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.