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Want to keep from gaining weight as you age? You may need to get as much as 60 minutes of exercise every day. Here's how to sneak it in.

Thanks to processed food, most of us get too much sugar. Here’s how to spot added sugar on food labels.

Soups, salads and other foods that are high in fiber and water can make you feel fuller and help you lose weight.

Nutrition coach Rovenia “Dr. Ro” Brock comes to the rescue of a detective who’s been investigating too many fast food restaurants.

Dining out with a dietitian is a bit like being behind the wheel of a car with a driver's ed instructor in the back seat. The pressure's on to make a good impression. While the burger and fries may be calling your name, you probably end up going for the grilled fish and steamed veggies. It's far less likely to raise eyebrows.

In her blog, Everwell's registered dietitian Carolyn O'Neil describes a recent meal with a group of fellow nutrition experts. She writes that "there were impassioned pleas for splitting entrees, sauce on the side, spinach steamed not creamed, salads sans croutons, and probing questions about how much oil is brushed on the broiled fish."

For Carolyn, the experience wasn't intimidating as it would be for most of us non-dietitians. But it did provide an opportunity to pick up some tricks for eating out on a diet. Here are five that she shares:

1. Start with soups that aren't creamy. They're usually low in calories and help fill you up.

2. Ask the wait staff to remove, or better yet, never bring free foods such as bread and chips to the table. Otherwise, you can consume hundreds of calories before you even get your main dish.

3. Choose only one starch. If you want the bread, skip the potato. If you want the chips, skip the rice and beans.

4. Never assume grilled, baked, or broiled means without butter or oil. Always ask questions of the wait staff. Most chefs add extra butter even when not necessary.

5. Share an entrée or ask the server to put half your meal in a to-go container.

For advice from Carolyn on eating healthfully at fast food restaurants, check out this video.

Resolved to get healthier in 2010? If so, good for you. Of course, the big challenge with any resolution is following through. When it comes to health resolutions, there's another one: making sure you're following sound advice.

Too often, the health advice we get is filled with hype, half-truths, and spin. While we think we're helping ourselves, our efforts may actually be wasting time and money, and doing little to promote our health. They may even cause harm.

Here are some pitfalls to avoid for three common resolutions.

1. LOSE WEIGHT
We're bombarded with ads for weight loss plans that promise dramatic results, and bookstore shelves bulge with guides that offer all kinds of "secrets" to help us shed those unwanted pounds. The sad reality is that there are no magic bullets for weight loss, and over the long term, dieting rarely works. About 95 percent of dieters eventually regain lost weight.

One reason is that most diets leave us feeling deprived, and we fall back on our old eating habits. Another is genetics. No matter how much they diet, people prone to be heavier are unlikely to become skinny, and even if they do shrink substantially, their bodies eventually return to a higher weight. (Just ask Oprah.) This doesn't mean we're completely powerless regarding our weight, just that there are limits to how much we can control.

If you've tried and failed at counting calories, cutting out carbs, or combining foods, consider a different approach: focus on eating healthfully (meaning more fruits, veggies, and whole grains, and less junk food) and getting more physical activity. Unlike many diet plans, this method offers no guarantees to melt away pounds quickly. But it will make you healthier, give you more energy, and help you feel better.

2. EAT BETTER
Every day, it seems we hear about another food that we're supposed to eat to ward off illness. Acai berries, pomegranate juice, green tea, dark chocolate, yogurt, garlic, tomatoes. The list goes on and on. While there's nothing wrong with most of these foods–indeed many are quite healthful–the claims for them tend to be overblown.

In recent years, there's been an explosion of research on all kinds of constituents in superfoods–everything from alpha-linolenic acid to zeaxanthin. Though this line of inquiry is interesting scientifically, it's still in its infancy. Because foods contain multiple nutrients, which may interact with one another and with other foods to affect our bodies in a myriad of ways, teasing out the precise effects of a single constituent in one food is tricky, to say the least. But that hasn't stopped superfood promoters from pushing the misleading idea that specific foods, in isolation, are proven to keep us healthy.

While it's tempting to believe that tossing some blueberries into a cup of ice cream will keep heart disease at bay, what matters in the long run is our overall diet–not whether we include one specific food or another. Instead of stuffing yourself with superfoods, focus on broad categories–fruits, veggies, whole grains, fish, legumes–that constitute a healthful diet. When you can choose a variety of foods you like, rather than specific ones you feel compelled to consume, it makes eating far more enjoyable.

3. EXERCISE
We've all seen those ads for gadgets promising to give us rock-hard abs or thinner thighs. Targeted exercises can in fact strengthen muscles in a particular area, but they can't get rid of fat that covers those muscles. How quickly and easily fat disappears depends on where it's located, as well as your age, gender, and genes. But in any case, it requires vigorous, whole body exercise. Unfortunately, you can't spot reduce flab with ab crunches or leg lifts alone.

Likewise, you generally can't reshape your body with moderate exercise. Yet that's sometimes the promise we get from fitness clubs or personal trainers. Certainly, a half-hour a day of walking on a treadmill or riding a bike is highly worthwhile; it can provide an array of benefits from improved heart health to increased energy. But don't expect it to give you a perfectly-sculpted body. Changing your physique requires far more intense, sustained activity.

False promises about exercise create unrealistic expectations that eventually lead to disillusionment. After failing to get the results we're led to expect, we may give up entirely. Don't let that happen to you in 2010. Set reasonable goals–and get going!

How mindful are you? Unless you're a Buddhist, it may sound like a strange question. But being more mindful could be an answer to two health issues high on many people's top-10 list: stress and weight.

Simply put, mindfulness means being aware of what you think and do in response to what's around you. It's the idea behind a technique known as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which was developed by best-selling author Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. Research has shown that MBSR can help alleviate anxiety, depression, and pain.

MBSR, which is now offered by medical centers around the world, teaches people to live in the moment and become more aware of how they respond to their surroundings. As a result, they can change how they view whatever causes stress, pain, or other negative feelings and thereby achieve greater peace of mind. Typically, training is intensive, requiring eight weekly 2.5-hour classes plus 45 to 60 minutes a day of meditation. For some busy, stressed-out people, the time commitment is, well, too stressful.

A recent study, published in the journal Health Education & Behavior, has found that a scaled-down version of MBSR can be used successfully at workplaces. People who attended weekly one-hour MBSR meetings at lunch and practiced 20 minutes of yoga a day at their desks reported feeling less stress and sleeping better than those in a comparison group who did not participate.

On the heels of that research comes another new study, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, suggesting that mindfulness may also play a role in weight control. Participants (80% of them women) filled out questionnaires asking how often they had reactions such as:

• When a restaurant portion is too large, I stop eating when I'm full.
• I taste every bite of food that I eat.
• I recognize when I'm eating and not hungry.
• When I'm sad, I eat to feel better.

Those who were more mindful about food and eating tended to weigh less. They were also more likely to practice yoga, which the researchers hypothesize may have taught them greater self-awareness.

Food scientist Brian Wansink has written a terrific book, called Mindless Eating, about our lack of mindfulness regarding food and what we can do about it. I highly recommend it. And for more on how greater self-awareness can help control stress, sit back, relax, and watch this video segment.

Stand on a vibrating platform and shed pounds. No exertion required. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, maybe not.

A recently-released study from Belgium looked at the effects of whole body vibrating machines (in this case one known as Power Plate), which are in a growing number of health clubs. The researchers assigned 61 subjects - all of them overweight or obese - to one of four groups: 1) a restricted-calorie diet and no exercise; 2) diet plus a conventional fitness program consisting of activities such as swimming, cycling, and strength training; 3) diet plus vibration training; and 4) no diet, no exercise.

So who were the biggest losers? Believe it or not, the vibration group. After six months, they had lost 11% of their body weight, compared with 7% of the conventional exercisers and 6% in the diet only group. (The control group's weight increased slightly.) After one year, the vibration group had maintained their weight loss more than the others.

The study, presented at a European obesity conference, has not yet been published. But it comes on the heels of published research out of the University of Oklahoma, which found that in older women, resistance training plus whole body vibration decreased body fat more than resistance training alone.

Other published studies suggest that whole body vibration may increase muscle strength, bone density and balance in older women, and boost strength and jumping ability in trained athletes.

So how can this be? The machines' vibrations of 30 to 50 times per second are thought to trigger the body's reflex response, which causes muscles to contract. But the evidence regarding benefits is still preliminary, and some scientists are concerned about unknown risks.

Even if whole body vibration lives up to the claims, it shouldn't replace regular exercise. Instead, use it as a way to supplement to your routine. As these clips on videogame exercises and exercise gadgets for the office remind us, technology can add some fun and variety to your workout, and as a result, help you stick with it. Now get shaking.

Looking for the best multivitamin brands? Pharmacist Doug White offers a few tips to guide you through the multiple choices on the vitamin aisle.

What’s more detrimental to your diet—calories, carbs or fat? Can low-fat foods really help you lose weight? Test your weight-loss knowledge with our Everwell Challenge.