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 7 seat 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 captures 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 as you see the other boats falling behind you with a beautiful reservoir in the background. 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.
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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, then I think to myself, “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’s 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 (wow). She posts at least every other day on her blog for Summer Tomato and she also writes for UCSF’s 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 122. The layout of Summer Tomato is nicely organized with tabs on the top for Basic, News, Market, Science, Recipes, Tips, and Random.
Overall, what struck me most about Darya’s blog is that she has developed a new word for the overused negatively connotated word that I really do not like (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. Definitely going to keep reading this one.
voice critique
When you think of weight loss or fat loss, you probably think of aerobic activity or doing an hour of cardio on the treadmill or elliptical everyday. However, you’d be doing yourself a favor if you did a little research in the area. You would most likely find that the greatest benefits are actually achieved from strength training or strength training combined with interval training instead of just steady-state cardio. Alwyn Cosgrove, a certified strength & conditioning specialist with a degree in Sports Science, mentions several studies to back up this point in his blog post, Hierarchy of Fat Loss.
He begins his post with a motivational quotation from Dan John, a Masters Highland Games athlete and the American Record holder in the Weight Pentathlon, which really draws the reader in to what he is about to discuss. Then he continues his post with the fact that time is a limiting factor with fat loss and that that the rest of the post is his opinion, but he credits himself with the fact that he has had 17 years of experience in the field.
Then, his Hierarchy of Fat Loss begins. The hierarchy has correct nutrition as the most important, exercises that promote muscle mass and elevate metabolism as the next most important, and finally exercise that only burns calories as the least important. His posts are enjoyable to read because he uses plain language like the word "crappy" in referring to an unhealthy diet and he also uses catchy expressions like "icing on the cake." Alwyn refers to several physiological studies to back up his opinions on fat loss and he follows the studies with basic analogies of what the facts would mean to an ordinary person. For example, he translates a study backing up fat loss though metabolic resistance training compared to diet or aerobics alone by mentioning that:
The diet group lost 14.6 pounds of fat in 12 weeks. The aerobic group lost only one more pound (15.6 pounds) than the diet group (training was three times a week starting at 30 minutes and progressing to 50 minutes over the 12 weeks). The weight-training group lost 21.1 pounds of fat (44% and 35% more than diet and aerobic only groups respectively). Basically, the addition of aerobic training didn’t result in any real world significant fat loss over dieting alone. Thirty-six sessions of up to 50 minutes is a lot of work for one additional pound of fat loss. However, the addition of resistance training greatly accelerated fat loss results.
He really proves his point by explaining these studies in layman’s English. Alwyn finishes this post by suggesting what you can do with a certain amount of time that you have available to exercise. He breaks down the facts and mentions the best ways to get results if you have just 3 hours/week or a whopping 6-8 hours/week available.
Another one of his posts, S.Y.S.T.E.M.S, ironically begins talking about how McDonalds is successful and people eat there, even though they may not have the best burger, because it has established a time efficient system. He really captured my attention in this post by ironically using the analogy of McDonalds in his Results Fitness blog. Overall, Alwyn speaks to the ordinary person in his blog and it makes his posts easy to understand and very interesting. People who spend an hour each day on the treadmill or elliptical trying to lose the lbs could really benefit from reading a little bit of what he has to say.- particularly this week.
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