Nutrition Frenzy

Here’s a little trick for controlling your appetite. And, interestingly, it has nothing to do with what you eat. It’s about how you exercise.

Seems that the right combo of physical activity may have the power to make you eat less. The magic formula? Doing both cardio and strength training. Doing just one or the other doesn’t really curb your calorie intake as much, if at all.

Pump It Up, Run It Off . . . and Eat Less
When men in one small study combined aerobic exercise with weight training for 16 weeks, they ate significantly fewer calories compared with the men who did either aerobics or weight training alone or who did no exercise at all. The researchers suspect that the combo of cardio and strength exercises had the most favorable effect on blood levels of fats, glucose, amino acids, and satiety hormones — producing a powerful combination of hunger-controlling physiological changes.

Keep At It
We all know that eating fewer calories than we burn is a major key to long-term weight loss. Besides balancing your physical activities, try these other helpful tips for turning the dial down on hunger:

Understand why you eat.

Crank up your fat-burning furnace.

Crank up your fat-burning furnace. Instead, make a permanent life change.

Controlling the Chemistry of Emotional Eating

Learning the science behind cravings is the first step toward controlling them

Our ancestors ate to survive. They ate because they were hungry, or maybe to celebrate a victory over a warring tribe. Us? We eat because we’re angry, bored, stressed, frustrated, depressed, watching a movie, too busy, not busy enough, getting together with friends, or ticked off because the Lions lost.

And when eating is the result of an emotional reaction — where we substitute chocolate for a conversation, ice cream for a relaxing bath, or chips for a punching bag — it isn’t as much about character as it is about chemistry.

Brain chemicals not only influence your emotions but also provide the foundation for why you eat at certain times. Here are a few examples:

Norepinephrine: This is the caveman fight-or-flight chemical. It’s what tells you to tangle with a saber-toothed tiger or hightail it to the safety of your hut.
Serotonin: This is the James Brown of neurotransmitters. It makes you feel good (Hey!) and is a major target of antidepressants.
Dopamine: This is the brain’s fun house. It’s a pleasure and reward system and is particularly sensitive to addictions. It’s also the one that helps you feel no pain.
GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid): This one is the English Patient of amino acids. It makes you feel like a zombie and is one of the ways that anesthesia may work to reduce your responsiveness to the outside world.
Nitric oxide: This is your meditation-like chemical. It helps calm you. This powerful neuropeptide is usually a very short-lived gas that also relaxes the blood vessels of the body.