Self-Awareness Is the First Step

The inside is kept at a precise cold temperature so the eggs do not rot en route. They travel alone, says Diana Thomas, the president and CEO, just like sperm and embryos. In a study conducted in Denmark, a group of non-active adults in their 50s, some with type 2 diabetes and some without, participated in HIIT exercises three times a week for eight weeks. The results of the study were impressive. Both the non-diabetic and diabetic participants benefited from significant abdominal fat loss. Diabetic participants enjoyed significant improvements in blood sugar and insulin categories, as well as improved pancreatic b-cell function, prompting the authors to conclude: The study provides evidence for the health benefits of eight weeks of HIIT in type 2 diabetics. Whether you're one of the 38 million Americans with diabetes, diagnosed or not, or one of the one in three Americans in a prediabetic state, the great news is that just eight weeks of exercise can significantly improve how your body processes sugar. When combined with diet, appropriate exercise can reduce or prevent this deadly disease. Losing excess weight bridges the gap between medical benefits and fitness gains. If you're overweight, losing even as little as 5 percent of that weight can reduce your risk of acquiring certain diseases and cancers due to improvements in any one of several areas, like blood pressure, cholesterol, and insulin sensitivity. In the fitness category, weight loss can decrease the load on your muscles and joints, and improve your sleep, energy level, and mood. The studies are clear: HIIT is the best way to lose weight. Let's consider each in turn. Throughout all of human prehistory, and much of our recorded history, calories were relatively scarce and hard to get, and physical activity was unavoidable. We have devised a modern environment in which physical activity is scarce and hard to get, and calories are unavoidable. Our species has no native defenses against caloric excess or the lure of the couch, never having needed them before. To admit the truth is to confront that uncomfortable reality. Why it's hard for humans to eat well and be active in the modern world: Nothing during the era of civilization and recorded history has made the truth about food any more convenient. Civilization began with the advent of agriculture.

Since that innovation, human ingenuity has been applied in ever-proliferating ways to ensuring the continuous availability of a bountiful supply of food, and to the deflection of effort from our own muscles to the muscles of other species, and then to the pistons and gears of mechanized contrivances. To confront the truth about food is to admit we overshot the problem and encumbered ourselves with a whole new suite of problems of our own devising: too bountiful and constant and hyper-palatable a supply of food; At the other end of the journey, they are met by a customs broker who chauffeurs them through paperwork. Boldt says that buying frozen is better than buying fresh. Frozen is cheaper than fresh, costing about $15,000 per cycle compared with $25,000 to $40,000 for fresh. Better yet, when you buy frozen, you and the donor do not have to synchronize menstrual cycles, a hassle during typical egg deals. When you buy fresh eggs, you pay in advance and hope the donor will produce a plentiful batch. On the downside--a huge downside--you are less likely to get pregnant with a batch of frozen eggs. About 3 to 5 percent of frozen eggs yield babies, compared with 6 to 8 percent of fresh eggs. So far, nine babies have been born with eggs purchased at Cryo Eggs International. The bank boasts a 70 percent egg survival rate, of which 69 percent fertilize. After that, you are dealing with the same odds as IVF. Not only does it appear that you burn more fat when your exercise intensity is higher, but in some cases, moderate-pace exercise may not even lead to any of the fat loss observed in HIIT. This may not come as a surprise to you, since many people have difficulty losing weight even when engaging in typical forms of aerobic exercise. Take the following two studies as examples. A 2016 study compared the effects of 20 minutes of HIIT compared to 40 minutes of MICT performed twice a week for 16 weeks in postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes. The results showed that overall fat mass decreased and that significant loss of abdominal and visceral fat mass--also known as central obesity, the type most commonly associated with disease--was observed only with HIIT. In another study, this one from 2008, 45 young women participated in a 15-week cycling exercise program. The women participating in the HIIT exercise did three 20-minute sessions per week, and the women enrolled in the steady-state exercise did three 40-minute session per week. While both exercise groups got significantly fitter, only the HIIT group had a significant reduction in total body mass, fat mass, and leg and trunk fat.

Even in those studies that discover similarities in weight-loss measures between HIIT and MICT, HIIT participants achieve their results in much less time. One such 2017 study, reported in Obesity Review, found that both high-intensity and moderate-intensity exercise produced significant reductions in whole-body fat mass and waist circumference. With so much inertia invested in the concepts that ever more abundant, ever more civilized food, and ever less effort, were good, culture interposed herself between us and our elusive sense (not at all common, alas! So here we find ourselves, mired in needless obesity and unnecessary disease. Yet even as we lament the burdens of our fate, we are lulled into overlooking the obvious, even audacious causes. We know that our food supply is willfully manipulated to be addictive to foster overeating at the expense of public health for the sake of corporate profit - yet we manage to be oblivious to what we know. We know that refined carbohydrate and added sugar are among the salient liabilities of the modern food supply, yet we are complacent as we hear every day that America runs on Dunkin. This in no way refutes the considerable public health value of strategic fortification, such as vitamin D in dairy, or folate in grains. Were we not in a cultural trance, wouldn't we be righteously outraged? Where is that indignation among loving parents and grandparents, looking on as legions of our children succumb to obesity, diabetes, and worse ? A representative sampling of new kids' cereals introduced in 2017 by two major manufacturers: It is asleep, amidst the lullabies of modern culture: toaster pastries for breakfast; That's about a 30 percent pregnancy rate per cycle. Cryo Eggs suggests that customers increase their chances of a take-home baby by purchasing about a half dozen eggs, which should make two to three embryos. The Yale team has had 34 women freeze eggs so far, about a quarter of them because of illness. The cost of harvesting eggs is $6,500. They do not charge for storage. The Donor Egg Bank, based in Los Angeles, has a guitar instrumental introducing its Web site and their logo is where dreams meet innovation. They deal in fresh and frozen donor eggs. You buy a frozen batch (eight eggs) for $12,750.

An additional $500 allows you a second batch for free if the first one is a dud. Just like the sperm trade, women can flip through catalogs of potential donors, though most of the donors have checked the box that says willing to donate fresh eggs but do not agree to donate eggs for the freezer. They concluded that HIIT and MICT show similar effectiveness across all body composition measures, suggesting that HIIT may be a time-efficient component of weight-management programs. The bottom line: HIIT results in equal to greater weight loss and body reshaping--in half the time! The fitness benefits of HIIT have been known for many years, mainly in the circles of elite athletes training at the highest levels. Even professional athletes who compete in moderate-paced sports--like distance runners and cyclists--discovered that they could perform better in their sport by adding high-intensity interval training to their workouts. HIIT has more recently filtered down into the realms of amateur athletes and fitness buffs, mainly through programs offered at gyms and other facilities. These workout programs are sometimes referred to as Tabata, named after Izumi Tabata, the Japanese speed-skating coach and professor who co-authored a 1996 study extolling the fitness benefits of HIIT. The original protocol utilized cycling ergometers. After a 5-minute warm-up, the regimen consisted of eight 20-second intervals of high-intensity pedaling broken up with 10-second rest periods--4 minutes total--followed by a 2-minute cool-down period. While Izumi Tabata's study proved the value of HIIT with elite athletes, numerous studies since then have utilized non-athletes to confirm the fitness benefits. One such study, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, followed previously sedentary men, who were randomly placed into either MICT or HIIT exercise groups, for 24 weeks. More of the same tomorrow. The truth about food is in such ways inconvenient. So we manage to lose the obvious in a haze of cultural obfuscation, just like that famous forest hidden in its trees. But we must overcome all that. Our destinies are at stake. The destinies of our loved ones, our progeny - are at stake. The fate of our very planet is at stake. The truth about food, diet, nutrition, and health has long been beleaguered.

But when I set out to write this, that wasn't true about everything else. If it now is, in this era of post-truth and alternative facts, then defending the truth and the ways of recognizing it are more important than ever. But we found that because it's a new technology, a lot of people didn't want to do it, or their doctors didn't want them to do it. You know, it's new, scary, they want to do it the old-fashioned way. In the last six to nine months, everyone has started to want frozen. We kept the prices low to give the patients a break in exchange for trying a new technology. The Donor Egg Bank offers a concierge service that provides assistance with flights, transportation, and hotels. Rather than selling other women's eggs, Extend Fertility, based in Woburn, Massachusetts, freezes women's eggs for their own use later on. As Allison Aubrey put it on National Public Radio, Extend Fertility founder Christy Jones saw opportunity in the ticking biological clocks of her 30-something Harvard MBA classmates. Jones likes to say that she was her own first customer, and yet shortly after the freeze, she met a man, married, and got pregnant naturally. Jones is not a scientist but lured leading fertility specialists throughout America to partner with her. Extend boasts a postthaw survival rate of 85 percent and a 61 percent pregnancy rate. After the study, the authors determined that HIIT is more effective than MICT in increasing VO2 max. Long-term HIIT--participation in HIIT for longer than 12 weeks--significantly improved waist circumference, percentage of body fat, and VO2 max in overweight populations. Of course, the fitness benefits of exercise are inseparable from the health benefits. The more fit you are, the healthier you are. Numerous studies have demonstrated that a high level of fitness is associated with a lower rate of death from any cause. Whether your goal is to be fitter or healthier, HIIT is a great way to get there. Strengthening By some estimates, our muscles get at least 5 percent weaker every decade starting in our 40s, accelerating to 15 percent per decade once we reach our 60s, assuming we don't intervene.