A large body of scientific research indicates that music positively influences sports and exercise. Dr. Costas Karageorghis, a leader in sports psychology, has conducted dozens of clinical trials with a broad range of professional and amateur athletes including tennis players, long and short distance runners, basketball players, bicyclists and more.

Dr. Karageorghis’ findings show that music “distracts people from exhaustion and pain, increases endurance, boosts mood and even increases metabolic efficiency.” People who exercise while listening to music not only experience an increase in endurance by as much as 15%, but are also left happier and more satisfied by the workout. Music is particularly useful for getting through that last push or extra mile, perhaps because music redirects an exerciser’s attention from the not-so-pleasant sensations of physical exhaustion. Anyone who has ever been to a spinning class at Soul Cycle knows the value of a great song. In fact, spinning teachers are often valued as much for their playlist as they are for their enthusiasm and skill.

So what music is suited for exercise? The researchers used Queen, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Madonna in their experiments. As intuition suggests, music with more beats per minute and louder low-frequency sounds work best.

Bottom line:  Turn it on and pump it up. As an aside, out of consideration for others, may I suggest skipping “Pump Up the Jam.”

When Save the Children was invited into Vietnam to fight malnutrition, they asked an employee, Jerry Sternin, to open the office. It was a serious challenge. Malnutrition was widespread and seemingly unsolvable. There were countless reasons why: poverty, poor sanitation, ignorance about nutrition and lack of clean water.

Sternin described the analysis of the situation as TBU “true but useless.” Instead of being paralyzed by this overwhelming information, he employed a different strategy. Rather than focusing on all the malnourished children, he searched for examples of children living in poor villages who were not malnourished. He looked for exceptions to the rule.

Sternin’s strategy was to search for bright spots—successful efforts worth emulating. If some kids were healthy despite their advantages, that meant malnourishment was not inevitable.  Furthermore, the mere existence of healthy kids provided hope for a practical, short-term solution. Sternin knew he couldn’t fix the “root causes.” But if a handful of kids were staying healthy against the odds, why couldn’t every kid be healthy?

By observing the way that mothers of these healthy kids fed their children differently (they added cheap sweet potato greens, shrimp and crab into the food, they fed their children the same amount of food but spread it out into four meals a day instead of two larger ones and they hand fed their children rather than allowing them to feed themselves) they learned a simple way to fix a seemingly unfixable problem.

What can we learn from this? Don’t be deterred by TBU (true but useless information). Instead of troubleshooting, look for bright spots.

“What should I eat?” It’s a complicated question and we keep getting mixed messages. Fat is bad. Fat is good. Salt will kill you. A calorie is just a calorie. Thankfully this myth has been unequivocally tossed out. Frankly it is pretty hard to believe why anyone ever bought into it in the first place. When you think about it, there is no way eating a Snickers bar (266 calories) could ever be the nutritional equivalent of eating a bowl of steel cut oatmeal.

The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released by the Agriculture and Health and Human Services Departments in January further add to the confusion. In spite of the Advisory Committee’s suggestion to include (1) reduction of the consumptions of soda and (2) reduction of red and processed meat in the formal primary recommendations, they were dropped from the final draft.

As Dr. Walter Willett, Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health said:

Clearly these Guidelines bear the hoof prints of the Cattleman’s Association and the sticky fingerprints of Big Soda. They fail to represent the best available scientific evidence and are a disservice to the American public.

While nutritionists battle over what is healthy, you may want to consider this question: “When should I eat?” According to research, altering the time you eat affects your weight and metabolism. The key is to restrict the window of time within which you eat and to extend the amount of time you go without eating.

A small 10-week study divided 16 volunteers into two groups. The first group didn’t change a thing. They consumed their normal diet and stuck to their regular mealtimes. The second group also consumed their normal diet but were asked to move their breakfast 90 minutes later and their dinner time 90 minutes earlier. Essentially they were fasting three extra hours each day. Results showed that the group who shortened their eating window lost more body fat and had a greater reduction in cholesterol and glucose than the business-as-usual group.

No more milk and cookies before bed.

At the very least, cut down on those late night snacks. In addition to affecting the quality of your sleep, they might be the reason you cannot drop that extra five pounds.