5 Good Reasons to Skip Your Workout

I’ve skipped my workout plenty of times, sometimes for no real reason. (Well, unless  you count lounging on the couch with a glass of wine as a legitimate reason, which I don’t.)

Of course, skipping a workout doesn’t do me any favors when it comes to my fitness goals. And I know it’s important to stick to a regular exercise routine to stay healthy. But there are certain times when skipping a workout shouldn’t make you feel guilty. (I’d even consider them good reasons!)

Here are five times it’s okay to cut yourself some slack and skip your workout.

You’re injured
If you’re injured, it’s important to take some time off or adjust your regular workouts if you want to get better. If you don’t give your injury proper time to heal and recover, you could put more strain on it and get sidelined for even a longer amount of time. Talk to your doctor about what activities you can do with your injury. Modifying exercises might make it possible for you to continue to work out, but it’s especially important to know which exercises to avoid. Keep in mind, most injuries will get better with proper care, so don’t get discouraged by this setback. On a positive note, an injury might help you discover some new ways to exercise. For instance, if your knee is bothering you, you might be able to try a low-impact workout like yoga or Pilates, and, hey, it’s always fun to try something new, right?

You’re fighting off an illness

Are you sniffling, sneezing, and coughing? Not sure if you should exercise or not? Use the “neck rule” to decide. If your symptoms are all located above your neck (stuffy nose, scratchy throat, headache), you likely have a head cold and it’s fine to exercise. However, if you have a fever, congestion in your chest and lungs, or feel achy, it might be a sign of flu, bronchitis, or another more serious ailment, so you should rest up and certainly skip your workout to rest and recover. (Exercising with a fever will make you more vulnerable to dehydration, among other ill effects.) When you’re really not feeling well, it’s more than okay to spend a few days on the couch instead of at the gym, so your body can focus on fighting off illness. And, of course, the last thing you want to do is spread germs to others or pick up something else at the gym !

Health.com: Best and Worst Exercises to Do When You Have a Cold

You just completed an endurance event
Just ran a marathon? Competed in a two-day CrossFit competition? Finished a Tough Mudder in one piece? Congrats! What an accomplishment to be proud of! You might still be high on endorphins from your recent fitness achievement, but a rest day (or two) is likely much-needed to give your body time to recuperate. Some athletes feel better when they engage in active recovery, such as light walking, stretching, or foam rolling, which can help alleviate soreness, but it’s probably best to give your body some time off to help you recovery properly.

Health.com: 6 Races You’ll Love!

You haven’t slept well all week
If you’re feeling just a little bit tired after a rough night of sleep, a workout might actually give you an energy boost, but if you haven’t slept well in days (or maybe you’re jet-lagged), it’s okay to choose sleep over hitting the gym– and this decision will benefit you in the long run. Research shows that lack of sleep can increase your appetite for high-calorie dense food, which can make it more difficult to maintain your weight. Even though heart-pumping cardio will burn calories, you’re better off sleeping in and saving your workout for when you’re feeling more rested. Plus, if you’re really exhausted, you’re not going to get a great workout anyway, and there’s always the possibility of injury if your mind and body aren’t in top shape.

Health.com: Sleep on This: Our Top Pillow Picks

Your [insert reoccurring injury] is acting up

Similar to exercising with an injury, working out when a reoccurring injury is acting up is not good. Even a slight twinge could mean something more serious, so instead of exercising through pain and letting your old injury get worse, take a break before things get too serious. Once an old injury rears its nasty head, it often takes a considerable amount of time to heal, which, of course, will keep you from the exercising for an even longer amount of time. Get back to your regular exercise routine faster by nipping it in the bud with a rest day.

Read Tina’s daily food and fitness blog, Carrots ‘N’ Cake.

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‘Fat and Fit’ Is a Myth, Report Says

MONDAY, Dec. 2, 2013 (HealthDay News) — The notion that some people can be overweight or obese and still remain healthy is a myth, according to a new Canadian study.

Even without high blood pressure, diabetes or other metabolic issues, overweight and obese people have higher rates of death, heart attack and stroke after 10 years compared with their thinner counterparts, the researchers found.

“These data suggest that increased body weight is not a benign condition, even in the absence of metabolic abnormalities, and argue against the concept of healthy obesity or benign obesity,” said researcher Dr. Ravi Retnakaran, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.

The terms healthy obesity and benign obesity have been used to describe people who are obese but don’t have the abnormalities that typically accompany obesity, such as high blood pressure, high blood sugar and high cholesterol, Retnakaran explained.

“We found that metabolically healthy obese individuals are indeed at increased risk for death and cardiovascular events over the long term as compared with metabolically healthy normal-weight individuals,” he added.

It’s possible that obese people who appear metabolically healthy have low levels of some risk factors that worsen over time, the researchers suggest in the report, published online Dec. 3 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, welcomed the report. “Given the recent attention to the ‘obesity paradox’ in the professional literature and pop culture alike, this is a very timely and important paper,” Katz said. (The obesity paradox holds that certain people benefit from chronic obesity.)

Some obese people appear healthy because not all weight gain is harmful, Katz said. “It depends partly on genes, partly on the source of calories, partly on activity levels, partly on hormone levels. Weight gain in the lower extremities among younger women tends to be metabolically harmless; weight gain as fat in the liver can be harmful at very low levels,” Katz said.

A number of things, however, work to increase the risk of heart attack, stroke and death over time, he added.

“In particular, fat in the liver interferes with its function and insulin sensitivity,” Katz said. This starts a domino effect, he explained. “Insensitivity to insulin causes the pancreas to compensate by raising insulin output. Higher insulin levels affect other hormones in a cascade that causes inflammation. Fight-or-flight hormones are affected, raising blood pressure. Liver dysfunction also impairs blood cholesterol levels,” Katz said.

In general the things people do to make themselves fitter and healthier tend to make them less fat, he added.

“Lifestyle practices conducive to weight control over the long term are generally conducive to better overall health as well. I favor a focus on finding health over a focus on losing weight,” Katz noted.

For the study, Retnakaran’s team reviewed eight studies that looked at differences between obese or overweight people and slimmer people in terms of their health and risk for heart attack, stroke and death. These studies included more than 61,000 people overall.

In studies with follow-ups of a decade or more, those who were overweight or obese but didn’t have high blood pressure, heart disease or diabetes still had a 24 percent increased risk for heart attack, stroke and death over 10 years or more, compared with normal-weight people, the researchers found.

Greater risk for heart attack, stroke and death was seen among all those with metabolic disease (such as high cholesterol and high blood sugar) regardless of weight, the researchers noted.

As a result, doctors should consider both body mass and metabolic tests when evaluating someone’s health risks, the researchers concluded.

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

More information

For more information on obesity, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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Graphic Cigarette Warnings Could Get Millions to Quit

MONDAY, Dec. 2, 2013 (HealthDay News) — Pictures of diseased lungs and other types of graphic warning labels on cigarette packs could cut the number of smokers in the United States by as much as 8.6 million people and save millions of lives, a new study suggests.

Researchers looked at the effect that graphic warning labels on cigarette packs had in Canada and concluded that they resulted in a 12 percent to 20 percent decrease in smokers between 2000 and 2009.

If the same model was applied to the United States, the introduction of graphic warning labels would reduce the number of smokers by between 5.3 million and 8.6 million smokers, according to the study from the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project.

The project is an international research collaboration of more than 100 tobacco-control researchers and experts from 22 countries.

The researchers also said a model used in 2011 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to assess the effect of graphic warning labels significantly underestimated their impact.

These new findings indicate that the potential reduction in smoking rates is 33 to 53 times larger than that estimated in the FDA’s model. They also prove the effectiveness of health warnings that include graphic pictures, according to the authors of the study, which was published online recently in the journal Tobacco Control.

“These findings are important for the ongoing initiative to introduce graphic warnings in the United States,” study lead author Jidong Huang, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, said in a news release.

“The original proposal by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was successfully challenged by the tobacco industry, and the court cited the very low estimated impact on smoking rates as a factor in its judgment,” Huang said.

“Our analyses corrected for errors in the FDA’s analysis, concluding that the effect of graphic warnings on smoking rates would be much stronger than the FDA found,” Huang said. “Our results provide much stronger support for the FDA’s revised proposal for graphic warnings, which we hope will be forthcoming in the near future.”

More information

Learn more about the FDA’s tobacco-labeling rules.

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Brain Scans May Support Venus/Mars Divide Between Sexes

MONDAY, Dec. 2, 2013 (HealthDay News) — While not every woman is intuitive or every man handy with tools, neurological scans of young males and females suggest that — on average — their brains really do develop differently.

The research comes with a caveat: It doesn’t connect the brain-scan findings to the actual ways that these participants behave in real life. And it only looks at overall differences among males and females.

Still, the findings “confirm our intuition that men are predisposed for rapid action, and women are predisposed to think about how things feel,” said Paul Zak, who’s familiar with the study findings.

“This really helps us understand why men and women are different,” added Zak, founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California.

Researchers Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues used scans to explore the brains of 428 males and 521 females aged 8 to 22.

The goal was to better understand the connectivity in the brain, Verma said, and determine if certain types of wiring are in good shape or like a road “that could be broken or has a bad rough patch that needs to be covered over.”

The study found that, on average, the brains of men seem to be better equipped to comprehend what people perceive and how they react to it. Females, on average, appear to be better able to connect the parts of their brains that handle analysis and intuition.

“It starts when they’re young,” Verma said. “It manifests itself when they are adolescents.”

To put the results another way, “men’s brains are biased toward rapid understanding of a situation and how to respond to it, especially in how to act and move in response to information,” Claremont’s Zak said. “Women’s brains are biased toward integrating information with feelings.”

The findings suggest the hormones that begin to kick in during adolescence push the male and female brains in different directions, he said.

What does all this mean in the context of people’s day-to-day lives?

“It tells us why, almost always, when men and women are in a car together, the man drives,” Zak contended. “His brain is biased toward being better at moving a vehicle along a road and going to the right place, the stereotype of the lost man notwithstanding.”

Also, “women maintain and value friendships and other relationships better than men do. Men can have many friends, but on average we are less good at this,” Zak said.

Verma, the study co-author, said the next step in the research is to figure out if people behave differently depending on how their brains are wired.

The study appears online Dec. 2 in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter

More information

For more about the brain, try Harvard University’s Whole Brain Atlas.

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Recipe of the Day: Curried Carrot, Sweet Potato, and Ginger Soup

When it comes to beating the winter chill, there’s only one thing better than a hot, comforting bowl of soup: A bowl of soup that’s packed with superfoods.

This Curried Carrot, Sweet Potato, and Ginger Soup, cuts down on fat, salt, and calories because it uses chicken broth as a base rather than cream. And you won’t miss that full-fat cream because this soup has a wonderfully creamy texture from puréed carrots and sweet potatoes. Both are rich in vitamin A and beta-carotene, which promotes healthy skin and vision.

This soup works well as a starter, but can easily be turned into a hearty and satisfying meal. Pair it with a whole grain baguette or whole grain crackers for extra fiber. You can also make it vegan-friendly by using vegetable broth instead of chicken.

Ingredients: shallots, sweet potato, carrots, ginger, curry powder, chicken broth, canola oil, salt

Try this recipe: Curried Carrot, Sweet Potato, and Ginger Soup

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Do You Sound Tall or Small?

TUESDAY, Dec. 3, 2013 (HealthDay News) — Your voice might help listeners determine your approximate height without seeing you, according to a new study.

Researchers had men and women listen to recordings of identical sentences read by men and women of different heights. The listeners were asked to rank the speakers from tallest to shortest.

The results showed that the listeners were about 62 percent accurate in identifying the taller speakers. This rate is much higher than what can be achieved by chance alone, according to the study, which is scheduled for presentation Tuesday at an Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Francisco.

The findings could prove useful in solving crimes, the researchers noted.

“One would certainly like to know if, when an ‘ear witness,’ as they are often called, says that a talker’s voice seemed ‘tall’ or ‘large,’ this information can be trusted. The answer seems to be yes,” study author John Morton, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a society news release.

This ability may be attributed to a type of sound called subglottal resonance, which is produced in the lower airways of the lungs, said Morton.

“The best way to think about subglottal resonances is to imagine blowing into a glass bottle partially full with liquid: the less liquid in the bottle, the lower the sound,” he explained.

The frequency of the subglottal resonance differs depending on a person’s height, with resonances becoming progressively lower as height increases.

“In humans, the resonances are part of a larger group of sounds, which are sort of like an orchestra playing over the sound being made from the glass bottle. [The glass bottle] sound is still there, but it isn’t easy to hear,” Morton said.

Data and conclusions presented at meetings are typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

More information

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more about hearing.

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What Is The Difference Between Medicare, Medi-Cal, and Medicaid?

Everyone who begins to investigate their long-term health care options quickly comes across these terms.  The following will hopefully help you understand what these terms are and the differences between them.
Medicare is a Federal program which provides basic health insurance to everyone over age 65, and people who are under 65 but are eligible for Social Security Disability benefits.Medicaid is a joint Federal-State program which provides (among other things) long-term care for seniors.  Medi-Cal is what the Federal Medicaid program is called in California.  Thus, Medicaid and Medi-Cal are essentially the same thing.This week we will look at the Medicare program, what it covers, and what it doesn’t cover.MedicareMedicare has several “parts.”  These include:

• Medicare Part A, which is Hospital Insurance;

• Medicare Part B, which is Medical Insurance;

• Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage), which was formerly known as Medicare + Choice;  and

• Medicare Part D, which is prescription drug coverage.

Generally, people who are over age 65 and getting Social Security automatically qualify for Medicare Parts A and B.  Part A is paid for by a portion of Social Security tax.  It helps pay for inpatient hospital care, skilled nursing care, hospice care and other services.Part B is paid for by the monthly premiums of people enrolled and by general funds from the U.S. Treasury.  It helps pay for doctors’ fees, outpatient hospital visits, and other medical services and supplies that are not covered by Part A.  This year, the monthly Part B premium (which is deducted from your Social Security payment) is $104.90Part C (Medicare Advantage) plans allow you to choose to receive all of your health care services through a provider organization.  These plans may help lower your costs of receiving medical services (many plans have zero premium!) or you may get extra benefits for an additional monthly fee.  You must, however, have both Parts A and B to enroll in Part C.  Medicare Advantage plans are the private insurance plans you see commercials for all the time – especially during the Open Enrollment period between October and December of each year.  The Federal Government’s official Medicare website has a tool which can help you compare the various Medicare Advantage plans. https://www.medicare.gov/find-a-plan/questions/home.aspx.Part D (prescription drug coverage) is voluntary and the costs are paid for by the monthly premiums of enrollees and Medicare.  Unlike Part B (where you are automatically enrolled and must opt out if you do not want it) you must specifically enroll in an approved Part D plan by filling out a form and submitting it to your insurer. Does Medicare Pay For Long Term Care?NO.  After a 3 day hospital stay, Medicare pays 100% of the cost, but only for the first 20 days of skilled nursing care. For days 21 through 100, you are responsible for a co-payment.  As of this date, the daily co-pay rate is $148 per day.But it gets worse:  After 100 days of care in a nursing home, Medicare stops paying altogether, and you are responsible for all future costs, unless there is a new 3 day qualifying hospital stay (which then re-sets the 100 day clock).

You also need to be aware that Medicare does not pay for “custodial care.”  If you or a loved one are in need of custodial care, it must be paid for either by writing a check, by private long-term care insurance, or by Medi-Cal.

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