You’re still my workout buddy and I talk to the camera, imagining you seeing me workout on the treadmill. Here is a little clip from one of my workouts. I was walking during my warmup and I realized that all I have is today. I can eat healthy today. I can exercise today. I can’t change yesterday and tomorrow isn’t here yet. All I have is now.
I have talked quite regularly about Dance Dance Revolution and how fun it is to burn a bunch of calories. I kind of thought the whole world knew about it by now. Not so…
CBS has announced that they are making a Saturday Morning show about DDR. This description on Yahoo! News makes the show sound like a modern version of American Bandstand, where people compete each week. I can just imagine kids all over the nation fantasizing about being on this television show and practicing thier legs off at home. EXCELLENT!
If you would like to start practicing to get your moves on, you can do it now. Just go to any arcade or play it on a gaming console in your home.
Yesterday, I talked about eating healthy and how it can be fun like a video game.
If Eating Healthy were a video game, what activities would give you a high score?
What activities would lower your score?
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.
Lofty title, huh? Considering all my struggles with eating healthy, I can understand if you’re skeptical. In fact, I’m sitting here right now thinking, “How can I explain this?!”
The truth is, eating healthy CAN be fun. I KNOW this because I see it in other people all the time. I’m talking about those people that you know. None of us want to admit it, but we hate them sometimes because they purposely make us feel bad about what we’re eating.
I’m talking about vegetarians.
Not the vegetarians that live a quiet life and eat healthy without imposing their beliefs on anyone else. I’m talking about the rabid vegetarians. I’m talking about the vegans. I’m talking about the raw food enthusiasts. These people have made eating healthy like a video game. There are stages for you to achieve and you get to feel more and more justified at each one. Vegans are “better” than vegetarians and raw foodies are “better” than vegans. All of them are “better” than us.
They piss me off and I sometimes wonder if their ideas are truly healthy, but the fact of the matter is, they have made healthy eating fun. Even though it’s not fun for us, it’s obviously quite fun for them. So the question is:
How Can Eating Healthy Be Fun?
What if eating healthy was like a video game? What if each time you checked off a box for vegetables, you got a score? What if you could display your score to the whole world and they would know that you’re a “fifth level eater”? What if being able to announce that you’re a “fifth level eater” felt as good as saying, “I’m a vegetarian”?
There HAS to be some way to quantify eating healthy. There HAS to be some way to get a high score in eating healthy and the scale isn’t it. The scale is a cumulative score. You need a score for every day.
I don’t know the answers yet, but there HAS to be some way to harness the feeling of accomplishment from eating healthy.
I was looking at Google Trends to find out what’s going on in the world. I compared Exercise with Eating Healthy and I was surprised to see what I found:
The blue line shows the activity surrounding “exercise” and the red line shows the activity for “eating healthy.” It seems that “exercise” is getting a lot more news media and search activity than “eating healthy.”
For me, exercise was the first step. I had decided to never diet ever again and I was just going to concentrate on walking and running. I was going to be strong and active, even if I was going to be fat. I lost a little bit of weight from this determination.
It wasn’t until I learned how to truly eat healthy, however, that I started to lose weight. It’s a two-fisted approach. Just eating healthy might help you lose weight. Just exercising might help you lose weight. Both together and you are guaranteed.
So why is “exercise” so much more popular in the searches and news articles than “eating healthy?”
Because exercise can be fun and eating healthy just sounds boring…
There are so many ways to be active that are truly fun, but no one has really come up with a way for eating healthy to be enjoyable. It seems like eating healthy is just a matter of taking away “good” things from our lives instead of giving us a benefit like stronger bodies.
Tune in tomorrow to find out why I think eating healthy can be fun.
If you missed it, there has been a heated discussion about why women should be allowed in the NFL on my previous entry:
I believe all sports should be integrated and women should be allowed to compete with men and against men. Adjusting the rules of team sports games to be more like softball where there must be an equal number of men and women on a team is probably the most efficient way to accomplish this.
Segregating the sports isn’t the answer. Women’s football doesn’t provide as much access to corporate sponsorship because it doesn’t get equal time on television. Women’s basketball is filled with amazing athletes that aren’t allowed access to the financial opportunities that the players in the NBA are.
If you don’t believe this, log on to ESPN.com and try to find women’s sports. There is no mention of the WNBA on the front page at all. You have to hunt and search for it. Hunt and search ESPN.com for NWFA (National Women’s Football Association), and you will find NOTHING. So much for separate but equal.
In the end, segregation HURTS sports.
There are women who would have been the next Michael Jordan, but they were discouraged from entering sports because, “No one will watch you play,” or “There’s no money in that for women.” Just like when racial integration took sports to a whole new level, gender integration will do the same. Excluding half of the human race from participating in a sport makes the sport “gene pool” smaller, less diverse and ultimately poorer for it.
Just saying it amazes me. Half of the human race is not allowed to even try out for the NFL, the NBA or major league baseball. It doesn’t matter how good they are, they are just not allowed to play. How did we let it get to this point?
Every father who has a daughter should boycott all sports until they allow women to compete. How could we support an institution that rejects half of all our children just based on a 1-6 inch flap of skin?
TLC has a show called “Honey We’re Killing the Kids.” If you haven’t see the show, you can see their website here:
I haven’t seen the show, so I don’t know how realistic it is. Here is a guide of how to encourage activity with your children. They’ve broken up the activities into age groups, which help. I find the list a little simplistic, but it’s a good start if you feel totally lost with your children.
I have a hard time with most recommendations regarding childhood obesity. Sometimes eating is a control issue and children are just exercising their will on the only thing they feel they have control over. I feel like you can’t force a child to eat healthy. They have to do it on their own and the only way you can get them to do that is to provide a good example: “Do you want to be strong like Daddy?” or “Do you want to be pretty like Mommy?” Younger children will answer yes to that question every time. If Mommy and Daddy are eating healthy, then the children will automatically mimic that behavior.
Child obesity has more to do with the parents than the children.
Anica Mercado started out her weblog entry with the following phrase:
“This weekend entailed a roughly six hour drive to our first away game.”
I saw the picture of football players and thought to myself, “She must be a cheerleader.” It was so beyond my cognition to think that she could actually be playing on a football team herself. Man, just when I think I’m totally forward thinking, my prejudices smack me in the face with a Whiffle bat.
After playing a couple of games, she has dreams as big as any football player has had:
“I’ve also been sitting here and thinking about my dreams. I’m a big dreamer. So, baring my soul to you all, I will divulge one of my bigger dreams: I want to play football in college. If I’m really, really shooting, I want to be the first woman in the NFL.”
She immediately follows her declaration with a dismissal…
“Now, I’m not stupid, I know that those are very, very unlikely. Like I said though, I shoot high.”
Why does it have to be very, very unlikely? I think the NFL should play like softball, where you have to have a minimum of 45% women on the field. If we integrated sports that way, then we could prove how well women can do in sports. Why do we have separate women and men’s leagues? We should require each team to play with half women and let each team be equally balanced. I think they’d be surprised at how strong us girls are.
Good luck, Anica! May you be the first woman in the NFL!
Mark, at A Passion for Running, has fully tested the new running skirts. He has included pictures and a video of him donning the bright pink running skirt and matching jogging bra. Is he insane?
Probably…
More importantly, he did it for charity. Urging his readers to make donations to thier favorite charities, he promised to wear and review the running skirts for everyone’s enjoyment.
You can read his review here:
You can see the video of him in the skirt here:
If you would like to purchase a running skirt, you can do so here:
After reading his review, I know that I wouldn’t like the running skirt. There is only a panty underneath, so there is nothing to protect my inner thighs from chafing. That’s a lot less of an issue now than it used to be, but I’m still very sensitive about my exercise clothing. Mark looks cute, though.
I videotaped myself exercising the other day. I talked to the camera, letting you be my workout buddy. There are so many times when I have no one to talk to when I’m exercising, so I thought talking to the camera might be interesting. After going through thirty minutes of video, this minute and a half is all that I’m willing to share with you.
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