Looking forward to "Summer Tomato[es]"

Welcome back! I was one of those children that would pretty much eat just about anything that you put in front of my face. I was addicted to sour patch kids and could eat an entire loaf of bread in one sitting. One of the saddest moments in my life was when I realized that I could no longer eat anything and any portion size I wanted and still look great. At that point, I was still participating in athletics so I still didn't really have to worry because I had forced exercise everyday. Then college and the notorious freshman 15 happened and the weight struggle began. Finally, this year I have the opportunity to have my own apartment and cook healthy meals for myself. But, what to cook? So, I did what every normal 21-year-old college student would do; I searched the internet and came across a blog that really struck my eye. Darya Pino is the author of the blog, Summer Tomato. After reading her bio this morning, I can understand why I was so attracted to her blog. Not only is she also from Northern California, she has also struggled with her weight and finding the right balance of food and exercise for her optimal health. I admire her in that her whole life she has

strived to balance academic and professional success with personal health and fitness

and a healthy balance is one of my lifetime goals.

Darya Pino graduated as one of the top students in her class from UC Berkeley with a degree in Molecular and Cell Biology. She is a UCSF scientist and is currently working on getting her PHD in neuroscience. She posts at least every other day on her blog for Summer Tomato and she also writes for the UCSF newspaper, Synapse, and has had a few posts featured in the Huffington Post. Her blog, Summer Tomato, is fairly popular with a technorati authority rating of 120. The layout of Summer Tomato is nicely organized with tabs on the top for Basic, News, Market, Science, Recipes, Tips, and Random. Every Friday, Darya makes a For the Love of Food post, which is basically a weekly miscellaneous post with links to interesting sites relating to health and fitness that she’s found within the week. Darya is also an avid fan of fresh farmer’s market produce and she often blogs with updates about farmer’s markets that she has been to in the San Francisco Bay Area and what she’s purchased with illustrative pictures of nutritious goodies, which is a nice break from all the fast food ads surrounding my daily life. You don’t even need to be from the Bay Area to benefit from these nutritious posts. Recently she blogged on Meal Planning at the Farmer’s Market, with a detailed 5-step process and conclusion for the ordinary shopper.

Overall, what struck me most about Darya’s blog is that she has chosen a new word for the overused negatively connotated word 'diet'. Instead she uses the word Healthstyle, which she defines as

your own eating and exercise habits that influence your health.

Darya’s goal with her blog, Summer Tomato, is to help people do away with short term fad diets and instead, simply upgrade their healthstyle.

Hello World : )

I could not help but think of the saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” during my first 90 minute Bikram yoga session on Sunday. In this case the saying should go “what doesn’t make you pass out, rejuvenates you!” It’s interesting to me the amount of pain that people, myself included, are willing to put themselves through to achieve maximum physical health and fitness. Most health experts agree that Bikram yoga, which is a series of 26 postures each repeated twice in a 100 degree heated room with 40 percent humidity for 90 minutes, is beneficial for healing your body and stimulating your internal organs. I couldn’t help but question this as I attempted to turn my knee in a way that just did not seem possible. Still however, after two consecutive days of knee twisting and sweating profusely, I am a new addict and am looking forward to my next sweating session. My love for borderline painful hot yoga probably stems from my years of pleasant torture rowing in a lightweight 8 in high school. I started crew about 10 pounds over lightweight status and when my coach claimed that I could easily be a lightweight, I immediately attempted to be as healthy as possible in order to achieve this goal. I educated myself on healthy eating and tried to stay as hydrated as possible throughout the day. It took me several months to lose the weight but eventually I became a lightweight. The combination of working out as hard as I could and dieting was extremely hard and took a serious amount of self-discipline. Not only was my last season of crew the healthiest and strongest (the picture captured it haha) that I have been in my life, it was also a time in my life that I grew the most as a person. There is no comparable experience to following stroke seat and setting the pace for the other 6 people in the boat while doing an extremely difficult anaerobic and aerobic workout for a little over 7 minutes with the coxswain yelling at you to pull harder through a beautiful reservoir as you see the other boats falling behind you. Eventually, I would like to buy a single and workout on the water, but for now Bikram yoga and running the smoggy loop around campus will fulfill my exercise and health needs. If it’s not obvious from my previous stories, I am very interested in overall health, specifically fitness and nutrition. I believe that exercise is essential and that processed foods are the devil. I do not like artificial sweeteners, especially aspartame (although I love chewing gum and have yet to find a chewing gum without aspartame so I make a few exceptions) and I try not to eat products with ingredients that I have no idea what they are. Healthy food makes me feel good and exercising makes me happy, so I am going to attempt to comment on different aspects of each of these in my blog.