If it’s competitive, IT’S NOT YOGA.

Look it up.

What I like the least about this photo is that when it was originally published in Glamour, it was hidden away on page 194.  It’s had its comeuppance, though, since now it’s plastered all over teh interwebs.

Most of the articles about this are similar to this one, in which a PR exec admits that though the magazine has received a flood of “positive” responses about this image, they don’t think “real women” are going to sell magazines any time soon because consumers “want to see perfection.”

Given how wealthy the advertising industry is, this may be true. It’s certainly true that we shell out big money to be made to feel insecure.

Which came first, the yearning to be perfect or the magazine that sells it?  It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, but which one are we? I guess it’s up to us to get uppity and break out of this cage. Don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: Lizzie Miller, Glamour Magazine

In category after category, women do a better job of taking care of their health. They smoke less and drink less, and they’re less likely to be overweight. They eat more fruits and vegetables. They have their cholesterol tested more regularly.

…..

To be sure, the gap between men and women varies in magnitude, depending on what’s being measured. It’s fairly narrow when it comes to tobacco use, with 17.3 percent of men identifying themselves as current smokers, compared with 15.5 percent of women. But men are dramatically more prone to report problems with weight and alcohol use.

The psychologist in me wants to know why are women, on average, healthier than men?

The article speculates maybe it’s because our social messages teach men “we’re stronger than depression, we’re stronger than alcoholism, we’re stronger than cancer or heart disease – or we should be.” So they are less likely than women to conscientiously engage in activities such that help prevent those things, like eating well and exercising.

Maybe. But perhaps it’s because our social messages teach women we’re supposed to be thin hardbodies, so we are more likely to eat well and exercise. Healthy insides are a side effect of hottie outsides.

Not that I’m complaining. Women can only rule the world if we are healthy, and why not look great doing it?

Technorati Tags: women’s health, men’s health

There’s so little news about fitness, the industry media has to invent it in order to have something to publish. Even mainstream journalists will sensationalize or twist information about fitness because they need copy that will sell papers.

It’s rare for fitness “personalities” to talk about this, afraid as they are of getting bad press in retaliation. But a few righteous Ribs do, like Tom Venuto, which is why I read his blog. ¹

Venuto, the hottie there on the right, writes frequently about the importance of analyzing critically the info on health rather than just believing everything you read.

His latest post is about the media’s ridiculous reporting on a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine titled, “Weight Loss With a Low-Carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or Low-Fat Diet.”

Venuto points out how totally wrong most journalists got this study. Most of them said – in big, splashy headlines – that it proves that low-carb diets like Fatkins are superior to low fat and “Mediterranean”-style diets for weight loss.

Wrong! But thanks for playing.

The study actually shows that none of the diets worked very well. The weight loss was minimal: 6 to 10 pounds in 2 years.²

In addition, this study proves nothing because the diet data the researchers used was all based on participant reports. Food diaries are hardly scientifically controlled. (Like memory, estimating one’s food intake is notoriously error-prone.)

There’s lotsa other things the journalists got wrong about the study, but you get the idea. As Venuto says:

Please, please, please learn how to find and read primary research and take the news media stories with a grain of salt. If you want to know who died, what burned down or what hurricane is coming, tune in to the news – they do a GREAT job at that. If you want to know how to lose weight or improve your health, look up the original research papers instead of taking second hand information at face value.

Amen and pass the sourdough.³

Technorati Tags: fitness, health, journalism

1. So does Mistress Krista of stumptuous.com. Check her out, too.
2. And who knows how much of that was actually fat and not muscle.
3. Interestingly, the study reported that the rate of adherence was the poorest in the low-carb group, proving that man cannot live on bacon grease alone, at least for very long, no matter how good the idea sounds at the time.

“Do they think we’re stupid or what?” I ranted asked.

I stopped buying the mags and subscribed instead to a few About.com topics that promised to deliver by email the latest info and news on stuff like women’s health, nutrition, allergies, and gardening.

It’s deja vu all over again.

Consider the cutting-edge content of articles such as this one in today’s email from About.com Nutrition:

Why You Need To Eat
Your body and your brain tells you when you are hungry, but do you know why you need to eat? The foods you eat provide energy for daily activities, structural building blocks and the vitamins and minerals help keep all of your biochemical processes working. Here is an introduction to why your body needs good nutrition.

I’m going out on limb, but I’ll bet everyone out of infancy, let alone people who are seeking out news about nutrition, knows that eating food is rather important. And being the weight-obsessed culture that we are, the 80-bazillion TV shows and articles about health have made even the most uninterested of us aware of the value of “good” nutrition.

Yet somebody at About.com felt the world needed an article based on the nutrition chapter of their 6th grade biology book (“Calcium is best known as the mineral that is stored in your bones” and vitamins are the body’s “little helpers.”).

The articles I’ve seen for other About.com topics are rarely any better (did you know that there are medications, called antihistamines, to treat the symptoms of allergies?! Somebody call CNN!).

Granted, About.com is not exactly The New York Times… but it is an NYT Company, and it brags about being a top distributor of expert information.

Is this non-news really the kind of content the general public wants? Is the bar really that low, or does the media just really not want to work that hard?

And while we’re on the subject of work, are these writers paid for this stuff? I sure hope so. Because I can think of TONS of great topics upon which I can effortlessly expound:

The Primary Function of Deoderant. Why Your Houseplant Needs Water. What To Put In Your Car’s Gas Tank…

Where do I send my resume? On second thought, I’d rather work here.

Technorati Tags: fitness, health, nutrition, non-news

It seems the muse has deserted me. Or more accurately, the muse has a bad case of sympathetic Desk Job Ass and has gone off to a yoga retreat to recuperate.

Not only have I been unable to write five-hundred-to-one-thousand words a day as was the goal, but I’m hardly able to sit still at all, for any reason.

At work, I barely restrain myself from racing down hallways, scaling cube walls and hurtling over desks a la Office Parkour. At home, I ignore my email, even sweet notes from kind friends worried that they’ve offended me somehow with their previous sweet notes. After work, I find myself hoeing a weedless garden or scrubbing a bathroom already pleading for mercy.

On Saturday, I went to the mall.

Yes, things are getting rather desperate around here.

On the bright side, I have started doing power yoga again. I always feel so wonderful after doing yoga, I wonder why I ever stopped. Yoga massages a back stiff and sore from sitting for long periods. It strengthens muscles I never knew I had. It stretches hips tight from years of running. It sharpens my focus, quiets my mind, soothes my soul.

Now I just have to get it to write once a day.

Technorati Tags: yoga, writing

I’ve only read one of them, his masterpiece Running & Being. The specifics are fuzzy, but as I recall the take-home message was: Running, like any practice, is an expression of, and can lead one back to, one’s authentic self.

Fairly heavy shit for a book about putting one foot in front of the other. I admit that the first time I read it, I thought parts of it were a little much ado about nothing. Well, maybe not nothing, but comparing running with being seemed a bit of overstatement. Yet something must have resonated because I still remember it twenty years later and the more I run, the more I think: by jove, I think he got it.

—

The Komen Race for the Cure is an awesome race, especially if you don’t do that sort of thing much. There are thousands of participants of all ages, races, shapes, sizes, and walks of life. Everyone is wired and happy. There’s a band and an unofficial mascot, the Energizer Bunny. It’s hard to feel intimidated when you’re running with hundreds of people wearing pink foam bunny ears.

There are a few at this 5K who actually run to beat other runners. But the majority of us just run.
—

I almost didn’t get to race this morning. Traffic on the way to Qwest Field was fine, but there was a huge back up getting off the freeway. Every car had a woman in a ponytail driving it; I could see the anxiety on each face as we all worried we’d miss the gun.

Luckily I work in that part of town and I know the super-sneaky way to the cheap parking lot. Nonetheless, I still got a healthy warm-up walking from my car to the grounds. I made it to the starting line just as the gun went off.
—

I’ve been “training” for this year’s Race for the Cure since last year’s. Which is to say I get up most mornings and run for half an hour to forty-five minutes.

Sometimes I really enjoy it: the bod feels strong, the mind focused. I’ve still got energy at the end of the route. I seem to be improving. I’m a jock!

But often I don’t enjoy it at all. It’s windy outside so my ears hurt or the gym is hot so I’m dehydrated. The infamous first-five-minutes lead legs don’t go away. My lungs are filled with sawdust. I’m tired and worse, I’m bored.

Thing is, I keep doing it, which astonishes me. I am sometimes honestly surprised to find myself running. I’ve never experienced the supposed “runner’s high” of endorphins, so addiction is out. And making the time to run can feel more like a hardship than just being unfit. Yet running must do something significant for me, or I wouldn’t spend my ever-dwindling spare time doing it.

—

The Race for the Cure draws thousands, a crowd that fills the street for two blocks. This means that unless you position yourself right at the front with all the 6-minute milers, you won’t actually see the starting line until several minutes after the clock has started.

We gather, we wait. Our eyes grow bright with anticipation. We hop from foot to foot as the time draws near. Not long now – adrenaline surges. At last the race master shouts into the microphone: “Ready! Set!…” Walk. And walk. Just as the starting line comes in to view, he shouts, “You are now three minutes into the race!” and we laugh.

It was a perfect day – clear, cool, and sunny. I was glad I’d remembered my camera. A year ago, pausing during a run to take a snapshot would have seemed like cheating. This year, I took ten.

I can’t say the run was easy. But I can say that the one hill on the course seemed flatter than it was last year. I was passed by many people, but I found myself breezing by a lot of people too. The home stretch seemed shorter than I remembered it. I smiled at people a lot, and they smiled at me.

As I ran the last hundred yards toward the finish line, I increased my pace to a comfortable sprint. Months ago I read an article that said sprinting your last quarter mile will help you get faster over all, so I started doing it on every run. The first several times it felt very sophistocated, like I was a Serious Runner in Training. Now it’s just a habit.

So I was startled today when a spectator called out decisively as I passed, “Finish strong!”

He said it like he meant it, believed in it. Like he had faith. He may not have even been talking to me specifically, but it didn’t matter. In that moment I realized I am a serious runner in training.

Flo Jo I’m not and never will be. But just a few years ago, I was a depressed couch potato for whom racing seemed as likely as space travel. Just last year, I ran the race five minutes slower. Just last month, I felt no more fit than the day I wheezed through my first jog. Just last week, I was so sick I was in bed by 8:30 every night. Just yesterday, I almost decided not to race at all, afraid of being last.

Today, I ran 3.2 miles in 33 minutes. I finished strong.

—

In some ways, things haven’t been going real well for me lately. Old demons are back for another round. Spiritually speaking, I’ve been that couch potato, sick and tired, doubtful and afraid. But every day, I get up, do what I can with what I have, and call it good. I show up, do my best, finish strong.

Today I understand why I run. I’ve met my hero and she is me.

This post is dedicated to the wonderful women of Beautiful_Us.

Technorati Tags: Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure

I swear I did not set up this photo. I was trying to get the black Race for the Cure® sign into the shot, but I aimed too low. Little did I know I’d captured the unofficial race mascot peeking over my shoulder.

Full race report coming soon. Right now I really need a shower.

Technorati Tags: Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure®

It’s particularly annoying to be sick right now because the Race for the Cure is this Saturday. But I’m going to run it even if I have to bribe my way out of the ER to get there. (And by the way, if you haven’t yet donated, you still can. )

Mystery photo: it’s amazing what you can find in your house if you’re not careful. I honestly don’t know what this stuff is or what it’s for, but I know it’s imported from Kevinsylvania.

OK – so Martha Stewart I ain’t. This is how the other half lives. Sure, I’d love a 300-square-foot laundry room with a Victorian-era antique tub sitting prettily among my state-of-the-art washer and dryer (not that I’d have to use them myself, of course), as well as a separate two-story garden house where my herbs drip-dry peacefully in the golden sun filtering through the windows….

But I don’t want to do time for them, so I’ll settle for a utility/laundry room so small, the door misses the washer by an eighth of an inch when it opens. When the hot water in the sink is turned on and the door is closed – instant sauna. Hey, yet another function for this highly versatile room! I’m installing wood benches tomorrow!

Photo: Uppity utility/laundry/sauna room, 06/12/07 7:00 pm

This is Herby my garden gnome. He’s hiding from Kevin, as usual, because, well, you know what happened to Herby the last time Kevin was in a bad mood.

You see, yesterday was Himself’s 40th birthday. I have no pictures from the auspicious anniversary because Mr. Crankypants wouldn’t let me take any. He didn’t want a party, no presents, nada. The night before, he’d mourned, “I’ll never be a millionaire before I’m forty.” To which I replied, “Keep trying. You have an hour and a half.”

Despite Kevin’s protests, I did manage to rally some of our friends whose assisted living communities have later curfews. We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurante muy bueno by the water, siphoned off some of the excess carbs playing frisbee in the park, then drank them back again at a martini bar. We were finally at home and in bed by midnight, which is, like, the first time since college graduation.

Then today we got up and went for a run, during which was made the sobering discovery that old people should not drink and expect to be functional for the next 24 hours. This did very little to cheer up Himself, who spent the rest of the day holed up in the garage, consoling himself with his power tool. (What?)

I, much more sensibly, chose retail therapy. I went out and bought cheese, pie, magnetic paint, a pair of shorts, some stupid-expensive hair goo, a few vegetable starts, and a potted two-headed daisy. Then came home and puttered in the garden which is where I saw Herby, who’d come out to supervise.

All in all, a decent, if somewhat bleary, start to a long Memorial Day weekend at home.

By the way, thanks to everyone for the emails and Happy Birthday songs left on the voice mail. And thanks to Kevin’s parents for the five cards – we’re glad his birthday coincided with the postage increase so you could use up your old stamps. Hugs!

Photo: Herby in the lavendar and thyme, 05/26/07 3:30 pm