The Checkup: Want to Love Your Life? Exercise Longer, Study Says

• How about some good news to kick off your week? New research reveals that if you exercise longer than usual, you’ll feel more satisfied with your life. Penn State researchers looked at two groups of young adults, ages 18 to 25; both groups answered questions about self-esteem and physical activity and kept track of their exercise and moods. But for the second group, researchers controlled for factors like mental health, fatigue and Body Mass Index to exclude them as possible reasons for better or worse life satisfaction. What they found was that a person’s amount of exercise related directly to his or her satisfaction with life. “Specifically, the team found that by exercising just a little more than usual a person can significantly improve his or her satisfaction with life,” reports Futurity.org. Your takeaway? Hit the gym for just 10 minutes more than usual today to start your week off on a seriously good note.

• Who’s to blame for childhood obesity? Parents, according to, well, parents. In a recent survey of parents conducted by Yale University, parents assigned 60 percent of the childhood-obesity blame to themselves. The rest, they said, is the fault of an “unhealthy food environment,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

• We’ve all heard of the Freshman 15, but what about the Sandy 15? The Associated Press reports that dire grocery store conditions and hours or days of being trapped at home last week resulted in lots of people to overeating and pigging out on processed junk food. The result? The Sandy 15, of course.