A Funny Way To Lose Weight: Laugh It Off
Weight loss is hardly a laughing matter here in the Obese Nation, where two-thirds of adults are overweight or worse. But the newest aha! breakthrough in the battle of the bulge just might prompt a snicker - and maybe make you healthier.
One can lose weight by laughing. No joke! Instead of yo-yo dieting, try ho-ho dieting. Scientists have found that a good laugh is a calorie burner not to be ignored.
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 yuk-yuks started. Even scientists are examining the good laugh in clinical studies.
Katie Namrevo, who wrote a book "Laugh It Off! Weight Loss for the Fun of It", 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.
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.
Varkey's laughter club is one of about 1,000 in the United States and 3,000 worldwide. Most clubs are founded by "laughter leaders" trained and certified by either of two laughter-advocacy organizations, Laughter Club International, based in Bombay, India, or the World Laughter Tour, based in Gahanna, Ohio.
"It gives a lot of exercise to our body and a kind of well-being," says Varkey. "The well-being helps us not to eat too much. When we are depressed, we tend to eat more. Laughing is antidepressant medicine."
"It's just laughing, but you have to work up to the 10 minutes just as you would in any exercise program," says Betty Hoeffner, who sells the $10 recording through online retailers and at her Laughtercising and HeyUgly Web sites, the latter dedicated to increasing self-esteem in teenagers. Sales are "picking up," she says. "It has just been word of mouth - ha! ha!"
Hoeffner breaks into a big raucous laugh as a spontaneous demonstration of proper technique. "You just keep going and going and you work up such a sweat and your abs are aching," she says. "You get so much energy you'll be vacuuming your house at 10 o'clock at night. Just try it!"
"The laughter industry is really funny to me," says physician Patch Adams, an alternative-medicine advocate and the icon of the health benefits of laughter. "The clearest connection" of laughter to weight loss "is that depression, boredom and loneliness are the gigantic reasons why people eat gigantic quantities of trash and fatness," says Adams, who founded the Gesundheit! Institute in Arlington and West Virginia, which works to bring fun and creativity to health care. "It's not really laughter that is a great power, but the life that leads to laughter and the readiness to laugh at things."
Jacki Kwan, a Bethesda clinical social worker and laughter club leader, says if there's weight loss from laughing it's because people feel better about themselves.
Kwan leads her "Ha!Ha!logy" therapeutic humor program twice weekly with elderly residents at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville. The 15-to-30-minute sessions start with breathing exercises, move to "ho-ho-ha-ha-ha" chanting and clapping, then a closed-mouth humming laugh exercise and finally the open-mouth, tongue-out lion laugh.
"When they begin to focus on the physical exercise of laughing, people tend to forget what's wrong," says Kwan. "Laughter brings you into the moment where there is no pain, fear and anger - only joy and love. The tendency is to feel better about who you are, which might lead someone to take better care of themselves and make better food choices and do exercise."
Science is finding that laughter alone produces biological benefits. 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.
William F. Fry, associate professor emeritus of clinical psychiatry at Stanford University, says "a belly laugh is internal jogging." He says laughing involves "a great deal of physical exercise and muscular behavior" - 15 facial muscles plus dozens of others all over your body that flex and relax. Your pulse and respiration increase, oxygenating the blood.
"Laughing 100 to 200 times per day is the cardiovascular equivalent of rowing for 10 minutes," calculates Fry.
But how often do people laugh per day? "Far more than they realize," he says, adding that any kind of laughter sets the respiratory apparatus and its muscles into motion.
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, an associate research professor of pathology and human anatomy at Loma Linda University and a pioneer in studying the physiological effects of laughter, says regular "happy or joyful laughter" in the right doses decreases detrimental hormones and increases beneficial ones. "That we have proven," he says. "The biological changes we see with moderate, routine exercise is very similar to the changes we see with the constant use of mirthful laughter."
But can laughter make an ounce of difference in that midriff bulge? Berk says science has not yet proved that but it can be extrapolated. "We know the mechanisms," he says, explaining that stress causes an increase in 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. "I'm doing it now with my patients," he says.
Katie Namrevo: "I believe that it will work for anybody. The gift of laughter is available to everybody. It is amazing. And the side effects are all good."
A life with laughter is certainly more fulfilling than one without.
Another study:
It may not be as good for reducing the waistline as going to the gym or resisting that ice-cream sundae, but American researchers have found that 10-15 minutes of genuine giggling can burn off the number of calories found in a medium square of chocolate.
Lose 2 kg a year
The researchers separately tested seven pairs of male friends, 17 pairs of female friends and 21 mixed couples.
"We didn't tell them that the goal of the study was to measure laughter, because then they might have forced it and forced laughter is regulated by a totally different part of the brain. We wanted it to be genuine laughter," said the lead researcher, Maciej Buchowski, director of bionutrition at Vanderbilt.
The volunteers were told the researchers were testing emotional reactions to various video clips.
The room was specially designed so the scientists could measure how much oxygen the volunteers inhaled and how much carbon dioxide they exhaled - the gold standard for measuring energy burning.
Noting differences in the oxygen and carbon dioxide patterns before and during laughter allowed the scientists to calculate whether laughter used more energy and how big the difference was.
Heart rate monitors were also fitted on the volunteers as a back-up measure of changes, as heart rate tends to respond to changes more quickly than breathing does. Microphones were fitted to record the laughter.
The volunteers were told not to talk or move and to just kick back in the reclining chairs and watch what was on the screen.
"First it was half an hour of something boring - an English landscape," Buchowski said. "During that time we measured the baseline, the resting metabolic rate."
Five different comedy clips, starting with a take-out from the Cosby show - minus the canned laughter - were then shown for 10 minutes each, interspersed with five minute intervals of sheep wandering around fields in England.
"They burned 20% more calories when laughing, compared to not laughing," Buchowski said.
"Then we calculated what would happen if somebody laughed for 10 or 15 minutes a day and we found that it was up to 50 calories, depending on your body size and the intensity of the laughter."
That means that if you laugh for 10-15 minutes a day, you'd burn enough calories to lose 2kg in a year, Buchowski said.
A study shows you can burn up to 50 calories by genuinely laughing for 15 minutes. So pop in your favorite funny movie and giggle to help whittle your waist! Remember, every calorie burned counts!