TGIF – Weighty Matters

As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.

Quote of the Week:  “Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.”  Yoda

Humor Break: We here at TGIF have found a very happy and long-time married couple named Al and Bev who have some witty moments to share with us in their daily lives:

Al (working his daily crossword puzzle): “Hey Bev, what are the four major food groups?”

Bev: “Dark chocolate, white chocolate, brownies and fudge.”

Stat of the Week: Half of U.S. adults will be obese by 2030 if current trends continue, a new report shows.

About one in three adults in the U.S. are obese today. That figure will rise to half of American adults by 2030 if little is done to address the obesity epidemic, Columbia University researcher Claire Wang, PhD, at a news briefing in London.  Wang says expenditures to treat obesity-related diseases will cost the U.S. health care system up to an extra $66 billion each year by 2030, if the projections become reality.

Wang and colleagues from Columbia University and England’s University of Oxford constructed a mathematical model to project obesity rates in the U.S. and U.K. over the next two decades.  If, as they predict, 164 million Americans are obese by 2030, Wang says the health care burden will include:

-An additional 8 million cases diabetes
-6.8 million additional cases of heart disease and stroke
-Over 0.5 million cases of cancer

Bonus Humor: American obesity is already famous.  Sign on the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, China: This Stadium holds 120,000 Chinese or 80,000 Americans.

Action Tip: Watch this brief slide show on dieting facts and myths.

Volunteering: While most of us have to watch our weight, some folks are lucky to get a meal at all.  A great opportunity to volunteer to serve meals to the homeless in downtown Los Angeles is the Los Angeles Mission.  The Mission also has a wide variety of other volunteer opportunities including “Serve for a Day”.  Not from the Los Angeles area?  Go to this site and type in your location and “meal service.”
[tags]obesity, weight loss, dieting, meal service, feeding the homeless, envisia, envisia learning, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.