Fitness Over 40

The premise of The Biggest Loser is pretty straightforward. Take a group of morbidly obese Americans, isolate them on a ranch and put them through a rigorous diet and exercise program/competition to see who can lose the most weight and win the curiously backhanded title of Biggest Loser. With approximately 34 percent of US adults classified as obese and an additional 34 percent classified as overweight [source CDC], you would think that anything that inspires people to lose weight would be a positive thing. I’ll talk about the positives in another post, "Why I Love The Biggest Loser," but today, let’s look at what’s not to love.

As obesity rates climb in the U.S. and the rate of debilitating chronic diseases climbs right along with it, the message to improve our diets by eating fewer processed foods and more fruits and vegetables is hard to escape. You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the word that fruits and vegetables are low in calories, high in fiber and nutrients and much healthier for us than fatty, sugary, salty processed foods. But if you’re not a natural veggie lover, how do you get more fruits and vegetables in your diet? Try these seven easy tips:

Show of hands, ladies. How many of you are less than 100% happy with the gal you see looking back at you from the mirror? If you’re like many American women (and a few guys), you have grown up your whole life with body image issues. My chest is too flat, my rear end is too big, my ears stick out. The woman you think you see in the mirror is actually distorted by years of self-talk, family expectations, schoolyard teasing and a barrage of airbrushed images in the media.

As if losing weight weren’t hard enough, keeping it off is often even harder. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life yo-yo dieting, you’ll need to develop good, long-term lifestyle habits. Luckily, there has been a lot of good research done to help you know what works and what doesn’t.