Background Physical activity after bariatric surgery is associated with sustained weight loss and improved quality of life. Some bariatric patients engage insufficiently in physical activity. The aim of this study was to examine whether and to what extent both physical activity and exercise cognitions have changed at one and two years post-surgery, and whether exercise cognitions predict physical activity. Methods Forty-two bariatric patients (38 women, 4 men; mean age 38 ± 8 years, mean body mass index prior to surgery 47 ± 6 kg/m²), filled out self-report instruments to examine physical activity and exercise cognitions pre- and post surgery. Results Moderate to large healthy changes in physical activity and exercise cognitions were observed after surgery. Perceiving less exercise benefits and having less confidence in exercising before surgery predicted less physical activity two years after surgery. High fear of injury one year after surgery predicted less physical activity two years after surgery. Conclusion After bariatric surgery, favorable changes in physical activity and exercise cognitions are observed. Our results suggest that targeting exercise cognitions before and after surgery might be relevant to improve physical activity.
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The case for veridical out-of-body experiences (OBEs) reported in near-death experiences might be strengthened by accounts of well-documented veridical OBEs not occurring near death. However, such accounts are not easily found in the literature, particularly accounts involving events seen at great distances from the percipient. In this article, I seek to mitigate this paucity of literature using my collection of dream journal OBE cases. Out of 3,395 records contained in the database as of June 15, 2012, 226 had demonstrated veridicality. This group divides into examples of precognition, after-death communications, and OBEs. Of the OBEs, 92 are veridical. The documentation involved is stronger than is normally encountered in spontaneous cases, because it is made prior to confirmation attempts, all confirmations are contemporaneous, and the number of verified records is large relative to the total number of similar cases in the literature. This database shows that NDE-related veridical OBEs share important characteristics of veridical OBEs that are not part of an NDE. Because the OBEs are similar, but the conditions are not, skeptical arguments that depend on specific physical characteristics of the NDE-such as the use of drugs and extreme physical distress-are weakened. Other arguments against purported psi elements found in veridical OBEs are substantially weakened by the cases presented in this article.
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A problem in spontaneous dream psi studies is validation of purported psi elements. Dreams rarely have enough specifi city to satisfy critics that they point to paranormal knowledge of a specifi c event. This creates evidential hurdles to overcome when evaluating whether a dream contains psi-derived information such as scenes of future events or physically distant locations. In this study, the goal is to arrive at a reasonable method to establish that information derived from spontaneous dream experiences can be established as veridical. To accomplish this, a method for fi nding the equivalent of a target within a spontaneous experience is used to fi x a specifi c locale and time for comparison. Adverse scoring criteria are used to address complaints about confi rmation bias. The result is a psi-adverse method for scoring spontaneous experiences that are anchored to a specifi c locale and time. This method regularly produced signifi cant p-values when used to assess 20 consecutive dream records, comprising 598 individual line items. These records were taken as a sample from a group of 3,305 dream records made over the past 22 years by the author.
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