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Typically when you or your doctor take your height and weight you end up with a BMI (body mass index) measurement. This is simply a ratio of weight to height and is a somewhat useful tool for determining overweight or obesity when looking at a large population. On an individual level, however, it tends to fall short of revealing the whole story. For example, one can have a very high muscle mass and be labeled as overweight or obese. This is typical of many athletes and bodybuilders, but does not reflect the average person.

How fast your heart beats may predict how long you live. There are a lot of fancy and expensive medical tests that can be done to determine your risk for heart disease, stroke, and premature death. But there’s one test that you can actually do at home sitting on your couch that costs nothing, takes about one minute, and will give you a pretty good idea of your risk.

Here’s how you do the test. Sit quietly and rest for 15 minutes. Then find your pulse in your wrist or your neck and count the beats for one minute. If your resting heart rate is more than 84 bpm, your overall risk of cardiovascular disease goes up by about 40%. And the odds are you will live about a year and a half less than others your age.

But if you will lose your excess fat and start exercising, your heart rate should slow, and your risk should return to normal.

Berries help prevent heart disease. A study that looked at 93,000 nurses over 18 years, found that the more deeply pigmented berries they consumed, the lower the risk of heart attacks.

The magic number for blueberries, strawberries and raspberries seems to be about three servings per week. Even those women who were overweight, smoked, or suffered from diabetes had a reduction in their risk of heart attacks, when deeply pigmented berries were a significant part of their diet. But as expected, thin women who exercise regularly did even better than their sedentary and overweight counterparts.

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I’m often asked about the best supplements for weight loss. Most of the things I see sold have very little science to back them up. The exception to this rule seems to be green coffee extract.

Several well done peer-reviewed studies show that green coffee extract, in the range of 1100 to 1200 mg per day, does a good job of enhancing weight loss. Those who use an adequate dose of green coffee extract coupled with a reasonable diet and exercise program do a better job of losing weight than those who eat the same diet and do the same exercise without using the extract. There are also some indications that green coffee

Over the decades aerobic exercise has developed into a quasi-cult. But the latest science tells us that short intense bursts of exercise are more efficient at shifting our metabolism than long stretches of aerobic activity.

If you change your exercise routine into four or five short intense bursts of exercise that leave you breathless, separated by three or four minutes of gentle exercise that allow you to recover, your body quickly shifts into fat burning mode. Studies show that these bursts of activity separated by gentle rest periods effectively lower your risk of diabetes, increase fat burning and enhance both sexuality and mental acuity.

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