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PORT OF SPAIN (AFP) – Commonwealth leaders representing two billion people on the planet on Saturday threw their combined weight behind upcoming climate talks, driving momentum towards a new carbon-cutting treaty. "We, as the Commonwealth, representing one third of the world's population, believe the time for action on climate change has come," Australian Prime Minister Rudd said as he unveiled an agreement struck at a summit in Trinidad. The Port of Spain Climate Change Consensus, backed by all 53 member states of the Commonwealth, supported the December 7-18 climate talks in Copenhagen and committed to seeking a legally binding treaty...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Parents may be setting their daughters up for weight problems simply by allowing them to drink two or more sweetened drinks daily while young, study findings hint. Higher sweetened beverage intake, such as sodas and fruit and sport drinks, at age 5 years was linked to more body fat during the following 10 years, Dr. Laura Fiorito, at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park, told Reuters Health in an email. Higher body fat during the teen years has been tied to long-term overweight and other health problems such as diabetes and later heart disease,...

The study, conducted by Aletha Akers, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and colleagues, further links girls at weight extremes with an increased risk for engaging in sexual risk-taking behaviors. "This study will contribute to sexual health education prevention efforts, which can be tailored to address how cultural norms regarding body size may influence adolescent sexual decision making. Knowing how a girl perceives her weight may be just as important as knowing her actual weight," noted Dr. Akers. Of the nearly 7,200 high school girls asked about their sexual...

Lose weight while you sleep? It sounds too good to be true—but recent research indicates that there is a connection between how much you weigh and the amount of shut-eye you get per night. Two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, help to control appetite. When you do not get enough rest, levels of ghrelin, which increases hunger, rise; levels of leptin, which promotes feelings of fullness, sink. A study in the May issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology found a significant disruption in nighttime ghrelin levels in chronic insomniacs. According to the study, this hormone imbalance leads insomniacs to experience an increase in appetite...

As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week. Thursday is "body wedge" class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from...

I just purchased a package of Peanut Butter M&M's that has led me to ponder three things: Why does the name M&M's contain an apostrophe-s? Why is the package Net weight 1.63 oz.? Maybe related to a metric measure you might suggest. Well they also list that at 46.2g. Why not 1.5 oz. or 50g? Why can't they balance the colors? There's always at least one under represented color. My package has 6 blue, 6 orange, 5 green, 4 brown, 3 yellow, and only 2 red.

Being overweight won’t kill you — it may even help you live longer. That’s the latest from a study that analyzed data on 11,326 Canadian adults, ages 25 and older, who were followed over a 12-year period. The report, published online last week in the journal Obesity, found that overall, people who were overweight but not obese — defined as a body mass index of 25 to 29.9 — were actually less likely to die than people of normal weight, defined as a B.M.I. of 18.5 to 24.9. By contrast, people who were underweight, with a B.M.I. under 18.5, were...

Last year, 200,000 Americans had weight loss surgery and while gastric bypass surgery can significantly reduce weight, the surgery comes with risks. Now a procedure that was once commonly used to treat ulcers is being tested as a safe alternative to weight loss surgery. Action News reporter Kimberly Tere has the details. The vagus nerve controls your feeling of hunger. Some even say every single thing the vagus nerve does is designed to make you gain weight. That is why San Francisco Doctor Robert Lustig is testing laparoscopic vagotomy, a surgery in which the vagus nerve is cut. Cutting the...

So let’s add another item to the list of impossibles: I have lost more than 20 pounds in less than 24 hours on more than a dozen occasions. The most extreme example was 33 lbs. — from 185 lbs. to 152 lbs. — in less than 20 hours, which produced a rather unpleasant 120 beat-per-minute resting pulse while attempting to sleep. In 1999, I was a gold medalist at the Sanshou (Chinese kickboxing) national championships in the 165-lb. weight class (here is a video sample of Sanshou). This is perhaps the most controversial accomplishment in the 4HWW, as I make...

ELMENDORF AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska, March 16, 2009 – Air Force Airman Derrick Bell has found that a lot of determination and a little help from his friends helped him meet his goal of returning to military service when it seemed that both his age and weight might have prevented it. Air Force Airman Derrick Bell, left, after he lost 115 pounds to join the Air Force Reserve’s 477th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska. On right, before he spent 11 months to reaching his goal. Courtesy photo  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The 38-year-old...

UPDATED to include Dane Patterson's apology. A followup to my Thursday story about the fabricated account of "Biggest Loser" eliminee Dane Patterson running a marathon, when in fact he only ran 23 miles: The producers of "The Biggest Loser" are taking full responsibility for the misrepresentation. Here's the apology put out late Thursday night by Reveille, the company behind "TBL": "As the Executive Producers of 'The Biggest Loser' we would like to make an official apology and set the record straight with regards to the claim in last night's episode that Dane completed a marathon in Arizona. "After seeing on...

The average American woman is 53 lbs. heavier than the typical fashion show "runway" model, according to a new study. This video report shows graphics comparing the size of the average runway model (5'9", 110 lbs), to the average American woman (5'4", 163 lbs). I was surprised the average American woman is 5'4" tall. I know this is a little off-topic for what we usually post here at Freedom's Lighthouse, but I could not resist posting this report. If you have ever thought those models don't look like virtually anyone you see in real life, now you know why --...

1/2/2009 - MANAS AIR BASE, Kyrgyz Republic (AFPN) -- "I knew I was unhealthy and had to make some changes, especially when I thought about my five-year-old looking up at me," said Senior Airman Jarvis Johnson. "Without changes, I wouldn't be around to see him and my daughters grow up." When you ask someone what they can accomplish in six months -- just 24 short weeks -- they may say something like, "I plan to finish a couple college courses," or maybe, "I'm going to read a couple books," or "Tour a little." Many may say they are going to...

For the first time in a decade, losing weight will NOT be one of my New Year's resolutions. The reason? After years of piling on the padding (and a few failed weight-loss attempts) I've lost 60 lbs. over the past four months. I've only blogged about diet once and did so hesitantly. But that two-year-old post is still getting consistent hits. Everybody is Googling for the silver bullet to shedding pounds. They think that there must be some secret diet, high-tech fitness equipment, or miracle pill that will finally give them health. As I said back then, fat people offer...

RAWAH, Iraq, Dec. 9, 2008 – Before Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Allan Desruisseaux could become a Marine, he had to become a loser. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Allan Desruisseaux, a telephone system and personal computer repair technician with Regimental Combat Team 5’s Provisional Rifle Platoon 3, patrols the streets of Rawah, Iraq, Dec. 4, 2008. Desruisseaux dropped from 326 pounds to his Marine Corps recruit training graduation weight of 189. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. M. Trent Lowry  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Desruisseaux lost more than 100 pounds between his first visit to a Marine Corps...

Reviewed by Brunilda Nazario, MDAre there really certain foods that can help you lose weight and keep it off? We're not talking about any so-called miracle food that "melts the fat" (does the cabbage soup diet ring any bells?). These are foods that really can help you lose or maintain weight, either by helping you to eat less or to burn more calories -- or, in some cases, maybe even helping to decrease your body fat.Experts say there are two basic categories of foods that can be considered "keeping it off superfoods" because they fill your tummy without piling on...

Thinking too much can make you eat more. Researchers at Universite Laval say intellectual work raises peoples' calorie intake and could be a reason for obesity. A group of 14 students were invited to eat as much as they wanted at a buffet, after taking part in three different tasks: * Sitting down and relaxing * Reading and summarizing a text * Finishing memory and attention tests on a computer All the tasks turned out to be low energy -- students only needed three more calories to do the mental work than to rest. However, they spontaneously ate 203 more...

EDINBURG -- Authorities scrambled Friday to figure out how to arrest, incarcerate and prosecute a woman estimated to weigh nearly half a ton who was indicted on capital murder charges earlier this week. Mayra Rosales, 27, has remained under house arrest since she was charged in March with beating her 2-year-old nephew to death. But now that her case has moved into the state court system, law enforcement officials must address a whole new set of logistical problems before it can go to trial.

I Read a story in the Washington Post about the death of a young woman. This ultra-huge died in her sleep. Her mom blamed it on obesity. Possibly so ... her mom is obese herself. In the story the mom bemoans the lack of "affordable" weight loss clinics and exercise facilities. Oh boy ... here we go. As we know, in the modern USA every single item or service that a person could possibly need or even want must be affordable. The new mantra is that there is something wrong with our country, our economy and our government if someone...

Six young brothers and sisters face being taken from their parents and put into care because they are overweight. Social workers have warned they will intervene if three of the youngsters – including a 12-year-old boy who weighs 16 stone – do not shed several pounds in three months. The parents have been told they risk losing all their children if there is no improvement in the 12-year-old or two of his sisters aged 11 and three – who weigh 12 stone and four stone – by June. The parents could lose their obese children if they cannot help them...

It was alleged he spent $80,000 over a 10-year period on hookers. But the morality of public servants and the hypocrisy of high office, the fact that he wanted “unsafe” sex - this wasn’t what people were talking about. Most of the focus was on “Kristen”, the prostitute he met at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC and booked for $1,000 an hour. She was described as, “American, petite, very pretty, brunette, 5 feet 5 inches, and 105 pounds”. My female friends in New York were outraged. “105 pounds? No way.” This was the biggest grievance. Not that she was...

“The obesity epidemic has absolutely been exaggerated,” said Dr. Vincent Marks. I once ticked off the local franchiser of Weight Watchers by pointing out my weight gain after quitting smoking was no big deal. OK, the column should not have pointed out that the Nazis did not feed people to death in the Holocaust. Did I mention she’s Jewish? Now we have been told to the point of ridiculousness that we face an obesity epidemic — an abuse of a noun that really medical professionals, of all people, should avoid. The definition of overweight and obese were redefined to the...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The central Mexican city of Aguascalientes is considering paying a cash bonus to local police who slim down, amid the increasingly common sight of overweight officers in Mexico. Aguascalientes city hall plans to decide next week on whether to pay 100 pesos (5 pounds) for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) that officers lose, a police spokesman said on Thursday. "We do have some fat officers. We have been encouraging them for a while to lose weight, to be more agile, to do sport," he added. Obesity is one of the biggest health problems in Mexico, where diabetes...

HEALTH and beauty. They seem inextricable. That smiling, slender woman on the cover of Self magazine. The ripped guy looking out from the pages of Men’s Health. They’re thin. Their eyes are bright. They look like they’re bursting with energy. They may well be. But they might be better off if they had listened to their grandmother and... --snip-- Today, poorer people are most likely to be fat and so, said Abigail Saguy, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, “fatness is associated with downward mobility.” Weight has thus become a moral issue couched in health concerns,...

some doctors are now warning that bariatic surgery - which jumped 40% in frequency in 2005 from the year before - can increase a patient's risk of a rare, yet serious neurological condition called Wernicke's encephalopathy. A result of a vitamin B deficiency (no doubt spurred by the poor digestion that removal of large portions of the stomach and intestine can cause), this condition can cause confusion and impaired coordination, memory, and vision.

Obesity is more dangerous than smoking and will dramatically shorten the lives of millions, a landmark study has found. While smoking reduces life by an average of ten years, the research says being seriously overweight can cut life expectancy by as much as 13 years. The Foresight report, written by 250 leading scientists, says Britain's obesity crisis is so severe that it would take at least 30 years to reverse. If current trends continue, by 2050 about 60 per cent of men, 50 per cent of women and 25 per cent of children in the UK will be clinically obese...

Americans are obsessed with fat because fatness has become a symbol for poverty, downward mobility, nonwhiteness and socially marginal status in general. Fear and hatred of fat has very little to do with the health risks associated with being "overweight" and "obese" (which are wholly imaginary and highly exaggerated

The original prototype for the kilogram, stored under lock and key near Paris, appears to be losing weight. The cylinder, which dates back from 1889, seems to have lost 50 micrograms, compared with the average of dozens of copies of the original. Richard Davis, of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, said: "The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart." The one in Sevres is the original that the...

I don’t often remark on entertainment subjects; this is the sort of thing I leave to people whose childhoods included eating paint chips while listening to Casey Kasem. With that said, the Britney Spears debacle during the MTV Video Music Awards is a situation that requires a comment. I will leave the topic of her lip syncing, dancing, and speculation of her intoxication level to those who were apologists for Marv Albert after he slipped on a leather teddy and bit a prostitute a decade of so ago. It is the criticism of her body that I am having a...

DALLAS, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have determined a single "skinny gene" might alone control whether a body tends to accumulate fat. "From worms to mammals, this gene controls fat formation," said Dr. Jonathan Graff of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the study's senior author. "It could explain why so many people struggle to lose weight and suggests an entirely new direction for developing medical treatments that address the current epidemic of diabetes and obesity." The gene, called adipose, was discovered more than 50 years ago but its mechanism was not determined. In the new study, researchers...

Rules require link only http://www.theolympian.com/opinion/story/117372.html

HAVANA - A statement signed by Fidel Castro Wednesday said his weight was stable and he was eating solid foods after months of intravenous feeding that followed several operations, including an initial surgery that did not go well. The statement from the 80-year-old Cuban leader said he was taking all medicines orally and his weight had stabilized. "I tell everyone simply that I am getting better and maintain a stable weight of about 176 pounds," he wrote. "It wasn't just one operation, but various. Initially it wasn't successful and had a bearing on my prolonged recuperation." He added that the...

The bad body image blues has been hitting some big names in music hard these days. First, British sensation Lily Allen posted on her MySpace blog that she was researching liposuction because she thinks she is chubby. Now Star magazine (via I'm Not Obsessed) is reporting that Kelly Clarkson is on a mission to lose weight in order to get a boyfriend.

This is from the Journal Of American Medical Association published on 7 March 2007. The authors are Christopher D. Gardner, PhD et al and the study was sponsored by Stanford University. This is a prospective study of these diets. The Atkins Diet is very low carbohydrate. The LEARN DIET is a comprehensive lifestyle, excercise, attitude and relationship approach that includes a diet low in fat and high carbohydrate. The Ornish Diet is very high in carbohydrates. The Zone Diet is low in carbohydrate. These diets are popular and can be easily Googled. Seventy or more premenopausal women randomly assigned to...

"Full fat dairy products are more likely to keep you slim than comparable low fat foods. That's the apparently topsy-turvy conclusion of a new Swedish study, which shows that the fat encourages calcium uptake. Researchers at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute now reckon that daily consumption of full fat dairy products will lead to a reduction of obesity, reported Svenska Dagbladet. "

CHICAGO - Want to spend less at the pump? Lose some weight. That's the implication of a new study that says Americans are burning nearly 1 billion more gallons of gasoline each year than they did in 1960 because of their expanding waistlines. Simply put, more weight in the car means lower gas mileage. Using recent gas prices of $2.20 a gallon, that translates to about $2.2 billion more spent on gas each year. "The bottom line is that our hunger for food and our hunger for oil are not independent. There is a relationship between the two," said University...

Obese men are more likely to be infertile than their slimmer peers, according to the first study to look at whether a man's weight influences a couple's fertility. Every excess 10 kilograms may cut a man's fertility by 10 per cent, Dr Markku Sallmen of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki and colleagues at National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, write in the September issue of Epidemiology. Sallmen was a post-doc at NIEHS when he conducted the study. The researchers looked at couples

Being a little overweight can kill you, according to new research that leaves little room for denial that a few extra pounds is harmful. Baby boomers who were even just a tad pudgy were more likely to die prematurely than those who were at a healthy weight, U.S. researchers reported Tuesday. While obesity has been known to contribute to early death, the link between being overweight and dying prematurely has been controversial. Some experts have argued that a few extra pounds does no harm. However, this is one of the first major studies to account for the factors of smoking...

In the 30-plus years that Richard Atkinson has been studying obesity, he has always maintained that overeating doesn’t really explain it all. His epiphany came early in his career, when he was a medical fellow at U.C.L.A. engaged in a study of people who weighed more than 300 pounds and had come in for obesity surgery. “The general thought at the time was that fat people ate too much,” Atkinson, now at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me recently. “And we documented that fat people do eat too much — our subjects ate an average of 6,700 calories a day. But...

(FOX NEWS) - Rabbi Marc Sack drank diet soft drinks, cycled about 70 miles a week, and limited sweets and he struggled with hunger, "a big issue for me was appetite control." But when the weight wasn't coming off, he saw a dietitian who told him to stop the diet soda. "that was a big surprise to me," said Sack. "I thought I was doing something great by only drinking diet coke, and she really caught me off guard with that one." Jennifer Broder Katz is Rabbi Sack's food coach. She says artificial sweeteners like those found in diet sodas...

EVERY time Marie Cabrera goes shopping, she brings along her mental checklist of things to avoid. It includes products with artery-clogging trans fats, cholesterol-inducing saturated fats, MSG and the bogeyman du jour, high-fructose corn syrup. That last one, she says, is the hardest to avoid unless she happens to be shopping in the small natural-foods section of her supermarket. As she pushed her shopping cart down an aisle of the Super Stop & Shop near her hometown of Warren, R.I., recently, Ms. Cabrera, a retired schoolteacher, offered her thoughts on why she steers clear of high-fructose corn syrup: "It's been...

Immortality is within our grasp . . . In Fantastic Voyage, high-tech visionary Ray Kurzweil teams up with life-extension expert Terry Grossman, M.D., to consider the awesome benefits to human health and longevity promised by the leading edge of medical science--and what you can do today to take full advantage of these startling advances. Citing extensive research findings that sound as radical as the most speculative science fiction, Kurzweil and Grossman offer a program designed to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you should be in good health and good spirits when the more extreme...

HARTFORD, Conn.,   Connecticut's state legislature voted on Thursday to ban sales of sodas and other sugary beverages in state elementary, middle and high schools as part of an effort to stem teen obesity.Gov. Jodi Rell has pledged to sign the bill, which would make Connecticut the fourth U.S. state with a strong law in schools to trim the growing American teenage waistline. The ban includes all regular and diet sodas, along with "electrolyte replacement beverages" such as Gatorade. The only drinks allowed to go on sale in schools would be bottled water, milk or 100-percent fruit and vegetable drinks. "The...

The users call the drug Lizzie, the Big Brother or sometimes Gilly. On blogs they rave over its uncanny ability to melt away pounds, although some are wary of its side effects, which can include nausea and strange welts. The users are not fad dieters or methamphetamine addicts, but people with diabetes. And the subject of their rhapsodies is not a gray-market diet pill sold on late-night television but Byetta, a federally approved diabetes medicine, available only by prescription, whose popularity and sales have soared since its introduction last June. For diabetics, the weight loss caused by Byetta comes as...

Indian minister said offering $10m for beheading cartoonistBy Haaretz Service Last update - 08:38 19/02/2006 An Indian state minister has offered a reward of more than $10 million and a prospective killer's weight in gold to anyone who beheads one of the cartoonists who angered Muslims by depcting the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, the London Sunday Times reported this week. The offer follows a Pakistani cleric's reward of $1 million and a car for the killing of one of the cartoonists. The new, larger reward was announced by Yaqoob Qureshi, minister of minority welfare in the Indian state...

U.S. Marine Corps Pfc. Glennon Parks Jr. Mailman Sheds Weight, Obtains Age Waiver to Join Corps By Sgt. Scott Whittington 4th Marine Corps District EVANSVILLE, Ind., Feb. 14, 2006 —He already has an eagle on his uniform, but now he’s ready to put that one on hold for another – the eagle, globe and anchor. This 34-year-old, postal worker hung up his mailbag and headed for Parris Island Oct. 12 but not without a few bumps in the road. Glennon Parks Jr., has been a postal worker for the last 15 years. He started at the U.S. Postal Service...

SYDNEY, Australia - A prison inmate in Australia lost a dramatic amount of weight, squeezed through a gap in the wall and escaped, a newspaper reported. Robert Cole, 35, was serving time for sex offenses and armed robbery in a prison hospital in New South Wales state when officials noticed he was missing early Wednesday, The Sydney Morning Herald reported in its online edition. Cole, who had recently undergone a dramatic weight loss, slipped his 123-pound body through a gap between the bars on a cell window and a brick wall at which he'd been chipping away, the paper quoted...

Baghdad's mortuary reels under the weight of killings By Oliver Poole in Baghdad (Filed: 07/11/2005) The bodies are arriving at the mortuary in Baghdad in such large numbers that the orderlies have run out of places to store them properly. They are forced to leave them in piles in the overloaded freezer compartments or send them for burial in anonymous graves. Grief at the funeral of a driver, killed on Saturday by gunmen Last month there were 972 corpses received, almost all victims of violent death. The vast majority were brought in with bullet holes. Many had their hands bound...

Habitual and enthusiastic singers may be more predisposed to put on weight because exertions in the lungs act as a trigger for their appetite. A new study suggests that hormones released during singing may be responsible for the excess weight common among opera singers. Peter Osin, consultant at the Royal Marsden Hospital, suggests the mechanism of singing encourages the lung cells to release chemicals including leptin, a protein made by the body's fat cells that is involved in the regulation of appetite. (C) 2005 Evening Standard - London. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved

From the Scotsman, we have the alarming discovery that overeating at work is a big part of obesity. According to the story: Almost three-quarters of Scots blamed a poor diet at work for weight gain and the same amount admitted the type of food they eat directly affects how well they work. The results have led doctors to call for a "Jamie Oliver-style revolution" of the work canteen, with fruit replacing fry-ups. Workers said that stress and a lack of time leaves little room for healthy eating. More than half admitted struggling with low energy levels as a result, with...