Coming Soon: How important are the right shoes?
Are you weighing yourself? Does your BMI matter?
Health professionals disagree about how often you should check your weight because there are daily fluctuations. You don’t want to become so obsessed that it runs your life. But the reality is that it isn’t your weight in pounds that matters: it is the components of those pounds. Your body has lean muscle mass, fat, water, and bone mass. There are now scales that use electrical impedance and will read back these numbers to you. You can’t feel it, but as you step on the scale it passes an electrical current through the water in your body. Muscle holds more water than fat, and as the current makes it quick pass, it measures the resistance, and can produce a fairly accurate set of readings. Exercise, specifically strength training, builds your muscle and your bones, and you can see the payoff of your fitness program over time, even if your weight doesn’t change.
You can really see the importance of body composition when you compare it to the ubiquitous Body Mass Index (BMI) calculation. Try it for yourself: multiply your weight by 703 and divide that by your height in inches, squared.
BMI= (weight in lbs.) * 703)/(height in inches * height in inches)
This is an estimate of healthy body weight. Did you get an answer between 18-25? Congratulations. Our government considers you healthy. Check it out. http://www.consumer.gov/weightloss/bmi.htm
Here’s the problem. The BMI calculation never considered the composition of your weight. If you are really muscular and in very good shape your BMI may be higher than 25, labeling you overweight. I know a guy who couldn’t get health insurance because the insurance company considered him fat, according to the numbers. He is a trainer and in excellent shape. Conversely, one could be very thin, and have low bone and muscle mass and would be considered healthy even if they are out of breath walking up stairs. Sadly, many teenage girls fit this profile. Bottom line—if you are going to weigh yourself, pick a scale that can give you information that you can use.
There seems to be no agreement on how much water to drink every day. We read that we should drink eight glasses of water or juice; that coffee counts or doesn’t count; drink when you are thirsty or by the time you are thirsty you are already dehydrated. We can not make sense of conflicting data and advice, but we can know two things: Water is an important medium for our body to do its work—help digest our food, remove lactic acid from our sore muscles—and if we don’t have a prescription for how much liquid needs to go in our engines we can make individual adjustments based on what comes out. Your urine should be clear to pale yellow in color. The deeper the yellow, the more you need to drink. How easy is that?
Ok, that was a teaser headline because there is NO debate. Acne, oily or dry, your skin needs protection and there is a product out there for you, if you look. Melanoma will kill you and statistics suggest it's on
the rise. 15 SPF every morning before leaving the house, and serious stuff, greater than 30 SPF, if you are going out to play, regardless of the weather.
We've experimented with lots of stuff at my house. For your body, it's only a warm weather concern and it really doesn't matter--cheaper is probably better if you are going to need to reapply to keep the
protection going.
For your face, you need to have a daily fix. Dermatologists are now saying that your product should have Avobenzone 3% (sometimes called Parsol) as its active ingredient, and for a while, this was hard to find. The great news is that it's so much less greasy than the old stuff. Neutrogena is our product of choice because it has avobenzone, and it's really light feeling. It comes in lots of ranges of SPF so you can have your everyday 15 SPF, and your sport 55 SPF. Best of all, all big pharmacy chains carry it.