Tag: health

Kickboxing: The Only Workout I Can Stand

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Flickr Creative Commons, Phicen Kickboxing, Edward Liu

It’s been a while since I kickboxed, but it was, by far, my favorite form of exercise. It’s the only thing that ever got me looking forward to class, and kept me coming back 3 or 4 times per week. Now, I’m thinking about getting back to it again, but all kickboxing classes are not created equal.

There are a few things I really love about kickboxing:

  • I don’t need to do anything else. My favorite class incorporated 15 minutes of ab work at the end of class, after I’d punched and kicked an inanimate bag into submission. Then we would stretch. There was no need for any other kind of work out.
  • I’ve never liked exercising for the sake of exercising. I don’t like to run just to run, or lift weights just to lift weights. But with kickboxing I felt like I was learning to defend myself, which made it feel like more than exercise.
  • I like to hit stuff. Let’s be honest, we all spend a lot of time being more civilized than we might like. I don’t yell at other drivers, or cuss out strangers in parking lots. But hitting stuff is fun!

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Going Vegetarian, Getting Rid of Sugar, and Becoming Smoothie Obsessed

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20130818-191659.jpgA few weeks ago I decided to tackle my sugar addiction once and for all. You can blame NPR for reporting the dangers sugar poses to the cardiovascular system, and for someone telling me that Agave nectar is as bad for you as high-fructose corn syrup. There was also the small fact that I was chowing down on donuts all winter like a bear preparing for hibernation. It was a huge problem. My pants were getting a little too tight.

My cousin started the Paleo diet a few months ago, and while the program didn’t seem right for me — that much meat is bad for you, and for the environment — there were some rules that made sense to me. I don’t believe in “diets” because they aren’t sustainable. Eventually you go off of them, and then what? I’ve always been a big proponent of adopting rules that make sense for you in the long-term. But when my cousin told me how she’d cheated on her Paleo diet during the Super Bowl, and woke up the next morning feel so hungover she almost had to call out of work, it convinced me that there were some changes I could make that would have me looking and feeling better.

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My Non-Resolution: Why I Built a Standing Desk

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I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions for the same reason I don’t believe in diets. If you can’t sustain change, making it in the first place is pretty pointless. So I don’t generally make resolutions, though I do sometimes take the impetus to change that a new year provides and I make something happen. This year I made one, easy to keep resolution: to finally get around to changing out the faucet in my downstairs bathroom. But I also decided to make a bigger change in the way I work, a decision that was driven by the media coverage surrounding the dangers of sitting.

I’m not ready to go this far…

Yes, sitting is apparently the “new smoking.”

I work from home which both allows me to be more active, and more lazy than the average employee.Yes, I take my dog for a lengthy walk in the middle of the day — when most office workers are stuffing their faces with lunch under fluorescent lights — but I also don’t have to get up and walk to co-workers’ offices or desks. I do get up a lot to let the dog or cats out (or in), and sometimes I do chores for a quick work-break. Toss in a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, or vacuum the living room. Still, that wasn’t enough to keep my back from being enraged at the end of the day. I bought a yoga Groupon but that membership has ended and I needed a new solution to help me feel better at the end of the workday. Continue reading →

Why I Hate Running

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esbjorn2, Flickr Creative Commons

Yesterday afternoon I headed over to my gym for a yoga class. (Yes, I did find my way back to yoga despite this.) I know you’re supposed to be all focused inward and stuff, but I can’t help it…my mind wanders and I start looking around. There was a woman a few feet away from me who looked to be in her 40s and in really good shape, but for some reason she didn’t seem to be able to do some pretty basic yoga poses.

I was intrigued. 

After watching her through much of the class I came to a conclusion. The bad joints, inflexibility, and lean muscle mass were a dead give away: She’s a runner.  Continue reading →

The Art of Slowing Down

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From twicepix, Flickr Creative Commons

I really wish the media would just get out of my head already… Every time I turn around someone is writing an article about or doing a show on something I’ve been thinking about. Most recently, I saw an article from the New York Times pop up in my newsfeed, talking about “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” The basic premise is that you’re probably only busy because you’ve made it that way:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.

I think about this a lot while I’m lying, motionless, on my couch, or reading a book on the lounge chair in my backyard, or taking an unnecessarily long walk with the dog. Actually, I started thinking about it after my best-friend returned from a  trip to Italy saying she wanted to move there because it was so relaxing and work wasn’t such an all-consuming part of life. Then I started thinking about it again when another friend said he wanted to move to Austin (or really any city outside of the northeast) to find a slower pace of life. Continue reading →

Bikram Revisited: Still Don’t Like It

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I was lucky enough to have my first post about Bikram Yoga make it to the Freshly Pressed page, which led to hundreds of people weighing in on the hottest, stickiest form of yoga. It seemed most people agreed with me: Bikram was not for them. But when I posted I had only been to two of the ten classes I paid for through Groupon. Being a frugal gal, I intend to get my money’s worth. With eight classes left I had plenty of time–usually while sweating profusely in a stinky room filled with half-naked strangers–to think about many of the points the commenters raised. Continue reading →

The Problem with Bikram Yoga

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I recently purchased a Groupon for a local Bikram Yoga studio. For $30 I get 10 classes. It was a great deal so I bought it on sight, and a friend followed suit.

I was worried about my friend who has a heart condition that is made worse in hot, humid conditions. She regularly passes out on gross summer days. Doing yoga in a 105 degree room seemed ill-advised. A few minutes into the first class she thought she’d have to give up, but she stuck it out and by the time we got to our second class she had acclimated and did much better.

I, however, still dread going. If this wasn’t a group activity, I think I’d give up. It’s not that it’s hard, because it’s not — at least not the yoga part. I’ve done yoga off and on for years, and the 26 poses done in Bikram are not all that challenging — though they are, of course, harder when you’re sweating profusely and dizzy. I have no problem sitting out a posture if I suddenly feel like passing out, and since many of the people in class are other Grouponers, they are also new to class and sitting out many of the poses. The problem with Bikram is that it strikes me as yoga for people who are hyper-competitive. I imagine helicopter parents and people with OCD enjoy it very much. But I don’t find it relaxing in the least. Continue reading →

The Sickness

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I am, perhaps, genetically predisposed to distrusting the medical profession. If you shake my family tree more than one person will fall out of the paternal side who does and takes some “strange” things in the name of alternative medicine. So, it’s not a surprise that, as I grow older, I look at doctors more skeptically and look at my refrigerator more closely.

I try and steer clear of prescription medications unless I’ve got poison ivy in my eye, or am coming down with something a day before I leave for vacation. Then, today, as I was put off going out to the garden with a bag of kitchen scraps in the freezing cold, I decided to watch Food Matters.

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