Author: Lance Garrison

If you are overweight or have obesity, you might think you need to lose a lot of weight to improve your health. It can feel daunting. But actually, you can start to get health benefits from a small amount of weight loss.Research shows that it’s possible to lower your blood pressure and cholesterol, cut your risk of diabetes, improve joint pain, and boost your cardiovascular health by losing less than 10% of your total body weight.Losing 5% to 10% is “modest but clinically significant,” says Melanie Jay, MD, associate professor in the departments of medicine and population health at New…

The U.S. economy has just gone through an extraordinarily successful year. Many economists (although not all of us) predicted that getting inflation under control would require a recession and an extended period of high unemployment. Instead, inflation has plunged — over the past six months the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation has been running slightly below the target rate of 2 percent — even as the economy has boomed, with real G.D.P. rising 3.1 percent and employment rising by 2.9 million.In case you’re wondering, Tuesday’s somewhat hot inflation report doesn’t change the story much. You never want to…

By Elena Sledge, as told to Kara Mayer RobinsonI’ve been living with depression for almost 12 years. I’m 31 now and I found out I had major depressive disorder when I was 19.I had a miserable freshman year of college, but I didn’t really know what was wrong. I saw a therapist and the following summer, I was diagnosed with major depression. Looking back, I can see I was also depressed in high school.Coming to terms with my diagnosis was a process. I had a hard time understanding why I was depressed and where it came from. In my mind,…

To the Editor:Re “Accountability for Museums’ Plunder, at Last,” by Erin Thompson (Opinion guest essay, Feb. 5):Some might cringe at Ms. Thompson’s suggestion that museums that return stolen artifacts could replace them with replicas.Frankly, my recent museum visits to big-name shows have left me more irritated than awed by being in the presence of revered “originals.”First, the virtual queue tickets, then the snaking lines and then the crush — straining to see over the heads of other acolytes, some of whom cannot resist giving curatorial mini-lectures to their companions as they block your view entirely. And all those iPhones snapping…

In my debut novel, a family retraces their lineage in order to be eligible for the nation’s first federal reparations program for Black Americans. When I was selling my novel in 2021, it was pitched to publishers as “speculative fiction, but only slightly.” I hadn’t specifically identified that genre, but I could see how it made sense: Up to that point, only one U.S. city, Evanston, Ill., had actually issued reparations in the form of housing grants. The idea that the United States could ever collectively support a national reparations policy for Black people seemed, well, the stuff of fiction.Since…

Betrayal is a powerful emotion, especially at the ballot box. Voters who feel betrayed tend to act like spurned lovers, punishing the offending party even if it means electing somebody who will actually be worse.That’s how America got Donald Trump as president. Many blue-collar workers in factory towns in battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — who were once pillars of the Democratic Party — voted for a man who promised to rip up free trade agreements, which they blamed for the loss of manufacturing jobs. It didn’t seem to matter to them that Mr. Trump had no track…

Galentine’s Day, celebrated on Feb. 13, a day before Valentine’s Day, has been popularized as a day for women to celebrate their female friendships.In this audio essay, the Opinion Audio news assistant Kristina Samulewski argues that rather than celebrating women, Galentine’s Day patronizes them, particularly single women. Samulewski makes the case for doing away with the pop culture celebration and instead refocusing Valentine’s Day on the universal experience of love — familial, platonic or romantic.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)The Times is committed to publishing a…

I have tried, for many years, to find words for this phenomenon. Maybe it isn’t even a phenomenon; maybe I am affected by a cynical bubble of a world where individuals have become so siloed that such kindness can seem indescribable. But it has touched me, and it has changed me, and the word it all comes down to might be deceptively simple: grace.Grace is a tricky concept to define. One definition among many others is “courteous good will.” But that does not encompass what I saw from my boyfriend and my father: They were not merely being kind, or…

Or consider the time, last November, when Trump confused China and North Korea, telling an audience of supporters in Florida that “Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people, and there is no doubt about who the boss is. And they want me to say he’s not an intelligent man.”There was also the time that Trump mistook Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House.“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of…

What’s the word that describes how you feel about the 2024 presidential election? What’s the wordthat describes how you feel about the 2024 presidential election? “Are we allowed to curse?” Kenneth, 29, Latino, Texas “Anxious” Kim, 43, Black, N.C. “Abyss” Gary, 64, white, Mich. What can President Biden say and do to win over undecided voters? What concerns and arguments will draw these voters to Donald Trump? For our latest Times Opinion focus group, we spoke with 13 undecided independent voters from across the country about how they see the two leading presidential candidates and explored some issues that might…