Feb. 17, 2011 (San Diego) — Stretching before a run won’t prevent injury, but it won’t cause it, either, according to a new study that has a surprising twist.

The surprise finding? Runners in the study who switched routines for the sake of research were at a higher risk of injury, says Daniel Pereles, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon in Potomac, Md.

Pereles will present the findings here Friday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

“If you are used to stretching, there is no reason not to stretch,” he tells WebMD. “If you aren’t used to stretching, there’s no reason to start.”

Pereles, a runner, assigned 2,729 runners who ran 10 or more miles weekly to one of two groups: a stretch group or a non-stretch group.

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There are some key principles of weight loss we need to learn in order to understand why the actions we talk about on this site are necessary.

Principle 1: Energy Deficit

Body fat is an energy store. When we consume more energy than we use, the excess is stored as fat. There are other energy stores, such as glycogen, but what we are interested in when trying to lose weight is body fat.

To remove excess body fat, we must incur an energy deficit by using more energy than we consume. The body will tap into its energy stores only when there is an energy deficit.

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My hubby and I, who are currently on a low carb diet to lose weight for the summer time, have been on it now for about two weeks. We found ourselves out and about today, and we got hungry, but we werent sure where we should go where we could eat and still stick to our diet. It was either go somewhere for wings or something else very low carb like a chicken salad, or find a buffet.

Find a buffet we did. We found a Golden Corral in the area, which we were previously unfamiliar with. It was lucky for us that they were having a weekend deal where they had all sorts of beef and pork ribs on special. Of course, it was all you can eat as well.

So what I ended up eating was  a big heaping salad, lots of green beans, a few small pork ribs, some city chicken, chicken breast, and brisket. T

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People who are sleepy by day may be unable to resist calorie-laden comfort foods, new research shows.

The findings, slated for presentation Monday at a meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Minneapolis, Minn., add to a growing body of research linking lack of sleep to weight gain and obesity.

In the new study of 12 adults aged 19 to 45, people who were sleepy during the daytime showed decreased activation in the part of their brain that inhibits behavior (prefrontal cortex) when they were shown photos of high-calorie foods such as hamburgers, French fries, pizza, cakes and ice cream, compared with images of low-calorie, healthier foods.

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