified as visceral fat; that means it is located behind your abdominal wall and surrounds your internal organs. Because it carries an express-lane pass to your heart and other important organs, visceral fat is the fat that can kill you. Just consider one University of Alabama-Birmingham study in which researchers used seven different measurements to determine a person’s risks of cardiovascular disease. They concluded that the amount of visceral fat the subjects carried was the single best predictor of heart disease risk.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker) Page xiii
• “One pound of muscle requires your body to burn up to 50 extra calories a day just to maintain that muscle.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker) Page xv
• “Video games have displaced a major activity in the lives of teenage boys, but that activity isn’t reading; it’s playing outdoors. In 1980, many boys spent lots of time playing outdoors. Today, those boys are more likely to spend that time indoors with the GameCube or the PlayStation or the Xbox. That may be one reason why boys today are four times more likely to be obese compared with boys a generation ago.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 38
• “Overweight people are: 50 percent more likely to develop heart disease (obese: up to 100 percent) Up to 360 percent more likely to develop diabetes (obese: up to 1,020 percent) 16 percent more likely to die of a first heart attack (obese: 49 percent) Roughly 50 percent more likely to have total cholesterol above 250 (obese: up to 122 percent) 14 percent less attractive to the opposite sex (obese: 43 percent) Likely to spend 37 percent more a year at the pharmacy (obese: 105 percent) Likely to stay 19 percent longer in the hospital (obese: 49 percent) 20 percent more likely to have asthma (obese: 50 percent) Up to 31 percent more likely to die of any cause (obese: 62 percent) 19 percent more likely to die in a car crash (obese: 37 percent) 120 percent more likely to develop stomach cancer (obese: 330 percent) Up to 90 percent more likely to develop gallstones (obese: up to 150 percent) 590 percent more likely to develop esophageal cancer (obese: 1,520 percent) 35 percent more likely to develop kidney cancer (obese: 70 percent) 14 percent more likely to have osteoarthritis (obese: 34 percent) 70 percent more likely to develop high blood pressure (obese: up to 170 percent)” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 4
• “Protein is recommended for several reasons. It fills you up, it digests more slowly than fast-absorbing carbs do, it spurs lean muscle growth, and it even elevates fat burn, as research continues to prove.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 5
• “A study in the International Journal of Obesity determined that eating two eggs in the morning promotes weight loss. In the experiment, overweight subjects ate a 340-calorie breakfast of either two eggs or a single bagel 5 days a week for 8 weeks. Those who ate these inexpensive protein-packed wonders, the study found, lost 65 percent more weight than the bagel eaters, with no effect on their cholesterol or triglyceride levels.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 5
• “Another new study in the journal Obesity finds that people who eat nuts just twice a week are about 30 percent less likely to gain weight than people who rarely eat nuts. Similar research from the City of Home National Medical Center in Duarte, California, determined that study participants who ate a few ounces of almonds every day lost 6½ inches from their waists in 24 weeks, 50 percent more than dieters who ate the same number of calories without the fiber-rich nuts.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life(The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 6
• “Eat, then write. People who kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t, according to a study of 1,685 overweight or obese adults at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 6
• “Walk to the water fountain. An Australian study showed that workers who sit for more than 6 hours a day were up to 68 percent more likely to be overweight or obese than those who sat less. The take-home advice: Get out of your chair and move around more. If you work on a computer all day, consider raising the screen and keyboard so that you can stand and do your work.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 6
• “A combination order of whole grains and regular exercise adds up to greater belly-fat loss. In a study conducted by researchers at Penn State University, 50 obese subjects were split into two groups. One was instructed to eat whole grains as their only grain choices; the other was told to avoid whole grains. Both groups were encouraged to do moderate exercise. After 12 weeks, the exercisers who ate whole grains lost a significantly larger percentage of belly fat than those who ate refined grains. Furthermore, their levels of C-reactive protein, a warning signal of heart disease and diabetes, had dropped by 38 percent, while the people who avoided whole-grain foods saw no change in their CRP levels.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 7
• “The blubber around your organs, known as visceral fat, is more likely than surface fat to cause disease. Now a new study in Obesity shows that exercise is crucial for keeping visceral fat off. In the study, people who lost belly weight and exercised 80 minutes a week didn’t regain visceral fat after a year. Subjects who stopped working out, but who still kept a healthy weight, had 25 percent more of the dangerous fat.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life(The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 9
• The average American is carrying around about 30 billion fat cells. Each of those buggers is filled with greasy substances called lipids. When you pump doughnuts, corn chips, and fried Snickers bars into your system, those fat cells can expand—up to 1,000 times their original size. But a fat cell can get only so big; once it reaches its physical limit, it starts to behave like a long-running sitcom. It creates spin-offs, leaving you with two or more fat cells for the price of one. Only problem: Fat cells have a no-return policy. Once you have a fat cell, you’re stuck with it. So as you grow fatter and double the number of fat cells in your body, you also double the difficulty you’ll have losing the lipids inside them. The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker). Paige 11
• “In any case, abdominal fat doesn’t just sit there and do nothing; it’s active. It functions like a separate organ, releasing substances that can be harmful to your body. For instance, it releases free fatty acids that impair your ability to break down the hormone insulin (too much insulin in your system can lead to diabetes). Fat also secretes substances that increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes, as well as the stress hormone cortisol (high levels of cortisol are also associated with diabetes and obesity as well as with high blood pressure). Abdominal fat bears the blame for many health problems because it resides within striking distance of your heart, liver, and other organs—pressing on them, feeding them poisons, and messing with their daily function.”  The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page11
• “Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature heart attacks in the United States. Imagine that—overeating is worse for you than smoking a pack a day. We’ve forced the smokers out of our restaurants and onto the sidewalk to light up, and yet you can still order an appetizer off the menu that delivers a day’s worth of calories and enough grease to turn your colon into a Roman candle. Go figure.” The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker)
• “For example, the incidence of cancer among obese patients is 33 percent higher than among lean ones, according to a Swedish study. The World Health Organization estimates that up to one-third of cancers of the colon, kidney, and digestive tract are caused by being overweight and inactive.”  The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page14
• “Federal health surveys show that, as of 2008, the average American man’s waist measures around 40 inches, an increase of 5 inches compared with 40 years ago. In the past four decades, the average American woman’s waist size has grown from 30 inches to 37 inches.”  The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page13
• “Upper-body obesity is also the most significant risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which the soft tissue in the back of your throat collapses during sleep, blocking your airway. When that happens, your brain signals you to wake up and start breathing again. As you nod off once more, the same thing happens, and it can continue hundreds of times during the night—making you chronically groggy and unable to get the rest your body needs.”  The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page14
• “Fat’s role is that it can impede muscles that inflate and ventilate the lungs, forcing you to work harder to get enough air. When Australian researchers studied 313 patients with severe obesity, they found that 62 percent of them with a waist circumference of 49 inches or more had a serious sleep disturbance and that 28 perecnt of obese patients with smaller waists (35 to 49 inches) had sleep problems.”  The New Abs Diet: The 6-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life (The Abs Diet) (David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker).  Page14