Roberto Locatelli

We were together sitting side by side during our IRC Volleyball course in Tehran more then a decade ago... but still I remembered the great friendship, he is a good referee and now serving smartly for FIVB in World Women Grandprix in Japan. Hopefully you are still like before, handsome and always carrying a dictionary Italy-English...hahahahahha. I cooked for you Mee Maggi at Azadi Hotel and you mistaken named the noodle Italian crusine..and do you still keep my 'Songkok'? which you requested on the last day of the course.....

Well everything was a momento to us....hope to meet you sometimes in the FIVB Volleyball tournament soon...I had met Khurana (India) in Nakhon Pathom and others soon...Bravo!!!

Task 14.08.2009

Meet you guys again...Lower Six Sina & Batutta

As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week. Thursday is "body wedge" class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from which I will push myself up in various hateful ways for an hour. Friday will bring a 5.5-mile run, the extra half-mile my grueling expiation of any gastronomical indulgences during the week.

I have exercised like this — obsessively, a bit grimly — for years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I doing this? Except for a two-year period at the end of an unhappy relationship — a period when I self-medicated with lots of Italian desserts — I have never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn't all the exercise wiping it out? (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.")

It's a question many of us could ask. More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. We spend some $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.

And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government's definition. Yes, it's entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don't. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight? (Watch TIME's video "How to Lose Hundreds of Pounds.")

The conventional wisdom that exercise is essential for shedding pounds is actually fairly new. As recently as the 1960s, doctors routinely advised against rigorous exercise, particularly for older adults who could injure themselves. Today doctors encourage even their oldest patients to exercise, which is sound advice for many reasons: People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases — those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss has been wildly overstated. (Read "Losing Weight: Can Exercise Trump Genes?")

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

The Compensation Problem

Earlier this year, the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE — PLoS is the nonprofit Public Library of Science — published a remarkable study supervised by a colleague of Ravussin's, Dr. Timothy Church, who holds the rather grand title of chair in health wisdom at LSU. Church's team randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
By John Cloud Sunday, Aug. 09, 2009

Questions

Assalamualaikum dearest students of Lower Six Sina & Batutta,

I have some questions for you guys here......please do answer at "comment" column.


When was the last time you went to the beach? Where did you go?
What do people do at the beach?
Can you swim? When did you learn to swim? Who taught you to swim?
Have you ever been night-swimming?
Are there any problems with jellyfish, sharks or stonefish at your local beach?
Have you ever played sports on the beach? Which sports? How are they different from non-beach versions of the sport?
Have you ever collected seashells?
Can you describe a shell that you have collected?
What did you do with the shells that you collected?
What sort of animals live at the beach?
Have you ever been fishing on the beach?
What did you catch?
What did you use as bait?
What is the "tide"?
Why is there a tide?
What is a "rip tide"?
Have you ever been on a sail boat or a row boat?
Have you ever used a surf board or body board?
Do you like to sunbake?
Do you think sunblock is important?
Have you ever been to a famous beach?
What do you wear to the beach?
How do you keep your wallet safe while you are swimming?
Is erosion a problem at your local beach?
Is pollution a problem at your local beach?
Should people be able to own a beach or part of a beach?
Why is beachfront land so expensive? Why do so many people want to live there?
Do you prefer a calm sea or do you prefer big waves?
Should dogs be allowed on the beach?
Should dogs have to wear leashes at the beach?
Should cars be allowed on the beach?
What do you think of people who swim in the nude?
Is there a nude beach near where you live?
Have you ever gone to a nude beach?
What do you think of topless swimming?