2/21/2007

Quackwatch Report on Amaze Rx

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Amaze RX

If you have been watching the Oxygen Network at the wrong time of the day, you might have seen the 30 minute informercial for Amaze RX. It’s a meal replacement shake that has about the same calories as a Slim Fast. Of course, it claims massive weight loss in short amounts of time.

Unfortunately, Quackwatch has revealed that their claims are deceptive.

The before and after pictures are of people who used Amaze Rx in conjunction with lapband surgery and the commercial isn’t very clear about that “minor” fact.

Most segments of the program do not make it clear that the testimonial-givers were lapband recipients, which means that people who begin watching after the first minute may not realize this. The infomercial contains occasional text messages that the participants used Amaze Rx to “maintain” or “accelerate” lapband results. Some of these messages lasted about 5 seconds and were large enough to read. But others lasted only 2 seconds and were too small to read without pausing the video. During the eighth minute of the infomercial, Carter says, “You have seen some of the amazing results results of lapband procedure recipients, and you have seen other men and women other men and women, just like you, losing weight and inches daily.” The phrase “just like you” suggests that the product alone will bring about the pictured results.

Forcing yourself to gag down protein shakes instead of eating real, healthy food isn’t the answer. If it was, Oprah would have stayed thin back in the 80’s when she was on the Optifast plan. The only way to lose weight is to eat less and move more. We all know that, but the solution is difficult at times. Don’t make it harder by putting yourself on a fast.

Bad form, Dr. Rick Carter, bad form…

2/11/2007

All The Celebrity Photos From Fashion Week and No Mention of Eating Disorders

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

The Olsen Twins at Jenni Kayne

The celebrity tabloids are filled with pictures from Fashion Week. They show the Olsen Twins, Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie on the front rows of fashion designers. All of this talk about Fashion Week and not a peep about the new health guidelines that the American Fashion Industry announced:

The guidelines mentioned nothing of BMI like Spain’s did. Instead they just suggested that healthy snacks be made available. Here are a few of their suggestions:

“There should be no models under 16 and no work after midnight for models 18 and younger; the consumption of cigarettes and alcohol on location should be forbidden; statements on the early signs of eating disorders should be officially issued to those in the industry; models identified as suffering from eating disorders should be required to receive professional help; the industry should develop workshops designed to address the impact of eating disorders and the negative effects of smoking; organizers should provide “healthy” snacks backstage during shows.”

When the American Fashion Industry is so lax about eating disorders, it’s no wonder that we end up with starlets, models and the girls who want to be like them plagued by anorexia and bulimia. When are they going to start putting normal sized women on the runway?

Bad form, Fashion Week, bad form…

2/10/2007

FDA Allows Xenical Without a Prescription

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Last week, a reduced strength of Xenical was approved for sale without a prescription. You can find out about it here:

Xenical is supposed to prevent the body from absorbing about 150 to 200 calories worth of fat. It is released in the bowel, which can cause lower intestinal pain and “oily, fatty stools.” It was the drug that Kevin Smith tried to lose weight. Sadly, Xenical was not the answer, and he has since started another attempt at losing weight. I talked about his story here:

Here’s an interesting concept: don’t spend $25 a week on OTC Xenical. Just cut out 200 calories a day. Start small and only cut out 100 calories a day for a week and then ramp up to 150 calories a day and finish out with 200 calories a day. Don’t do anything big, just skip one Starbucks coffee a day. Only eat half of what you were served at the restaurant at lunch. Maybe get on the treadmill for 30 minutes instead. 200 calories is small and you can take care of it yourself without Xenical… and without oily, fatty stools.

1/19/2007

Black Toenails: Final Update

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Black Toenails

They look worst when they hurt the least. Now that the pain is just a dim memory, they are ugly and black, reminding me every day that I need to take EVERYTHING in moderation. Running, walking, eating, exercising, desserting, EVERYTHING. Okay, I really shouldn’t take poison in moderation. I think I’ll just avoid that altogether.

For the whole story on black toenails, read these:

1/2/2007

How I Treated My Black Toenail

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Minor case of black toenails

Here is a picture of how my toes look after a week of nurturing. They don’t look all that bad. Compared to the pain that I experienced, they look shockingly unharmed. There was one day last week when I couldn’t walk without limping they hurt so bad. I was shocked that even putting on socks hurt them so much.

After reading all the recommendations on the Internet about how to deal with black toenail, I cringed at every one of them. They suggested lancing under the toenail with a sterilized needle or even lancing through the nail. I was reluctant to do any of those things. I knew what I was experiencing was a really bad bruise, so I treated it like a bruise and an open wound.

Here is how I treated my black toneails:

  • Warm water foot baths with epsom salts to reduce the swelling: Since the swelling was so bad that the nail was pushed up at least a quarter inch away from my nail bed, I soaked my feet in warm water with epsom salts.

  • Alternating with ice packs: After soaking for about ten minutes, I would fill a Ziploc bag with ice and water and place it on my toes (with a towel inbetween for comfort). I read that alternating between warm, moist heat and ice packs reduces swelling. None of the websites recommended this, but it sure helped for me.

  • Triple Antibiotic: After two or three foot baths/ice packs I would put triple antibiotic on my toenails, around the cuticle area and gently under the nail. Since this was a wound, I wanted to prevent any infection, so I used Neosporin liberally. It may be that just keeping the nail and cuticle area soft with petroleum jelly might have been enough, but I grew up in a family that lived under the motto: Neosporin cures everything.

  • Most importantly – REST: I stopped running, period. I stopped walking on the treadmill. For two days, I didn’t even leave the house and walked as little as possible. Part of the rest was enforced by necessity. My feet hurt too much to do anything, but after they felt better, I forced myself to stay off the treadmill. It was difficult for me, knowing that I could be logging miles, but I did it. When you feel like you could do an easy workout, DON’T. Wait a couple more days to ease yourself back into exercise.

I’m not a doctor and I didn’t see a doctor about my toes. I probably should have and if you have black toenail, don’t risk infection and pain. Go see a doctor. I definitely wouldn’t follow the advice of the websites that tell you to poke at it with a needle that you’ve held in a lighter for thirty seconds. If your toes are so bad that you feel like they need to have the pressure relieved, have a trained professional do it.

I am easing back into the world of running right now. Wish me luck and you’ll be guaranteed that I won’t increase my distance drastically like I did before. Over the next few months, I’m working up to six miles a day instead of doing it overnight like I did last month.

Other Entries:

12/27/2006

Black Toenail

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

The beginnings of Black Toenail

If you look closely at this picture, you can see it. There is only a slight discoloration of the two big toes and my feet are swollen. It looks so minor that you might miss it. I have the beginnings of black toenail on the two biggest toes. I wrote earlier about Black Toenail.

All those entries made it sound like such a common affair. The one thing they didn’t tell you:

It hurts like a MUTHA!!

I only have a minor version of Black Toenail. I won’t lose my nails, but the throbbing pain has made me unable to log any miles for three days. I feel completely unable to describe the constant feeling of my heartbeat coming through my toes. If anything brushes against them, they hurt: socks, my cat, even the sheets on the bed. Does that give you any idea of the pain? After being so obsessed about the Nike+ Challenges, it is killing me to take time off from running, but not nearly as much as the pain of just putting on a pair of socks. Not only are my toenails bruised, but my feet are very swollen. Those cute and fat little toes are usually much smaller.

Why did I get it?

I increased my mileage dramatically. Instead of slowly working up to six miles a day, I jumped in with the Level 3 group and started doing as many miles as my legs could handle. No muscle soreness means I can do more the next day, right? Nope. I felt as if my trusty Ryka shoes had betrayed me. I’ve never had this trouble before because I’ve always taken the slow and steady route to mileage increases. I thought that the only way to suffer from increased mileage was muscle soreness, but that repetitive movement can cause problems with your toenails. It’s not the shoes’ fault. It’s the fact that I ran WAY more than my body is used to. After so much weight training, my muscles could easily handle the increased mileage. Suddenly, my weakest link isn’t my muscles, but my abused toes.

You do NOT want to deal with black toenail!

No matter what the running websites say about how common it is, it REALLY hurts. Not only that, I’ve found that I am really vain about my feet. I never knew this until I was threatened with losing the nails. I had no idea that I put so much stock in how my feet look after a good pedicure. The risk of losing these nails has grounded me until they are healed.

Sandals seemed like a good idea…

I thought maybe I could keep on running by wearing my hiking sandals during workouts. Since I do my mileage on the treadmill, sandals at this time of year isn’t a problem. My feet are so swollen that I had to loosen all the adjustable straps. I was wearing my sandals everywhere. I thought that this black toenail thing wasn’t a big deal and I can just use sandals if I get it again. That was a great plan right up to the point where my exposed toe bashed into my other foot. The nail on the left foot broke down to the quick. It’s currently super-glued together and I’m hoping that I don’t have to deal with the cracked nail until it is able to grow out some more. Sandals are NOT the answer. They’re not even a good idea.

Steel-toed boots one size too big.

That’s what I’m looking for now. I need a pair of steel-toed boots in a size big enough to prevent my toes from having to touch any portion of the shoe. What am I doing for exercise? REST. That’s it. It is hard for me to do because I have to limit my food when I don’t exercise. Limiting my food can make me feel deprived and I worry that a binge is right around the corner. I have miles of walking to do at CES in two weeks. I have to get these feet healthy and ready to go, so I have no other option but to rest.

Other Entries:

12/24/2006

Weight Loss Supplements Aren’t Worth It

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Just published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, is a study that analyzed over 402 dietary supplements that claimed to aid in weight loss, fat loss or increase metabolism. Their findings are published here:

They found that most products had the same ingredients: green tea, chromium picolinate, ma huang (ephedra), ginger root, guarana, hydroxycitric acid white willow, Siberian ginseng, cayenne, and bitter orange/zhi shi. When the researchers looked for studies regarding the effectiveness of these ingredients, this is what they found:

  • Modest evidence of effectiveness exists for green tea, chromium picolinate, and ma huang (ephedra).

  • For the remaining seven (ginger root, guarana, hydroxycitric acid white willow, Siberian ginseng, cayenne, and bitter orange/zhi shi), inadequate or negative evidence exists.

  • Although precautions and contraindications were found for all 10 ingredients, the strongest concerns in the literature appear for ma huang, bitter orange, and guarana.

In the end, the study concluded with this quote:

“The general lack of research evidence for the safety or effectiveness of the many ingredients . . . even the most frequently included ingredients, is cause for concern.”

Don’t spend your hard earned money on products that haven’t proved that they actually do what they say they do. Weight loss supplements aren’t worth it.

Via: Consumer Health Digest, December 19, 2006

12/22/2006

Dilbert Self Censorship

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

The "Unpublished" Dilbert

Is telling the world that you’re not going to do fat jokes and then showing them the fat joke that you’re not going to publish really not doing fat jokes?

Here is Scott Adams’ explanation for the comic:

“That’s why I have a personal preference to avoid fat jokes. No one chooses to be overweight. We’re all moist robots and some of us have programs in our brains that make food especially enjoyable. If I liked food and disliked exercise as much as a 400 pound guy, I’d be a 400 pound guy.”

“With that background in mind, I decided not to submit the following comic for newspapers. I intended it to be a clever commentary on the non-existence of free will. But in the execution it comes off looking like a fat joke. So you won’t see this one in newspapers.”

The true question is why is it so hard for me to eat healthy when I am vividly shown what eating poorly can do to my body? If looking like a walrus with diabetes doesn’t motivate me, what will? Strangely, running challenges on Nike +…

12/17/2006

Master Cleanse Lemonade Diet: Don’t Believe The Hype

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

This is a commercial I found on YouTube for the Master Cleanse Lemonade Diet. What these people are trying to sell you is overpriced maple syrup. What they don’t tell you is what being on the Lemonade Diet is really like. I can do that, however…

After Beyonce Knowles went public about her starvation diet while filming her latest movie, I decided to try the lemonade mostly to see how it tasted. I realized that if I went on a lemonade fast, I would end up bingeing in the end, but so many people were talking about it that I thought I should try it.

Research, I told myself.

All I lost was the weight of poo. Seriously, I hate to talk about it so vulgarly, but I lost five pounds while fasting, nothing more, even though I fasted for two weeks. The minute I started eating healthy again, the five pounds came back on.

Worse still, it took weeks of eating healthy and normal for my normal weight loss to resume. The reason why is that fasting puts your body into starvation mode. It takes a couple of weeks of healthy eating to convince your body that you’re NOT starving. Mine, it took a little longer than that.

The good thing is that I was able to survive the fasting experiment without bingeing, but it took a lot of inner workouts to prevent my MIND from going into starvation mode.

Next time you hear about some great diet that will take off five pounds in five days, just know that you aren’t losing five pounds of fat. You’re losing five pounds of water and stool, which will come right back when you go back to a healthy diet. Don’t believe the hype.


Update 03-04-07: I turned off comments on this post. Fasting of any sort is NOT a recommended course of action. Please read these entries on fasting from Quackwatch:

This quotation from Wikipedia is another testament to avoiding fasting:

“Short term fasting causes a starvation response that encourages the body to store fat once eating is resumed. This is one of the pitfalls of Yo-yo dieting. The starvation response is the switching of the body from carb fat energy generation to amino acid fat energy generation. The amino acids are synthesised from the breakdown of muscle tissue. Since muscle tissue is always metabolically active and requires energy to exist, the reduction of muscle tissue also reduces the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Basal metabolic rate is the absolute minimum energy requirement of your body while at rest. (Similar to a car’s fuel requirement when idling.) One of the effects of fasting is to reduce the body’s energy needs during times of scarcity (similar to turning the idle lower or replacing a big engine with a small engine). Thus, when the same amount of food is eaten, less of the calories are required for basal metabolism, the rest (a greater percentage than before the fast) is stored as fat.”

The people who have been commenting on this entry seem very well-intentioned, but are not qualified medical professionals. Taking their advise is not recommended.

12/12/2006

Enviga Review on Big Fat Blog

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Here is a great review of Enviga, the purported “negative calorie” drink from the Coca-Cola company.

I love their evaluation:

“Let’s just say the Enviga is true to it’s word and the increased energy expenditure actually leads to fat burning. According to Nestle you need to drink 3 cans per day. So, to burn 1 pound of fat (3,500 Calories) you would need to drink 105 bottles of Enviga over 35 days. That amounts to $147 (average $1.40 per can).

“Enviga is sweetened with aspartame and ace-k. At 3 cans a day – that’s a lot of aspartame going down the hatch.

“This isn’t a weight loss wonder – but simply a stepping stone in a market where carbonated drink sales have been falling.”

Remember, weight loss is big business and companies think we are stupid. Don’t fall for it. Just because they slap a label on something telling you that it will make you lose weight, doesn’t mean it will or that it’s good for you.

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