[Hey all. It’s your fitness guru here, ready to keep you up to date with this week’s workout tips. I hope you found last week’s Elliptical vs. Treadmill article helpful to your road to a new bodddday! This week I am going to be discussing the pros and cons of working out at a gym, versus buying your own equipment and working on your own, at home.]

Working out at the gym:

Pros: It can be great motivation to see people you know, or strangers, pushing themselves to lengths that you want to push yourself too. Creating a sense of unity, a gym can group individuals together that have the same mentality: getting and staying healthy. You can even make gym dates with your friends or spouse as a way to bond, workout, and push each other. Additionally, there’s more of a variety at a gym; you can take classes or use machines that really work for you.

Cons: The competition can get to you. Some people go into gyms to flaunt their bodies, while sizing up the other men and women, making you, say a less healthy or thinner individual, feel inadequate. Some people view gyms like sororities; you have to look a certain way to fit in. Also, there can be lines for specific equipment, which can cause a time constraint. Depending on where you join, a gym can cost you an arm and a leg; the local gym by me is $100 bucks a month – yikes!!! Too rich for my blood.

Working out at home:

Pros: You can work out when you want, however you want, in your sweats or in your undies. Yes, buying equipment is expensive, but the lump sum you pay will add up to less than a annual gym membership. I splurged three years ago on a treadmill for the holidays, which ON SALE, cost me $500 bucks. However, three years down the road, it’s still alive and kickin,’ which is more than I can say for my uber expensive monthly gym membership. Read More »

According to a recent study in the UK, the weight of a woman will fluctuate in stages over the course of her relationship.

I know what you are thinking: who needs a study to figure this out? I agree, ladies, and so do my fat jeans.

But while we all know how quickly we turn to ice cream when our BF breaks up with us, I don’t think anyone has really given much thought to the many stages of a college relationship and how they affect our bodies.

Mostly, by making us fat.

The following are typical gains and losses over the course of a rather tumultuous college relationship. Weigh in (haha) on what makes you fluctu-weight. (See what I did there? Yeah, I’m good.):

Lose 5 pounds when we first meet the man - after that one-nighter in the bathroom we want to make sure we are hot enough to keep him from doing that with anyone else.

Gain 5 pounds back when the boy starts sleeping over and we know he’s all ours.

Gain another 5 pounds (in cake) when we find out that man has indeed taken another girl to the bathroom our special place.

Lose 15 pounds due to too-depressed-to-eat syndrome/”Just wait until he sees me now!” Read More »

Gorgeous underwear model Katie Green is taking her curves and laughing all the way to the top.  A modeling sensation in the UK, 21-year-old Katie made headlines earlier this month when Wonderbra used the 5’10, size 10 stunner for their “real women” campaign and then shamelessly blasted her for being too fat. She’ll now debut as the new face and body of lingerie firm, Ultimo.

“I really didn’t know where my career was going to go after the depression of being told I was too fat,” she said after Wonderbra execs asked her to lose upwards of 30 pounds. “They got great publicity out of launching me as a ‘real’ curvy model. Then I was told that I had to lose lots of weight and become like all the other girls on the catwalk or I was finished. What a joke.”

Devastated by the demand, she quit the firm, telling friends she refused to sacrifice her health to look like a “bag of bones.” Read More »

…At least that’s what happened to Angela Stokes. Once nearly 300 pounds, the girl stopped eating anything that was cooked and lost almost half of her body fat. CNN reports:

She stopped eating meat, animal products and processed foods and instead switched to a diet that consisted of uncooked and unprocessed vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds.

“To me, the thing with raw food is that it just makes sense. It’s simple and natural, eating food straight from the earth. There’s no rocket science, no mystery,” said Stokes. “Once you understand the simple principal that no other animal in the wild eats cooked or processed foods. That’s it.”

She makes a very good point - especially considering all the hormones and crap that goes into everything we eat. We should all hop on this raw food bandwagon! We can all be healthy! We can all lose weight.

It can’t be that hard, right? I mean, we would never have to cook again!

Wait, what? Cheddar and Sour Cream chips aren’t raw? Ramen isn’t raw? BEER ISN’T RAW?!

Jesus H. Christ; that Allison chick is crazy. What the hell did she eat? HOW DID SHE SURVIVE?  I really don’t know anyone who can do this - most definitely not anyone in college.

You know how you can rub a lamp and a genie will come out and grant you three awesome wishes (I mean, in theory)? Well, according to some people, if you rub a staple shoved into the “upper cartilage of [your] left pinna” — the visible part of the ear — three times a day, you won’t want candy and you’ll lose weight.

I’m serious.

Acupuncture has been around for a while, but this type of acupuncture has recently become more popular with lazy people who would rather get foreign objects stapled into their body then move around and eat more vegetables. Ear Stapling is connected to the idea that piercing the upper ear cartilage, “provides constant stimulation for the vagus or pneumogastric nerve, a very lengthy (the word vagus means wandering) nerve that supplies motor and sensory information from the mouth and larynx down to the large intestine and colon“.

Even though some people swear it works, one can really prove anything scientific when it comes to the practice of Ear Stapling. Maybe it’s real. Maybe it’s the Dumbo’s Feather affect. Whatever the case, if you’re asking someone to shove a staple through your ear to lose weight…you’ve got more to worry about than a propensity for donuts.

I mean…leave your ears alone, lift some weights, and cook more stir-frys. Honestly, friends…it’s not that hard.

I’ve got to get this out. Joy Bauer pisses me the f*ck off.

For those of you who have saved yourself by not knowing who this lady is, I’m about to ruin you — Joy Bauer is the nutritionist correspondent for the Today Show. She’s also published a ton of books and written about eating your veggies for a bunch of publications. Basically, she’s the Martha Stewart of the health world.

So why do I hate her? Because she’s systematically trying to destroy my happy relationship with food.

Every time I turn on the Today Show (read: while I’m on the elliptical at the ass crack of dawn or getting ready to brave the day) Bauer seems to be running her mouth about all the fantastic! and easy! ways for Americans to lose weight. As she gestures with her skinny arms (I want to know if this lady has ever lived a day over 115 pounds) to bad foods! and their subsequent good food! counterparts, I can’t help but want to shake that way-too-wide grin off her face.

Because she wouldn’t be so happy if she was actually taking all of her grey, lifeless advice.

Her recent “4 Weeks to a Better Body” segment illustrates exactly what I’m taking about. Her advice to get thin in 4 weeks? Basically: make your life so boring food wise the pounds will drop off your body in pity.

Some example “tips”:

1) keep only one or two snack items in the house

One or two snack items? Who the hell enjoys eating the same damn thing over and over again? Even peanut butter filled pretzel bites lose their appeal if they’re my only “snack” source for an extended period of time. This method is sure to make me start hating foods I once loved. Read More »

[Click Here to read Part 1 of this series]

To the claim that romance novels are anti-feminist, well, it’s hard to argue this point. Not because romance novels are, in fact, anti-feminist. In fact, I would consider many of them to be extremely pro-female. No, it’s difficult because so many people have their minds set on what is considered under the umbrella of “feminist” and what isn’t, and those opinions are usually formed through one’s own life experiences.

So I will only say that I find a book like Jenny Crusie’s Bet Me more feminist, than, say, (Pitchforks at the ready?) Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. I applaud Chopin and, indeed, I even empathize greatly with her heroine, who is trying to establish herself as a woman as opposed to a mother or a wife amidst all that patriarchy. But I enjoy literature in which women are rewarded or at least not denigrated for their bold and brave decisions. Isn’t it more feminist appreciate a happy woman than to accept that the only way that she can be free is to die? I recall poor Anna Karenina, who threw herself under a g*ddamn train. What kind of a message is that?

It’s also patently untrue that all heroines featured in romance novels are unrealistically perfect looking with no problems (thus perpetuating unhealthy self-images in readers) . I would go as far as to say that most of the main female characters do have flaws in appearance or nature. The heroine in Bet Me is overweight and has low self esteem but her love interest sees her weight and interest in food as a good thing. She doesn’t have to lose weight to be loved, she is accepted for who she is. The novels in which women are loved instantly on sight because of their heart-stopping beauty or unerring kindness and generosity of spirit are almost always the least interesting ones, just like in real life. Read More »

Thin may be in on the runways, but the blogosphere is providing heavy men and women with a place to inspire each other–not to try the latest fad diet or lose that last 5 pounds, but to accept themselves as they are.

The fat acceptance movement has been growing steadily in response to the dwindling sizes of models, celebrities, and the average man or women who feels pressured to live up to those unrealistic standards. The primary message behind fat acceptance is one of health, not excess or loss of control. Because tools like BMI calculators do not take into account frame size or muscle percentage, many athletes and other healthy people are categorized as fat or even obese. This has contributed to shock figures like “6 out of 10 Americans are overweight“. Read More »