But it’s your arms that I need this time,” she said to Mimi, whose arms were still around him. Then she turned to her side and placed her hand to her back to the right of her spine.
Mimi said she felt the pain then, shooting through her side and in her upper back, like a jolt of electricity. After only one week of treatment, her pain was gone and she was able to do her whole range of push-ups in her studio.
“I did have the pain,” Mimi said. “I was really feeling the pain. And it wasn’t just the weight, it was the muscle. I was not used to being pushed around, doing sit-ups like that.”
Today, Mimi’s lower back pain has improved greatly, as have her body and stomach muscles. And for now, Mimi has stopped eating the doughnuts and soda pop, although she did sneak a doughnut on the way to my office.
But she is a hard person to convince of the benefits of exercise, she told me.
“I eat a lot and I eat a lot of bread,” Mimi said. “I don’t know. I’ve been raised in the West and I like those things. I just can’t change them. I like pizza. I like doughnuts. When I was little I liked ice cream,” she said.
“I mean, this is not healthy, no,” she added. “But I don’t think this is bad.”
Her next goal is to be able to lift 30 pounds. And what’s in store for Mimi is more lifting, more exercise, and more weight loss, all of which will make a big difference in her overall health. And as she is feeling better, she is getting more and more active at the gym, in her classes and at the table with her friends.
If there’s one thing the medical profession is beginning to understand, it is that weight loss alone does not address other issues that underlie poor health. If you gain it, you must lose it. The body that loses weight is a healthier one. And, the sooner you start, the better the results, according to one expert.
]]>http://time.com/3154206/japanese-women-eat-soy-beans-and-other-healthy-foods/feed/0Mimi Takagawa, Japanese Woman, Gains Ten Pounds After Losing FiveEating Healthy on A $4-a-Day Budgethttp://time.com/3154165/eating-healthy-on-a-4-a-day-budget/
http://time.com/3154165/eating-healthy-on-a-4-a-day-budget/#commentsTue, 20 Oct 2009 19:24:29 +0000http://time.com/?p=3154165]]>You’ve heard the headlines, right? And I know what they’re going to say about me after this. After that. You know, stuff like: Woman Who Lost 70 Pounds Gets Skinny on Soda Pop and Doughnuts. (Which is kind of a stupid headline, if you think about it.) But I just can’t help it. I love my snacks.
The point, you see, is this: Yes, I realize that a couple of years ago I used to eat an entire package of Oreos in one sitting, eat a whole sleeve of salted cashews without thinking about it and make two or three trips through our local Dairy Queen a day. (Okay, one trip per day, but it was a lot. And more than one trip might have been pushing it.) But I can’t help but wonder: Is eating healthier so expensive?
Sure, yes, it can be. And not just when you’re trying to lose weight. But since I want to eat healthy again, it’s not that surprising to me.
I just don’t understand why it’s so hard for people to eat healthy.
Let me give you an example. For about a week now I’ve been experimenting with a $4-a-day diet for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s been surprisingly easy. I’ve had a protein bar for breakfast, a can of tuna for lunch, a slice of turkey or ham for dinner.
On other days, I might have a hard-boiled egg with toast and a banana, and skip lunch altogether.
I love my snacks! I go to Costco or Sam’s Club about once a week and buy $20 in nuts, chocolate chips and the like. That makes for a great afternoon snack, and it’s not that hard to throw something like that into a lunch box on the way to the train.
Sometimes I eat nuts and popcorn for a snack at work. My office is fairly big, but if I’m craving chocolate, I pop my earbuds in and listen to music, eating the snack on my desk and then going back to my work.
I don’t think it’s too expensive. In fact, if you think about it, the amount of money I’m spending is really nothing in the grand scheme of things, right? I have about $2 left over at the end of the day.
I’d be much more concerned if my husband was complaining about how much I was spending on candy and snacks. But he has other worries.
“I think my favorite thing is to drink two hot glasses of coffee in the morning,” Tim Horton told me the other day. “I don’t feel guilty about it. I’m never going to give it up. That’s the only guilty thing about it.”
Then Tim Horton started speaking more in his own character, Tim Horton, saying: “I am the living embodiment of the Canadian male.”
To which his wife of 32 years chimed in, the more rational of the two. “Tim,” she said, “you’re 52. If you didn’t want to give up two cups of coffee in the morning, that’s your problem.”
As she says, that’s her job.
So eating healthy is expensive, but it isn’t impossible. My problem is I can’t keep from buying snacks. Just yesterday I bought five pounds of sugar snap peas and bought another pound of sugar snap peas on Friday. At around $3 a pound, that’s about $15 in ten days.
On top of that, Tim Horton is a pretty frugal guy. He’s a man who knows the value of his dollar, right? And yet, he’s a big coffee drinker. He could try cutting out coffee for a week.
And he told me he’d never stop drinking his black coffee. He even said it might be an issue in our marriage. If I didn’t like black coffee, that’s it, it’s over.
Then, of course, I had to remind him of a joke we share from time to time.
“The difference between me and Tim,” I said to Tim Horton, “is that he drinks his coffee like men drink their coffee.” I paused and looked at him. “And you drink it like Tim Horton.”
We laughed. Then he had a little more beer.
“I drink it because I need to,” Tim Horton told me. “My body needs it.” He paused and thought for a moment. “My body needs it.”
And there it was. The answer to all of life’s problems, for Tim Horton and for any of us: I need my coffee.
“It’s hard to explain how we live,” Tim Horton said about his and his wife’s daily routine. “It’s routine, but there are so many changes in our daily lives.”
He paused and smiled. He’s a good-looking guy. It makes sense that this attractive man still buys his own coffee for his favorite morning brew.
But when he drinks his coffee, he drinks it black. Not even the skim milk. I think if he was drinking black coffee and eating healthily, his weight would be coming down a bit faster than his wife’s.
]]>http://time.com/3154165/eating-healthy-on-a-4-a-day-budget/feed/1Eating Healthy on a $4-a-Day BudgetLosing Weight is About Health, Not About Looking Good in Clotheshttp://time.com/3154579/losing-weight-is-about-health-not-about-looking-good-in-clothes/
http://time.com/3154579/losing-weight-is-about-health-not-about-looking-good-in-clothes/#commentsTue, 29 Oct 2013 15:52:19 +0000http://time.com/?p=3154579]]>We are bombarded with ads that say, “If you want to look good in a pair of jeans, drop ten pounds.” And the messages never seem to stop.
This is despite the fact that many people are overweight but don’t look very heavy at all. Others could be overweight, but are more concerned about their health than their appearance.
For those of you who
