Really Useful Fitness Blog has a good post on 4 ways to lose fat faster. I’ve basically been doing all four to do good results. Here’s 2 more to add:

1) Wait 15 minutes if you have a food craving.

Along with the tip to eat frequently throughout the day, I also have noticed that for me, my food cravings go away after a small snack of a few calories and waiting 15 minutes or so. If I’m consumed by the thoughts of eating a piece of pie, I force myself to wait 15 minutes and eat an apple instead. By the time the 15 minutes are up, I end up feeling satiated and have forgotten about the pie entirely.

2) Eat a small snack first thing in the morning within 30 minutes of waking.

One tip I heard which has been helpful is to eat a small snack within 30 minutes of waking up in the morning. Supposedly, it revs up your metabolism early in the day. Up until I started this crusade to get healthy, I used to skip breakfast in the morning and grab a cup of coffee instead. Nowadays, I grab a light snack upon waking up and then walk the dog for 30 minutes, and I feel a lot more awake and active by the time I hop in the car to get to work.

Read the whole post at Real Useful Fitness.

I’ve been battling a cold over the last few days, and if with all those deadlines looming at work, I had a tough time deciding whether I should go to work or sleep it off at home. You don’t want to pass the cold on to your co-workers, but on the other hand, you don’t want to appear to be a slacker.

This is a pretty common question, and this article from MedicineNet seems to be the best I have found on the subject.

This is a little old, but still exciting news. A New Scientist article reveals a possible new cancel therapy that has been showing promising results in the labs. Even more surprising, the drug used in the study, dichloroacetate, is cheap, easy to produce, and patent-free. Based on a study done by University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, the article states:

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

While it’s a long way from being proven useful on humans and even longer before we see it active use, it’s still something to be excited about.

Links to followup:

• Official DCA Research Information
• The DCA Site

RadicalBehavior.com has a handy formula to calculate the number of calories one should eat in a day.

To do a simplistic calorie content for me each day, I use the light activity setting and then add all the activities I do to get the count of all the calories I should be doing. For instance, if I run for 30 minutes, I add the calories I should I burn doing that activity to the calories calculated from that formula to decide how many calories total I should eat. It’s not exact, but it works for me.

I added a simple Daily Calorie Calculator here using RadicalBehavior.com’s formula. You can find it here.