Upper and Lower Back

Your back really is one of the workhorses of the human anatomy. Whether its bearing loads bending, stretching or taking the strain of an office where ergonomics doesn’t appear to be in the dictionary, every day brings big challenges. Those challenges are never going to go away, so what you want to do is prepare your back as best you can. By working the muscles in both the upper and lower sections, you will also promote better posture, and this will have a knock-on effect on how the other core areas of your body are handling everyday life.

Let’s start unravelling those knots and stretching your spine by lying flat on the floor, legs slightly apart and out in front of you. Slowly raise your right arm and your left leg out straight, to the same level and hold the position for 5 - 10 seconds before slowly lowering both the floor. Breathe rhythmically for 10 seconds, then repeat the drill with the left arm and the right leg. Aim to complete a series of 10 repetitions over as long a period as it takes. Don’t rush.

Remain Grounded

Initially the action may feel strange and a little unstable, but remember that the two limbs that remain grounded will be providing the stability to execute the drill, so relax, be confident in what you are doing, and keep your neck straight and relaxed.

Remaining flat on your stomach, bring your arms so that your palms are flat to the floor and just in front of the corresponding shoulder. To work on your lower back, push up from the palms so that only the upper body raises off the floor, hold for five seconds, then down, and repeat up to 10 reps.

To work the area around the upper back, stand with the feet a shoulders’ width apart, bend your arms at the elbow so that the backs of the hands are level and facing the top of the shoulders. Make a loose fist and push back with both fists out and around your shoulders so that the arms extend behind the line of the shoulders, thereby squeezing the blade muscles together. Hold for 10 seconds, then return to the original position. Complete 10 reps.

Movements Slow and Steady

Supplement these exercises with some walking and swimming. These extracurricular periods will build on the improved posture that the above drills will promote.

Always remember that although your back feels solid, it is prone to injury, especially as the aging process takes hold. So when exercising or completing floor repetitions, keep your movements slow and steady. Giving your muscles something to think about is one thing, but they’ll quickly tell you when they can do no more. When they do, listen to them. It’s better to cut down on repetitions and continue exercising regularly than succumbing to an injury born of over-enthusiasm.

Don’t forget, too, that stretching exercises are essential before working your back, so some gentle bends from the waist to the floor, hip rotations, marching on the spot while swinging the arms rhythmically, and star jumps will guard against injury. Not only will these routines warm up the muscles but they will also shake loose some of the stress of everyday life that your back soaks up.

Source:- http://www.tonedbody.co.uk/UpperLowerBack.html

Britons Getting Fatter Despite Consuming Fewer Calories

Britons are consuming 600 fewer calories a day but are actually getting fatter because of sedentary jobs and a lack of exercise, a respected think-tank has found.

Despite consuming less fat, sugar and alcohol Britons are getting larger Photo: PA

On average adults weigh up to 30 pounds, 14kg, more than they did 30 years ago despite a 20 per cent drop in daily calorie intake.

Although they are consuming the equivalent of a burger and chips or three pints of Guinness less they are also less active than those of the same age were in the 1980s, the Institute of Fiscal studies claims.

Expanding waist-lines are also explained by the fact that as you get older it is harder to keep your weight down and you become more susceptible as to the effects of some sugars and fats, the five-year study found.

The full study is to be published later this summer, but details disclosed on Monday show that the average adult has cut calorie intake by around 600 a day.

This is almost entirely attributed to better habits in the home, as the amount of calories consumed outside has risen by 15 per cent over the same period.

At home we are opting for cereal over fried breakfast, using semi skimmed milk, eating more fish and less red meat and drinking less alcohol.

But people are also more likely to have a desk job during the day and more likely to spend time in front of a screen when home in the evening.

The average adult is putting on weight at an average of just over half a pound – 0.25kg - a year.

A man in his twenties weighs around 15 lbs, 7kg, more than a man in his twenties three decades earlier, while someone in their 50s weighs 30 lbs more.

Report author Professor Rachel Griffiths told industry journal The Grocer: "The drop in calories consumed would have been expected to have caused a weight loss of 1kg per year over the period."

The IFS will look at why certain age groups are more susceptible to weight gain.

Source:- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/diet/10126042/Britons-getting-fatter-despite-consuming-fewer-calories.html

My History Of Being Fat

I was born 10 pounds, 7 ounces; fat from the get-go. There are pictures of my mother pregnant with me, walking around our neighborhood with my costumed brother on Halloween, the day before I was born. She is enormous. I am enormous inside of her. Nobody cares if you’re fat when you’re a baby. They say things like:There’s more of her to love, or Look at those chubby cheeks. And they mean it.

There were years I was an average weight, I think, but I was certainly fat by elementary school. I recall stopping by a friend’s house in the neighborhood once to see if she wanted to play with me, but finding only her mother home. The next day at school, my friend and some of the other little girls in our class laughed as I approached. “What’s so funny?” I said. “I heard you came over yesterday,” she said. “My mother said a husky girl knocked on the door. I asked her what ‘husky’ meant and she said it meant ‘fat’ and then I knew it was you.” Husky, they all laughed at it.

A new vocabulary word for them, but not for me. I knew so many more words than they did. Also, I knew that Husky dogs were from Alaska and had beautiful fur and could race sleds. Why bother sharing information with these girls?

I remember going to a birthday party at another  friend's house and playing a video game, checking out already from the world around me.  I was so chubby that my pants rode down below my waist and my butt crack was revealed.  Some boys stood behind me and shot a water gun at me, down my pants.  I swiveled my head, appalled, and pulled down my shirt.  And then I turned back to the video game and continued to play. I was approaching a high score.

I'm certain that all of this hurt my feelings. I am trying to remember what that pain felt like, but I have been in a perennial state of not letting it bother me for decades. 

Maybe I went home and cried. I wish I could remember. Let’s pretend I went home and cried. It’s probably true. 

In junior high school, in the advanced English class, our teacher engaged us in a verbal exercise. She wanted us to learn about the powers of description. So she had us all stand up in a circle, and everyone had to go around the room and say one word to describe the person standing. Funny, smart, etc. And when it was my turn to stand, a boy named Mark said, “Thunder thighs.” Mark, you idiot, that’s two words. Even now, that’s all I’ve got in terms of a comeback. I was never that good with the burns.

Why was I fat? Where do I start? I was fat because I loved books more than people and instead of playing with other kids, running around and getting exercise, I had my nose stuck in a damn book. I was fat because my parents were a little fat themselves at that point in their lives, and I ate what they ate. I was fat because I was a latchkey kid, so I would go home and eat whatever I could get my hands on in the house. And I was fat because part of me didn’t give a shit; I already lived the life of a mind, and I didn’t care how I appeared to the outside world, so satisfied was I in my imagination. I was fat because I lived in the Midwest in the 1970s and everyone was a little fat then, and only getting fatter.

High school: tits and ass, not-so-fat, but never skinny. I dated very little, and sometimes I cared, and sometimes I didn’t. I started going on runs, right before I went to bed. I liked the way I felt at the end of the run. The streets of the suburbs were quiet at night. I used that time to picture a life anywhere but there. I hated high school. I would feel like a fat girl forever. I think I realized that even then.

College: As much late night drunk eating as my heart desired. Freshman twenty. Also I started smoking weed somewhere in there, and discovered the pleasures of eating while stoned. Every vice begat another. Gateway chub.

And then it was up and down for a decade. I started having sex, and, in my mind, as long as I was having sex, I was attractive, which means I couldn’t be too fat, now could I? Sex as a guideline for physical health. How about that. That’s how I saw it in my twenties. That’s not how I see it now.

It is the year 2000, and I weigh around 200 pounds, a fact of which I am unaware because I never get on a scale. (Although I find it out a few weeks later in the bathroom at my brother’s house, finally too curious to resist.) I am sleeping with a man who is not a very nice man, and perhaps not even particularly attractive, but he is quick-witted and sort of cool, and this covers up the not-nice part of him, at least for a period of time. Also, we are always fucked up in one way or another when we are together, either on booze or drugs, and I am still insistent on proving my own attractiveness to myself by having sex as regularly as possible, even if it is with terrible people. We are lying naked on his couch in his shitty Lower East Side basement apartment, and for some reason he is talking about other women he’s seeing, and I’m starting to feel terrible about myself. It’s this feeling that’s creeping slowly up my spine, an unfolding self-disgust, and then he says to me, “But you know, there’s something about a big girl,” and, after a pause, he pats my ass, and all of a sudden I realize he’s talking about me, I am that big girl.

It was another few years until I lost the weight. Lost, that’s what it felt like, that it disappeared one day when I wasn’t paying attention, and I never saw where it went. I wasn’t trying to lose weight, but I did. I went away for a summer to the woods in Northern California and started writing my first book. In exchange for a small cottage, I was tasked with taking a giant, cranky Tibetan Mastiff for hikes every day. I was introduced to yoga, and found that I loved it. There was no television, spotty internet access, and my cell phone barely worked. So I wrote. I wrote a collection of stories. I put my entire self into that book. And the book replaced the food. Whatever hole was in me that needed to be filled, writing books, for the most part has filled it. I realize this is not how it works for everyone, but this is how it worked for me.

But here’s the truth: If I could still eat like I did then, I would. I still do sometimes, though rarely. Definitely there are days when I cannot get full enough. But I enjoy being this thinner – but never thin – version of myself. I prefer my clothes fit in a certain way. And yoga and meditation have made me a happier person, stronger, more balanced, more capable of compassion, and a better writer. But most importantly: I want to live a long life. That, more than anything, is why I try to keep my weight in check. I have shit genetics in my family — cancer, heart attacks, all the fun stuff — and I have a lot I want to do over the next forty or fifty years, at the very least a lot of books I want to write, so I try to keep the goddamn weight in check, even when I don’t feel like it.

For the purposes of this piece, I got on the scale in the bathroom at the café near my house this morning. (I don’t have a scale in my house, because what do I need a scale for when I have Amazon numbers to obsess over?) I was at 156 with my clothes on but my shoes off, probably because I ate an entire personal pizza the night before because I found out a certain publication wasn’t going to review my book. (What is it about eating an entire thing, I wonder? Is there a sense of accomplishment? Or perhaps it’s that there’s nothing left behind to remind you of what you just did.)

Maybe tomorrow I’ll weigh 154 if I eat better today, but as of right now I’m three pounds away from being technically overweight, 158 at 5’6” being the danger zone on that chart I found on the internet. So right now I’m fat-adjacent. This is the territory I will travel in for the rest of my life.

Look, I don’t smoke anymore. I don’t do drugs anymore. I don’t date men who are terrible for me. I still like to drink, but I prefer to get up in the morning with a clear head and write my books, so I’m less likely to drink all night long. What I have left is food; that is my vice. And I will always want to eat a pizza when I am feeling rejected. And thus, my history of being fat is my past, present, and future. In the back of my mind, there is always a possibility of return. Fat-adjacency. But I like being responsible to myself. I like taking care of me, as much as I love food. So here I am. Alive.

Jami Attenberg is the author of ‘The Middlesteins,’ a novel about food obsession, families, love, the Midwest, and other important topics.

Source:- http://thehairpin.com/2012/10/my-history-of-being-fat/

Overweight Seen As The Norm, says chief medical officer

Image captionThe number of obese and overweight people has been rising in recent decades

Being overweight is increasingly seen as the norm, England's chief medical officer says.

In her annual report on the state of health, Dame Sally Davies said this was concerning, pointing out many people did not recognise they had a problem.

Parents of overweight children were also failing to spot the signs too, she said.

Dame Sally blamed the way weight was being portrayed by the media and clothes industry.

"I have long been concerned that being underweight is often portrayed as the ideal weight, particularly in the fashion industry. Yet I am increasingly concerned that society may be normalising being overweight.  Larger mannequins are being introduced into clothes shops and "size inflation" means that clothes with the same size label have become larger in recent decades.  "And news stories about weight often feature pictures of severely obese people, which are unrepresentative of the majority of overweight people."

Sugar tax
Dame Sally also reiterated her belief that a sugar tax may be necessary to combat obesity.  At the start of March she told the Health Select Committee it may be needed, although she hoped not.  This caused some controversy as the government's approach has been characterised by working with industry to get them to make food and drink products healthier.  In her report she says this should continue, but if it fails to deliver a tax should be "considered".

She said children and adults of all ages are consuming too much sugar.  Nearly two thirds of adults and a third of children are overweight or obese - classed as a body mass index of above 25. This is about double the numbers in the early 1990s.   But research shows that half of men, a third of women and over three quarters of parents do not recognise weight problems.  Professor Kevin Fenton, of Public Health England, said he agreed with Dame Sally's comments.  "We share her concerns. Overweight and obesity costs the NHS over £5bn each year and is entirely preventable."But Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said he would have liked Dame Sally to take a tougher approach to sugar.  "The report lets the food and beverage industries off the hook. It gives industry no deadline by which to show improvement with the likely result that her words will be quite ignored. How distressing."

Source:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26765078

Addictive Personality: Meet Ajay Rochester

This is on the beingfatsuckschannel on YouTube.



Source:- https://www.youtube.com/user/beingfatsuckschannel

On Being Fat

KATHLEEN BROOKS

I am fat. This fact cannot be disputed.

I am also intelligent, educated and successful. To look at me, one might never guess that I am a successful director at a large corporation or that I gave up a child for adoption or that I survived kidney failure and a lifesaving kidney transplant. You probably also would not guess that I speak Arabic and was an interpreter on an archaeology dig in Syria. Would you guess I have been married twice and that I was an accomplished athlete? I have many stories, but because I am fat, you may never know these things about me.

You see, I, like many others like me, endure one of the few remaining acceptable forms of discrimination. Some people may judge me by the way I look and assume that I am stupid, lazy or that I eat chips and ice cream all day. They may also assume I don’t care about myself. They only see the fat. They treat me differently than they treat thinner, more attractive women. I know this because I wasn’t always fat. I, too, was oblivious to fat people and even shared some of these cruel misjudgments toward them. When I resided in a different body, I didn’t know how different my life would be and how different I would feel about myself in a fat body.

My transformation has been remarkable. I went from being a confident, fun, smart and beautiful woman to a fearful and shy resemblance of my former self. I am somehow falling into my dutiful place in the world, trying not to been seen and feeling ashamed of me.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to be fat. I want to feel the way I used to feel. I am on a constant diet and trying every new one that comes along. I watch the weight loss shows and fantasize. I exercise with a personal trainer; I obsess over food and how many calories there are. I get creative with vegetables and eat a ton of them. I get discouraged and pick myself up again. But since my transplant and the steroids I take to keep my body from rejecting my new kidney, I can’t seem to lose the weight that I put on since that life-saving surgery. But losing weight is not what this is about.

I am amazed at how inferior I feel now. I feel invisible. People avoid eye contact with me. I am often treated rudely or dismissed. I live in daily fear that my weight will be the thing that results in my long list of fears, which now rule my every thought. I fear things like being let go from my job because “I don’t represent the company well,” or of never finding a man to love me again because I am no longer attractive. I wonder if people are embarrassed to be seen with me. I fear that someone might say something horrible to me like, “stay away from the donuts, fat a**,” or complain loudly that they have to sit next to me on the airplane... again. And yes, the big one, will I die young because of the fat on my body?

Will anyone know the amazing life I have lived and the person that I used to be? Will they know the adventures I have had and people I have met? Amazing experiences like riding horseback Saturday mornings at the Giza pyramids when living in Cairo; being interrogated at gunpoint in Syria; living in Yemen; moving to Egypt as a 13-year-old American; living with lupus, and raising a son by myself. I fear the answer to my questions is no. Just like others that are discriminated against for the color of their skin, many people dismiss me or are rude when they see me in this body. They don’t want to know me because they assume that I am something different than I am. The key difference is there are laws and social pressure against racial discrimination (which is still far too prevalent!). Discriminating against fat people is still socially acceptable, and in fact, it is done all the time.

My dream, of course, is to lose some weight. But, if I continue to be unsuccessful, will I ever been seen and acknowledged again the way I used to be? Will anyone step back and see me, want to know me, or will they just continue to see that I am fat?

Source:- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-brooks/being-fat_b_6097544.html