Do You Live In One of the Fittest Cities In America?

You might want to check in on Facebook the next time you hit the gym: Virginia Beach, Virginia, is the fittest city in the U.S., according to a recent Facebook analysis.

When deciding which city deserved the title, analysts looked at fitness-related status updates and check-ins over a period of three months. They also included the use of fitness apps in various cities across the country. Here’s the full top 10 list:

1. Virginia Beach, VA
2. Colorado Springs, CO
3. Austin, TX
4. San Antonio, TX
5. Livingston, NJ
6. Portland, OR
7. El Paso, TX
8. Oklahoma City, OK
9. Tacoma, WA
10. Albuquerque, NM

Want to help your city climb the ranks? Check out the Women’s Health Facebook page, and start sharing some of your favorite workouts!

photo: courtesy of FacebookStories.com

More From Women’s Health:
Want a Challenge? Join This Facebook Group NOW
Download a Fitness App
Awesome Apps From Women’s Health

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The Worst Breakfasts in America

Some foods go together like peanut butter and jelly. Like cheese and wine. Like eggs and…a glazed donut?! Select Massachusetts Dunkin’ Donut stores now carry a Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich, an insane concoction made of bacon and a pepper-fried egg between two halves of a glazed yeast donut.

The sandwich weighs in at 360 calories, 20 grams of fat and 13 grams of sugar—though Dunkin’ Donuts may be low-balling it with these stats. The company lists its glazed donut alone as having 260 calories and 12 grams of sugar, and it seems unlikely that everything else on the sandwich combined comes in at 100 calories and 1 gram of sugar.

As outrageous as the Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich may be, the scary thing is that it actually seems like a virtuous choice compared to some of the other offerings out there in the restaurant biz. Behold, some of the biggest diet disasters you can have for your morning meal—along with alternatives for when you want to eat breakfast out without doing so much damage.

THE DIET DISASTER:

Dunkin’ Donuts’ Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich
Calories: 360
Fat: 20 grams
Saturated fat: 8 grams
Sodium: 720 milligrams
Sugar: 13 grams

That’s 90 gourmet jelly beans’ worth of calories!

THE BETTER CHOICE:

Dunkin’ Donuts’ Bacon, Egg, and Cheese on an English Muffin Sandwich
Calories: 290
Fat: 10 grams
Saturated fat: 4.5 grams
Sodium: 700 milligrams
Sugar: 2 grams

 

THE DIET DISASTER:

Denny’s Grand Slamwich with Hash Browns
Calories: 1,530
Fat: 102 grams
Saturated fat: 45 grams
Sodium: 3,690 milligrams
Sugar: 11 grams

(Hash browns not pictured.)

You’re taking in the same amount of sodium as you would if you ate 17 servings of Chex Mix!

THE BETTER CHOICE:

Denny’s Fit Slam
Calories: 360
Fat: 10 grams
Saturated fat: 3 grams
Sodium: 820 milligrams
Sugar: 16 grams

 

 

THE DIET DISASTER:

Bob Evans’ Spinach, Bacon, and Tomato Biscuit Bowl
Calories: 1,013
Fat: 60 grams
Saturated fat: 29 grams
Sodium: 3,188 milligrams
Sugar: 7 grams

You could eat seven small Wendy’s Frosty treats for the amount of fat that’s in this dish.

THE BETTER CHOICE:

Bob Evans’ Garden Harvest Omelet
Calories: 478
Fat: 33 grams
Saturated fat: 14 grams
Sodium: 1,454 milligrams
Sugar: 5 grams

 

THE DIET DISASTER:


IHOP’s New York Cheesecake Pancakes

Calories: 1,100
Fat: 44 grams
Saturated fat: 21 grams
Sodium: 2,430 milligrams
Sugar: 53 grams

 

You might as well eat four Snickers bars—you’d take in the same number of calories.

THE BETTER CHOICE:

IHOP Original Buttermilk Pancakes (short stack)
Calories: 470
Fat: 15 grams
Saturated fat: 5 grams
Sodium: 1,590 milligrams
Sugar: 13 grams

 

 

THE DIET DISASTER:

Panera’s Pecan Roll
Calories: 740
Fat: 39 grams
Saturated fat: 12 grams
Sodium: 320 milligrams
Sugar: 50 grams

This has as much sugar as 11 fun-size Reese’s cups.

THE BETTER CHOICE:

Panera’s Chocolate Pastry
Calories: 410
Fat: 23 grams
Saturated fat: 14 grams
Sodium: 250 milligrams
Sugar: 18 grams

photo: Dunkin’ Donuts

More from Women’s Health:
Healthy Restaurant Eating
78 Ways to Cut Fat Calories from Your Diet
How Food Packaging Messes with Your Mind

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The 9 Quirkiest Cooking Classes in America

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. But teach a woman to cook and she’ll eat well for a lifetime. It’s true: cooking classes can actually improve your diet and boost your kitchen confidence, according to published in the journal Public Health Nutrition.

Researchers from the UK enrolled 44 adults in a National Health Service (NHS) cooking course. The course took place over four to six weeks and involved weekly two-hour classes. A year later, the participants reported eating fewer pre-packaged and restaurant meals, more veggies, and more fruits than they had before the class. Better yet? The lessons gave them the confidence to follow simple recipes and cook new foods.

While it helps to take a healthy cooking course, you don’t need to study raw cooking or enroll at Le Courdon Bleu to become a better chef—and better eater. In fact, there are plenty of cool culinary experiences around the country that will make you want to tie up your apron and sharpen your knives—even if you hate to cook.

Here, 9 amazing and quirky cooking classes to try.

Pack Lunch For a Week: Brown Baggin’ It
Want to save lunch money–and save yourself from the gross food you typically gobble down at your desk? This Sunday HipCooks course supplies all the containers, ingredients, and skills to prepare and pack a week’s worth of packed lunches. On the menu: caramelized shallot and goat cheese tart, shaved fennel salad with lemon, olives and orange, penne with eggplant, tomato, basil, and pine, and more. Sure beats peanut butter and jelly.
$ 60 at HipCooks in Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Portland, ME, and San Diego, CA

Get Food and a Fortune: Psychic Palm Readings and Unwrapping the Mystery of Thai Food
According to the chefs at The Way-Cool Cooking School in Savage, Minnesota, your hands are your best kitchen tools. In this class, a palm reader uncovers the secrets in your palms while you discover the secret to making perfect spring rolls and pad Thai, and write your own fortunes for homemade fortune cookies.
$ 80 per person at The Way-Cool Cooking School in Savage, MN

Turn Up The Heat: Iron Chef Challenge
Face off against your friends in this BYOB competitive cooking party. First, the head chef runs though some basic cooking techniques. Then work with your team and provided ingredients to put together a winning dish before the buzzer sounds.
$ 85 per person for 10 people at Taste Buds Kitchen in New York, NY

Date While You Dine: Match.com Singles Cooking Parties
Perk up your dating life while you hone your cooking skills at this singles-only cooking party. Mingle with wine, music, and light bites before the cooking demo, then break up into co-ed cooking teams to prep a gourmet meal. Like speed dating, you rotate around the room to meet everyone.
$ 65 per person plus Match.com membership fess at Parties That Cook in San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, and Portland, OR

Win the Cupcake Crown: Cupcake Wars
Want to be a better baker? Put your creativity to the test at a Parties That Cook Cupcake War. During this edible experience, you work with teammates to choose a chocolate or vanilla batter base. Then, add flavor with your pick of exotic ingredients like bacon, basil, cayenne, and, of course, standards like sprinkles. Judges award a prize based on taste, appearance, plate presentation, and originality of the dish. But win or lose, you’ll still leave with a sugar high.
$ 1,275 for 15 people at Parties That Cook in San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Chicago, IL, and Portland, OR

Cook for Your Canine: Dog-Gone Good! Real Food for Your Pooch
Just like packaged foods for people, many store-bought pet foods contain preservatives, high-fructose corn syrup, and additives. Want to fill Sparky’s bowl with more wholesome, healthy food? In this three-and-a-half-hour cooking demonstration, you’ll watch chefs prepare organic meals free of chemicals and common allergens like gluten and dairy, like grass-fed beef and caramelized root vegetable meatloaf and chicken liver fudge. Sure, you might leave hungry. But you do get a doggy bag filled with samples for your pooch.
$ 125 per person at Natural Gourmet Institute for Food and Health in New York, NY

Bake Your Own Junk Food: Homemade Twinkies and Pop Tarts
If you love the cellophane-wrapped versions of these classic childhood treats, this class will truly tickle your taste buds: Taught by Casey Barber, author of the cookbook Classic Snacks Made From Scratch: 70 Homemade Versions of Your Favorite Brand-Name Treats, this hour-and-a-half course will teach you how to bake Pop-Tarts and Twinkies that rival the real deals.
$ 10 per person at the Brooklyn Brainery in Brooklyn, NY
(Can’t make it to Brooklyn? Find recipes for Fig Newtons, Cheez-Its, and Pinkberry on Barber’s website.)

Make Meat-Free American Classics: Sporkie Drive-In
This class doesn’t take place in a ’57 Chevy, but it’s designed to muster memories of an old-school drive-in menu. The caveat: the vegan menu is free of meat, dairy, and other artery-cloggers. While there’s no movie, you can feast your eyes on the avocado and caramelized onion burger, cheesy chili bowl, and baked zucchini fries you’ll prep. For dessert, wash it down with a nutty toasted marshmallow milkshake.
$ 65 per person at Spork Foods in West Hollywood, CA

Cook With Chefs Around the World: ChefHangout.com
Can’t find a cool cooking course in your area? Bring a live, virtual class to your kitchen. At ChefHangout.com, you can learn from chefs all over the world via a Google+ Hangout. There, up to 10 people can cook together via webcams. Just pick a meal like paella or mini whiskey-braised tacos and sweet Thai chili wings. Then sign up for the class to receive an ingredient list, stock your pantry, and prop your web cam in you kitchen to join the class at a designated time.
$ 25- $ 90 for a single class, or $ 349 for a 10-session series at ChefHangout.com

photo: iStockphoto/Thinkstock

More From WH:
Cooking Videos From Women’s Health
Get Delicious Recipe Ideas at The Dish
Women’s Health-Approved Recipes

To find out how to suppress your hunger hormone, buy The Belly Fat Fix now!

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10 Sleepiest Cities in America

 
Wake up, New York! Charleston, West Virginia, is the real city that doesn’t sleep.

The average person in this sleep-deprived locale doesn’t get enough shut-eye one out of every three nights—and more than 25 percent of its population doesn’t snooze enough more than half of the time. This finding comes from sleepbetter.org‘s analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data and subsequent ranking of the country’s 100 most sleep-deprived cities. (For the record, New York came in as the 33rd sleepiest city.) Even in 100th place, Green Bay/Appleton, Wisconsin, is still pretty darn groggy, missing out on quality sleep about one full week each month.

Presenting the 10 worst snooze-offenders:

(See the full list at sleepbetter.org.)

And as if feeling tired weren’t bad enough, here’s the really bad news: The sleepier your city, the larger your waistline could be, says Manfred Hallschmid Ph.D., from Germany’s University of Tübingen and lead researcher of a recent study which found that sleep deprivation creates a perfect storm of conditions that contribute to weight loss.

How your body reacts to being tired:

Boosts Belly Growling
By screwing with appetite-regulating hormones such as leptin and ghrelin, lack of sleep ups your hunger factor big time. What’s more, it makes you crave just about everything you should shun. One 2011 study found that when women slept four hours per night for five days, they increased their saturated fat intake and caloric intake by 61.7% and 15.3%, respectively. An early wake-up time can make these hormonal swings even worse, Hallschmid says.

Slows Calorie Burn
If you’re extra sleepy, you’re probably not going to hit the gym. But sleep can also slash your resting and after-meal calorie burn by up to 20%, according to Hallschmid’s recent study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers believe this reduced calorie-burning is an adaptive process to conserve energy when you’ve got little to spare.

Holds Onto Fat
Even if you manage to cut calories in the face of sleep-induced hunger, “sleep loss undermines the success of dietary interventions to lose body fat,” Hallschmid says. On reduced-calorie diets, getting 5.5 hours of sleep a night compared to 8.5 hours cuts the proportion of weight lost as fat by 55%, according to a 2010 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Increases Diabetes Risk
Lack of sleep reduces insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance, both of which predispose the body to type 2 diabetes, and its partner in crime, weight gain, Hallschmid says. In a 2012 study published in Science Translational Medicine, researchers found that when participants didn’t get enough sleep, or slept at odd times of the day, they had higher blood sugar levels thanks to decreased pancreatic function.

So what’s a sleepy girl to do? Try one of these sleep-better tricks or this bedtime yoga routine.

More from WH:
Surprising Things That Make You Tired
Insomnia Solutions
10 Sleep Myths Busted

Look Better Naked: Buy the book to learn how to look (and feel!) your very best
 
 
 

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