My mother used to have predictable comments on my appearance (regardless of my age). “Stand up straight” and “get the hair out of your eyes.”

Well the hair is still in my eyes but I have taken her advice about standing up straight. This was after glancing at my hunched over form in a store window. Was that really me, slouching down the street? Were my shoulders permanently bent forward. Did I always have to slump toward the computer screen?

A plate and cereal bowl with markers for proper portion sizes appear to help obese patients with diabetes lose weight and decrease their use of glucose-controlling medications, according to a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Sue D. Pedersen, M.D., F.R.C.P.C., and colleagues at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, conducted a six-month controlled trial of commercially available portion control plates and bowls in 2004. The plates were divided into sections for carbohydrates, proteins, cheese and sauce, with the rest left open for vegetables. The sections approximately totaled an 800-calorie meal for men and a 650-calorie meal for women. The cereal bowl is designed to allow a 200-calorie meal of cereal and milk. Half of 130 obese patients with diabetes (average age 56) were randomly assigned to use the plate for their largest meal and the bowl when they ate cereal for breakfast. The other half of the participants received usual care, which consisted of dietary assessment and teaching by dieticians.

Sometimes I really do feel bad about always expecting the worst when I’m about to start reading a new diet and/or exercise book, but after a second or two this feeling passes.  After reading Winning by Losing, by Jillian Michaels of Biggest Loser fame, my “expect-the-worst” attitude is really vindicated.  This book has been out for a while - Michaels has just released a new book – but you can judge a fitness personality’s body of work by his or her “signature” book, in which their overall philosophy is revealed.

Drs. Maratos-Flier and Kliewer found the hormone behind Atkins diet

We have seen some truly remarkable research come out in favor of the Atkins low-carb diet this year, most notably the Stanford JAMA study from March 2007 showing it as the superior diet for weight and health.

People who are livin' la vida low-carb already naturally accept the physiology behind this way of eating as an excellent way to burn stored fat through the use of ketosis and that those ketone bodies become our source of energy rather than carbohydrates. We've even had studies showing a low-carb diet burns twice as much stored fat as a low-fat diet.

But now we read in this MedPage Today column that two different researcher teams have stumbled upon what one of them describe as a "serendipitous" discovery of a hormone in their studies that actually works as the very mechanism behind why fat-burning is so functional on a low-carb diet.