This isn’t the first time that someone has suggested that you not eat in front of the television. Generally the reasoning is that you will pay more attention to how much you are eating when you are not focused on your favorite show. The BBC is reporting recent research that suggests that the background noise of the television actually diminishes how much you taste the foods you are eating. The lead author on the study, Andy Woods, explained that they wanted to try to understand why airline food is notoriously bad. I had always figured it was a cost-cutting and logistics issue, but maybe not.

Experiment participants were asked to rate the overall flavor, sweetness, saltiness, and crunchiness of foods while blindfolded and wearing headphones. The headphones of the control group played no sound, while the experimental group heard white noise, like what you would hear on an airplane or with a fan nearby. The louder the white noise was, the less sweetness or saltiness the participants reported; however, they did report more crunchiness as noise increased.
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The question of the month is: How do you manage trick-or-treating overload without being coined the Grinch Who Stole Halloween?

Here are a few suggestions to keep the kids’ sugar comas and your day-after guilt to a minimum:

First off, limit the frenzy altogether. Don’t allow your kids to trick-or-treat for hours. Discuss, ahead of time, that they are only allowed to trick-or-treat until their bag (or bucket) is full. Make your rules about obtaining and consuming candy very clear. Take the opportunity to explain some healthy-living tips to your young ones.

Shift the focus away from candy. Host a Halloween party that encourages other festive activities.
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Also sometimes called sleep-related eating (disorder), nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder (NS-RED), or sleep-eating syndrome, sleep eating is a rare and dangerous sleep disorder (not an eating disorder) that affects up to three percent of the population. There can be comorbidity with eating disorders; however, ten to 15 percent of those that suffer from eating disorders also experience sleep eating.

Definition
Sleep eating is classified by episodes of sleep walking during which one eats. Often the foods eaten during sleep are high in sugar or high in fat. Non-food items (such as soap) or odd combinations (such as raw bacon covered in mayonnaise) have also been reported as eaten during episodes of sleep eating. The sleep eater often awakes in the morning with no memory of the event.

There are several dangers associated with sleep eating. Sleep walking of any kind poses the risk of self-injury from running into things, falling down stairs, etc. Those that are sleep eating are at risk of injury from eating uncooked food or non-food items, choking, using knives, and even cooking while sleeping, and starting a fire. In addition, sleep eating also carries the same risks as binge eating, such as weight gain and increased risk of diabetes.
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Despite your best intentions for Labor Day, you partied your butt off, which means you downed more drinks and hot dogs than you can remember.

The ideal situation would have meant you nibbled on watermelon wedges and sipped club soda with a twist of lime all day, but it didn’t happen. So, instead of beating yourself up, let’s move forward, shall we?

I usually don’t like to use the word ‘detox’ because I feel it insinuates that your kidneys and liver need help to cleanse your body, which they don’t: they’ve been doing it since the beginning of time. After a few days, weeks or even years of filling your body with junk, however, sometimes you have to get a little strict with your diet and exercise to filter it out.

In order to bounce back from your BBQ indiscretions, you are going to have to start now, scale it back and keep reading.
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In my experience as a personal trainer, women like to blame exercise for a lot of things: making them tired, making them bulk through muscle gain (oh, please), and making them overeat. The last one is when I like to politely remind them that we, as humans, do in fact possess the gift of freewill, and exercise is not what brings the chips to their lips after a workout, it’s their brain, which makes the decision to eat it sound okay.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the hunger is not real. Women especially experience energy cravings after tough workouts, which can be hard to suppress. According to an article in the ACSM Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews, there are several studies that suggest exercise promotes higher responses in energy-regulating hormones in women than it does in men. The more calories women burn, the more calories they crave after exercise. The result?  Women crave more food after exercise than men, making them more likely to overeat after a workout which can have disastrous effects on their goals.

Just one more biological reason men can lose weight easier and faster than women.
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