Feel better & lose fat off your waist...

Today's post: Tuesday, 12-2-2008

Yesterday, Monday, 12-1-2008, AP had an online health article saying that a new study found that people who were depressed were more likely to develop abdominal fat internally than people who were not.

1. The article didn’t mention that depressed people are proven to be more likely to NOT exercise or to exercise less than people who are more optimistic and feel better. And, regular exercise has been shown to help reduce abdominal fat both inside the body and outside. So that’s a very important omission.

But it works the other way too. If you make sure you get regular exercise each week no matter how you feel, it’s been shown that you become less depressed. Not only that, interval cardio and progressive strength training seem to work best at producing this effect.

So, one excellent solution to reducing the dangerous inside the body abdominal fat and the outside the body abdominal fat that many people would like to lose -- AND to feel better is to do regular sessions of interval cardio and progressive strength training each week.
This makes you less depressed and directly removes abdominal fat.

Regular exercise also helps to improve your sex life for both men and women other studies have shown.

2. The article quotes the researchers as speculating that depression releases excess cortisol; and since excess cortisol from too much stress has been shown to contribute to increases in belly fat, that may well be correct.

Meditation, Tai Chi, and other kinds of physical stress relief, if done regularly, have been shown to reduce the effect of excess stress or turn it off entirely. So that likely can help with this. And, a separate study was reported recently that said that meditation (& presumably similar stress relief practices) also helps people who recover from depression, stay recovered. So this looks like a good solution if you can do it. Regular exercise also helps relieve stress.

In addition, I got an intriguing report in the email I get from Brain Longevity expert, Dr Singh Khalsa, that eating whey protein either in a whey based protein supplement or in low fat ricotta cheese effectively lowers excess cortisol.

And, since adding servings of whey based protein supplements to your food each day increases your protein intake, this will also help you lose belly fat. Protein helps keep you from being hungry; and whey protein has virtually no carbs and is low in fat.

Most whey protein supplements have stevia, which I find has a disagreeable and over-powering flavor. (To me, it tastes like a badly done, imitation marshmallow flavoring.) In addition, since stevia tastes somewhat sweet but delivers no sugar to your body, it may tend to make you hungry or hungrier as the artificial noncaloric sweeteners do. But there is good news, because the supplement company, Jarrow, does offer a whey protein supplement that has no stevia added. You can buy or order Jarrow’s stevia-free whey protein supplement at virtually any health food store.

3. You can also take action to feel better & reverse depression. (When you stop being depressed, the depression stops producing excess cortisol since it is no longer present.)

Here are some effective methods that do NOT involve the addicting and only slightly effective drugs for depression.

a) This time of year particularly, due to less sunlight, some people often become depressed. This effect is called SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder.

There are three treatments that work.

The most expensive and least effective is Light Therapy where you get full spectrum light bulbs in your kitchen or bathroom or the room where you exercise & where you spend time early in the day and spend up to 45 minutes a day exposed to several very bright full spectrum light bulbs that are on.

It also has been shown to work to take even as little as a 10 or 15 minute walk at mid-day, possibly over your lunch hour. Yes it may look almost dark on very overcast winter days. But the actual light readings on a light meter are substantially higher than the light bulbs in the light therapy can deliver. The other benefit is that the walks burn some calories and add to your weekly exercise. So if it’s safe where you could walk at lunch time, which can vary with the weather in some places, this is a good one to use.

Taking 3,000 iu or at least 2,000 iu extra a day of vitamin D3 in addition to any in your food or multivitamin has also been shown to work. And, it certainly is the most convenient of the three. Plus it costs only $5 or $6 a bottle to buy.

b) Do the Thanks part of Thanksgiving once a day.

It IS doable to write down a list of things that you ARE thankful for and that have gone well each day even if there are a lot of bad things going on too.

Studies have found that people who spend just a few minutes each day doing this once a day feel remarkably better in just a few days or weeks. The only downside is that it’s like exercise, because it works best if you keep doing it every week.

c) An optimistic frame of mind can be learned. And, an optimistic frame of mind turns off the cognitive part of depression.

(Martin Seligman, PhD in his books notably, Learned Optimism, explains how this works and what it consists of.)

Here’s a short summary.

It has two parts.

When things go wrong, optimistic people are extremely realistic and scientific in thinking about what went wrong.

They assume that the bad things had causes that can be identified, they won’t keep happening if the causes are removed or reversed; they assume when the cause disappears and the damage is repaired and, in some cases, preventative measures are set up, that the bad things will stop. And, the are careful to not assume that one bad thing will cause others without actually checking to see if this is the case.

To put it simply, they avoid shooting themselves in the foot if they just stub their toe.

For example if someone is a bit mean to them because that someone had a bad day, optimists tend to expect that to reverse or at least that that person sometimes has a good day instead of deciding that person is a mean person. They also remember when that someone was nice before if they were. So they tend to be hard to lose as friends and give you credit for what you do right and usually forgive you when you are grouchy.

The second part is more akin to noticing the things that go right. Since there are virtually always some things going well, optimistic people tend to notice that many good things are always happening.

In addition, they look for ways they CAN do things or ways things might be possible.

If what they try doesn’t work or almost works, they often will make an extra effort to make things work. This often is effective.

They look for ways to succeed in life and expect to find them. Then they try the things they’ve found. As long as they take prudent risks instead of foolhardy ones in doing this, they are often remarkably effective at making good things happen even when other people cannot.

As a result they tend to see problems as challenges that can be overcome.

The results are almost spectacular. Seligman and others have found that people who are optimistic by this definition, have more friends, enjoy much better health, and even make more money, than the pessimists who have the reverse tendencies in these two areas.