weight gain/loss

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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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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From Sex to Sanity: The huge benefits (and one surprising negative) of being active

January 3, 2012

“I like weights. You know where you stand with them. Well, sometimes you’re lying under them, trying not to let them crush you, but you see, you know they’d crush you if they could. There’s honesty.” – One of my all-time favorite quotes about fitness (truly, nothing is more honest than weight lifting!) from my Shape.com slideshow The Smartest Things Ever Said About Fitness. One of the best things about my job, even better than getting to interview celebs like Allison Sweeney and Tony Horton, is getting to talk to all kinds of people and see how fitness has changed [...]

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Acupuncture, Hypnosis, Running an 50-mile race: What would you try to lose weight??

December 1, 2011

This is a real book. The subtitle: “Naughty hypnosis to rocket your pulling power.” Egads, so many double entendres! My head might explode! It’s almost as if they can read my… Actually this has “unintended consequences” written ALL over it.  “If you could live longer as an obese person verses a thin person, how many years would have to be added to your life to make you choose obesity?” Gym Buddy Krista came up with this one-question survey for her final project for a graduate school course on overcoming weight bias. Go take her survey – take you 2 seconds! – [...]

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Breaking the Scale Obsession (So I can become obsessed with other things like geeky TV)

November 27, 2011

Fever dream or best idea ever for a Great Fitness Experiment? Admit it: she’s getting an awesome workout. (Click through to see the above video if it doesn’t show up in your e-mail or reader.) Lying feverish and delusional in bed makes you think funny things. At first it was just stuff like “Can I be totally sweat-soaked and still be freezing?” and “I wonder if that noise means the children have emptied every cereal box in the house into a big pile and are jumping into it like leaves?” Answers: sadly, yes and even more sadly, yes. But as [...]

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From Oscar-Seeking Stars to Empathetic Personal Trainers: What happens when people try to gain weight?

November 21, 2011

When super-fit personal trainer Drew Manning decided to “get fat” for six months and then lose the weight, chronicling his journey on his website Fit2Fat2Fit, his story shot into the media limelight faster than a starlet’s nip slip. Everyone, it seems, wants to know why Manning would voluntarily shed his rock-hard body – one he’d used to model in the past – and trade in his thin privilege for something most Americans are doing their darndest to get rid of? He explains, “My goal is to inspire people to get fit, teach them how to do it and give them [...]

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My Before & After Pics [My fitness story]

August 9, 2011

From an upcoming Shape mag slideshow…! (And I know my form sucks – this was from the blooper reel.) Mr. Miyagi would be so proud of me. I just caught a mosquito – the Minnesota state bird, woot, woot! – mid flight with only my thumb and forefinger (fingers: like chopsticks but for monkeys). This feat of athletic prowess got me thinking about how far I’ve come. People who read this site and/or only know me from 2004 onward think I’ve always been this crazyobsessed with health and fitness but the truth is I do have a “before.” And since [...]

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How Do You Talk To Someone About Their Weight? (Advice, please!)

July 24, 2011

Times sure have changed, huh? Awkward: “Wow, you’ve sure lost a lot of weight!” Worse: “You’ve gained a few – you know the freshman 15 doesn’t count after college, right?!” Worse-r: “You’re too skinny, eat a sandwich!” Worst: “You used to be so pretty; aren’t you worried about your health at all?” (The last one is the worst because it can be said for everything from morbid obesity to anorexia and every weight in between. For some reason “health” is the ultimate trump card in all weight conversations.) I hate talking about weight – mine, yours, anyone’s – because I [...]

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How to Help A Child Lose Weight [Help a reader out!]

May 24, 2011

Courtesy of the State of Georgia’s new childhood obesity campaign Three hours of hysterical sobbing, a whole box of kleenex thrown and self-inflicted eye poking (yes, really) is what my third grader did when I assigned him a second sheet of math problems after he lied to me about having homework so he could go play with a friend after school. I am well aware that kids often do not do what we want them to. But then if parenting was meant to be easy they would’ve given us the user manual in the hospital. Instead we do everything we [...]

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I Had a Bad Day [The Problem With Confessional Blogging]

April 8, 2011

Now THIS would be a legitimate reason to freak out… (Ad is for Nikon face recognition software – “finds faces you don’t even see” Eeeeek!) There’s the mom who confessed to loving her son more than her daughter, to the point that if her daughter died she’d be okay with it as long she could keep her son. There are the parents who confessed to suggesting kids roll their backpacks in peanut oil to protest the “special treatment” of a child with a life-threatening peanut allergy at their school. There are confessions about incest, affairs, drug use and My Little [...]

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