Body Image Dichotomy: Thinspo vs Fitspo

In the realm of body image, one of the highest trending search topics are Thinspo (abbreviation for Thin Inspiration) and Fitspo (short-hand for Fitness Inspiration). The idea and popularity behind Thinspo has been increasing particularly among young women the past couple years. Books have been written regarding this relatively new and shocking craze.

Thinspo is essentially the glorification of eating disorders as a form of weight-loss and being “healthy.” The main eating disorder Thinspo enthusiasts support is “Ana” short for Anorexia. In order to encourage starvation or food resistance, Thinspo enthusiasts surround themselves with emaciated photographs of what their ideal body image will be.

Erroneous Body Image

Continuously seeing these images helps to reinforce the resistance to eat, and to continue starvation. Thinspo enthusiasts see this as a healthy goal, and their desire for “perfection” reaches unhealthy extremes. The internet has been flooded with images of “models” with bulging bones, gaunt faces, and dead eyes. Support groups for Thinspo are at an all-time high. Trying to reason with Thinspo enthusiasts seems to be a lost cause because their desire for stick-thin figures is so strong that they are willing to do anything to be “skinny”.

As Thinspo diets (or lack thereof) increase in popularity, women on the opposite spectrum of this craze have retaliated with the newer health craze “Fitspo.” Fitspo is a mixture of clean eating and exercise, basically the epitome of good health. The same process resides within this trend of circulating photos of women with rock hard abs, and women eating healthy foods to reinforce good and positive health habits.

The difference between the two trends is stark and challenges anyone who attempts to achieve skinniness and perfection. They are two extremes of different body types, both attempting to claim the title as “healthy” looking. Whether it be starvation or over-exercising can result in loss of body fat which will ultimately result in Amenorrhea in women, which is the body’s way of shutting down the reproductive system by stopping the production of estrogen until a healthier equilibrium of fat and health is achieved. The results and requirements of both Thinspo and Fitspo are at a pinnacle.

Whether you want to lose a few vanity pounds or an extreme amount of weight, doctors and health experts would agree that Thinspo is not the healthy route, and is dangerous when attempted. Eating sensibly, avoiding processed foods, and getting adequate exercise 3-5 days a week is the healthy alternative for anyone trying to lose weight and be healthier over all. Depriving your body of nourishment is not. Think smart, eat smart, and be healthy.

Can’t.. Hold.. It.. Longer (Extend Your Bladder)

If we were animals, we could just pee anywhere whenever needed.

But now that we are civilized, it’s inappropriate to just leak it out while you’re in the car with your friends in the middle of a busy street. Someone threw the punch line right and you tried to laugh with them but deep inside you’re in agony and you fantasize on turning the air-conditioner off.

You can’t just let it drizzle while standing in a U2 concert but you can’t hold it any longer and you’ll miss “With or Without You” which is your fucking song and the crowd is too much of a hassle to deal with and now you’re regretting the damn large strawberry banana smoothie.

You can’t wet your bed because you’re too fastidious to sleep on urinated sheets and you’re tired and lazy to get up but your full bladder is bothering you and you’re still confused what to do and sleep is drifting away. All you can say is, damn you bladder!

Doesn’t it suck that we have to hold it in? We’re only allowed to pee in a room designed for it.

There are a few techniques that could help extend your bladder’s life.

Holding-the-pee position works! Cross your legs when standing, open them when sitting, tighten your urethra and restrict the muscles surrounding it. It’s a comical pose but it just helps you last longer. Caution though on the lower stomach – you don’t want to put pressure on it. Fake a smile but don’t laugh. Laughing will contract your stomach muscles and may squeeze your bladder. And avoid sudden movements.

Don’t think about it. Stay away from a peeing image in your mind as it induces your need to do it. Forget the relief you’ll feel after it’s over. And obviously, don’t even dare to drink more fluids. Slap anybody who opens a can of coke or describes the sound of a flushing toilet. It’s best to find a distraction.

Warm up. Cold temperature makes your body want to dispose your urine. It doesn’t want to spend energy on keeping the urine warm because it’s a waste. Have a warm surrounding and your body will worry less.

If you can’t hold it any longer and you know it’s coming out, find a bottle and go. Or just go and get it over with.

Dr Elizabeth Farrell informs that peeing once every four hours is a normal frequency. Taking the trip to the toilet in under two hours is too frequent. Forcing to pee before leaving, she adds, should never be done as the bladder shrinks if it doesn’t reach full volume.

Dr. Chamandeep Bali warns the dangers of holding the pee. If done too often, the body “might lose the ability to know when it’s time to go”. Bacteria could build-up resulting to infections in kidney, urinary tract and bladder.

Holding it until it’s full is the ideal. Pee not too often and not too seldom.

Where else have you peed beside the restroom?

Vaccination Industry Secrets

I had a chat with a mother who refused vaccination for her family. She has five children, the youngest in her arms while she talked to me. I’d say the young is about eight months old. She is raging about vaccination, reasoning that it isn’t natural and it’s dubious why we don’t hear anything in the news about the fatalities of antigen injection. Vitamins are her best bet to build up their immune system.

Vaccination is an intervention against diseases. It saved thousands of medical cases in the United States. Before the widespread of measles immunization, 20% of affected people are hospitalized with 450 deaths each year. Vaccination equips immunity from diseases like chickenpox and hepatitis.

Yet, not everybody believes in them. Parents who refused their child vaccination were called ignorant. But 4% of pediatricians won’t give their own children ages 11 years and below any immunization, according to a 2005 study. Are these pediatricians ignorant too or do they know more than public knows?

Vaccines have side effects. The nurse may inform the patient that inflammation, pain and fever are normal occurrences after the immunization. But no one has ever told us, or at least in my case, that vaccination has rare but major side effects. For example, DTap, a vaccine to prevent diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (all are serious illnesses) has a 1:1,000,000 risk of developing encephalitis (a critical condition where the brain swells). Some may have long term side effects such as an inflammatory process that extends to a lifetime.

The ratio may be small but as Stephanie Messenger said, a mother who lost a baby after immunization, the “risk was 100%” when it happened to a child. The doctors call her son’s disease unexplained yet a mere coincidence that it occurred after the vaccination. Messenger had three more child, all are healthy and unvaccinated.

Administering vaccines all at once increases the risks. A recent study found a significant correlation between babies’ vaccination and hospitalization. Those who received the most immunization have higher and worse hospitalization occurrence. They also have higher death rates.

Giving multiple vaccines also increased the risk for older children since it is unusual to have a high dose of antigens all at once; and under normal settings, these foreign bodies are usually inhaled or swallowed, not pushed through the skin. But the US government is requiring vaccinations for immigrants and public schools in which multiple injections are given at the same time.

While a vaccine’s safety was studied incessantly, there is no scientific backup that injecting them all at once will not yield any unprecedented harmful effects.

Vaccines may have halted epidemics and saved many lives, but the mother I talked to was right. We don’t hear these stories and we don’t know the full information.

The Juicing Debate: To Drink or Not to Drink?

There has been a lot of talk recently about clean eating and juicing. Most people hear the word “juicing” and think of one of two things: (a) steroids, and (b) the sugary beverages you buy in the soda isle at the grocery store.

Juicing has been around for a long time; since at least the 1930s when the Gerson Therapy was first suggested as an alternate treatment plan for serious medical ailments. Gerson Therapy is basically a treatment plan where juicing raw fruits and vegetables (15 – 20 pounds per day) is used to treat and reverse cancer causing carcinogens and diabetes.

While there are medicines used to treat the symptoms of an illness, more times than not, these medicines comes with their own list of side affects. There are no serious side affects of juicing, with the exception of withdraws, but those typically dissipate after the initial 72 hours of starting. Juicing is a natural way for the body to heal itself without using more chemicals that could add other unwanted problems.

I personally have been on a juice fast for 23 days, and I am an advocate of the body healing itself naturally. Before I started juicing I suffered from migraines, I was lethargic all the time, I was overweight, suffered from insomnia, and how I felt inwardly and looked outwardly, was a direct reflection of the substances and foods I was putting into my body. The first 3 days I felt awful, withdrawing from the foods that got me in trouble in the first place; but after day 3, I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. My energy levels increased dramatically, giving me the energy to exercise. I no longer have trouble sleeping through the night; I wake up feeling energized, and I maintain a steady level of energy throughout the day.

Getting adequate nutrition is essential when juicing (for any duration of time) and needs to be taken seriously. Part of the problem with the American diet is that we are increasingly becoming overweight, yet we are starving on a nutritional level. Have you ever eaten a bag full of chips, or a bowl of sugary cereal, and been hungry an hour later? It’s because nutritionally your body is not getting what it needs. With juicing you are maximizing your nutritional and enzymatic intake by ingesting all that goodness in a liquid form allowing it to get into your system faster.

A lot of people say, “Well why don’t you just eat those fruits and vegetables?”. It’s simple – you would have to eat nonstop in order to get the same benefits as you would in juicing. Your body is going to convert those foods into juices anyway, so you’re maximizing your intake by drinking more fruits and vegetables than you could by eating them. And for those of you concerned about protein (nobody cares about protein until you tell them you’re a vegetarian or you’re on a diet), throw in a couple almonds into the blender. The rewards of juicing speak for themselves, and I challenge anyone to try it for at least 5 days. Allow your body the opportunity to heal itself and cleanse.

Dictating Your Genes

C’mon, let’s tell the truth. We wished our parents bestowed us their best genes. We hoped for the blue eyes, vertically profuse bones, tame teeth, and hyperactive metabolism. But since genes are shuffled randomly, some will get receding hairline or left inclined nose.

Thankfully, there is a way to change them. Cosmetic help has never been better at its job. But the epidemic of a treacherous disease in your line can be stopped. You have the ability to alter your genetic makeup starting from you and down your line.

Researchers in Madrid investigated the genes of twins growing up. We know that twins are basically clones with genes almost completely identical. They found that as the twins grow up, their genetic similarities became fewer since the twins engage on different lifestyles.

You may start thinking on eating leafy vegetables. Munching on greens for just 12 servings a month reduces DNA methylation of genes to 20%. Taking multivitamins reduces it to 50%. Lowered methylation suppresses the expression of diseases like cancer and helps repair DNA, thus you’ll be walking with a beneficial genes inside.

Eating foods rich in fats and sugars is carving a new gene. Not only does it make you fat but it also changes your genes in a way that your body retains more fat than you should. It makes it harder to shed them away. In contrast, a healthy intake of omega-3 found in fish oils can leverage over 100 genes positively.

There is another identical twin study that shows the influence of controlling methylation. At age 22, one developed schizophrenia while the twin brother successfully suppressed his “schizophrenia gene”. This gives us an easier breath as the disease gene we may have can be silenced.

The bad habits will make your genes bad. People who smoke, endure prolonged stress and eat on poor diet conceive children with higher risks of diabetes, heart disease and depression, among other health problems. Everything you are doing to your body may be your burden or gift to the next generation of your family. You start taking care of them by taking care of yourself.

What genes would you like to have?

Overweight People Have the Advantage

The ideal body can’t have any flabs. We exercise to shed off the fats and we cringe upon seeing the bad but luscious foods. We feel guilt when we munch them.

But why can’t a bulky body be healthy?

A recent study indicates that 20% of obese people, by looking at their medical risks, are healthy. This trumps the notion that all obese people need to lose weight. But majority is still on risk. This means that 4 out of 5 are susceptible to obesity-related diseases like diabetes, heart attack and stroke.

How about those who are overweight? In what ways can fats be their asset?

People whose BMI is 25 – 29 (thus, overweight) have 6% less risk of death than those with normal BMI (a.k.a. the fit ones). In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reported 100,000 fewer deaths among overweight people.

According to the researchers, this may be because these people at risk visit the doctors more often and their health is monitored. But the data will agree that overweight people “outlive the obese, the underweight, and people at normal weight”.

Overweight people have their own advantages. They have fuller faces and glowing skin leading to a youthful appearance. They have stronger bones and osteoporosis are less common in them.

Women with rounder shape are in sound condition. Those with bigger thighs have a better metabolism, thus lowering the risk of heart disease. Extra pounds also increase fertility while underweight women have 72% risk of a miscarriage. Fats protect post-menopausal women from cognitive decline.

And of course, their boobs are bigger and unfortunately, it’s also true for men.

Doctors are baffled as to why overweight people are better in fighting an illness. It seems that fat act like reserves to keep the body functioning during hard times for the body. After all, fats are for storage of vitamins A, D, E and K. It covers the cells and helps supply nutrients. This much-hated substance has a critical role in inflammation, blood pressure, and clotting regulation.

As long an active lifestyle and healthy diet are dominant, it seems that the weight won’t matter. It became a social expectation to be model-like.

What is your favorite fatty food?

“I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday, For a Hamburger Today”

I recently watched an older episode of “Parks and Recreation.” It’s the episode where Ron Swanson and Chris Traeger have a competition to see who makes the better hamburger. Chris pulls out all the stops with seasoning, toppings, and sides to please the palate, whereas Ron simply cooks a plain ground beef burger and puts it on a bun – and wins. Sometimes less is more. Jimmy Buffet captured his love for the cheeseburger in his famous song “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and Wimpy’s catch phrase from Popeye quickly caught on as “I”ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” So what is it about this food that has us salivating and including it on menus of virtually every American restaurant around?

I think part of the appeal of hamburgers is that they are familiar to everyone. When you go to a restaurant and you look at all the options, it makes choosing more difficult. However, with picking the Hamburger, you already know its a dependable option and will leave you feeling full and satisfied. It’s also the more economical choice when comparing it to say, seafood options or steak. Hamburgers are often paired with a heaping serving of chips or fries that will leave you feeling that you got your money’s worth in food. Hamburgers are also easy to eat. They don’t require you to cut into them, you just simply pick them up and shove them into your mouth.

The hamburger is a timeless meal. Restaurants are always competing to try and remaster the hamburger, adding fancier toppings, changing the meat from ground beef, to sirloin, Angus, and turkey. Even the vegetarians and vegans have their own meat-free options like the garden burgers and boca burgers which tried to emulate the familiar taste that you get when biting into a juicy hamburger. The hamburger and bun also serve as a template for anyone wishing to be innovative with their toppings and sides. You can add pretty much anything to it, and you still know its going to taste good.

Among the biggest reasons why hamburgers are America’s national food are because they are social and nostalgic food. They bring community in the sense that people often serve them at neighborhood barbeques and parties. They remind us of summertime, pool parties, and conversation with friends. They go great with beer, and they’re a crowd pleaser because everyone likes them. It also helps that they’re relatively inexpensive to make and can accommodate a plethora of people. People tend to stick with foods they already know they like; and as Americans, we know we can always count on the hamburger.

What’s your favorite hamburger restaurant?

Country Doctors – A Fading Memory

At eighty-seven, Dr. Russell Dohner still sees patients who come by his office off the town square in Rushville, Illinois, just like he has done for the past sixty years. But time marches on, and Dr. Dohner has been forced to more than double his fee for a first-come-first-served office visit. On their way out, each patient now pays Edith Moore, the eighty-five-year-old secretary, a five dollar fee.

Dr. Dohner doesn’t accept medical insurance–he says it’s not worth the bother. “I always just wanted to be a doctor to help people with their medical problems and that’s all it’s for. It was never intended to make a lot of money.” You can read more of Dr. Dohner’s story here, in the LaCross Tribune.

From the late 1950s, I grew up in a small, rural town in northeast Ohio. There was a little white house across the street from us, where Dr. List had his office. With wisps of gray hair, black-rimmed glasses, and a white coat, Doc List stitched me up when I fell partway through a glass storm door, prescribed medicine whenever I got sick, and he even fitted me with my first pair of glasses. My parents always paid him in cash. Back then, Doc List either didn’t take medical insurance, or we didn’t have that kind of insurance. I’m not sure which was the case, but whenever we needed medical care, we just walked across the street.

Fortunately for me, Doc List’s son followed in his father’s footsteps. When I was about thirteen, and too sick to even walk across the street, the young Dr. List made the last house call I can remember. He ended up sending me straight to the hospital with a 105 degree temperature, and a bad case of viral pneumonia.

In the story, An Irish Miracle, Doc McGowan makes a house call to look after Alastar Connolly, after he took a nasty fall and split his head open. Dr. Dohner, both Dr. Lists, and Doc McGowan are caring, dedicated country doctors. The only difference is that Doc McGowan was a large animal veterinarian, affectionately, a horse doctor. Since his patients usually weighed well over 1000 pounds, it wasn’t really his fault that he might have been a little heavy-handed with the local anesthetics he administered to Alastar.

Would you trust an old country doctor, like the ones in this story, with your medical care today? Their training and methods might have been from a bygone era, but they each cared deeply for their patients, many of whom were also friends and neighbors. Going to a doctor’s office these days seems to begin with “Has your insurance changed?” instead of “It’s nice to see you, how are you feeling?”, and end with a string of cryptic billing statements and frustrating telephone calls that can stretch out for months afterward.

Something in between might be nice.

Squeezing a Ball Improves Sports Performance

Several athletes in the Olympics perfect their moves over years but they make mistakes on the day of show. It happens to the most of us. We prepare for a long time but on the exact time we should perform, we gag and choke. We make mistakes we have never committed when we are practicing. This is a familiar feeling to athletes because eyes are on them in every sporting event.

The source of the blunder is when athletes started thinking of their own movements instead of relying on their body’s motor capabilities. Overthinking can intervene with concentration and performance of motion tasks.

For the athletes who aren’t used to the pressure of an audience yet, squeezing a ball or clenching a hand may help. According to the new research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, doing so before the competition will activate certain parts of the brain.

But it has to be the left hand. In the study, right handed athletes who squeezed a ball using the left hand have lower chances of choking than right handed athletes who squeezed a ball using the right hand. This may be due to the system of our brain’s supervision, where the right brain controls the left part of our body – the side of the brain that directs automated and instinctive behaviors.

The idea is to distract athletes from thinking. “Athletes usually perform better when they trust their bodies rather than thinking too much about their own actions or what their coaches told them during practice”, said Juergen Beckmann, PhD, chair of sport psychology at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.

This technique may also be applied outside athletics, especially in pressing situations.

Do you think this will work for you?

Health Hazard: Sitting

Sure, we exercise regularly. We limit the indulgence and eat the right foods. Those are good healthy habits, but it’s not enough. According to UK researchers, sitting too long is risking you diabetes, heart disease and even death. That is regardless of your exercise.

This study also asserts that Americans spend 60-70% of their time sitting. Before you deny this, evaluate yourself. Do you sit when you eat? Do you sit when you use your computer? Do you sit when you watch your shows? Yeah, I think we do a lot of sitting.

Is this implying that we should stand when we do these activities? Yes, and it’s not a bad thing. I wrote this post standing up, and ideas come smoother when I pace around.

All we do now is contrary to the men who lived in a cave. They walk on foot. They stand and collect or kill for food. They don’t sit around and expect to receive food as instantaneous as ten minutes. It’s true that we live longer because of our medical innovations, but I believe their bodies are healthier. I don’t think our bodies evolved that fast to accommodate long hours of sitting. It is unnatural for us.

Pan (2012) called sitting as the “worst positions for the body to maintain”. You are familiar with the feeling of strain on your lower back after a prolonged sit. That is because sitting puts immense pressure on your back, unlike when standing up, the weight is evened out. Many people sit in the wrong posture as well. Flexors tighten, hamstrings shorten, nerves pinch, blood pressure flow disrupts result from sitting.

Either you cut your prolonged sitting or take intervals from sitting. How hard would this change be for you?

Category Archives: Health & Fitness