We're all Doomed!

So Rob our fitness director sent me this video and I watched it duly amused figuring it to be a satire of just how lazy our world has become.

I was wrong though.

It's not a satire.

It's real.

Today for Funny Friday I bring you Interactive Toy's remote controlled cooler.

Click here to buy your very own - only $79.

Have a great weekend!

Please Don't Buy this for your Child

Just what every child needs - a scooter after all, walking's for suckers.

Buy this for your kid and you can feel confident that you're setting them up for needing one of these as an adult.

[Via Gizmodo]

World's Greatest Star Wars Product

I know, I know, TV's bad and contributes to obesity and so do video games.

I don't care.

I want one of these!

(Yes, I'm a nerd)

Any remarkably generous multi-millionaire readers out there who want to donate one?

Only $2,9995.

Stupidest Products Ever or Brilliant Exercise Inventions?

I'm at a bit of a loss here.

As far as I'm concerned, it's not just one incredibly stupid product, it's a whole incredibly stupid product line.

Treadmills, exercise bikes and cross trainers for children ages 3-8.

Gymkids is the braintrust behind the idea.

And these things aren't cheap. $200 or so per product.

Now I'm not knocking kids exercising, but why can't a parent just buy a kid some shoes and play with them? Or a bike? Or a jungle gym?

Gymkids explicitly states on their website that, "Supervision by a responsible adult should be undertaken at all times."

I would love to meet the parents that actually sit around watching their kids walk on itty-bitty treadmills instead of playing with them.

My wife suggested that perhaps it was for parents who themselves use home gyms so if the parent was working out, the kid could too - That said, can you picture a 3 year old running on a treadmill for any sustainable length of time?

Do other people think these are ridiculous or am I being overly critical?

The Incredible Eating Reminder Gizmo

One of the most basic tenets of successful weight loss and weight maintenance is that if your life includes hunger, success is going to be a huge challenge.

Hunger is one of the most basic human drives. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have taught us to eat when we're hungry, and guess what, it's also taught us what foods have calories. We don't crave green leafy salads when we're hungry.

One of the best and easiest ways to minimize hunger in your life is to ensure that you practice pre-emptive eating. Eat before you get hunger and you'll have a much easier time controlling portions and choices.

Problem is, there's no internal cue to tell you to eat before you get hungry.

I've often recommended to patients that they buy watches that beep at them when it's snack time (I recommend no more than 3 hours between meals and snacks). Only thing is, those watches are kinda ugly.

In comes a patient with a brilliant solution. She bought a vibrating alarm pillbox. It's got five alarms and it's easy to set. She keeps hers in her pocket and when it vibrates, she eats.

I found one on Amazon.com for $14.95 and it's linked here:

Great idea!

Like-a-Bike

It's not a bike, but it's like-a-bike.

My wife wouldn't let me buy one, she said it was too expensive.

Basically picture a small, toddler friendly bicycle with no pedals. By using their feet, children are able to propel themselves forward and by lifting their feet up, they're able to start to learn how to balance.

Apparently kids who use these basically graduate to two-wheelers and skip the training wheels.

On the website there's a great video of a kid tooling around on one.

I may have to buy one without my wife's permission.

The Wee-Ride

As the newspapers will tell you virtually daily, childhood obesity rates are growing rapidly. Parents will often call me to ask me what they should do about their overweight kids and generally my answer's always the same - treat your lifestyles.

Kids are not going to live lives different from their parents. Live the life you want your child to live, and that includes healthy regular eating with no meal skipping or snack skipping, calorie awareness and exercise.

Perhaps the easiest way to exercise is to focus on what I often call "Functional Exercise" rather than gyms, and perhaps one of the best functional exercises is going out for family walks or bike rides.

The Wee-Ride looks like a great option in place of one of those rear baby carriage thing. With the Wee-Ride you can talk easily with your child while riding and not have to worry about what's going on behind you. You can also buy an additional mounting bar so the Wee-Ride can be swapped between parental bikes.

Remember of course, once your child is old enough to ride, a better option would be their own bike.

Tomorrow I'll post on a great bike related product for toddlers.

Geek-a-Cycle

Hot on the heels of bookofjoe's treadmill desk comes the self-proclaimed "Geek-a-Cycle".

Touted as a means to pedal your way to a healthier you.

May not cause dramatic weight loss, but certainly ala Dr. Levine's NEAT hypothesis of weight management, it certainly can't hurt.

Yours for just $349.95, computer equipment not included.

That's one scary cookie jar!

Here's a cookie jar you don't want to get your hands stuck in - the Shockolate Vault designed to keep you away from your goodies.

Not recommended by me as a diet aid, definitely recommended by me as a gag gift, the Shockolate Vault, can be set to "protect" your valuables or goodies for a given period of time. Try to get to them before the time is up and "there will be shocking consequences".

Would make for some interesting, amateur science experiements.

Television with Sole

Gillian Swan, a design student in England, has designed yet another soldier in the fight against inactivity. Dubbed "Square Eyes" her unique shoe soles contain an electronic pressure sensor and a computer chip to record how many steps their wearer takes in a daytime. An embedded wireless transmitter then passes that information off to a receiver attached to the wearers television which decides based on the wearer's steps and exertion how much television they've earned that day. 100 steps = 1 minute of television.

Readers of my blog will know that I feel activity to be the smaller part of the equation with weight, but certainly any intervention that can help encourage (in this case perhaps force) children to be more active certainly cannot hurt.

Track Calories with your Keychain!

I always recommend tracking calories to patients trying to lose weight. The simplest analogy is money, and the currency of weight in our bodies is calories. Before you buy anything, you need to know how much it costs.

Calorie counting can be difficult and while there are many free online services that can help track calories (www.sparkpeople.com, www.fitday.com) they still require hunting for calories.

No more. Enter Training Peak's Calorie Scanner which conveniently fits on your keychain and then scans the barcodes of the foods that you're eating. Couple that with Training Peak's online/desktop calorie software and all of a sudden those barcodes translate into calories and nutritional information.

Only problem I can see is that my from scratch spaghetti sauce doesn't come with a barcode.

Cost is a bit steep as well - $216.30 for a scanner with a one year subscription.

The HP Photosmart R927 Super Incredible Diet Plan

Perhaps in response to our growing waistlines HP has come up with a Super-Incredible-Diet-Plan - don't lose weight and use their cameras with their "slimming" feature and presto-chango you've lost weight.

The picture here shows the subtle changes the camera produces using Hurley from Lost fame.

If this isn't a sad statement about where we've come as a society, I don't know what is.

The Nutricate Receipt - Great idea!

The Nutricate Corporation based out of Santa Barbara, California has come up with a brilliant new receipt for restaurants - the Nutricate Receipt which provides nutritional information regarding the meal you've just paid for.

I love this idea, but it would be better if at the bottom of the receipt it would give a breakdown of how long you'd have to exercise to burn off those calories. For instance in their demo receipt some poor soul had 931 calories for lunch. In order to burn that off he/she'd have to walk at 3.5mph for 3.5 HOURs or cycle at 10mph for 2.2 HOURs.

So was that turkey sandwich and fries really worth it?

Cafeteria Big Brother

Parents in Houston now have a new tool in their battle against childhood obesity - Cybersoft Primero ParentOnline (warning PDF) allows parents to restrict the choices their children make in the school cafeteria. If you don't want little Billy to have dessert, simply don't allow it in his profile. As well, parents will be able to track their child's choices.

While this indeed may be helpful, it does seem a bit overlordish to me.

At the end of the day, the best way to treat your children is to focus on yourselves. If you take the time to make healthier dietary choices, control your own portions, limit desserts, and make exercise a part of your daily lives, guess what, your children will learn from you. If instead exercise consists of picking up the remote control, food is hurried, dessert is frequent, that's going to be what your children learn.

TV vs. BOB - Who Ya Got?

As many people know, TV viewing increases the risk of childhood obesity. In fact, it has been shown that the risk of obesity in pre-school children increases by 6% for every hour of television he or she watches per day and if there's a TV in their bedroom, their risk rises by 31%

Enter BOB. BOB helps parents manage their child's TV time. It utilizes a personal PIN number and allows parents to set the number of hours a child is allowed to watch television per week and also provides individual user reports for each PIN.

So TV vs. BOB....who ya got?

Cool scanner

Sorry that it's been so long since I posted. I got derailed by a bachelor party in Las Vegas.

Glad I didn't have this scanner there to tell me that I was not living in a healthy manner.

To my eyes it looks like it rivals MRIs in quality. Hopefully the $1,800,000 price tag will come down given that the technology, if CT scanner based ought to be a heck of a lot cheaper.

3DPS vs. Measuring tape

Talk about overkill.

A report on the news about a 3-dimensional photonic image scanner which uses 4 lasers to measure over 2 million points on the body.

What's it for?

It's to measure the incidence of abdominal obesity, otherwise known as apple-shaped. Not a bad thing to measure given that there is greater risk with abdominal obesity.

Want to know what I use in my office?

A tape measure.

Measure at roughly the umbilicus. More than 35 inches in women and more than 40 inches in men is said to confer greater risk.

Winter Walking Safety

If you're like many folks out there, walking in the winter can be a scary endeavor. Even without having any pre-existing problem with balance, unseen ice fills ERs in winter climates the world over.

Many folks who are active in warmer months head indoors in winter due to this fear.

Well, no longer. The Yaktrax Pro is a fantastic product that gives tremendous traction at a cheap price in an elegant package. You can even use it as a runner, especially now that the Pro version has an additional retention strap crossing over the top of your shoe.

Products like this one can be especially valuable to folks with balance difficulties or known osteoperosis, but there is one word of warning that I can give you from experience - they're VERY slippery on indoor ceramics and tiles.

The Amazing Wovel

Living in Ottawa with winter coming I'm sure many folks are debating the merits of shovel vs. snowblower vs. snow removal service.

Having had a snow removal service destroy the front of my lawn last year, my debate was between shovel vs. snowblower.

Definitely more calories burned shoveling, but it was quite time consuming, and for folks with pre-existing heart disease, it can be quite dangerous.

Enter the Wovel. It's like a shovel on steroids. The manufacturer says it's 3x faster than a shovel and half the effort.

Sounds like a fair trade to me.