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

Aside from the obvious things like partially hydrogenated oil, have you ever wondered what some of the items in your favorite food’s ingredients list are? With things like Calcium caseinate, Butylated Hydroxytoluene, and Calcium disodium EDTA routinely appearing on labels, it’s hard to figure out just what’s in there and how it can affect you.

Cooking for Engineers, an excellent cooking weblog, has a very comprehensive list of food additives that you may find helpful, or perhaps frightening:

• Cooking for Engineers – Kitchen Notes: Additives

The alphabetical list includes common uses of each additive, known side effects, and a detailed description. If you’ve happened upon a food additive not listed there, you can submit it for future addition to the list.

In this thread at community site Ask Metafilter, someone was looking for ideas for exercise that would work in a small apartment with minimal equipment, without access to a gym. If you’re looking for some new ideas for exercises, you might find a good idea or two among the responses.

The ideas ranged from push-ups to Bowflex to stability ball exercises to the ever-popular Kettlebells, and it seems just about everybody is enthusiastic about one particular approach. I think the important lesson here is that there are a million different ways to exercise, and the vast majority of them work if you commit to using them regularly.

If you’re bored with your current routine, try finding a new piece of equipment or a new approach. It won’t be a miracle, but having something that you’re excited about makes it much easier to maintain your exercise regimen.

The following article from Associated Press says something that many of us already know: it’s easier to exercise and lose weight with a partner, and dogs make good partners.

• Dogs make good diet buddies

In a somewhat scientific study involving 92 people and 89 dogs, comissioned by diet pet-food maker Hill’s Pet Nutrition, they found that people with dogs did slightly better at losing weight and keeping it off than those without.

Curiously, the dogs in the study lost more weight overall than the humans, and the dogs had more energy and did not increase begging. Having someone much larger than you hold absolute control over your portion size is apparently a very effective diet technique.

Welcome to Starling Fitness! We’ll be posting daily here about fitness, diet, exercise programs and gadgets, and health. If you’re looking for a place to get great ideas for losing weight or staying in shape, or just want a daily reminder that fitness is important, be sure to bookmark this site.

About the Site

This site’s main theme is physical fitness—whether that means losing weight, building strength, or maintaining general good health. We know that becoming and staying fit is hard work, so you won’t hear about any miracle drugs or fad diets here. We also believe that fitness can be fun, which is why we spend time talking about unconventional approaches like fitness-related video games.

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