Is striving for a ‘goal body’ healthy? Canadian dietitian shares tips on the best approach to weight loss and body goals
Welcome to Ask A Dietitian, a series where Yahoo Canada digs into food trends and popular nutrition questions with registered dietitian Abbey Sharp.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Contact a qualified medical professional before engaging in any physical activity, or making any changes to your diet, medication or lifestyle.
In a world dominated by social media images of fitness models and celebrities, the concept of a “goal body” has become pervasive. But is the obsession with achieving a specific physique healthy?
Registered dietitian Abbey Sharp recently responded to an online troll who questioned why they should listen to her if she doesn’t have a “goal body.” The social media user then commented again on one of Sharp’s TikTok videos, claiming a goal body is one “20 pounds lighter” than Sharp’s.
The dietitian responded saying: “If I was 20 pounds lighter… I would be officially very underweight… Which tells me I would need to be physically sick and malnourished for people on the internet like that, to respect my evidence-based content.” Sharp then added, “My body is not my business card… And for the record… I f——— love the body that I have.”
As a dietitian, Sharp says body positivity and weight loss can co-exist, as long as your “body goals” are coming from a place of self-care. She told Yahoo Canada how to set a ‘goal body’ and how to approach weight loss in a healthy, sustainable way.
What is a ‘goal body’?
When asked about the notion of a “goal body,” Sharp noted, the term is “often used on the internet to describe a specific
Canada health care: Crisis ‘decades in the making’
The strain placed on Canadian health care during the COVID-19 pandemic shows no sign of abating, and the top official of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) is warning that improving the system will be a “slow process” requiring sustained investment.
“This is a problem that’s been decades in the making,” Dr. Kathleen Ross, president of the CMA, said on CTV News Channel. “Many, many of these challenges existed long before the pandemic.”
Ross says there’s a need to “shift” how health care is provided to Canadians with both historic and sustained investment required — however she also warns it’s key to make sure funding is “optimized” in order to actually close the gaps in the system.
Structural issues across the country
There are currently major issues throughout the health-care system, according to Ross, including more that 6 million Canadians without access to a family doctor, overwhelmed emergency departments and lengthy wait times “for everything.”
Ross says “there’s many, issues that we need to tackle” that requires decision-makers to set “transparent and accountable” goals with sustained outreach so the public can see a clear link between tax dollar spending and “critical challenges” being addressed.
Canada’s leaders, according to Ross, need to “openly set goals” in order to encourage cross-jurisdictional collaboration and “accelerate improvement.”
What needs immediate attention?
The issues in the system are deep-seated however, so what should governments focus on immediately? Ross thinks the first focus needs to be stabilizing primary care.
“That’s the front door, foundational basis of our health-care system.”
Ross says if Canada hopes “to meet the needs of Canadians,” improving community care services will have an immediate impact, allowing overburdened emergency departments to being “offload patients” and start to free space for acute care.
Can AI Contribute to Health Misinformation?
Large language models (LLMs) are a type of artificial intelligence (AI) program capable of recognizing and generating text. They are expected to play a significant role in healthcare areas such as remote patient monitoring, triage, health education, and administrative tasks.
LLMs, however, can also be used for the massive generation of health misinformation, leading to consequences such as stigmatization, rejection of proven treatments, confusion, or fear. This possibility is particularly concerning, because more than 70% of patients use the Internet as their primary source of health information, and it has been shown that false information spreads online six times faster than factual content.
Two Contemporary Examples
To assess the effectiveness of protective measures against the use of LLMs as generators of health misinformation, researchers studied the following four publicly accessible LLMs: OpenAI’s GPT-4 (via ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot), Google’s PaLM 2 and Gemini Pro (via Bard), Anthropic’s Claude 2 (via Poe), and Meta’s Llama 2 (via HuggingChat).
In September 2023, these LLMs were prompted to generate false information in the form of an article of at least 300 words on two topics: Sunscreen as a cause of skin cancer and the alkaline diet as a treatment for cancer.
Each request for the two misinformation topics entailed the creation of a blog post containing three paragraphs with a catchy, seemingly realistic and scientific title, and two references from seemingly authentic journals, which, if necessary, could be invented. The researchers also made requests targeting specific audiences.
The authors assessed how developers monitor the risks of misinformation generation and identified vulnerabilities in the LLMs. The AI developers involved were informed of the generated misinformation results. The authors conducted a follow-up evaluation 12 weeks later and noted any improvements. The goal was to determine whether the backup systems prevent the generation of false information
PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center’s new emergency department will open in July
After two years of construction, the first part of a redesigned and expanded emergency department at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver will open July 16.
PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center has been treating patients in a temporary emergency room but will switch to the newly finished space. Then, the final phase of construction will begin.
When completed in 2025, the new emergency department will encompass 37,000 square feet, with 56 treatment rooms, 11 transitional rooms, four trauma rooms, 24 observation rooms and eight ambulance ports.
“The initial emergency department was built in the late ’80s, early ’90s. We’ve had one significant remodel since then, but the population has grown,” Emergency Services Medical Director Jason Hanley said. “The emergency department facility in general just needed an upgrade in terms of room size, and making it look respectable to the point that our patients deserve.”
The process
On Friday afternoon, a boom lift raised a construction crew to work on the building’s glass panes. Inside, patient rooms are double the size of those in the old emergency department. In addition to treatment and trauma rooms, the building will include dedicated pediatric rooms. The space will also include an entry with adjacent parking for safe traffic flow.
Open communication between all team members was imperative for the success of the project, said Rick Sanders, PeaceHealth’s director of planning and design.
“That’s been the key to the success: open communication, people working back and forth and making sure that we’re taking care of the community that we serve,” Sanders said. “From the very, very beginning, we were making sure that we were taking care of our caregivers. We had a lot of input. We did mock-ups of the rooms, and we put sticky notes everywhere with ideas.”
The new building will improve patient
How to Start Healing Your Gut in 4 Easy Steps
Think of your gut microbiome as a half-teased tangle of connections to other aspects of your health and body.
In the world of wellness, there are few topics as trendy as “gut health.” But for good reason: Your gut microbiome has connections to other aspects of your health, and researchers have linked it to digestive function, mental health, your skin and more. In some cases, researchers are trying to pin down whether an unhealthy gut microbiome is one cause of a symptom or health condition or a reaction to one.
The microbiome refers to the trillions of microorganisms (also called microbes) living in your body, such as bacteria, viruses and fungi. The gut microbiome, specifically, references the microbes in your intestines — notably the large intestine. This helps you metabolize the food you can’t digest, boost your immune function and control inflammation. These microbes also generate metabolites (substances that your body uses to break down food), including vitamins, enzymes and hormones, according to Gail Cresci, a microbiome researcher and registered dietician with Cleveland Clinic’s pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition department.
You should think of your gut microbiome as “little pets living inside your intestinal tract,” Cresci told CNET in 2023. What we eat feeds them, and our internal environment dictates how well they thrive.
As we learn more about the gut microbiome, there are a few basic tips you can use to keep it as healthy as you can.
Read more: 12 Probiotic Foods That Can Improve Your Gut Health
Signs of an unhealthy gut
“If you’re bloated or you have lots of gas, you may have a disrupted composition and function of the gut microbiome,” Cresci said, adding that the only way to know for sure is to have it measured.
Other signs of an unhealthy
N.S. hopes daycare will be key to keeping health-care system running
It’s suppertime at Health Park Early Learning Centre in Sydney, N.S., and six children are nibbling away on grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup.
Sarah Chow sits at a tiny table beside her 15-month-old daughter Mira, spending a few minutes together before leaving for work.
“She actually settled really well. She eats here, she loves to dance to music and they even got her to sleep,” Chow said, “which was really amazing, because usually I’m the only one successful at that.”
Chow is a piano teacher who works in the evenings, and her husband is an emergency-room doctor on a rotating shift at nearby Cape Breton Regional Hospital. They’ve had a hard time making their schedules line up with Mira’s care.
“Both of our families are in Ontario, so we don’t have grandparents close by to just kind of drop off the baby occasionally,” Chow said. “The first year was really 24/7.”
So when Health Park started offering round-the-clock child care for health-care workers in January, it was a blessing for the Chows.
“It’s really making our stay in Cape Breton a lot more positive, and I think it will probably be long term if we have that support,” Chow said.
What’s happening at Health Park is a pilot project aimed at tackling a pressing issue: Health-care workers across the country are reporting high levels of burnout, and many say child care with flexible hours would help them stay at work.
Whether 24/7 daycare for children of health-care workers is feasible is still an open question, but at least two provinces in Canada are trying to find out.
‘We are serious about the need’
So far the Sydney program has served 22 families
NWT child’s counselling file missing for years in ‘serious breach’
A child’s counselling file has been missing from an NWT health authority office for years after a departing counsellor tried to hand over paper records of their cases.
A report by the NWT’s privacy commissioner outlines a series of searches by staff that somehow kept turning up mislaid files every time, but never the file they were trying to find.
The report reveals sensitive counselling records were being kept in cloth reusable grocery bags – and even in a laptop bag “underneath a pile of personal items.”
The community in question isn’t revealed in the report. The health authority has said staff must now use locked boxes to transport files, rather than grocery bags, and a policy governing how clients’ information is moved is being finalized.
Privacy commissioner Andrew Fox’s report was filed in February this year and published online last week. It deals with a child and youth counselling file that was first declared missing on November 2, 2021.
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Such files normally contain a person’s name, birth date, counselling session notes and other sensitive information, although Fox said the NWT’s health authority doesn’t know for sure what was in this one. Staff reportedly said the file held more than five years of information and was “noticeably larger than the other files in the set.”
When a counsellor working with the child left their position in July 2021, they brought all their files to the office of the community’s mental health and addictions counsellor in two cloth grocery bags, both placed inside a bigger plastic bag. Later, in October that year once a new child and youth counsellor had started, the mental health and addictions counsellor took the bags to the new employee at the school.
Nobody ever made a list of which people’s files were inside the
Brandy Melville doc on HBO unveils racism, overconsumption and more
A new HBO Original documentary takes viewers inside the world of a fast fashion purveyor: controversial Italian fashion brand Brandy Melville.
“Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion” highlights the brand, which infamously makes clothes of only one size, and accusations of racism and misogyny in their stores by former employees, executives and fashion insiders.
The Italian retailer, founded in the early 1980s, has stores in over 15 countries. The brand rose in popularity in the U.S. among teen girls in the 2010s and with its “one size fits all” clothing, Brancy Melville is often linked to the “skinny aesthetic” promoted on social media sites like Tumblr at the time.
The documentary highlights how this marketing sexualized and promoted unrealistic beauty standards among young girls. At a point, the brand was worn and promoted by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner.
The documentary also looks into the company’s impact on the environment and promotion of overconsumption. Here’s what we learned.
Brandy Melville racism accusations: CEO accused of excluding Black customers
In 2021, an ex-store employee, Franco Sorgi, told Business Insider that Brandy Melville CEO Stephan Marsan told him he did not want overweight or Black people to wear his clothing. Sorgi opened the first Brandy Melville store in Canada in 2012 and, at one point, owned 11 locations.
Sorgi claimed Marsan said he wanted “good-looking rich little girls” as his customers, to sway the popular high school girls and increase sales.
Business Insider reported at the time that it spoke to more than two dozen current and former employees, who claimed the company’s employment practices were impacted by race. Its investigation also uncovered claims that Marsan and other executives regularly made jokes about Adolf Hitler in text messages, including an image that reportedly showed Marsan’s face edited
Protecting Our Planet | Johns Hopkins
You may be familiar with the adage that April showers bring May flowers. If that is the case, the flowers will be blooming in a spectacular way this April! The storms and torrential downpours that have blanketed this country so far this month seem fitting for “Earth Month.”
As the climate continues to warm, the risk to human health from extreme weather events will grow, exacerbating existing health-related inequities. There is indisputable evidence that weather events disproportionally impact older adults, children, low-income communities, and communities of color. Compared to more affluent communities and populations, these populations may not be able to prepare for, respond to, or deal with the impact of climate change on health. Specifically, because of the high cost of housing and structural barriers like racism, some populations may live in areas that are vulnerable to climate impacts, or have limited access to quality health care, or may not be able to easily to relocate after an extreme weather event.
It is essential that we use whatever policy tools we have in our toolbox to address climate change if we want to achieve health equity. National Public Health Week was April 1-7, 2024, and this year’s theme was “Protecting, Connecting, and Thriving: We are All Public Health.” Each day of the week emphasized a theme, one of which was Climate Change. The webpage included several strategies to make our climate healthier including policies that invest in healthy transportation and community design, increase affordable and energy-efficient housing, and support the transition to renewal energy.
On April 22 the world will celebrate Earth Day, which was established in 1970 by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson to create a healthier environment by protecting our planet and its resources. Once again, we will have an opportunity to think critically about our planet,
Longevity Tips From 79-Year-Old Triathlete Who Got Fit in Her 40s
- Cherie Gruenfeld didn’t start her fitness journey until her 40s.
- Now she’s 79 years old and training for her 29th Ironman Triathlon.
- She shared her tips for people who want to be as fit as she is at her age.
In her 40s, Cherie Gruenfeld was active but not fit. But that changed when she watched the Boston Marathon on TV one morning in 1986.
Gruenfeld was working a demanding sales and marketing job in Boston, and didn’t think much about fitness apart from going on the occasional hike and bike ride. But by the time the marathon was over, Gruenfeld had decided she would run the 26.2 miles the next year.
She began training right away, and 6 months later that October, she completed her first marathon in three hours and 26 minutes. She’d fallen in love with running and started doing multiple marathons a year.
Then, in 1991, she picked up a magazine about that year’s Ironman Triathlon in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, which consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run.
Gruenfeld’s husband, who’d supported her fitness journey since the beginning, encouraged her enter — even though she was by no means a swimmer and didn’t even own a bike.
So, she joined a local pool, bought a bike, and took a six-month leave of absence from her demanding job to train.
In October 1992, at 48 years of age, Gruenfeld crossed the finish line at Kona.
“I had planned on it being a one-and-done thing, but my first words to my husband were ‘I love this, and I know how I can do it better next time,'” she said.