Registered Dietitian Sets The Clock on Eating Habits - Late Night Eating Doesn’t Cause Weight Gain

The other day, this cartoon was posted and liked and reposted all over the net. And as much as registered nutritionists agree that a healthy breakfast is critical to kick start your day and get your metabolism geared up, it reinforces this idea we have that late night eating causes weight gain. I’ve heard clients swear off food after 7:00 pm, certain that their bodies would absorb it differently and put on the pounds overnight as if food transformed and became extra-caloric with sundown. According to the US Department of Agriculture’s Weight Control Website “it does not matter what time of day you eat. It is what and how much you eat and how much physical activity you do during the whole day that determines whether you gain, lose, or maintain...

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Personal Trainer Debunks the Bulk Up Myth About Women and Lifting: Women Should Do Strength Training and Weight Lifting For Better Health

There’s been a longstanding rule that women should be careful not to lift if they don’t want to bulk up and end up looking like The Hulk. It’s as if we’ve had this equation burned into our subconscious: lifting = muscle mass = bulk = Hulk (minus the green hue). Personal trainers can talk until we’re green in the face to convince clients otherwise, but we can always tell there’s still a bit of fear when we recommend weight training. Unless you have incredibly high levels of testosterone (levels only achieved through steroid use which is dangerous and illegal) and are wearing an avocado face mask, weight lifting will bring you no closer to Hulk-like appearance than any other exercise. Women have 10 to 30 times less of the hormones that cause muscle hypertrophy (the body-builder bulk). In...

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Make a Personal Trainer Cringe Today: The Lingering Stretching Myths That Just Won’t Go Away

Lean down. Grab your ankles. Wait. Hold it. Now repeat. Does this sound familiar? It’s the sustained stretch that will insure you won’t get sore or injured during a warm up. It has been a mainstay of many exercise routines and rituals. Limber limbs equals safety. Wait for it. Here it comes. There you got it … the cringe. Beyond feeling more limber, studies published in American College of Sports Medicine Journal and Science in Sports and Exercise, as well as articles in CNN, NBC News, and more have refuted the stretching myths: stretching will prevent soreness and injury. It won’t, actually. But these myths seem to linger and won’t go away. Stretching doesn’t replace a warm up, and most injuries happen when the muscles are in their normal range of motion. So stretching to origami-lengths...

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Registered Nutritionists Take Soy off Women’s Black List: Introduce Soy Back into Your Diet With These Simple Steps

As it seems to happen with almost everything, nutrition advice and news aren’t exempt from scandal, innuendo, and misinformation. For years, without the scientific backing, scientists and researchers were convinced soy consumption helped prevent breast cancer, taking their conclusions from the fact that women in Japan, China, and Singapore, where soy is a diet staple, had much lower rates of breast cancer than women in the States. Fast forward to a study published in 1996, in which soy isoflavones and soy proteins – both contain compounds similar to estrogen (however much weaker) – were found to stimulate the growth of abnormal cells in breast tissue. Another 1998 study drove the soy fear home when a particular strain of mice that received high amounts of isoflavones for a period of time...

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Dietitian and Personal Trainer in NYC Debunks Diet and Exercise Myths: Celebrating a Month of April Fools!

I bet you’ve heard that 3500 calories equals a pound of weight loss. And don’t forget that soy causes breast cancer. Everyone knows stretching before exercising prevents soreness and injuries. And women really shouldn’t lift weights because they don’t want to bulk up. April Fools! This month, we’re going to be debunking myths – some of the most common – about nutrition and exercise, weight loss and weight gain. Age-old knowledge changes with information, science and research. It’s hard to let go of those old ideas, but, hopefully, through myth busting, we can understand our bodies, nutrition, weight loss, and health better. Weight management and health isn’t an exact science. For years, we’ve been trained to think about weight loss as a balance between calories ingested and calories burned...

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Registered Dietitian in NYC Offers Tips for a Healthy Colon: Diet, Exercise, and Regular Screenings Can Save Your Life

March is colorectal health month. Colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the States and the one with the second highest mortality rate. The CDC has created a Screen For Life campaign encouraging men and women after fifty to get regular screenings, as screenings can find precancerous polyps as well as detect colorectal cancer in its earliest stages. But colorectal health doesn’t only deal with cancer. Other conditions can cause our colons to work improperly including diverticulosis, diverticulitis (when the diverticulii become inflamed and painful), constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis and Chron’s disease. We often hear recommendations to drink more water, eat more fiber and move more. But do these recommendations impact our colon health? The American...

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Registered Dietitian NYC Celebrates Green: And Not Just for Saint Patrick’s Day

Go Green Every Day! Many of us “went green” on March 17th, celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day with corned beef, the “much maligned” spud (completely misunderstood), parades, and green beer. But by going green, just a little in our every day diets and our St. Patrick’s celebration, we can improve our health leaps and bounds. (And we can eat those potatoes). Adding a daily dose of healthy greens to our diets means introducing a powerhouse of nutrients and vitamins to our bodies. Greens are essential, matching our needs better than any other food group. They offer some spectacular functions including: fiber, proteins, antioxidants, calcium, beta-carotene, folate, Vitamin A, Vitamin K, caratonoids, vitamin E, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxathin. That, in and of itself, is a mouthful. (Go here for a breakdown...

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