“ Change Your Lifestyle to Conquer Obesity”
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It is rampant in today's society that it is now considered a public health concern.

When a person's intake of energy, which he gets from the food he eats, exceeds that of the energy burned or expended, the excess energy is stored in the body as fatty tissues.

Over time, the amount of fat accumulates.

When the accumulation of fat posses a serious risk to one’s health, the condition is known as obesity.

One way to tell if a person is obese is to use Body Mass Index or BMI. The BMI is computed by dividing a person's weight (kilograms) by their height (meters) squared. If the BMI is 30.0 or higher, the person is classified as obese. Other methods involve measuring waist circumference or body fat percentage.

Obesity is a dangerous and life-threatening condition. Obesity can lead to other health problems such as diabetes, heart failure, high blood pressure, and various other afflictions. Obese people have a shorter life expectancy than people with normal weight.

Obesity can also negatively affect one's mental and social wellbeing. People suffering from obesity are more likely to have self-esteem issues as well as suffer from depression.

In order to conquer the growing obesity epidemic, it vital to live a healthy lifestyle. Doing this will result to a longer life expectancy, as well as improving the overall quality of life.

To conquer obesity, you must simply expend more energy than you consume. This means practicing healthy eating habits as well as engaging in physical activity.

With all the available diets today, choosing one which is right for you can be a difficult task. It is important to remember that different diets work well for different people.

When choosing a diet, pick one that suits your particular needs. More importantly, choose one that you can maintain for a long period of time. Don't go for the trendy short-term diets that promise quick weight loss. Eating right and losing weight takes time, effort, and dedication.

Some good eating habits to practice are:

1) Avoid eating food that are rich in fat and carbohydrates. Overeating can greatly contribute to the fat stored in your body.

2) Eat a balanced diet, consisting of a variety of healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables.

3) Have meals regularly. Avoid impulsive eating, especially late night bingeing.

4) Take your time when eating. Chew food thoroughly before you swallow in order to facilitate digestion.

In order to maintain balance, you need to burn the nutrients that you have taken in. This can be done by engaging in physical activities. This means watching less television and doing more exercise.

Exercise can encompass a variety of activities that include cycling, swimming, playing sports, jogging, etc. Just like choosing a diet, pick an activity that is right for you. It must be something that you can enjoy and do often.

Take not: the activity does not have to be overly strenuous. Just walking around the block a few times a day can be greatly beneficial.

It is also a good idea to incorporate physical activities in your daily routine. Here are some ways to achieve this:

1) Try to get some household work done. Things like cleaning or doing improvements in the house are good forms of exercise and will make the surroundings more pleasant.

2) Avoid driving short distances. If it is possible, try to walk or ride a bike instead.

3) Avoid using elevators or other lifts. If possible, use the stairs.

4) Don't waste another day mulling around, eating potato chips while watching TV.

Obesity is a real problem nowadays, but it can be beaten. By incorporating these simple lifestyle changes into your life, you can lose weight & conquer obesity with ease.

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A Funny Way to Lose Weight: Laugh It Off

Weight loss is hardly a laughing matter here in the Obese Nation, where two-thirds of adults are overweight or worse. But the newest aha! breakthrough in the battle of the bulge just might prompt a snicker — and maybe make you healthier.

One can lose weight by laughing.

No joke.
Instead of yo-yo dieting, try ho-ho dieting.

Before guffawing at the notion that mirth reduces girth, be aware that purposeful laughing is gaining a following. Thousands of laugh clubs worldwide now invite people to, well, laugh out loud together. A hybrid branch of psychology called "laughter therapy" is finding its way into hospitals and nursing homes with mood-lifter activities.

A new exercise movement called Laughtercising has created guidebooks and laugh-track CDs of nonstop hooting and howling to get the yuks started. Even scientists are examining the good laugh in clinical studies.

"When it comes to the weight-loss arena, I ask myself: Is laughter a gimmick or a gift?" says Katie Namrevo of Bellevue, Wash. "Some people don't take this seriously."

But she does. On the back cover of her 2004 book, "Laugh It Off! Weight Loss for the Fun of It," is a "before" photo showing her as a frumpy 50-year-old and an "after" photo as a 54-year-old who says she laughed off 35 pounds. Included in the $29.95 book is a laugh-track CD to jump-start your weight-reduction hilarity.

Namrevo was a "stress eater" who had tried all the diets and pills, she says. They only added stress and she didn't lose an ounce.

One day, after watching a TV program on laughter therapy, she headed to the fridge to "medicate" and decided to try laughing instead. Loud, long and hard, like a lunatic.

Giving new meaning to the phrase "belly laugh," Namrevo says she found that laughing 30 seconds to five minutes as often as 10 times a day, she no longer craved food. She began losing weight and she had more energy and a desire to exercise. "Laughing is a happy and healthy thing to do," she says.

Which may mean it's only a matter of time before Robin Williams and Chris Rock join the ranks of fitness trainers.

Laughing exercises "will definitely become a part of all the fitness clubs and yoga centers," predicts Thomas Varkey, a business consultant who two years ago founded the Laughter for Life club in Boston. Members meet for 25 minutes twice a month for yoga-inspired, roll-on-the-floor laugh-o-ramas.

Varkey's laughter club is one of about 1,000 in the United States and 3,000 worldwide. Most clubs are founded by "laughter leaders" trained and certified by either of two laughter-advocacy organizations, Laughter Club International, based in Mumbia, India, or the World Laughter Tour, based in Gahanna, Ohio.

"It gives a lot of exercise to our body and a kind of well-being," says Varkey. "The well-being helps us not to eat too much. When we are depressed, we tend to eat more. Laughing is antidepressant medicine."

When Chicago public relations professional Betty Hoeffner decided last year to make a CD of uproarious laughter, friends thought she was crazy. But she had been using concerted laughter to reduce stress for years and was convinced that laughing 10 minutes a day would reduced stress for others. So she founded the Laughtercising program that gradually builds up people's ability to laugh hard for 10 minutes at a time. And she produced the 60-minute "Laugh It Off" CD to trigger laugh contagion.

"It's just laughing, but you have to work up to the 10 minutes just as you would in any exercise program," says Hoeffner, who sells the $10 recording through online retailers and at her Laughtercising and HeyUgly Web sites, the latter dedicated to increasing self-esteem in teens. Sales are "picking up," she says. "It has just been word of mouth — ha! ha!"

Hoeffner breaks into a big raucous laugh as a spontaneous demonstration of proper technique. "You just keep going and going and you work up such a sweat and your abs are aching," she says. "You get so much energy you'll be vacuuming your house at 10 o'clock at night. Just try it!"

"The laughter industry is really funny to me," says physician Patch Adams, an alternative-medicine advocate and the icon of the health benefits of laughter, who returned last week from taking 32 clowns, a third of them high school students, on a tsunami relief trip to Sri Lanka.

"The clearest connection (of laughter to weight-loss) is that depression, boredom and loneliness are the gigantic reasons why people eat gigantic quantities of trash and fatness," says Adams, who founded the Gesundheit! Institute in suburban Washington and West Virginia, which works to bring fun and creativity to health care. "It's not really laughter that is a great power, but the life that leads to laughter and the readiness to laugh at things."

Jacki Kwan, a Bethesda, Md., clinical social worker and laughter club leader, says if there's weight loss from laughing it's because people feel better about themselves. "If laughter would help you lose weight, then I would be very thin and I am not. But in conjunction with other things, exercise and eating right, yes."

Kwan leads her "Ha!Ha!logy" therapeutic humor program twice weekly with elderly residents at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington. The 15-to-30-minute sessions start with breathing exercises, move to "ho-ho-ha-ha-ha" chanting and clapping, then a closed-mouth humming laugh exercise and finally the open-mouth-tongue-out lion laugh.

"When they begin to focus on the physical exercise of laughing, people tend to forget what's wrong," Kwan says. "Laughter brings you into the moment where there is no pain, fear and anger — only joy and love. The tendency is to feel better about who you are — which might lead someone to take better care of themselves and make better food choices and do exercise."

Science is finding that laughter alone produces biological benefits. A study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, presented last month to the American College of Cardiology's annual conference, showed that daily hearty laughing increases the flow of blood by expanding vessels constricted by stress.

"A belly laugh is internal jogging," says William Fry, associate professor emeritus of clinical psychiatry at Stanford University. Laughing involves "a great deal of physical exercise and muscular behavior" — 15 facial muscles plus dozens of others all over your body that flex and relax. Your pulse and respiration increase, oxygenating the blood.

"Laughing 100 to 200 times per day is the cardiovascular equivalent of rowing for 10 minutes," Fry calculates.

How often do people laugh per day? "Far more than they realize," he says, adding that any kind of laughter sets the respiratory apparatus and its muscles into motion.

Which means even brown-nosers who laugh too hard and too long at the boss' jokes are getting healthier, if not ahead.

Other studies have found that laughter bolsters the immune system, regulates abnormal heartbeat related to stress, improves the respiratory system and relaxes muscle tension.

Lee Berk, associate research professor of pathology and human anatomy at Loma Linda University and a pioneer in studying the physiological effects of laughter, says regular "happy or joyful laughter" in the right doses decreases detrimental hormones and increases beneficial ones.

"That we have proven," he says. "The biological changes we see with moderate, routine exercise is very similar to the changes we see with the constant use of mirthful laughter."

But can laughter make an ounce of difference in that midriff bulge? That hasn't been proved but can be extrapolated, Berk says. "We know the mechanisms," he says, explaining that stress increases cortisol, the hormone that causes craving for food, and laughing reduces it.

Berk figures that one day doctors will tell overweight patients to eat right, exercise regularly and get 15 minutes a day of good hearty laughter. "I'm doing it now with my patients," he says.

Robert Provine, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, thinks that would be a little premature, scientifically. In 2000, he wrote the book "Laughter: A Scientific Investigation." He says that for laughter to produce the same benefits as aerobic exercise it would require a long, sustained bout of hysterics.

"If we were treating laughter as a drug and it had to go for review before the FDA," he says, "it wouldn't pass because we really don't understand its physiological correlates and consequences."

He pauses to chuckle. "Having said that, a life with laughter is certainly more fulfilling than one without."

Of Namrevo's story of shedding pounds with laughter, Provine says: "If it works for her, that's fine. ... If you're laughing, you aren't eating."

But Namrevo thinks there's more to it than that: "I have to believe that it will work for anybody. The gift of laughter is available to everybody. It is amazing. And the side effects are all good."

http://www.ajc.com/health/content/health/0405/18laughtersize.html

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