When cardiologist Ethan Weiss concluded his 12-week study of weight loss and intermittent fasting, the results surprised him. The randomized trial set up by Weiss, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, split participants into a control group and another group who ate all their meals between noon and 8 p.m. He expected to find more weight loss in the fasting group. But the results he published in JAMA Internal Medicine last fall showed something else: that those following the time-restricted eating schedule lost roughly the same amount of weight as those in the control group. What’s more, the weight they did lose was lean muscle mass, and not fat.
Randomized controlled trials are considered the gold standard when it comes to scientific studies. Yet when it comes to figuring out how to lose weight, or which sort of diet is best, it’s often the case that different trials yield much different results, even when participants follow similar nutritional plans. (Another 12-week trial of time-restricted eating showed the opposite effect of Weiss’s study: Participants who followed a time-restricted schedule lost weight without losing muscle mass.)
This muddle is enough to leave anyone scratching their head. And it points to a bigger issue in the science of weight loss: There’s a lot that researchers have figured out, but there’s still no consensus on the single optimal diet or way to lose weight—and there might not ever be.
If you’re looking for a quick, personal-trainer-approved way to burn out your shoulders, back, chest, and arms, an upper-body circuit workout can be a fantastic choice for your next routine.
Circuit training—where you go through a bunch of exercises without resting between them—is one of the most efficient ways to work all the upper-body muscle groups you’re targeting. Plus, when you don’t take any rest, you get a cardio boost along with the strength-building benefits of weight training, like getting stronger, maintaining bone density, and offsetting an age-related decline in muscle mass.
This workout, created by NASM-certified personal trainer Alicia Jamison, a trainer at Bodyspace Fitness in New York City, predominantly uses pulling and pushing exercises to fire up your entire upper body. “By hitting all of those muscle groups, you’re avoiding muscle imbalances, which can lead to injury,” Jamison tells SELF.
Pulling exercises get your muscles to contract as you pull your arms toward your body—whether you’re using a weight or not. For this workout, Jamison chose the bodyweight pulldown and single-arm row to light up the muscles in the back of your body, like your rhomboids (the upper-back muscles that help you retract your shoulder blades) and your latissimus dorsi (the wide muscles that stretch from your armpit to your spine). Strengthening those back muscles helps with posture, especially if you spend most of the day sitting down, she explains.
Our homes are our sanctuaries—a fact that became clear to a lot of people this past year when they suddenly had to spend all their time there. But your indoor air might be dirtier than you think, and that could be making it uncomfortable at home, and potentially even make you sick.
There are a few things you can do to help and devices you can buy, like an air purifier, a dehumidifier, and a humidifier. But they aren’t cheap, so you don’t need to spend the money on anything if you aren’t already struggling with your indoor air quality. These are potential tools, not necessities. While their names are self-explanatory, it’s not as easy to figure out when each one is actually needed in your home. We talked to experts, read research reports, and tested some products. Below is what we found, and what we advise.
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You’ll be seeing more air purifiers in schools and offices as the world deals with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Read on to see which devices make sense for your home. Photograph: Getty Images
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Five World War II bombers took off from a Florida airfield on Oct. 5, 1967, to bomb the American South. An article that ran that morning in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that three B-17s and two PV-2s laden with 10,000 pounds of death-dealing cargo each would carry out their missions “with the City of Sarasota and eastern Manatee as their targets.”
While the bombers were certainly at war, they weren’t dropping explosives. Their enemy was a millimeters-long, brownish-red insect known to scientists as Solenopsis invicta, meaning “invincible ant,” and to lay people as the fire ant, aka “ants from hell” and “them devils.” The bombers were to unload mirex, a poison usually applied to grits, onto the critter.
By the late 1960s, the fire ant had been in the American South for more than 30 years. Southerners spoke of ruined crops, destroyed wildlife, and the ants’ fiery sting. How much damage the ants had actually caused was uncertain, but it was enough for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to declare war on the pest. During an 11-year campaign, more than 143 million pounds of mirex were dropped across 77,220 square miles of land from Texas to Florida, costing close to $200 million. The outcome? The ants nearly doubled their range. The mirex, which was later found to be a carcinogen, persisted in the environment for decades, accumulating in birds’ eggs, mammals’ milk, and human tissues. The world’s leading ant researcher, E.O. Wilson, dubbed the mirex program the “Vietnam of entomology.”
As the pandemic has raged, we have been told to sequester ourselves to stay well and safeguard others. For many of us, that has meant living a more housebound life than normal.
We have developed an intimate familiarity with the textures of our couch. We have grown deeply attached to the softest items in our wardrobe. We have pounded vitamin D supplements to compensate for our vampiric relationship to the sun.
Now as we slowly emerge from our collective hibernation, it’s unsurprising that many of our bodies have changed.
But where we might see new curves, the $70 billion-a-year American weight-loss industry sees only profit. And so the dieting hustlers and charlatans have been pelting us with offers of products and routines that promise to strip us of the “quarantine 15” (while stripping us of our cash).
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Don’t let the weight-loss industry shame you into thinking “back to normal” means a return to calorie counting and appetite suppressant lollipops.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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James' World 2 