January 2012

Eating is Now A Spectator Sport: How do you play?

January 31, 2012

Now THIS is a good reason to bust out your camera phone in a restaurant. You know, for when the boy toys come back. A waitress friend of mine recently snapped a pic of an overweight patron’s meal. Why? So she could text it to several of her friends. Sure her customer’s meal was appalling – One of every appetizer? Yes, please – but even more so was the realization that now, more than ever, eating is a spectator sport. People feel they not only have a right to see what other people are eating but also to pass judgment [...]

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How Do You Know When to Push and When to Rest?

January 30, 2012

Disaster struck at the gym this morning. We were doing the P90X  fitness assessment to prepare for February’s Great P90X 2 Experiment (I know!! Squee!!!) that we start Wednesday. The test has you check your performance against the P90X standard in pull-ups, push-ups, in-and-outs (abs), vertical jump, biceps curl max, wall sit, flexibility and a high-intensity cardio interval to check how quickly your heart rate recovers, to see if you are fit enough to do the workout. Needless to say, the test to do the workout is a workout in and of itself. But us being us, we had to [...]

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Are Push-Ups Better Than a Push-Up For Your Chest? (And what are square boobs?)

January 29, 2012

courtesy of lipglossjunkie  “I must! I must! I must increase my bust! The bigger the better, the tighter the sweater, the boys depend on…” Not me, that’s for darn sure. (And for any of you that are going to point out how busty I look in that green-skirt pic in the rotating images at the top of my site – push-up bra + pose, for the win!) As a small-chested girl who’s always wanted to be just a smidge bigger I’ll admit that I’ve always read with interest anything that reasonably claims to enhance my bust size. Okay and I might [...]

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6 “Healthy” Foods That You Should Never Eat

January 27, 2012

See, it does take a village! Of chihuahuas!  It’s Project Runway, health food cycle: One day you’re in, the next day you’re out! (Bonus points if you can say that like Heidi Klum.) Food fads are a sad but true fact in the health and fitness industry. Science, and more importantly marketers, are always pimping the next Super Food. And sometimes that introduces us to some really awesome weird foods that we might not have otherwise tried. Chia seeds, quinoa and acai berries anyone? Many times these fads are duds. And then there are the few times where purportedly “healthy” [...]

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My Short-Short Health & Fitness Book Report!

January 25, 2012

Thanks to Turbo Jennie (who got it from Leah? Or Sara?) for the vid! Totally safe for work. In fact, this video should become the theme for your next office party. Awesome. Click through to see the video if you get this via e-mail or RSS. Relaxation is such a personal thing. Some people get pedicures, others watch a show, still others crawl into the butt-end of a Dope Zebra and get all Party Rocker up in their backyard. Me? I read stuff. Not even fun stuff but non-fiction science-y stuff. I love it. But not everyone has the time [...]

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“You Sure Are Strong… For a Girl.”

January 24, 2012

Tonight after a marvelously brutal interval class that involved jumping lunges, crouching push-ups and so many skaters that my I’d get an Apollo Ohno tattoo on my butt if it didn’t already hurt so much, a male friend gave me a grin and commented, “You sure are strong. For a girl.” Well, what do you say to that? Five years ago: ”I’m strong, period.” I would have felt insulted and then challenged the guy to a weight-lifting duel. Indeed, one of my very first posts on this blog to ever cause some (minor) controversy was when I bragged I could match [...]

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What is the One Piece of Fitness Equipment You Can’t Live Without? [Reader Question]

January 23, 2012

I was kind of rolling my eyes until I got to #9. That question will haunt me until my dying day. “So I have a post idea for you,” a friend at the gym recently said to me. (Incidentally this friend is the only person I have ever seen do the Wicked Wiper in person and he can do like 15 of them. It’s crazy. The first time we saw him do it we all burst into spontaneous applause on the weight floor which was even more awkward considering we hadn’t introduced ourselves yet and so pretty much looked like [...]

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How Smell Influences Taste (And how to use that to your advantage)

January 22, 2012

Fact: 70-75% of how you experience flavor is due to your sense of smell. Anecdote: A friend told me about a friend (isn’t this how all good anecdotes start?) who had lost his sense of smell in an accident and consequently lost 20 pounds easy-peasey because, in my friend’s words, “Everything pretty much tasted the same. Brownies tasted like whole wheat bread so why not just eat the bread then?” At the time my eating disorder – one of several, is there such a thing as multiple personality disorder for EDs? – was in full swing and I fantasized about [...]

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Bad Advice from Celebs and Good Advice from Bloggers: Where you do you get your advice?

January 19, 2012

Running in a sauna suit? A $425 cleanse? Bringing your personal chef to cook for you at restaurants because you can’t trust the food? Stars, they really are just like us! Sorta! While I’ll never have a personal chef (but neither will I have people with telephoto lenses trying to take pictures of me bending over in a swimsuit, so there’s that), when it comes to making diet and fitness mistakes, it turns out celebrities are just like the rest of us. This week I did a slideshow for Shape.com highlighting some of the bad advice certain A-listers are spewing [...]

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Having problems loading my site? Try Google Chrome instead of Internet Explorer

January 19, 2012

Quick note: since I switched to my new site there have always been a few people who have had problems with my site being slow to load or the comment section being possessed by demons. Neither me nor my web guy have been able to figure out why but Dr. J and Jody both recently informed me that their problems were resolved when they switched from using Internet Explorer as their browser to using Google Chrome. Which honestly might be a good decision regardless of my website. It’s generally faster all around, more secure and has better privacy options than [...]

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