Bathroom Medicine Cabinet

Exercise For Fat Loss

This article has been provided by guest author Kyle Wood known as one of the best among up and coming Melbourne personal trainers.  Kyle has a keen interest in new and more effective training for himself and his clients and he believes exercise should contribute to your life and make it more fruitful rather than detract from it. He currently runs a blog in his spare time called Kyle’s Fitness Facts so take a look there if you want to know more...

Exercise for Fat Loss

Diet is very important when losing weight. The best training system in the world cannot out do a terrible diet filled with junk food, irregular meals and no veggies. However, as you reduce your caloric intake your body adapts to that caloric intake and the weight loss will plateau. This is where a lot of people will give up, however for those who continue, more calories must be cut and so on. This reaches a point where the calories are cut so low that you begin to starve your body.

A better solution to making that second cut in calories (or even the first) is to add exercise. If you are already exercising regularly then I suggest adding more intense workouts to your training schedule.  Here are some great ideas (that can all be done without a gym membership):

Sprint Intervals

Find your local track or oval (soccer pitches work excellent). Start off by doing one or two laps to warm up and then follow this cycle:

• Jog 50m
• Sprint 50m
• Walk 50m

Repeat this 4 times. Each week add an additional cycle until you reach 10 cycles. When you can do that move onto something new.

Note: A full size soccer pitch is 50m wide and 100m long so you can complete 2 cycles in one lap.

Circuit Training:

I’m not talking about walking around in a circuit on weight machines for 30 minutes, I’m talking all out circuits that will get your heart pumping through your chest and your fat cells dropping like flies. For these circuits you will need a railing or play equipment bar about 1.2m (4 feet) off the ground and a low bench or steps.

Circuit 1:

• Feet elevated push up x12 (on knees if unable to do on toes)
• Bodyweight squat x12
• Crunches x 12
• Butt Kick Jumps x12

Repeat 2 times before moving onto circuit two

Circuit 2:

• Burpees x10
• Inverted row (on railing) x10
• Forward Walking Lunges x5
• Reverse Walking Lunges x5
• Pushups x10

Repeat 2 times. Each week add an extra circuit to one of the circuits until you reach a total of 10 circuits.

Hill Sprints

Find a small hill. Sprint to the top, walk back down, rinse, repeat. You will be amazed at how awesome this simple activity is for cardiovascular fitness and fat shedding. Do this 5 times and then add an extra sprint each week.

Remember to warm up thoroughly beforehand and then warm down and stretch afterwards. This applies when doing any exercise.

You want more?

If you work your way up to doing all of that in a week then you can add low intensity recovery cardiovascular work to your off days. This kind of exercise is excellent at promoting blood to muscles to aid in recovery from your previous workouts. Good ideas are swimming, bike riding or brisk walks with your partner/family/dog.

Give these high intensity techniques a go. Stick to them for at least 6 weeks before you truly give them your analysis. I believe by then you will be addicted to high intensity training. Not only will they help you lose weight faster but you will also have more energy and feel more alert. Before I go, some great fun facts:

• Muscle requires more energy to exist, so the more muscle you have, the faster your metabolism.
• 20-30 minutes high intensity training burns more total energy (calories) over 24 hours than 60 minutes of low-moderate total training.
• Recent studies are continuing to show that the lactic acid system (shorter bursts of energy like sprinting and circuits) is a far greater channel for fat oxidizing (fat burning) than the aerobic study (longer low intensity training) which might explain why sprinters are so ripped.

Childcare Centers– and Parents– Brace for Flu Season

Over the years, day-care and child-care centers have become a security blanket for millions of working parents who need their children looked after during the day. But as an H1N1 epidemic draws closer, these centers look less like protective bastions and more like potential H1N1 incubators.

"Since the virus has emerged, we've seen a number of groups that are at higher risk for complications from H1N2, and these include children under five and, especially, children younger than two," says Bill Hall, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services. "Infants younger than six months cannot receive the H1N1 vaccine, because their immune systems are not developed enough to tolerate it," he adds. To date, the CDC has recorded 76 deaths of children under 18. For day-care centers, that means more than just a risk of low child attendance; it's a huge potential liability. (See what you need to know about the H1N1 vaccine.)

A parent whose child contracts H1N1 at a day-care center because of negligent supervision could sue the facility, says David Wolf, a child injury lawyer and partner at Wood, Atter & Wolf, in Jacksonville, Fla. Wolf concedes the mere acquisition of minor flu-like symptoms would typically be insufficient to litigate an injury case. But there is a potential, he says, if there's extended hospitalization, permanent injury or death. (To date, he is unaware of any such lawsuits.)

To protect all parties, including owners, day-care center gatekeepers will need to play an increasingly prominent role in keeping symptomatic kids off the premises. Even though standards of efficiency in child-care centers, including appropriate staff-to-children ratios, cleanliness of the premises and good hygiene practices, are mandated, many day-care centers that operate in the U.S. are not in compliance with state regulations, says Wolf. Further, parents may not realize that most church-based day-care centers are exempt from certain regulations required by the state. (See how not to get the H1N1 flu.)

As the media saturates consumers with swine-flu recommendations, however, many day-care-center owners are rising to the challenge. "We started preparing last spring and have placed a heightened focus on retraining staff on hand-washing and sanitizing procedures throughout the center, with special attention in the sign-in area," says Beth Woodward, spokesperson for Knowledge Learning Corporation, the parent company of KinderCare Learning Centers. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine flu.)

Barbara Harwell, who has owned and operated Tender Loving Care, in Elkhart, Ind., for the past 18 years, has allocated more of her budget to bleach and cleaning products; she's been known to send home parents with their filthy diaper bags and instructions to wash them.

But, says Wolf, it's not just up to the centers. Parents also need to be more vigilant. "Day-care establishments are like nursing homes and hospitals," he says. "If you park a person there, and never visit, you'll never know what's going on."

See the most common hospital mishaps.

See how to prevent illness at any age.

Should Parents of Overweight Kids Lose Custody?

Should morbidly obese children be taken from their parents? That's the question an increasing number of countries are grappling with amid the Western world's obesity epidemic.

The latest case to make headlines concerns a Scottish couple who lost custody of two of their six children on the basis of what was, their lawyer claims, a failure to reduce the kids' weight following warnings from Scottish social services. The couple lost their Oct. 14 appeal in a case that is far from clear-cut — representatives of Dundee City say they would never remove children "just because of a weight issue." But obesity appears to be the primary reason South Carolina mom Jerri Gray lost custody of her 14-year-old, 555-lb. son in May. She was arrested after missing a court date to examine whether she should retain custody after doctors had expressed concern about her son's weight to social services. The boy is currently living with his aunt, and his mother is facing criminal child-neglect charges. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

Several other cases in recent years — in California, New Mexico, Texas and New York, as well as Canada — have garnered attention because a child's obesity resulted in loss of custody. "It's happening more than the public is aware of, but because these cases are usually kept quiet [as a result of child-privacy laws], we have no record," says Dr. Matt Capehorn, who sits on the board of the U.K.'s National Obesity Forum. The issue of whether parents should lose custody of their obese children took center stage two years ago with a British television documentary about Connor McCreaddie, an 8-year-old who weighed more than 200 lbs. and was at risk of being taken from his mother by authorities. She eventually weaned him off processed foods and retained custody.

Removing children from their parents remains a last resort, but obesity experts are increasingly debating whether doing so can boost a child's chances for a healthier life. Childhood obesity can lead to a host of health problems, including Type 2 diabetes, which until recently was primarily a problem seen in adults. Overweight children can also develop insulin resistance, hypertension, high cholesterol, sleep apnea and orthopedic problems and go into early puberty. "Children are vulnerable. If they're given food and told to finish what's on the plate, they'll eat it, and without exercise get bigger and bigger," says Tam Fry, chairman of Britain's Child Growth Foundation, who is lobbying obesity experts to consider overnutrition a form of child abuse. (Read "Mother's Obesity Raises Risk of Birth Defects.")

Yet the parents' share of responsibility in weight gain isn't always easy to judge. "It's unfair to blame solely the parents, when there's a myriad of other factors influencing a child's weight," says Dr. Dana Rofey of the University of Pittsburgh, whose weight-management clinic is regularly called on during custody battles in which one divorced parent blames the other for making a child obese. She says contributing factors include not just genetic predisposition and socioeconomic status but also environmental factors, like whether children have access to parks and playgrounds. Rofey also sees children of all ages sneaking extra food behind their parents' backs. (Read "The Social Side of Obesity: You Are Who You Eat With.")

And then there's the issue of parents, sometimes obese themselves, who can be in denial of their children's weight problems. When parents refuse to address the issue, Fry wants kids to be put in the care of professionals — with the provision that parents may visit — and that steps are taken to alter the family's diet so the child may eventually return to a healthier home. Last year, Fry introduced a motion to that effect at the U.K.'s National Obesity Forum conference but could convince just one-third of the delegates to support it. "I knew that I was running against the tide, but I'm seeing others slowly but surely coming around," he says.

During the 20 years Dr. Melinda Sothern has been working with obese children, the Louisiana-based exercise physiologist and author of Trim Kids has seen only about a dozen removed from their homes. But in recent years, she's noticed a real change in attitude. "I've seen less and less willingness on the professional side to understand how hard it is on the parents' side, especially from younger professionals," she says. "[Child protection] laws have changed, so a lot of times they worry that if they don't report parents, they'll get in trouble." (See a special report on the science of appetite.)

Dr. Sothern also notes how difficult it is for many of her patients to shed weight, including one boy whom social workers recently considered removing from his home. "They were saying, 'This mother must be feeding him to death. We need to remove him.' I said, 'Guys, before you do that, we need to look at more options — he's obese, but he's fit, enrolled in sports. He can run. His breathing has improved.'"

This child, like Gray's son, had difficulty finding a weight-loss program for which he wasn't over the cutoff weight. Gray's lawyer, Grant Varner, says she had been unable to find any programs in South Carolina that could handle her son. Even programs dealing with morbidly obese kids reportedly told her that he was beyond their maximum weight. (See the video "Heavy Mexico.")

According to Varner, Gray was worried that her son had an undiagnosed medical problem but that as a single mother with limited means and no health insurance, she was at a loss and couldn't monitor his eating 24/7.

"If she's found guilty, it could open a Pandora's box," says Varner. "Where does it stop? Who tells you how big is too big? Will parents of 16-year-old girls who are obsessed with being skinny be next in line?"

Dr. David Ludwig, who directs the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children's Hospital Boston, says there's plenty of blame to go around. "Parents have a responsibility, but it's also society's responsibility — the national government spending billions of dollars on farm subsidies for poor-quality foods, communities placing their priorities on development revenue rather than parks, cutbacks to school nutrition," he says. "All this is unfair to the kids."

Read "It's Not Just Genetics."

Read "Kids Who Lack Self-Control More Prone to Obesity Later."

Experts Redefine Dementia as a Terminal Disease

Dementia is most often thought of as a memory disorder, an illness of the aging mind. In its initial stages, that's true — memory loss is an early hallmark of dementia. But experts in the field say dementia is more accurately defined as fatal brain failure: a terminal disease, like cancer, that physically kills patients, not simply a mental ailment that accompanies older age. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)

That distinction is largely unfamiliar both to the general public and within the medical field, yet it is a crucial one when it comes to treatment decisions for end-stage dementia patients. Dr. Greg Sachs at the Indiana University Center for Aging Research says a lack of appreciation of the nature of dementia leads to misguided and often overly aggressive end-stage treatment. Five years ago, Sachs wrote a paper on such barriers to palliative end-of-life care for dementia patients, but he ran into difficulty explaining the findings to the editors of the major medical journal that published it. "The editors kept coming back to me and saying, 'But what do the patients die of? You don't die from dementia.' And I kept saying, 'Yes, they do. That's the whole point of the paper,' " says Sachs.

Now, a large, prospective study to be published in the Oct. 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine goes a long way toward identifying the true course of the slow-progressing disease, which affects some 5 million Americans — a number that is expected to triple by 2050. "This is the first large study to show what specialists have been arguing for years. Dementia is a terminal illness, and patients warrant palliative care," says Sachs, who wrote an editorial that appears in the same issue of the journal.

The new study followed 323 Boston-area nursing-home residents with advanced dementia for 18 months. These patients were unable to recognize family members, incontinent and unable to get around on their own. Researchers tracked the progression of their disease, complications and survival rates; they also recorded the treatments each patient received as well as their health-care proxies' understanding of advanced dementia and the patient's prognosis. Over the course of the study, 55% of the residents died, with nearly half of those deaths occurring within the first six months of the study. Patients' median survival span was 478 days, a figure comparable with that of terminal-cancer patients. Thirty-one residents suffered major health events, such as seizure, gastrointestinal bleeding, heart attack or stroke, but only in rare cases did those events lead to death. Only seven patients had a major event during the final three months of life. "Our main findings confirmed dementia has high mortality. People in the study didn't have other devastating things happen to them before they died," says the study's lead author, Dr. Susan Mitchell of the Harvard-affiliated Hebrew SeniorLife Institute for Aging Research. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.")

Dementia is not a single illness but a collection or consequence of many, including Parkinson's disease, vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease (which accounts for some 70% of all dementia cases). In the advanced stages of dementia, it is often impossible to tell which disease the patient had at the outset, as the end result is the same, according to Mitchell's study: a syndrome of symptoms and complications — eating problems (86%), pneumonia (41%), difficulty breathing (46%), pain (39%) and fever (53%) — caused by brain failure. "Dementia ends up involving much more than just the brain," says Dr. Claudia Kawas, professor of neurology at the University of California, Irvine. "We forget the brain does everything for us — controls the heart, the lungs, the gastrointestinal tract, the metabolism."

When those systems fail, patients are often treated aggressively rather than with palliative care. More than 40% of residents who died over the course of the study were sent to the emergency room, hospitalized, tube-fed or given IV nutrition during the last three months of life. These interventions can themselves cause distress and pain while providing, at best, questionable benefit and minimal prolongation of life, experts say. Among the family members who directed these residents' care, however, those who believed that the resident had less than six months to live and understood the nature of advanced dementia were less likely to intervene aggressively than caregivers who lacked such understanding. "Clinicians, patients' families and nursing-home staff need to recognize and treat advanced dementia as a terminal illness requiring palliative care," wrote Sachs in his editorial, noting that patients need not be close to death to warrant pain-relieving treatment.

Experts say part of the reason it is so common to intervene in dementia cases is that the patient, by definition, cannot make medical decisions autonomously, leaving a relative or friend to serve as their health-care proxy. "Family members are much less likely to forgo treatments or let go. An 80-year-old patient will tell you, 'I have lived a good, long life. I have no regrets.' But talk to his 50-year-old son, and he isn't ready. Being the decision maker for someone else is a much harder thing to do," says Sachs, who says the role requires more education than is typically given.

Promoting this kind of understanding, however, requires communication and counseling with doctors. "Counseling takes time — and requires adequate reimbursement for the physician," says Mitchell.

That's not a death panel. It's simply good medicine.

See the most common hospital mishaps.

See how to prevent illness at any age.

Earthquake Preparedness: Lessons from San Francisco

The San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics were just about to start Game 3 of the 1989 World Series on Oct. 17 when the shaking began. ABC play-by-play announcer Al Michaels managed to tell viewers, "We're having an earth—" before the signal went dead. The temblor was brief — just 15 seconds — but the damage caused by the 6.9-magnitude quake was impressive. It killed 63 people, injured thousands and caused $7 billion worth of damage throughout California's Bay Area, including major destruction to the Oakland Bay Bridge. "It was a good sized shock," says Peter Yanev, chairman of Risk Solutions International and the author of Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country. (See pictures of San Francisco.)

Looking back 20 years later, however, seismologists say the Bay Area got lucky. The epicenter of the quake was near Loma Prieta peak in Santa Clara County, outside the densely populated urban neighborhoods of San Francisco and Oakland. The destruction missed Silicon Valley — with its tens of billions in economic value — altogether. "If that quake had to happen, that was really the best place," says Yanev. "We were about as lucky as we could get." (See TIME's special report "Where Will the Next Five Big Earthquakes Be?")

Chances are we won't get that lucky again in earthquake-prone San Francisco or in any of the cities around the world that sit on unstable land. According to a 2008 study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), there's a more than 99% chance that a quake of magnitude 6.7 or higher will hit California over the next 30 years and a nearly 50% chance that a magnitude 7.5 or higher quake will hit the state over the same period. Tokyo, Tehran, Istanbul, Seattle, St. Louis — all are major cities built on land that has experienced massive quakes in the past and almost certainly will in the future.

The difference between then and now is that these cities are growing, which means more and more people will be living in seismological danger zones. The key to minimizing damage is to prepare for the inevitable. "The Loma Prieta quake was really a wake-up call for this region," says David Schwartz, a USGS geologist and the co-chair of the San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake Alliance. "But we still have a lot to do." (See pictures of Indonesia's devastating earthquake.)

California's responses to the 1989 quake and to a 1994 temblor in Los Angeles are instructive. First, there's the science of quake analysis and prediction. In 1989 the Bay Area had only 75 accelerometer sensors, which locate quakes and determine their intensity. Today, there are more than 200, which allow seismologists to more immediately pin down the size and strength of an earthquake as it happens. Many of those sensors have also been equipped with global-positioning system add-ons, which can determine the rate at which a quake has caused a fault to slip. Scientists in the Bay Area have also dug several deep trenches that expose rock layers that have been deformed by quakes — that helps give them a better sense of how often earthquakes hit and when the next one may come. Scientists still can't predict earthquakes the way they might predict a hurricane, but thanks to this richer data, they are getting a little closer. "We are getting better at understanding the probabilities of earthquakes," says Lucy Jones, chief scientist of the USGS's Earthquake Hazards Program.

Since earthquakes can't be accurately predicted or stopped, the key to preventing damage is to prepare. The death toll and destruction from a serious temblor often has less to do with the strength of the quake than with the strength of building codes and emergency-response plans. In the years since the 1989 quake, California has reinforced building codes, especially for public structures like schools and hospitals, while the state government has spent billions to improve the reliability of highways, bridges and roads. The Bay Bridge — which partly collapsed in 1989 — is being remade to handle the largest plausible earthquake expected to occur over a 1,500-year period. "We're in much better shape for emergency response," says Jones. (Read "How Disaster-Ready Are We?")

But even in California, older private homes remain a challenge. Although new structures are built in compliance with toughened building codes, existing homes need to be retrofitted to get up to code — but that can be costly, and right now there's little in the way of aid for homeowners who might want to quakeproof their homes. That means there are still countless older structures that aren't built to resist earthquakes — especially strong ones — and could collapse during a major temblor, which is exactly how most of the deaths in the 1989 quake occurred. "If you have a 20-story apartment building built in 1920, that structure is a collapse hazard," says Yanev. "We know the problem, but the political will is not there to fix it."

Cities like Seattle and St. Louis — which lie in seismological danger zones but where quakes haven't occurred for centuries — are even less prepared. And the worst disasters will continue to occur in the cities of the developing world, in places like Tehran and Gujarat, India, where sheer population density and virtually nonexistent building codes can lead to death tolls in the tens of thousands during a strong quake. That was clear during the May 2008 earthquake in western China, when some 20,000 children and teachers were killed in the collapse of shoddily constructed schools. "What happened in China happens too often," says Yanev. "They think it can't happen here, until it does, and they're not prepared." Twenty years later, the lessons of 1989 are clear — we just have to heed them.

See pictures of Pakistan reeling from an earthquake.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.