Yesterday, I made it another "no clean" day for Helen and I.  I also let her pick the menu and it wasn't long until I was following her around a supermarket.  Helen showed me the finer art of buying chicken for baking. "You don't want boneless breasts, baby," she told me. "The chicken will be dry and rubbery.

From Robert Roy Britt’s article, “Small Packages Trick People to Eat More.”
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If you think buying junk food in small packages will help you eat less, look out — marketers know the truth.
Two new marketing studies found that some people tend to consume more calories when junk food portions and packages are smaller. For some, it’s because they perceive small packages to be . . . get this . . . diet food.
For others, it’s just the temptation of small sins.
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Manufacturers are releasing more and more products in smaller packages.

If you love eating out but are worried about sticking to your diet, then check out what Bernie Salazar has to say.
This ‘Biggest Loser’ reduced his body weight by 50% in six months through diet and exercise, so he can definitely ‘talk the talk’.
A Chicago Tribune reporter caught up with Bernie recently to discover how he manages to eat out once or twice a week and still manage to keep the weight off.

By Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D We all heard this refrain; drug addicts kicking the habit, only to go through a lifetime of a constant battle to stay clean. Why is it so hard? Why is it getting progressively harder within days after quitting? Who is the “devil that made them do it”? The received wisdom for many years was that the reward system in the brain, which is the seat of all manners of addiction, is driven exclusively by dopamine receptors. But frankly, this belief had some problems.

Merely acknowledging that their husky teen has a weight problem is not enough to make parents implement healthier habits at home, as a new study in this week’s issue of the journal Pediatrics shows.
Dr. Dianne Neumark-Sztainer and colleagues at the University of Minnesota’s epidemiology and community health division wanted to explore how parents behave when they correctly perceive their child’s “weight status” – which, according to previous studies, doesn’t happen as often as one would think.

By Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.DEver wondered if loss of weight causes a reduction in the number of your fat cells? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that was true? You go on a diet, you lose weight and a bunch of cells, and you’d never gain weight again. Except it ain’t true, as anybody who went on a diet knows; unless you stick with your diet forever you will gain back the weight you had lost. Why is that?Your fat cell allowanceIn theory,there are two ways you can increase your body fat: you can increase the number of fat cells in the body, and you can store more fat in each cell.

By Dov michaeli MD, Ph.DThe April 14 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences carried an intriguing article titled “ Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor”. Both authors, J.M. Coates and J. Herbert are from the Dept. of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at Cambridge University . But J.M.C.

This is a laugh-inducing story from the Associated Press, which reports that zoos are looking for ways to whittle the love handles on their gorillas and polar bears. It seems the obesity crisis is affecting our caged animal friends -... (Source: Health Check the Blog)

By Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D It almost became a cliché: losing weight is relatively easy. That’s why you see so many “miracle diet” claiming astounding losses of weight. But why don’t we see miracle diets that tout maintenance of weight loss?