By Ben Garves
The podcast currently has 175 episodes available.
We’re not strangers to the concept of ‘goals’. There are so many gurus out there championing the idea of putting your goals down on paper to make them more clear, voicing them out into the universe to make them real, and using them to guide you through your decisions to make them impactful. One of the coolest mantras out there is that the difference between a dream and a goal is action.
Well, here’s a little twist. If you’ve been making goals for the past ten years but you’ve never really made significant progress toward them, I don’t think the creation of the goal is the step that you’re missing. If you want to eat healthier, it’s really easy to say, “in 2022, I’m setting a goal to eat healthier.” You can even be more specific, like, “in 2022, I’m going to make half of all my plates consist only of vegetables.”
Great! But where’s your accountability and emotional support when the universe tests you that first time when your friends want to meet up at a burger place? Or when you know you should get up early to go to the gym in the morning, but your spouse REALLY wants to watch the latest episode of the Sex in the City reboot?
That’s when your affirmations can bring more power to your goals. Saying you want to be a certain way is one thing, but better, deeply-consistent behavior changes don’t come from what you want to be, they come from how you identify the way you are.
Your Brazilian butt lift may bite you in the butt. Sorry. That headline was just asking for a dad joke.
Spend ten minutes on social media nowadays and it's hard to ignore the emphasis society has been putting on the ol’, as Forest Gump would say, “buttocks.”
Brazilian butt lifts are more dangerous than other cosmetic surgeries
That emphasis shows as the number of Brazilian butt lifts being performed is growing rapidly, despite the procedure having the highest mortality rate of any cosmetic surgery. Yes, greater than liposuction, breast augmentation, nose jobs, and the other myriad of tucks and lifts.
We live at an interesting intersection of body positivity - being proud of who you are and having the ability to physically manifest who you are inside. Those two things can complement each other, or they can live at odds with one another.
What does a Brazilian butt lift cost?
People are flouting their naturally-born, hard-earned, or hard-paid-for hourglass figures, and it has many dashing to surgeons, waving cash, and booking gluteal enhancements. The Brazilian butt lift, often referred to as a “BBL” can run anywhere between nine and ten-thousand dollars. It takes fat from the sides, back, and stomach, and injects it into the booty.
How common are Brazilian butt lifts?
In 2020, it’s estimated by the Aesthetic Society that there were over forty-thousand butt augmentations. It’s a procedure which, according to a report by the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation in 2017, results in death for two out of every 6,000 procedures. In fact, the number was so high that in 2018, surgeons in the United Kingdom received guidance from the British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery to stop performing the procedure outright. It’s not a mandate, but it is a strong condemnation.
Why are Brazilian butt lifts so dangerous?
Your butt seems like an innocent place to store a little badonk, but the buttocks actually have a vast network of blood vessels, some of which are very large and drain into the inferior vena cava, a vessel which is a highway directly to the heart. If the fat being injected gets into one of these main passageways, it can cause immediate death as it travels to the heart and lungs.
This may not be a deterrent for many, especially if you view yourself as living in a body you’re not comfortable with and one in which hard work can’t get you the body desire or feel at home in. But the least we can do is to do our research, be aware of the risks, and put ourselves in the best possible position to lead a happy, healthy life.
Updated screening recommendations for Type 2 diabetes suggests your doctor start testing you at a younger age.
The USPSTF, which stands for the United States Preventive Services Task Force, released a recommendation this month which states the screening age for overweight and obese Americans should be lowered from 40 to 35.
The idea behind screening people five years earlier is that doctors can catch many people in a prediabetic state and help them make lifestyle changes (like nutrition and exercise) before they are diagnosed as full-on diabetics.
What is diabetes?
Diabetes is a simple disease to explain. It’s where your blood sugar levels are higher than your body can process. Foods and drinks you consume contain sugars and other materials (like fats and other carbohydrates), which your body processes into one particular type of sugar, called glucose.
Glucose is an important part of how your body functions - our cells burn it as a basic source of energy in the same way a car burns gasoline. An important tool our body uses in order to burn glucose is a hormone called insulin. A more-scientific way of describing diabetes is when your body doesn’t have enough insulin to process all of the sugar in your blood. This is where the distinction between type 1 and type 2 diabetes comes into play, because one is where your body doesn’t produce insulin, and the other is where your body doesn’t make or use insulin well enough to process all of the sugars your body has.
What is type 1 diabetes?
In type 1 diabetes, also known as “insulin-dependent diabetes” or “juvenile diabetes”, your pancreas doesn’t produce insulin. This most-often is found at a younger age, but can really happen at any time in your life. Your body can’t make insulin so it can’t process glucose, and therefore can’t process through the buildup of glucose in your blood. Type 1 diabetes is managed through the injection of insulin and the close management of blood sugar levels.
What is type 2 diabetes?
For type 2 diabetes, your pancreas does create insulin, but can’t produce enough of it or use it efficiently enough to process the glucose in your blood. One of the most common scenarios is hyperinsulinemia - a point where the level of insulin your body is much higher than normal because your body is trying to process the excess of glucose you’re feeding it. With these elevated levels of insulin, your body is no longer using it efficiently and is considered insulin resistant.
Insulin resistance can also be caused by natural factors, although insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, and type 2 diabetes, in the United States, are much more likely to be caused by poor health, bad nutrition, and a lack of exercise.
How common is diabetes?
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), it’s estimated about 34 million people in the United States, about 13% of the population, have diabetes. The changes to guidance for screening of obese and overweight individuals should have a significant impact on decreasing the number of people eventually developing diabetes, as about 35% of Americans are estimated to be prediabetic.
Oh, aging. We keep talking about it.
It’s hard not to talk about aging, as a growing number of the baby boomer generation hit retirement age and begin to test the limits of our healthcare, medicare, and social security systems. So how do you talk to your aging parents about help as they get older?
It’s not an easy conversation. You spend twenty years (sometimes more) being supported by your parents. Anything from having your diapers changed and being spoon fed to their sage advice and financial support.
While the age at which it happens can vary greatly, those cared-for and caretaker roles can shift suddenly or slowly over time. When we’re kids growing up, we see ourselves maturing and we long for the freedom of adulthood and the myriad of opportunities freedom-of-choice can give us. As we age, it’s a drastically-different situation. We know what freedom and independence felt like and we’re forced to come to terms with the fact that we just don’t have those same levels of ability we used to. Losing control of your living situation, your mobility, and your outright independence is possibly one of the most excruciating experiences of our lives.
The guidance out there for these types of situations is vast, but they all hone in on a couple of specific, actionable items:
1. Look for signs of changing capabilities and awareness.
It’s hard to make an unemotional observation of living conditions, but there are signs which can help you. If you’re getting vibes that someone is no longer safe in their own care, don’t look past those signs. They could be anything from:
2. Have a level-setting conversation with them
If you’re becoming aware that your parent or parents need more assistance than they’re able to provide for themselves, the only way to help them is to start by having a conversation about it.
When you can come together and make some key agreements on key goals around their quality of life, it’ll be easier to agree on a path forward with them. It could be physical, it could be mental, or it could be financial, but you need to find a mutual agreement on what an ideal situation is.
Once you’ve done that, it’s your turn to sit back and listen. You need to hear what they have to say and they need to know they’ve been heard.
3. They’ll rarely start the conversation
You need to be their best advocate. Your parents will rarely engage the conversation on their own behalf. Remember that this represents a seismic shift in their life and it’s not an easy thing for someone to come to terms with. You can be their fierce supporter without being condescending or supportive in things they don’t need help with. But you have to start the conversation and you need to continue having it.
4. There are amazing resources out there
If you’re having problems getting your aging parents to engage in a dialogue with you about their living conditions, you can always involve their primary care physician. It’s a neutral, third-party individual they’ve already had some interaction with and may have some grounds for trust they can rely upon. Think of other similar long-term relationships out there - friends, attorneys, and more. There are also many community resources, like the Alzheimer’s Association, the Department of Health and Human Services, and most states even have agencies on aging.
Between your phone, your watch, your pedometer, your glasses, your shoes, and your headphones, fitness devices are everywhere. In fact, some fitness devices have their own tracking devices in a never-ending loop of tracking your tracking. But here’s the question:
Do fitness trackers really work?
Good morning and welcome to the Ben Garves Podcast - a show at the intersection of health, activism, and technology. I’m your host, Ben Garves.
Amazon, Apple, Garmin, Nike, UnderArmour, WHOOP, Fitbit...Peloton…
It’s 2021 and really, who isn’t in the fitness tracker game? They track your steps, your heart rate, your swimming stroke, food intake, running gait, sleep quality, and more. But does that abundance of information have a positive impact on your fitness journey?
It’s estimated over two and a half billion (with a “b”) adults around the globe are considered overweight or obese, and therefor at risk of a whole slew of chronic diseases from cardiopulmonary issues (those are of the lungs and blood), to the pancreas, in the form of Type II diabetes. The problem isn’t just personal for those who struggle with obesity - it’s estimated 85% of healthcare costs in the United States and 70% of deaths are related to diseases caused or exacerbated by obesity.
Many fitness trackers hone in on a magical number: 150 minutes of moderate physical activity, recommended by a number of researchers, as the minimum amount of activity someone needs to achieve every week in order to maintain a basic level of health. If you don’t know how many minutes of activity you hit last week, that’s the value of these tools. Whether they’re tracking steps or time spent exerting yourself, they all circle back to the simple idea of getting physically active.
A recent analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine combined data from 31 clinical trials, adding up to 2,268 participants, and found a modest reduction of body weight was able to fight off five to ten percent of adverse health effects related to various obesity-adjacent cancers, heart diseases, metabolic syndromes, sleep apnea, and cholesterol issues.
The study also found weight loss from someone who spent at least twelve weeks focusing on the feedback from their fitness trackers averaged over nine pounds.
Most importantly, these things are so accessible! A basic Fitbit can run less than a hundred dollars, free apps like Apple’s Health app being available on your phone, and really great proactive suggestions coming from Garmin’s inked watches and app (my personal favorite).
Don’t forget if you’re shopping for a device that it can be as simple as taking a long walk every night after work, and that buying a device doesn’t solve the problem: doing the work does. But the studies do prove that having a device as a companion does help you along your journey.
That wraps it up for today. Thanks for listening to the Ben Garves Podcast, at the intersection of health, activism, and technology. Don’t forget, Fitness is for Everyone™.
There are so many incredible life hacks out there that work, but for every functioning life hack, there are probably hundreds of money-printing psuedoscience ideas that don’t. Let’s talk about them.
1. Anti-aging LED light therapy.
No. It doesn’t work. Anti-aging LEDs claim to fight sagging, wrinkled skin. Some even claim to have a long list of additional effects, like increasing blood circulation, fighting dark eye circles, and removing acne and dark spots. But it’s still just light.
To make it even more interesting, some lights even claim they’re unsuitable for those with heart disease and hypertension. Again. These are literally just lights.
2. Anti-aging moisturizer.
Did you know that using a moisturizer can help your skin be less dry? It’s true. Did you know moisturized skin looks healthier? Yeah, that’s true, too. Then what makes one moisturizer so incredible, while others are so ineffective? The placebo effect and its impact on how you view these moisturizers when you use them to get identical results. Next.
3. Himalayan salt lamps.
It’s true, these are literally just salt with a light inside. There are no magical positive ions, they don’t clean the air around you, they don’t do anything to clear allergens out, they can’t have any more impact on your mood or your sleep than just looking at a glowing pink hunk of salt. Which...if that’s what you’re going for...by all means. But it’s still just salt.
A study published in July and shared by the American Institute for Cancer Research shares how diet and exercise affect breast cancer survivors, and the impact is fantastic.
Good morning and welcome to the Ben Garves Podcast - a show at the intersection of health, activism, and technology. I’m your host, Ben Garves.
Mya Nelson, a science writer for the AICR (American Institute of Cancer Research), says, “There are plenty of reasons why breast cancer survivors who are overweight or obese after treatment may be advised to shed weight. Research indicates that (sic) obesity increases the risk of cancer recurrence and even earlier death in women diagnosed with breast cancer. Too much body fat also increases the risk of type 2 diabetes and other chronic conditions that can have serious effects.”
It’s no big shock that keeping a healthy and active lifestyle can help deflect negative impacts of chronic disease, especially as we age. Mya goes on to say it’s important to also be mindful that just losing weight through diet and not through exercise can be detrimental, because it implies muscle loss unless you stay physically active.
Here’s a little bit about the study itself. It took a look at 351 survivors of breast cancer who underwent treatment within six months of the study’s start. Those 351 survivors, averaging 60 years of age and categorized as overweight or obese, were separated into four groups, each with a different concentration. The first group focused on exercise, the second on diet, the third on diet and exercise combined, and the fourth group received no guidance for their lifestyles and served as the control group. To clarify - that group was told to seek advice from their typical care providers about guidance on exercise and nutrition.
The study ran for a year, during which the women in the group assigned to exercise took on both resistance and aerobic training in-person and at home. The group focusing on diet and nutrition met with dietitians on a regular basis and were given a set diet for five months, then dove into some behavior modifications in how they shopped and prepared food. They had a set goal to lose ten percent of their weight with an emphasis on consuming veggies and fruit. Finally, the combined diet and exercise group focused on exercise for six weeks before adding in a nutrition element.
At the end of the year, the diet group averaged six percent bodyweight loss and the combined group lost a little over seven percent. While the exercise group didn’t average any weight loss, it’s worth pointing out that the study didn’t focus on body composition change and that group was very likely to have a much more-healthy muscle-to-fat ratio after a year of exercise. It also points out how valuable nutrition is, in addition to exercise, if you’re looking to make an overall weight change in addition to getting physically fit.
That wraps it up for today. Thanks for listening to the Ben Garves Podcast, at the intersection of health, activism, and technology. Don’t forget, Fitness is for Everyone™.
Today I’ve decided I’m done being nice and kindly asking people to wear masks. We’re way past the point where society should tolerate endangering behavior from the few. The mutations, the deaths, the economic crisis, this could all have been avoided had the freedom of the few to be ignorant not been treated like it outweighed the safety of the vast many and especially of the vulnerable.
If you don’t want to hear a rant, skip on to another podcast.
Today we’re wading in on what we know about Coronavirus mutations, if they affect the effectiveness of our vaccines, if they make the virus more deadly, and if these mutations are common.
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Wearing a mask after getting vaccinated against COVID-19 - everyone is asking - is it still necessary? We’ll dig into this today, especially in the light of the emergency use approval for a second vaccine and (more to come on this tomorrow) the discovery of a mutated COVID-19 virus in London.
Good morning and welcome to the Ben Garves Podcast - a daily show at the intersection of health, activism, and technology. I’m your host, Ben Garves.
We can probably all agree that masks and social distancing are not our favorite parts of this whole Coronavirus pandemic. I know many of the people I talk to have heralded the creation of a COVID-19 vaccine as the end-all, be-all solution to a return to normalcy. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case.
How does the Coronavirus vaccine work?
Right now, in the United States, we’ve received emergency use approval for two vaccines - one from Pfizer and BioNTech, and another from Moderna. Both of these vaccines utilized a new approach, called MRNA. It basically tells your immune system to prepare for a Coronavirus-shaped intruder without actually introducing your body to a Coronavirus. This is a big shift in technology because previous vaccines, like Chicken Pox and Influenza, instead relied on a deactivated (inert) strain of the virus in question, which would get your immune system working overtime to combat the virus before you could catch it.
Can you get COVID-19 after getting the vaccine?
This new approach is still impressive, with these vaccines estimated at 90 to 95% effective, but without having to introduce anyone in a lab to the virus while it’s being produced. However, because someone who receives one of these vaccines has not actually had the virus, they can still get it and they can still spread it. In two ways! You can literally touch something that has the Coronavirus on it, high five someone, and spread it to them through contact, and you can still have Coronavirus in your system, sneeze on someone because you were a jerk not wearing a mask, and spread it that way. You’re just 90-95% likely to be asymptomatic because your body has developed the ability to fight the COVID-19 disease, but not the ability to prevent itself from contracting the Coronavirus that causes it.
Can you spread COVID-19 after getting the vaccine?
But wait, if the vaccine doesn’t prevent the spread of Coronavirus, why does it exist? It’s an immediate protection of those who get vaccinated against the dangerous lung and heart symptoms. So, you absolutely should get the vaccine the instant you’re given the opportunity. But, you should continue to wear a mask in public at all times because your likelihood of carrying the virus and not knowing it are infinitely higher. This means when you see someone like Mike Pence walking around kissing babies without a mask on because he was vaccinated, he’s literally endangering the life of that baby, that baby’s parents, etc.
Just an FYI on that
That wraps it up for today. Thanks for listening to the Ben Garves Podcast, at the intersection of health, activism, and technology. Don’t forget, Fitness is for Everyone™. I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about the dangerous mutation of the Coronavirus that has been found in Europe.
Sources
The podcast currently has 175 episodes available.