Rehash: thought it went well. A dozen active, engaged and appreciative participants. My "Sit, Stress, Eat" was a play on the movie "Eat, Pray, Love." Bullet points:
Problem: Sitting is killing us.
Take-Home: Since studies establish a correlation between prolonged sitting and mortality EVEN AMONG THOSE WHO EXERCISE, it behooves us not only to find ways of moving more but also to find ways of sitting less.
Problem: Life is stressful. We are like mice. It takes twenty times the amount of amphetamines to kill a single mouse as it does to kill mice in bunches. And when an uninjected mouse is dropped into a bin with injected mice ... it dies within minutes.
Take-Home: Whereas proper breathing, exercise and weight control do serve to mitigate the harmful effects of cumulative stress, nevertheless, for some of us, a rethink may be in order. We may need to simplify our lives. Google: Jake Reilly 90-Day Amish Project.
Special Plea: I told them that I wanted them to succeed and prosper in their respective businesses ... but not at the expense of their health and sanity.
Problem: Work lends itself to mindless eating. One study shows that we eat 35% more food when eating with one other person than when eating alone, and 74% more food when eating with three or more people.
Take-Home: Stress, hurry, social-settings, this is the context in which we have to lose or control weight. Exercise, yes. But if you do not get a handle on caloric intake, regardless how you choose to do that, odds for success are slim indeed.
Observation: No one suggestion generated more controversy than the notion of reducing meal frequency. Fortunately, aside from myself, there was a participant who was also a practitioner of Intermittent Fasting. So, to the people who objected to the notion of "missing meals", I simply pointed to two living examples of people who, according to the experts, should be fat but are instead slim. Further, I told them, "I'm not here to tell you what to do. Rather, I'm here to tell you what you DON'T have to do."
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