According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average size of the American waist is expanding. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reveals that abdominal obesity is increasing, and so are our waistlines. (If your waistline is at least 35 inches for women, or 40 for men, you qualify for “abdominal obesity.”) Researchers pulled together data on more than 32,000 Americans ages 19 and up. They found an increase of 54 percent in abdominal obesity from 2011 through 2012. Over the last decade, they revealed that Americans have gained an inch of waistline, on avearge. As a group, women showed the biggest increase. Mexican Americans and African Americans increased the size of their waistlines more than other ethnic groups. There was not a single group that didn’t show some increase. This is worrisome from a health perspective: if you’ve got fat settled on your belly as opposed to your hips or your butt, you end up with a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and other obesity-related ailments. Why is belly fat on the rise? Common wisdom holds that Americans are simply eating too much and not exercising enough, but science is revealing that the story is more complicated. The CDC researchers cited sleep deprivation as a possible culprit. Possibly, not getting enough sleep alters brain patterns that prevent a person from feeling full after eating. According to the Havard School of Public Health, a growing body of research has accumulated which supports the idea that sleep and weight are related. Their report notes that sleep-deprived people may be too tired to exercise, and may also simply eat more because they are awake more hours during the day and thus have more opportunity to ingest additional calories. Lack of sleep, they suggest, also disrupts the balance of key hormones that control appetite. The CDC researchers also pointed to overmedication and endocrine disruptors as possible suspects in the growing waistline epidemic. Endrocrine disrupters are chemicals we are exposed to in our daily lives in products plastic bottles, food cans, cosmetics, cleaning supplies, and certain pesticides. LYNN STUART PARRAMORE
Sleep is definitely another piece in the puzzle. Who has not had a night of insomnia and craved carbs the next day? I'll add: gents, when they say "waist circumference", they are referring to the measurement at the navel, not the beltline!
And it (exercise) is a CHOICE! Those who choose to not exercise and gain weight have no one other than themselves to blame. And as they put on more and more weight it becomes more difficult for them to get motivated to work out. But it all started with a CHOICE, so I have little empathy for them. And both kids and adults are addicted to their gadgets ... tweeting and posting on Facebook is about as big a waste of time as one could choose. I mean who cares if you just went to an all you can eat buffet? Or took a dump and hope that 50 of your friends will 'Like' it. When I was working my corporate job and sometimes working 10-12 hours a day it was hard to come home when it was dark and head out for a 5-6 mile run or grab a quite bite and head to the gym for 2-3 hours of basketball. But sitting on my butt would have accomplished nothing other than potential weight gain. Last, if these people are 'too tired to exercise' maybe that suggests they are not in terribly good shape to begin with and all the more reason they should get out and exercise. Some intense exercise actually can create a feeling of accomplishment and well being. I have a sister who was diagnosed with breast cancer ... and after a long chemo session she was exhausted but instead of heading home she went to the gym and worked out and felt better when she got home.
"One study that the Finns could not consider, because it was published in 2006, six years later, is particularly revealing, both in what it concluded and how those conclusions were interpreted. The authors were Paul Williams, a statistics expert at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley , California, and Peter Wood, a Stanford University researcher who has been studying the effect of exercise on health since the 1970s. Williams and Wood collected detailed information on almost thirteen thousand habitual runners (all subscribers to Runner’s World magazine) and then compared the weekly mileage of these runners with how much they weighed from year to year. Those who ran the most tended to weigh the least, but all these runners tended to get fatter with each passing year, even those who ran more than forty miles a week— eight miles a day, say, five days a week. This observation led Williams and Wood, both believers in the doctrine of calories-in/ calories-out, to suggest that even the most dedicated runners had to increase their distance by a few miles a week, year after year— expend even more energy as they got older— if they wanted to remain lean. If men added two miles to their weekly distance every year, and women three, according to Williams and Wood, then they might manage to remain lean, because this might mean expending in running the calories that they seemed fated otherwise to accumulate as fat. "Let’s see where that logic takes us. Imagine a man in his twenties who runs twenty miles a week— say, four miles a day, five days a week. According to Williams and Wood (and the logic and mathematics of calories-in/ calories-out), he will have to double that in his thirties (eight miles a day, five days a week) and triple it in his forties (twelve miles a day, five days a week) to keep fat from accumulating. A woman in her twenties who runs three miles a day, five times a week— an impressive but not excessive amount—would have to up her daily distance to fifteen miles in her forties to retain her youthful figure. If she does eight-minute miles, a nice pace for such a distance , she’d better be prepared to spend two hours on each of her running days to keep her weight in check. "If we believe in calories-in/ calories-out, and that in turn leads us to conclude that we have to run half-marathons five days a week (in our forties, and more in our fifties , and more in our sixties …) to maintain our weight, it may, once again, be time to question our underlying beliefs. Maybe it’s something other than the calories we consume and expend that determines whether we get fat." Taubes, Gary (2010-12-28). Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (Kindle Location 734). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Or she would have to eat less/healthier as she got older (as it the case with most adults) as her metabolism slowed down. All of these studies are quite hilarious in their attempt to blame it on the food. And I'm not saying it has nothing to do with fructose or carbs, or sodas, or whatever. But it certainly has to do with using common sense in eating and exercising habits. People are eating more, and working out less. And getting fatter. And somehow this is surprising.
I won't argue with a study of 13,000 runners. But I'll offer some other reasons as to why people (runners) may put on weight as they age. And in line with this study I started running in the 70's and was a subscriber to Runners World for quite a few years. When I got my undergrad degree I weighed 170 and that was 3 years before I started running. In my adult life I've ranged from the 170 to 193. Currently at 180 after gaining 5 pounds on vacation in August. Now, reasons why one puts on the pounds ... as we age we do have to work (run faster) harder to get the same benefits. It's also assumed that our metabolism slows as we age. Actually it doesn't but it can impact weight gain: Thermogenesis, the food processing part of your metabolism, actually stays fairly steady throughout your adult life. The illusion that your metabolism slows as you age actually occurs because as you get older, your muscle mass decreases and your amount of fat tends to increase, decreasing your BMR and the amount of calories your body burns. I've run anywhere from 800 to 1500 miles a year since the late 70's and have gained a net of 10 pounds which is 1 pound every 3 1/2 years. In the end one can achieve whatever goal they set for themselves if they are willing to make choices, whether it be working out more (harder) or cutting out certain foods. I didn't see any detailed explanation as to how/why they imply you need to double mileage in the next decade and keep a similar pattern going. Also, they have no mention as to whether the runners are only running versus doing some weights as well. Both IMO are beneficial to overall fitness and weight control.
"That we have gotten to the place in our lives, and in the science of exercise, nutrition, and weight, where this concept of working up an appetite, of the body’s increasing its intake of energy to compensate for its increased expenditure, has been forgotten is one of the stranger stories in the history of modern medical research, or at least I hope it is. "Until the 1960s, most clinicians who treated obese patients dismissed as naïve the notion that we could lose weight through exercise or gain it by being sedentary. When Russell Wilder, an obesity and diabetes specialist at the Mayo Clinic, lectured on obesity in 1932, he said his fat patients lost more weight with bed rest, “while unusually strenuous physical exercise slows the rate of loss.” “The patient reasons quite correctly,” Wilder said, “that the more exercise he takes the more fat should be burned and that loss of weight should be in proportion and he is discouraged to find that the scales reveal no progress.” The patient’s reasoning had two flaws, as Wilder’s contemporaries would point out. First, we burn surprisingly few calories doing moderate exercise, and, second, the effort can be easily undone, and probably will be, by mindless changes in diet. A 250-pound man will burn three extra calories climbing one flight of stairs, as Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan calculated in 1942 . “He will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread!” So why not skip the stairs and skip the bread and call it a day? After all, what are the chances that if a 250-pounder does climb twenty extra flights a day he won’t eat the equivalent of an extra slice of bread before the day is done? Yes, more strenuous exercise will burn more calories—“ it really is much more effective to exercise hard enough to sweat,” Kolata tells us, “and that is the only way to burn large numbers of calories”— but, as these physicians argued, it will also make you hungrier still." Taubes, Gary (2010-12-28). Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (Kindle Locations 759-765). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.