- Former Blizzard president thinks you should be able to leave a tip after beating $70 games, but my 10 years in the hospitality industry knows that’s an awful idea VG247
- Former Blizzard president suggests you should be able to leave a $10 or $20 tip for the devs because ‘Some games are that special’ PC Gamer
- Former Blizzard President Thinks Tipping Game Creators Is Great Idea 80.lv
- Former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra would like to “tip” developers Eurogamer.net
- Former Blizzard president wants to be able to leave a “tip” after completing $70 games: “I wish I could give these folks another $10 or $20” Gamesradar
Tag Archives: hospitality
PCB Chief Makes Anti-India Remarks After India’s Hospitality To Pakistan Players – India Today
- PCB Chief Makes Anti-India Remarks After India’s Hospitality To Pakistan Players India Today
- Pakistan Cricket Board Boss Zaka Ashraf Triggers Controversy, Refers To India As ‘Dushman Mulk’ In Viral Video | Cricket News NDTV Sports
- PCB Chief’s ‘Dushman Mulk’ Attack On India After Grand Welcome For Pak Team; Cricket Fans Lash Out Hindustan Times
- ICC World Cup 2023: PCB chairman Zaka Ashraf calls India ‘dushman mulk’, Pakistani fans slam remarks Times of India
- Hyderabad Police working overtime for Pak team’s security Rediff.com
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Super Nintendo World Mario Kart Ride Has Strict Waistline Limits
Height limitations have always been a challenge for some amusement park guests, as safety features on thrill rides aren’t designed to accommodate every rider. But Mario fans flocking to Universal Studios Hollywood this month for the opening of Super Nintendo World may find themselves unable to enjoy the park’s most exciting attraction, this time because of their waistline.
According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, Universal Studios Hollywood has warned that some guests might not be allowed to ride Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge, which allows guest to climb aboard a go-kart and experience the popular Nintendo racing game in real life through augmented reality effects and animatronic characters, “if their waistline measures 40-inches or more.” With the average male waist size in America now exceeding 40-inches, that limitation is going to potentially leave many guests very disappointed after enduring what will probably be very long lines at the new attraction.
In recent years, theme parks around the country have become more stringent about safety and the restraints used on ride vehicles, and it’s not just for high-speed attractions like roller coasters that can take riders through inverted loops and steep curves. As indoor rides have become more complex and now provide riders with highly immersive experiences, the technology they employ has also become more complex… and more dangerous.
Trackless vehicles now deftly weave through attractions like Galaxy’s Edge’s Rise of the Resistance with more speed and agility than the ride vehicles used on classic attractions like The Pirates of the Caribbean. As a result, while Pirates doesn’t restrain riders, Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge will, as there is a serious risk of injury should a rider exit a vehicle before the ride is finished. On top of that, there’s now even more emphasis on safely securing smaller children in the same seats used by adult riders, which contributes to more limitations for larger guests.
Jeff Polk, the senior vice president of resort operations at Universal Orlando Resort, told the Wall Street Journal that many of its parks’ attractions offer test seats located outside the rides as a result, allowing guests to test restraints and capacity ahead of time to avoid finding themselves turned away after waiting hours in line. But at the same time, some park visitors also told the Wall Street Journal that testing seating ahead of time can be awkward, embarrassing, and not always indicative of the ride’s actual build and design.
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Some attractions, like Universal’s Islands of Adventure’s The Incredible Hulk Coaster in Florida, now offer certain seats specifically designed for larger guests. But as the pandemic-weary population is embracing travelling and vacations again, theme parks are bursting at the seams with hours-long wait lines, and there’s simply less incentive for parks to offer rides with seats they may not be able to fill every time the ride is operated.
‘Reverse Dieting’ Is Not a Weight Loss Cheat Code
To hear the TikTok girlies tell it, there’s a hack that will let you EAT MORE FOOD! While NOT GAINING WEIGHT! And it’s great if you are SICK OF DIETING! Never mind that one can achieve all those goals by a simple trick called “not dieting anymore.” No, it needs a name and a strict protocol: reverse dieting.
The basic idea of reverse dieting is that you slowly add a few more calories to your diet every week. So s you normally maintain your weight on 2,000 calories per day, but you’ve been eating 1,500 calories to lose weight. You might then “reverse diet” by eating 1,600 calories a day next week, 1,700 calories a day the week after that, and so on. Eventually you’ll be back up to 2,000 calories, or maybe even more.
This is not a trend that originated on TikTok. The term seems to have come from bodybuilders, whose sport requires that they engage in extreme cycles of bulking (gaining weight to gain muscle mass) and cutting (losing as much fat as possible before stepping on a stage). While the process can create dazzling physiques, it also fucks with your metabolism and overall health.
Reverse dieting is one approach for transitioning from an extreme cut, to maintenance or bulking: Instead of just pigging out the day after your bodybuilding show, you might rather slowly increase the amount of food you eat as you find your maintenance calories again.
This idea spawned the current trend of influencers pitching reverse dieting as the cure for all your diet-related complaints. But it doesn’t work that way.
The science behind reverse dieting
Some of the claims you’ll hear from thin women flexing their abs on TikTok, and from the bodybuilders saying to just trust them, bro, are true. Among them:
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- Your metabolism adapts to dieting, so over time you have to eat less and less food to keep losing weight (this is a known thing).
- After dieting a long time, you may be eating a miserably low number of calories.
- Eating more food will allow your body to stop being so stingy with the calories, and can increase the number of calories your body burns.
- After increasing your calories, someday you may be able to lose weight again while eating more food than when you were in the depths of your diet.
There are also a number of untruths and half-truths that come up. You may hear that increasing your calories too fast after a diet will make your body pack on fat, or that you can add 1,000 calories and still be losing weight, or something something hormones something cortisol. (Scroll long enough on fitness TikTok and somebody will explain that all your problems are due to cortisol. Take a drink.)
In any case, this is where “reverse dieting” comes in. Supposedly the cure to all of these ills is simply that you need to add 50 to 100 calories to your diet each week. The process is slow and requires patience, but stick to it and you too could look like this girl (imagine me moving my head to point at the before-and-after photos I’ve greenscreened behind me) on 2,400 calories instead of 1,200.
So what’s actually true about reverse dieting, and why is everybody so into it? Let’s take a closer look.
When it goes right, “reverse dieting” is just “not dieting” but with more rules
After reading all of those bullet points above, you might think, OK, so why not just stop dieting? You’ll get to eat more food, your body will burn more calories, and from there you can either diet again or—crazy idea here—just not diet anymore. Heck, you could give gaining weight a try.
And that is, in fact, the real answer. Just stop dieting. The world will not end. You can eat food again, and you will be fine. So why reverse diet?
As Eric Trexler, a nutrition and metabolism researcher, puts it here, the original reverse dieters’ goal was to smoothly transition from a calorie deficit, to maintenance, to their first bulk after a bodybuilding contest without gaining any more fat than they needed to. One problem with this approach is that after bodybuilders diet that hard, they need to regain fat. You can’t stay dangerously lean forever, and that’s true whether you’re a meathead or a TikTok girlie.
On social media, reverse dieting is often described as a way of continuing to diet while eating more calories. It’s true that if you’re in a 500 calorie deficit and you’re only adding 50 calories a week, you’ll continue to be in a deficit for a very long time—10 weeks, at that rate. Trexler notes that “this would serve only to delay even the most basic and immediate aspects of recovery, and make [the dieter’s] life unnecessarily difficult.”
Reverse dieting is not a cure for chronic dieting
There are two things going on here, I think. One is relatively harmless. Let’s say you’ve been on a diet and you’re ready to start gaining weight. Instead of eating an extra 1000 calories each day (to go from a 500 calorie deficit to a 500 calorie surplus), you can eat an extra few hundred this week, and add a few hundred more next week, and so on. You’ll be less surprised by changes in your weight (eating more food means there’s more food in your belly, so the scale might tick up a bit just from that) and it may be easier to figure out approximately how many calories you should eat going forward.
But that’s not how it’s being described on social media. Thin women are telling chronic dieters that they can eat more food while continuing to be very thin, if only they follow a strict reverse dieting protocol. But the strictness and the expectations can be damaging on their own.
For an extreme example, check out this video from a registered dietitian and eating disorder specialist. She describes a woman who was getting help for eating disorder recovery. The woman had such a low body weight, with associated health issues, that the dietitian says she “need[ed] to gain weight immediately.” But instead of following guidance from her care team that would have her gaining a pound a week, she secretly put herself on a reverse diet protocol. By adding just 50 calories each week to the too-low amount she was already eating, it took her three months to gain a whole pound of body mass—basically delaying her recovery by three months.
And here’s where I think we need to take a closer look at why reverse dieting posts are so popular in corners of social media that are focused on weight loss. While eating more sounds healthier—it’s a good start!—following a strict reverse diet is just another way of restricting.
Reverse dieting is sometimes just a way to restrict more
Let’s say, as in many of the examples on TikTok, that you are somebody currently eating 1,200 calories (officially a starvation diet) and no longer losing weight. Even if you are a small woman who never exercises—maybe because you don’t have the energy?—a healthy amount of daily calories will likely be 1,600 or more. So you’re supposed to eat 1,250 next week? And then 1,300 the week after that? At that rate, it would take eight weeks to get you up to the number that should be mere maintenance for you. Even if you don’t have an eating disorder, you’re creating the same problem for yourself as the ED patient in the dietitian’s case study.
What’s even more concerning to me is that 50 or even 100 calories is an extremely precise amount. If I’m aiming to eat 2,000 calories a day, maybe some days I’ll have 1,950 and some days I’ll have 2,100. Over time it balances out. But if you’re trying to hit exactly 1,850 and not 1,900 (because 1,900 is next week’s target) you’ll have to track your food meticulously. This is the kind of lifestyle where you’ll be weighing your toast before and after you spread the peanut butter, and you won’t want to eat at a restaurant, because how many calories are in each menu item? What if they’re heavy handed with the sauce?
In my scroll through #reversedieting TikTok, I found women saying that they had to miss out on family meals and deal with concern from their friends during their reverse diet. Clearly, they have not taken a step very far out of diet-land. For these folks, it actually seems like the “reverse” is essentially a way of extending their diet. You could be eating at maintenance for those eight weeks, but you’re restricting instead. And then what? Reverse dieting is often described as a way of increasing your calorie burn so you can diet again.
Even when the influencers show themselves gaining muscle and eating genuinely healthy numbers of calories (assuming that the numbers they cite are true), it’s still all couched in language around leanness and thinness, and features photos of their abs. Prioritizing leanness even while gaining muscle is some backwards-ass shit. It’s okay to not be able to see your abs while you are trying to make yourself bigger. As strongman JF Caron famously put it, “abs is not a thing of power. Is just a sign you don’t eat enough.”
Chevron Rides High Oil Prices to Record $35.5 Billion Annual Profit
Chevron Corp.
CVX -4.44%
banked historic profit last year as the pandemic receded and the war in Ukraine pushed oil prices to multiyear highs, with its shares climbing 53% for the year while other sectors tumbled.
The U.S. oil company in its quarterly earnings reported Friday that it collected $35.5 billion in its highest-ever annual profit in 2022, more than double the prior year and about one-third higher than its previous record in 2011. Almost $50 billion in cash streamed in from its oil-leveraged operations, another record that is underpinning plans to pay investors through a new $75 billion share-repurchase program over the next several years.
That payout, announced Wednesday, is roughly equivalent to the stock-market value of companies such as the big-box retailer
Target Corp.
, the pharmaceutical firm
Moderna Inc.
and
Airbnb Inc.
Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company after
Exxon Mobil Corp.
, posted revenue of $246.3 billion, up from $162.5 billion the previous year. The San Ramon, Calif., company reported a fourth-quarter profit of $6.4 billion, up from $5.1 billion in the same period the prior year.
The fourth-quarter results came short of analyst expectations, and Chevron shares closed down more than 4% Friday.
For all of its recent winnings, though, Chevron and its rival oil-and-gas producers could face a rockier year in 2023, according to investors and analysts, if an anticipated slowdown in U.S. economic growth dents demand for oil, and if China’s reopening from strict Covid-19 restrictions unfolds slowly.
U.S. oil prices have held steady this year, but are off about 36% from last year’s peak. The industry is proceeding with caution, holding capital expenditures for 2023 below prepandemic levels and saying production will grow only modestly. Chevron has said it plans to spend about $17 billion in capital expenditures this year, up more than 25% from the prior year, but $3 billion less than it planned to spend in 2020 before Covid-19 took root.
Oil companies are still outperforming other sectors such as tech and finance, which have seen widespread job cuts in recent weeks. The energy segment of the S&P 500 index has climbed 43.7% over the past year, compared with a 6.7% drop for the broader index.
Chevron Chief Executive Mike Wirth said the company is unsure of what 2023 will bring after global energy supplies were squeezed because of geopolitical events last year, particularly in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He said markets appeared to be stabilizing.
“We certainly have seen a very unusual and volatile year in 2022,” Mr. Wirth said, noting the European energy crisis has proven less dire than anticipated thanks to milder winter weather, growing natural gas inventories in Europe. “China’s economy has been slow throughout the year, which looks to be turning around. It’s good that markets have calmed.”
Chevron projects its output in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico to grow at a slower pace this year.
Photo:
David Goldman/Associated Press
Chevron hit a record in U.S. oil-and-gas production in 2022, increasing 4% to about 1.2 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, stemming from its increased focus on capital investments in the Western Hemisphere, particularly in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, where it boosted output 16% last year. Worldwide, Chevron’s oil-and-gas production was down 3.2% compared with the prior year, at 2.99 million barrels of oil-equivalent a day.
Its overall return on capital employed came in at 20%, it said.
“There aren’t many sectors generating the type of free cash flow that energy is right now,” said
Jeff Wyll,
an analyst at investment firm Neuberger Berman, which has invested in Chevron. “The sector really can’t be ignored. Given the supply-demand balance, you have to have some things go wrong here to see a pullback in oil prices.”
Even so, institutional investors have shown limited interest so far in returning to the energy sector, after years of poor returns and heightened concerns about their environmental impact prompted large financiers to sell off their stakes in oil-and-gas companies or stop investing in drillers outright.
Pete Bowden,
global head of industrial, energy and infrastructure banking at
Jefferies Financial Group Inc.,
said energy companies in the S&P 500 index are throwing off 12% of the group’s free-cash flow, but only account for about 5% of the index’s weighting—an indication their stock prices are lagging behind.
Investors’ concerns around environmental, social and governance-related issues are a constraint on the share prices of energy companies, “yet the earnings power of these businesses is superior to the earnings power of companies in other sectors,” he said.
Chevron and others have faced criticism from the Biden administration and others that they are giving priority to shareholder returns over pumping oil and gas at a time when global supplies are tight and Americans are feeling pain at the pump. On Thursday, the White House assailed Chevron’s $75 billion buyout program, saying the payout was proof the company could boost production but was choosing to reward investors instead.
Pierre Breber,
Chevron’s finance chief, said the company expects oil prices to be volatile but within a range needed to sustain its dividend and investments. There are some optimistic signs, he added, including that the U.S. economy grew faster than expected in the fourth quarter, at 2.9%.
“Supply is tight. Oil-field services are near capacity, and we continue to have sanctions on Russian production,” Mr. Breber said. “You’re seeing international flights out of China are way up, and low unemployment in the U.S.”
Mr. Breber said Chevron’s output in the Permian this year is expected to grow at a slower pace, around 10%, because it has exhausted much of its inventory of wells that it had drilled but hadn’t brought into production.
Exxon, which has typically posted quarterly earnings on the same day as Chevron, will report Tuesday. Analysts expect it will also post record profit for 2022, according to FactSet.
Both companies expect to slow their output growth this year in the Permian, considered their growth engine. The two U.S. oil majors, which had been growing output faster in the U.S. than most independent shale producers, are beginning to step up their focus on shareholder returns and allow output growth to ease, said Neal Dingmann, an analyst at Truist Securities.
“This has all been driven by investor requirements,” Mr. Dingmann said.
Write to Collin Eaton at collin.eaton@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Corporate Layoffs Spread Beyond High-Growth Tech Giants
The headline-grabbing expansion of layoffs beyond high-growth technology companies stands in contrast to historically low levels of jobless claims and news that companies such as
Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc.
and
Airbus SE
are adding jobs.
This week, four companies trimmed more than 10,000 jobs, just a fraction of their total workforces. Still, the decisions mark a shift in sentiment inside executive suites, where many leaders have been holding on to workers after struggling to hire and retain them in recent years when the pandemic disrupted workplaces.
Live Q&A
Tech Layoffs: What Do They Mean?
The creator of the popular layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi Roger Lee and the head of talent at venture firm M13 Matt Hoffman sit down with WSJ reporter Chip Cutter, to discuss what’s behind the recent downsizing and whether it will be enough to recalibrate ahead of a possible recession.
Unlike
Microsoft Corp.
and Google parent
Alphabet Inc.,
which announced larger layoffs this month, these companies haven’t expanded their workforces dramatically during the pandemic. Instead, the leaders of these global giants said they were shrinking to adjust to slowing growth, or responding to weaker demand for their products.
“We are taking these actions to further optimize our cost structure,”
Jim Fitterling,
Dow’s chief executive, said in announcing the cuts, noting the company was navigating “macro uncertainties and challenging energy markets, particularly in Europe.”
The U.S. labor market broadly remains strong but has gradually lost steam in recent months. Employers added 223,000 jobs in December, the smallest gain in two years. The Labor Department will release January employment data next week.
Economists from Capital Economics estimate a further slowdown to an increase of 150,000 jobs in January, which would push job growth below its 2019 monthly average, the year before pandemic began.
There is “mounting evidence of weakness below the surface,”
Andrew Hunter,
senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics wrote in a note to clients Thursday.
Last month, the unemployment rate was 3.5%, matching multidecade lows. Wage growth remained strong, but had cooled from earlier in 2022. The Federal Reserve, which has been raising interest rates to combat high inflation, is looking for signs of slower wage growth and easing demand for workers.
Many CEOs say companies are beginning to scrutinize hiring more closely.
Slower hiring has already lengthened the time it takes Americans to land a new job. In December, 826,000 unemployed workers had been out of a job for about 3½ to 6 months, up from 526,000 in April 2022, according to the Labor Department.
“Employers are hovering with their feet above the brake. They’re more cautious. They’re more precise in their hiring,” said
Jonas Prising,
chief executive of
ManpowerGroup Inc.,
a provider of temporary workers. “But they’ve not stopped hiring.”
Additional signs of a cooling economy emerged on Thursday when the Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product growth slowed to a 2.9% annual rate in the fourth quarter, down from a 3.2% annual rate in the third quarter.
Not all companies are in layoff mode.
Walmart Inc.,
the country’s biggest private employer, said this week it was raising its starting wages for hourly U.S. workers to $14 from $12, amid a still tight job market for front line workers. Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. said Thursday it plans to hire 15,000 new employees to work in its restaurants, while plane maker Airbus SE said it is recruiting over 13,000 new staffers this year. Airbus said 9,000 of the new jobs would be based in Europe with the rest spread among the U.S., China and elsewhere.
General Electric Co.
, which slashed thousands of aerospace workers in 2020 and is currently laying off 2,000 workers from its wind turbine business, is hiring in other areas. “If you know any welders or machinists, send them my way,” Chief Executive
Larry Culp
said this week.
Annette Clayton,
CEO of North American operations at
Schneider Electric SE,
a Europe-headquartered energy-management and automation company, said the U.S. needs far more electricians to install electric-vehicle chargers and perform other tasks. “The shortage of electricians is very, very important for us,” she said.
Railroad CSX Corp. told investors on Wednesday that after sustained effort, it had reached its goal of about 7,000 train and engine employees around the beginning of the year, but plans to hire several hundred more people in those roles to serve as a cushion and to accommodate attrition that remains higher than the company would like.
Freeport-McMoRan Inc.
executives said Wednesday they expect U.S. labor shortages to continue to crimp production at the mining giant. The company has about 1,300 job openings in a U.S. workforce of about 10,000 to 12,000, and many of its domestic workers are new and need training and experience to match prior expertise, President
Kathleen Quirk
told analysts.
“We could have in 2022 produced more if we were fully staffed, and I believe that is the case again this year,” Ms. Quirk said.
The latest layoffs are modest relative to the size of these companies. For example, IBM’s plan to eliminate about 3,900 roles would amount to a 1.4% reduction in its head count of 280,000, according to its latest annual report.
The planned 3,000 job cuts at SAP affect about 2.5% of the business-software maker’s global workforce. Finance chief
Luka Mucic
said the job cuts would be spread across the company’s geographic footprint, with most of them happening outside its home base in Germany. “The purpose is to further focus on strategic growth areas,” Mr. Mucic said. The company employed around 111,015 people on average last year.
Chemicals giant Dow said on Thursday it was trimming about 2,000 employees. The Midland, Mich., company said it currently employs about 37,800 people. Executives said they were targeting $1 billion in cost cuts this year and shutting down some assets to align spending with the macroeconomic environment.
Manufacturer
3M Co.
, which had about 95,000 employees at the end of 2021, cited weakening consumer demand when it announced this week plans to eliminate 2,500 manufacturing jobs. The maker of Scotch tape, Post-it Notes and thousands of other industrial and consumer products said it expects lower sales and profit in 2023.
“We’re looking at everything that we do as we manage through the challenges that we’re facing in the end markets,” 3M Chief Executive
Mike Roman
said during an earnings conference call. “We expect the demand trends we saw in December to extend through the first half of 2023.”
Hasbro Inc.
on Thursday said it would eliminate 15% of its workforce, or about 1,000 jobs, after the toy maker’s consumer-products business underperformed in the fourth quarter.
Some companies still hiring now say the job cuts across the economy are making it easier to find qualified candidates. “We’ve got the pick of the litter,” said
Bill McDermott,
CEO of business-software provider
ServiceNow Inc.
“We have so many applicants.”
At
Honeywell International Inc.,
CEO
Darius Adamczyk
said the job market remains competitive. With the layoffs in technology, though, Mr. Adamczyk said he anticipated that the labor market would likely soften, potentially also expanding the applicants Honeywell could attract.
“We’re probably going to be even more selective than we were before because we’re going to have a broader pool to draw from,” he said.
Across the corporate sphere, many of the layoffs happening now are still small relative to the size of the organizations, said
Denis Machuel,
CEO of global staffing firm Adecco Group AG.
“I would qualify it more as a recalibration of the workforce than deep cuts,” Mr. Machuel said. “They are adjusting, but they are not cutting the muscle.”
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com and Theo Francis at theo.francis@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
The Eight Types of Cheese You Should Have in Your Fridge at All Times
My fridge is very dairy-heavy. Currently, it is stocked with whole milk, half & half, heavy whipping cream, two types of yogurt (store-bought Greek and a homemade recipe I’m tweaking), sour cream, butter, and all of my various cheeses. (I usually have some labneh in there as well, but I just ran out.) The cheeses are a category onto themselves. At any given moment, I need at least eight.
I do not need eight specific cheeses, but I do need at least one cheese from each of the following categories. (If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me tweet that I need seven cheeses, but someone pointed out I was missing cream cheese.) These are the cheeses I need to keep myself full and functioning. They are tailored to my particular lifestyle and desires, but I think everyone could benefit from identifying and categorizing their specific cheese needs.
My cheese needs are as follows:
- Snacking cheese: These are my string cheeses, my Babybells, my sticks and pre-wrapped Tillamook “snack portions” that I shove into my mouth as a pre-lifting snack, or in those moments when I’m feeling peckish, but don’t know what to eat.
- Cooking cheese: This is cheese that gets mixed and melted into dishes. It’s usually bagged and pre-shredded, but Velveeta also counts.
- Salad cheese: Ah, my crumbles. This is usually a pre-crumbled blue cheese, though it can be a nice feta, and sometimes there is overlap with our next category (finishing cheese).
- Finishing cheese: This is the cheese you use to finish a dish. It is usually “nice,” and packed with flavor, like Parmigiano Reggiano, Pecorino Romano, and cotija. Finishing cheese can sometimes double as salad cheese.
- Sandwich cheese: These are (obviously) sliced cheeses that go on sandwiches. I usually have two—Dubliner (either a block or pre-sliced) and deli white American (both honor my heritage in their own way).
- Hangry cheese: This is just cottage cheese. It fills a more urgent need than snacking cheese, as it can be shoveled into my mouth.
- Cream cheese: She’s in a category of her own.
- Treat cheese: This is usually a small portion of something aged and crystal-flecked (I’m really into aged gouda right now), but sometimes it’s a super gooey washed rind specimen. I usually eat it with a really good apple.
That’s just me, and though I value my own opinions, I’d love to hear yours. How many cheeses do you keep stocked in your fridge? How many do you need to function? How many do you want? Tell me your cheese categories, your cheese desires, your cheese dreams. Identify your cheese needs, then demand they be met.
Experts Recommend Drugs, Surgery for Teen Obesity in New Guidelines
For the first time ever, experts with the American Academy of Pediatrics are recommending proactive medical intervention against childhood obesity. The organization’s new guidelines will no longer ask doctors to simply observe or delay treatment in children with obesity, defined as a body mass index over 30. They instead now emphasize a range of options, such as dietary and lifestyle counseling for younger children as well as medications and/or surgery for children 12 and over.
Past standards for treating childhood obesity have called for “watchful waiting,” the hope being that a child’s BMI (a measure of both weight and height) would naturally lower over time as they grew. In 2007, the AAP’s previous recommendations promoted a step-based approach, where doctors might slowly escalate from observation to treatment. But these new recommendations—released Monday—are the first clinical practice guidelines to put obesity treatments front and center.
“There is no evidence that ‘watchful waiting’ or delayed treatment is appropriate for children with obesity,” said Sandra Hassink, one of the authors behind the guidelines and vice chair of the AAP Clinical Practice Guideline Subcommittee on Obesity, in a statement released by the organization. “The goal is to help patients make changes in lifestyle, behaviors or environment in a way that is sustainable and involves families in decision-making at every step of the way.”
The lengthy guidelines outline a multitude of available treatments, depending on a child’s age and other circumstances (children under 2 are not considered eligible for obesity treatment).
For younger children, these options can include intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment, which can involve regular counseling sessions with the child and family over a 3- to 12-month period. For children 12 and over, doctors are now advised to consider medications as a front-line option. And teens 13 and over can also be evaluated for bariatric surgery as a potential treatment.
In crafting its recommendations, the AAP cites many studies suggesting that the benefits of these treatments outweigh any potential risks they can carry. Patients who have undergone bariatric surgery seem to have a lower risk of developing obesity-related complications such as type 2 diabetes and have a longer life expectancy when compared to non-surgical patients matched in age and baseline BMI, for instance. Long-term health benefits have been seen in teen bariatric patients specifically, too.
A new class of medication, called incretins, has also greatly changed the landscape of obesity treatment in recent years. These drugs, combined with diet and exercise, have led to far larger weight loss on average than most other treatments and are approaching the typical results seen with bariatric surgery.
Last month, the Food and Drug Administration extended the approval of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, the first drug of this new generation, to children over 12, following clinical trial data showing that teens saw a similar improvement in BMI as adults. The shortages that have plagued Wegovy’s rollout since its approval in June 2021 may finally be over as well, with the company recently announcing that its supply should now be stable. Without insurance coverage, which is often limited, the drug can still cost over $1,000 a month, however.
The AAP’s guidelines arrive at a time when the rise in U.S. obesity rates, including among children, has only accelerated, likely in part due to the covid-19 pandemic. The new recommendations notably do not cover how best to prevent obesity in children, though the organization has promised to release separate recommendations for that in the near future.
“The medical costs of obesity on children, families and our society as a whole are well-documented and require urgent action,” said lead author Sarah Hampl in a statement. “This is a complex issue, but there are multiple ways we can take steps to intervene now and help children and teens build the foundation for a long, healthy life.”
Don’t Waste Your Time With These Terrible Diet Tips
It’s the new year and everybody’s on a diet—I mean, a wellness journey. Whether you want to lose weight or not is none of my business, but I do beg you to please, please let all the following silly weight loss “hacks” die. Many of them verge on disordered eating behaviors, while others are just ways to make yourself miserable for no reason.
(By the way, if you feel like your relationship with food is out of control, the National Eating Disorders Association has a screening tool, helpline, and more resources here.)
Smaller plates don’t make us eat less
This one is a classic: Serving yourself on a smaller plate is supposed to make a small amount of food look bigger. Therefore, you’ll eat less food overall, and eventually lose weight.
But our brains and bodies are too smart to actually be tricked by that. The idea that smaller plates promote smaller portions came from a lab that was later found to be engaging in sketchy research practices. Other labs ran their own plate size experiments and found that people usually don’t eat less when given smaller plates. What’s more, we get better at estimating portion sizes when we’re hungry. The small plate hack wasn’t fooling us after all.
Drinking a glass of water isn’t going to satisfy your hunger
There’s a common healthy eating tip that says if you’re hungry, you should have a big glass of water, because sometimes our bodies can’t tell hunger and thirst cues apart.
But there’s no evidence that this is true, or that drinking a glass of water will help. One of the oft-cited papers on hunger, thirst, eating, and drinking found that we actually get a little hungrier after drinking—so even if it were true that our bodies mix up the signals, the proposed solution isn’t likely to help.
Ultimately, there is nothing wrong with drinking a glass of water if you think you might like one, whether you’re hungry or not. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that hunger pangs are your body telling you that you’re thirsty. Your body knows the difference between food and water, okay? That’s why you haven’t starved or dehydrated to death yet.
It’s not necessarily a good idea to eat like a bodybuilder
There’s a stereotype about bodybuilders eating nothing but chicken breast, brown rice, and broccoli out of little plastic containers. They eat with discipline and end up shredded, so this must be a healthy meal choice, right?
While it can be a fine meal if you enjoy it, this combination is not the best or only way to meal prep—especially if you aren’t a fan of the individual components. Chicken breast and rice are both notoriously unforgiving when it comes to meal prep, anyway. They tend to dry out, especially if you prepare them without marinades or sauces.
So ditch your idea of what healthy food looks like, and make a plan that involves foods you actually enjoy. Upgrade to chicken thighs, learn to use a good marinade, throw that dry rice in a waffle maker, or just make an entirely different recipe. It’s okay for food to taste good.
Oh, and while we’re discussing bodybuilder habits: no, eating many small meals does not “boost” your metabolism.
It’s a diet, not a lifestyle change
This last one isn’t so much a hack as an oft-repeated platitude: “It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change.” If you’re trying to lose weight, please do not make this a lifelong process. Dieting is the act of deliberately undernourishing yourself. If you want or need to do it for a short time, then own that choice, and do it in the healthiest manner you’re able. But once you’ve lost some weight, get back to fully nourishing your body again.
After all, it would not be healthy or smart to lose weight forever. Since the way we lose weight is by eating fewer calories than we burn, the exact meals and habits that help us lose weight are not going to be the ones that help us maintain our ideal weight once we get there. At the very least, you’ll have to increase your portions.
So if you feel like your current diet or habits need to change, make sure to separate out what should change in general (example: cook at home more often) and what should change temporarily (example: smaller portions). Healthy eating and undereating are not at all the same thing.
Vince McMahon Plots Return to WWE
Vince McMahon,
the majority owner and former chief executive of
World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.,
WWE 2.26%
plans to return to the company following his retirement last year amid a sexual-harassment scandal to pursue a sale of the business, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. McMahon, who has majority voting power through his ownership of WWE’s Class-B stock, has told the company that he is electing himself and two former co-presidents and directors, Michelle Wilson and
George Barrios,
to the board, the people said. The move to reinstate Mr. McMahon, which the board previously rebuffed, and the others will require three current directors to vacate their positions.
Mr. McMahon, whose abrupt departure in July 2022 followed disclosures by The Wall Street Journal of multiple payouts to women who had alleged sexual misconduct and infidelity, expects he will be able to assume the role of executive chairman, though he would need board approval for that, the people said.
It isn’t clear where that would leave his daughter, Stephanie McMahon. After his departure, she took over as chairwoman and co-CEO alongside
Nick Khan,
the company’s former president.
The 77-year-old sent a letter to WWE’s board in late December detailing his desire to return to the company he ran for four decades, to help spearhead a strategic-review process, the people said. Mr. McMahon believes there is a narrow window to kick off a sales process because WWE’s media rights—including for its flagship programs “Raw” and “SmackDown”—are about to be renegotiated, according to the people.
Mr. McMahon believes the media landscape is evolving quickly and more companies are looking to own the intellectual property they use on their streaming platforms, making WWE an attractive takeover target, the people said. WWE, which generates most of its revenue from selling content rights, posted its first year of over $1 billion in revenue in 2021. The company currently has a market value of just over $5 billion.
The board responded last month in a letter to Mr. McMahon that it was prepared to initiate a review process and would welcome working with him on it. However, it said it unanimously agreed that Mr. McMahon’s return to the business wouldn’t be in shareholders’ best interest, according to people familiar with the letters.
The board also asked Mr. McMahon to confirm his commitment to repay expenses incurred by WWE related to an investigation of the allegations and requested that he agree not to return to the company during government probes of the matter, the people said. Mr. McMahon said in response that he remains willing to continue working to complete any reimbursement for reasonable expenses related to the investigation, to the extent they aren’t covered by insurance, but he declined to agree to not return to the company.
He has communicated to the board that unless he has direct involvement as executive chairman from the outset of a strategic review, he won’t support or approve any media-rights deal or sale, the people said.
Mr. McMahon retired as WWE chief executive and chairman in July amid a board investigation of sexual-misconduct claims against him. The Journal reported that he had agreed to pay more than $12 million in secret settlements since 2006 to his accusers.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors launched inquiries into the payments. WWE later disclosed additional payments in 2007 and 2009 totaling $5 million that it said were unrelated to the allegations of misconduct that led to its internal investigation.
WWE’s board ultimately found that the payments, though made by Mr. McMahon personally, should have been booked as WWE expenses because they benefited the company.
Mr. McMahon had told people that he intended to make a comeback at WWE, the Journal reported last month. He said that he received bad advice from people close to him last year to step down, according to the people familiar with his comments.
—Joe Palazzolo and Ted Mann contributed to this article.
Write to Lauren Thomas at lauren.thomas@wsj.com
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