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

If you were hoping for a sequel to Yourself!Fitness, you probably are going to be disappointed. Because of a lawsuit that has been dragging in the courts for years, Yourself!Fitness isn’t looking at working on a sequel. You can find out the details here:

• The Gadgets Page » Yourself!Fitness Lawsuit

If Yourself!Fitness is dying a slow and painful death, be sure that exergaming isn’t. Konami just released a new version of DDR for Playstation 2 called DDR Supernova and you’ve already heard about the new game, Dance Factory. Exergaming is alive and well. It’s just Yourself!Fitness that is experiencing an implosion.

For more information about Yourself!Fitness:

• Starling Fitness » Yourself! Fitness for the Xbox

I have been playing a game on my Nintendo DS while exercising for the last couple of weeks. I can do it while walking on the treadmill, but I need to turn the incline up pretty steep and keep the speed slow so I can play the game AND keep my heart rate up. It’s easier on the exercise bike. I can do both easily.

Do you multi-task while exercising?

Which workouts work well with multi-tasking?

What do you do (listen to music, read, watch TV, play Animal Crossing…)?

How do you make sure you are getting a good workout?

Do you think that being distracted while exercising is dangerous?

Do you think that being distracted while exercising affects whether it’s a good workout? How?

Some people believe that being “with your body” is the focus of exercising. What do you think about that?

Sometimes having a distraction while exercising is the only way I’m willing to workout. Other times, I really want to feel the workout, so I don’t multi-task at all. I don’t really know how I feel about it. What do you think?

The Question of the Week is meant to be an Inner Workout for you. Find some time during the week and allow yourself to write the answers to the questions posted. You can write them on paper, on a word processor or here in the comments section. Whatever works for you as long as you do it.

Keep writing until you find out something about yourself that you didn’t know before. I’ve also heard that it works to keep writing until you cry, but that doesn’t really work for me. Whatever works for you. Just keep writing until it feels right.

I just received an email verifying that I have been approved to attend CES 2007 with a press pass! I haven’t received my pass yet, but I’m excited to announce that we will be covering CES 2007. If you would like to see the entries of all the cool stuff we saw at CES 2006, here is a list:

• Starling Fitness » CES: Konami and DDR

• Starling Fitness » CES: PowerGrid Fitness

• Starling Fitness » CES: ArcadeMX

• Starling Fitness » CES: GameRunner

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Console System

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Jackie Chan J-Mat Fitness

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Jackie Chan Powerboxing

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Baseball

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Prototypes

• Starling Fitness » CES: Garmin GPS and Heart Rate Monitor

• Starling Fitness » CES: TacX and Intel

• Starling Fitness » CES: Tacx Videos for Your Bike Trainer

• Starling Fitness » CES: NavMan

• Starling Fitness » CES: Journey to the Wild Divine

• Starling Fitness » CES: FitCentric

• Starling Fitness » CES: Wrap Up

I saw a lot of items that are STILL not available for widespread distribution yet. Others are available, but they didn’t work for the machines that they said they would work for. It’s the cutting edge. When they finally DO become available, you can be the one to say you saw it first on Starling Fitness.

Wendy Bumgardener has a great article about how to use walking poles. It’s a lot more complicated than it looks and there are several techniques that I didn’t know about.

• About.com – Using Walking Poles – by Wendy Bumgardener

I have only used walking poles for stability on really steep trails. In fact, they weren’t walking poles. We just used some big sticks that people coming down the trail gave us. “You’re going to need these,” they said, and they were right. We wouldn’t have made it up the Na Pali Trail without them.

Wendy walked her seventh marathon and even after seven events, she is still learning. Read about her thoughts here:

• About.com – Lessons Learned on my 7th Marathon Walk – by Wendy Bumgardener

Most importantly, she had trouble with her Nike+iPod:

“Electronic Failure: I walked with my iPod nano and planned to track it with my Nike+iPod sensor. But I should have turned it on at home and tested it out. Instead, I tried to do it in the portajohn line and, by golly, lots of other people were wearing Nike+iPod sensors and it wouldn’t link to mine. Oh well. I still had my Sportbrain pedometer to track my performance.”

I should have known that there could be interference with other Nike+iPods. I’ve never run into that problem with mine because I always run alone. If I went to a race, however, I’m sure I would. That’s another reason why a Polar system would be better. They have coded transmitters to prevent interference with other devices. Still, for 20 bucks, the Nike+ is a good little device.

Here is yet another article about Spain’s rejection of models that are too thin, but with a twist. It suggests that the United States has an obsession with weight loss and that our energies could be focused elsewhere.

• CITIZEN-TIMES.com: The American obsession with weight loss is unrealistic; moreover, it’s also harmful – by Kim Barto

Kim states that all of our bodies are different and trying to make us all look like super-models is unrealistic.

“In reality, a wide variety of body types are normal, depending on one’s bone structure, metabolism and genetics. It is fruitless and misleading to expect everyone to conform to the same weight. Whether you are naturally muscular, chunky, twiggy, curvy or tiny, trying to change your body can be frustrating and even dangerous. When people try to make the body thinner than it is genetically programmed to be, it retaliates by becoming ravenous and vulnerable to binge eating, according to ANRED (Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders), a nonprofit organization against eating disorders. “

Kim has a point. The diet industry rakes in at least $30 billion a year. How many museums could we build with 30 billion bucks? Think of that huge number next time you’re tempted to buy some exercise gadget or weight loss pill. What should we do instead?

“Rather than focusing on weight loss at any cost, we should aim for good health at any size. Too many dieters harm their bodies and psyches by skipping meals, purging and popping pills in the quest for skinniness. We should eat for nutrition and well-being, not solely to lose weight. Amidst all the deprivation and guilt associated with eating, we often forget that fresh, simple food is a joy in itself.”

You can have a healthy and strong body and you still may never look like you want. It’s a sad truth, but learning to love your body now is the best way to loving it when you have reached a healthy goal weight.

Via: Big Fat Blog: That’s Not News!

Each season has its traditional foods. We have just jumped back into Autumn and the days are getting shorter.

When you think of Fall, which foods immediately come to mind? Do you allow yourself to eat them?

Which foods do you usually eat during Autumn?

Are they healthy?

Have you found healthy ways to cook your traditional Fall foods?

Are there new, healthy Autumn foods that you now look forward to every year? What are they?

There are so many healthy foods that are finally coming to fruition right now like pumpkins, acorn squash and spaghetti squash. Now is the time to try something new and re-invent something old!

The Question of the Week is meant to be an Inner Workout for you. Find some time during the week and allow yourself to write the answers to the questions posted. You can write them on paper, on a word processor or here in the comments section. Whatever works for you as long as you do it.

Keep writing until you find out something about yourself that you didn’t know before. I’ve also heard that it works to keep writing until you cry, but that doesn’t really work for me. Whatever works for you. Just keep writing until it feels right.

Jean Paul Gaultier’s 30th Anniversary show was October 3rd and the world is still spinning. Gaultier put American model and actress Velvet d’Amour in his show. She has her head on right as far as physical image is concerned. When asked about other models and whether they are too thin, she replied,

“If you tell me somebody’s too thin, if you tell me somebody’s too fat, you’re still being prejudiced. The point is diversity.”

She’s right. We need to be just as accepting of the super-skinny as we are of the overweight. Sometimes I feel like the entire world is out to make fat people feel as if we don’t exist. When there are fat people in movies or television, they are usually portrayed by stick thin actors/actresses in fat suits. The few fat people shown are usually one-dimensional caricatures that are portrayed as people who are lazy, depressed and out of control.

Reality just isn’t like that. There are energetic and active fat people. There are overeating thin people. And now, thanks to Gaultier, there are overweight fashion models.

Via: Big Fat Blog: Gaultier Uses Fat Model; World Still Turning

During the hot months of summer, I retreated to my treadmill. Even though I was excited to run outside, I wasn’t able to get out of the door at 5am, which was the only time of the day that it was tolerable to run outside. I ended up logging a lot of miles on my treadmill.

Then I forgot the outdoors existed.

I don’t know how it happened. It was only a few weeks of indoor exercising, but just the other day, I looked outside and realized that it’s the perfect weather for running outdoors. Utah Autumns are typically quite short and immediately jump into Winter before the calendar tells them to do so. I almost let the small window of Autumn escape.

Tomorrow, I lace up the running shoes and hit the streets again. Fall Running is awesome!

This month’s Wired Magazine has an in-depth article about weight loss medications and the drug companies that are spending millions of dollars trying to convince you that being even slightly overweight is a disease of epidemic proportions.

• Wired 14.10: The Thin Pill

They are trying to have Metabolic Syndrome classified as a disease so that they can promote their pills to “cure” it. In reality, Metabolic Syndrome is just another name for obesity.

“But some wonder if metabolic syndrome really identifies anything new. Skeptics, which include the American Diabetes Association, suggest that researchers, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies have been so hasty to embrace the disease (each for their own reasons), they’ve overlooked evidence that the science behind the diagnosis is flimsy and conjectural. These critics say that so-called metabolic syndrome lumps together risks we already recognize and monitor – or worse, that it’s just a fancy way to describe obesity. By accepting it, we medicalize a lifestyle condition that we already know how to treat: with diet and exercise.”

Don’t let the pharamaceutical industry take away your will. You have everything you need to become healthy and thin. Eat less and move more. It’s free. If the pharmaceutical companies are willing to spend millions of dollars just to create a disease, then you can just imagine what they will charge for a pill to “cure” it.

You can lose weight on your own without fancy pills or exercise gadgets. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.