It’s a leap year – so you have one extra day this year that you can use to focus on your health. What will you do on that extra day to be healthier? Ride a bike? Take a long walk? Eat an extra serving of fruits or vegetables? Share your thoughts!

I would bet that it’s rare the person who can stand naked in front of the mirror and not identify a trouble spot or two.  Most of us stand there pinching, prodding and wishing that those extra bits of fat – whether on the belly, the behind or the back – would just disappear.  I thought the myth of spot-reducing had been pretty well busted by now, but I still get asked all the time if there are any special diet or exercise tricks that will target specific pockets of body fat. 

The answer is – in a word – no.  Your body parts don’t ‘own’ the fat that cover them.  When a regular walking regimen leads to weight loss, you lose weight all over – not just in your legs.  Performing hundreds of pushups or situps a day might eventually uncover a toned chest or six-pack abs – but it isn’t because you’ve burned off only the fat on your chest or your belly.  It’s because you’ve increased your calorie burn – and reduced your body fat from nearly top to toe.  Read more »

Whenever I travel, I do my best to spend a little time checking out the local foods. I’ll poke around on the internet and look at menus – and usually find something intriguing. Not long ago, we were far up the California coast, and I found a menu for a vegetarian restaurant serving a six-course “sea vegetable dinner” featuring sea palm, nori, dulse and wakame – all forms of seaweed. I have to confess that we settled for something a bit less adventurous, but it did get me wondering why we don’t see more sea vegetables on menus – at least here on the coast where it’s ‘ripe for the picking’. Read more »

Most of my clients know the healthy eating drill pretty well – keep your fats down, eat plenty of fruits and veggies, make most of your grains “whole” and focus on low fat protein. But many of them have adopted some eating habits that they truly believe are healthy – and I have to spend some time trying to convince them otherwise. These eating habits sound like they’re healthy – but they really end up being less so when they’re put into practice. Are your eating habits as healthy as you think they are? Read more »