One can lose weight by laughing.
No joke.
Instead of yo-yo dieting, try ho-ho dieting.
Before guffawing at the notion that mirth reduces girth, be aware that purposeful laughing is gaining a following. Thousands of laugh clubs worldwide now invite people to, well, laugh out loud together.
A hybrid branch of psychology called “laughter therapy” is finding its way into hospitals and nursing homes with mood-lifter activities. A new exercise movement called Laughtercising has created guidebooks and laugh-track CDs of nonstop hooting and howling to get the yuks started. Even scientists are examining the good laugh in clinical studies.
“When it comes to the weight-loss arena, I ask myself: Is laughter a gimmick or a gift?” says Katie Namrevo of Bellevue, Wash.
On the back cover of her 2004 book, “Laugh It Off! Weight Loss for the Fun of It,” is a “before” photo showing her as a frumpy 50-year-old and an “after” photo as a 54-year-old who says she laughed off 35 pounds. Included in the $29.95 book is a laugh-track CD to jump-start your weight-reduction hilarity.
Namrevo was a “stress eater” who had tried all the diets and pills, she says. They only added stress and she didn’t lose an ounce.
One day, after watching a TV program on laughter therapy, she headed to the fridge to “medicate” and decided to try laughing instead. Loud, long and hard, like a lunatic.
Giving new meaning to the phrase “belly laugh,” Namrevo says she found that laughing 30 seconds to five minutes as often as 10 times a day, she no longer craved food. She began losing weight and she had more energy and a desire to exercise. “Laughing is a happy and healthy thing to do,” she says.
Which may mean it’s only a matter of time before Robin Williams and Chris Rock join the ranks of fitness trainers.
Laughing exercises “will definitely become a part of all the fitness clubs and yoga centers,” predicts Thomas Varkey, a business consultant who two years ago founded the Laughter for Life club in Boston. Members meet for 25 minutes twice a month for yoga-inspired, roll-on-the-floor laugh-o-ramas.
A study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, presented last month to the American College of Cardiology’s annual conference, showed that daily hearty laughing increases the flow of blood by expanding vessels constricted by stress.
“A belly laugh is internal jogging,” said William Fry, associate professor emeritus of clinical psychiatry at Stanford University. “Laughing 100 to 200 times per day is the cardiovascular equivalent of rowing for 10 minutes,” Fry calculates.
Other studies have found that laughter bolsters the immune system, regulates abnormal heartbeat related to stress, improves the respiratory system and relaxes muscle tension.
Lee Berk, associate research professor of pathology and human anatomy at Loma Linda University said regular “happy or joyful laughter” in the right doses decreases detrimental hormones and increases beneficial ones.
But can laughter make an ounce of difference in that midriff bulge? That hasn’t been proved but can be extrapolated, Berk said. “We know the mechanisms,” he says, explaining that stress increases cortisol, the hormone that causes craving for food, and laughing reduces it.
Berk figures that one day doctors will tell overweight patients to eat right, exercise regularly and get 15 minutes a day of good hearty laughter.
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