Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

You are looking at some of the most delicious cupcakes in Salt Lake City. They were provided by The Sweet Tooth Fairy at a geek event I went to a couple of weeks ago.

They were beautiful and lovely, but I had absolutely NO desire to eat them.

Surprising, really, considering my eating patterns, but they didn’t appeal to me at all.

That was the day that I realized that I don’t actually like cupcakes. It has taken me forty years to finally come to that conclusion. Sure, I like the flavor. I like the frosting. I like the cake.

It’s the cup that I don’t like.

Cupcakes are top heavy and awkward. I have to get frosting on my fingers while I try to take off the cupcake liner or I have to risk a bite of paper if I don’t remove it. The frosting is usually piled too high at the top to eat appropriately with the rest of the cake, so I end up with some bites with too much frosting and others without any. They are simply impossible to eat neatly.

When I attended that geek event in Salt Lake City, the delightful catering included platters and platters of gorgeous cupcakes. I looked at the table of food, and all I could do was stress out about how to eat one of those cupcakes. I was in a room full of people that I barely knew peppered with people who I knew really well who were desperate to introduce me to all of their friends and I was stressed out about a CUPCAKE!

In desperation, I decided not to eat.

Suddenly, the weight of all that beautiful catered food was lifted from my shoulders. All those people I was introduced to asked me if I had tried a cupcake and I said, “I’m not eating cupcakes today.” They accepted my words and most replied, “I shouldn’t be either.”

I watched them struggle with the cupcake liners and the frosting and the top heavy creaminess of it all and I breathed a sigh of relief instead of feeling left out.

This is AMAZING for me. It’s like one of those breakthroughs or A-Ha moments everybody talks about. Food stresses me out and sometimes it’s just easier to NOT EAT IT! If you had asked me that morning how to deal with the mess of eating a cupcake, I would have written you a bullet list on how to eat a cupcake without splurging too much or making your hands too messy. I wouldn’t have even considered not eating it. It just wasn’t an option

So, the answer to the question of how to eat a cupcake is: DON’T.

The simplicity of it all could just knock me over with a feather.

Photo via: Crystalyn Life Images

• RT @ddrdiva: GHR video here (thx @daniel_hautjobb) http://bit.ly/13fid4 they are much harder than they look! I can only do negs! #
• Not excited about this one 🙁 RT @ddrdiva: Trailer for Wii Sports Resort w/Motion Plus, coming 7/26 http://bit.ly/ggGHv #
• RT @motivation “It’s a shallow life that doesn’t give a person a few scars.” – Garrison Keillor http://tqpage.com/25856 #

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I dare you to watch this video without wanting to get up and do something active.

There are a few particularly cool scenes:

• When he jumps into a moving car and gets into the driver’s seat.
• When he does a back flip off the back of a moving car.
• When he climbs up the light post just like the Cirque du Soleil people do in their show.
• When he jumps onto the car going right for him, bounces off it onto the wall and bounds past it to continue running.

The description of the video is humbly listed as:

Playing around with some new moves for 2009.

My description would have been.

Super-human feats of gymnastics! Do not try at home!

Next time you’re feeling a little down and not wanting to workout out, watch this quick video and get inspired to MOVE!!

• RT @ddrdiva: Trailer for “Your Shape” game for Wii: http://bit.ly/L2IVm #
• How does it work? RT @ddrdiva: http://twitpic.com/6gw27 – my homebrew glute ham raise #
• @arholtz UR right. I just can’t believe that Microsoft can write software that can tell my movements. Natal is no match for the Wii. #
• Radishes taste like the ground they’re grown in. RT @SproutCubed: Why does anyone grow radishes? They taste like poison. #

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I watched a couple of videos last week that really inspired me to eat healthy and exercise right now.

The first video is a talk by Alan Russell about medicine and the upcoming methods of making our bodies healthy again with regenerative medicine.

He said:

The richer we are, the longer we live. The older our population, the more expensive the diseases are to treat.

Diabetes is a debilitating disease. Why can’t we inject the pancreas with something that regenerates the pancreas and cures Diabetes?

We are learning how to switch on feature that our bodies could do when we were a fetus. A mammalian fetus, if it loses a limb in the first trimester of pregnancy, will regrow that limb. Our DNA has the capacity to do these sort of wound healing mechanisms.

In the future, medicine will be able to regenerate our bodies. This talk from Aubrey de Grey about how medicine could eventually get to the point where we could actually live forever.

It’s VERY important that we take the BEST care of our bodies now so that we can be the people who are able to take advantage of these technologies when they finally become available to all of us.

• Come ON, XBox! Quit LYING to me! RT @Befitt Will XBox change the exergaming world? Step aside Wii-Fit http://is.gd/MjGX #

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Here is an interesting talk from Ann Cooper, The Renegade Lunch Lady, from Berkley, California.

She says:

We are feeding our kids to death.

The USDA cannot be the be all and end all of what we feed our kids. We cannot believe that they have our best interests at heart.

We are responsible, but big companies are ALSO responsible for what kids eat.

We have to teach kids that Coke and Pop Tarts is not breakfast. If they eat a diet of sugar, then they’ll go up and down like a crack addict.

We have to teach people to cook again.

One gourmet coffee costs more than what we spend on school lunch for kids for a WEEK.

She talks about the Farm to School Project. Here is a link to them to see if they are in your area.

• FarmToSchool.org Home Page

Here is her list of food guidelines for her school district:

Chef Ann Cooper : Food Guidelines

1. Made delicious, nutritious, seasonal and sustainable food a priority
2. Elimination of trans-fats and High Fructose Corn syrup as well as reduced and or eliminated where possible refined sugars and refined flours
3. Cooking non-processed foods from scratch while, eliminating all highly processed menu items
4. Salad Bars with a majority of fresh items in every school
5. Universal Breakfast at every school
6. Fresh fruits and vegetables served every day
7. Antibiotic and Hormone free or Organic milk served daily
8. Elimination of Chocolate milk & desserts
9. All hamburgers and hotdogs are hormone and antibiotic free as well as grass finished
10. Segued to whole wheat or whole grain bread and baked products
11. Segued from pre-packed lunches to buffet style service
12. All recipes in a data-base that tracks nutrition and will track costs
13. Purchasing with a high priority on local, regional and organic foods, as well as foods purchased from small local companies.
14. Swipe Card System installed at every school except B-Tech
15. Financial systems in place to ensure “real-time” accounting
16. Computerized purchasing system in place to ensure best practices in procurement, and the adoption of a Board Policy that allows for local procurement
17. New job descriptions to allow for skilled staff, and Executive Chef and Sous Chef positions added to ensure staff training
18. Reorganization of departments which made CNN part of Nutrition Services
19. Purchased refrigeration and heating equipment for all cafeterias to ensure safe food handling of non-processed foods
20. Worked toward implementation of the dining commons for student meals and as a Central Kitchen for the Middle & High Schools, as well as remodeling of the Central Kitchen

I just found a new webcomic that looks promising. It certainly started out with a bang. Edmund Finney met some aliens on his search for the meaning of life.

• EQComics » Archive » Welcome!

Why are the aliens a little pudgier than we normally envision them? What consists of their very filling diet? Click on the comic to see!

Thank you, D. Long for the fun look at Edmund and his search for the meaning of life.