Did you see this NPR article today, “Gain Together, Lose Together: The Weight-Loss ‘Halo’ Effect?”
Per the article:
The so-called “halo effect” has been shown among people who drink alcohol and people who smoke, as well as those who gain weight. But now, Morton showed a positive halo effect — losing weight. Continue reading “Halo Effect?”
The Oatmeal had a really funny cartoon today about who’s watching who at the gym. Did you see it?
The key takeaway is that everyone seems to be looking at the next person with envy … who is looking at someone else with envy … who is looking at someone else with envy. In the end, though, we all get old and frumpy and die. (Except Betty White–may our golden girl live another 90 years, Godblessher!) Continue reading “Green Monsters — read as, not the spinach kind”
Triggers of all kinds exist everywhere.
Whether you’re a recovering alcoholic, drug addict, binge eater, shopaholic, disordered eater … triggers exist everywhere in life and they seem just as prominent in the blogosphere — where we choose what we read (whereas we have limited choice over what we see when we walk, shop, work, eat, etc).
I know at my worst, I couldn’t read some blogs because I felt the blogger was masking disordered eating behaviors , or because the focus was (what I thought to be extreme) weight loss, or because they were not recovered and still struggling (to the point where the posts made me uncomfortable).
I knew what I needed, and those blogs weren’t it. So I deleted them from my Google Reader. I should note that I’ve gone back to some of them. But there are some I just can’t read. It’s nothing personal against the blogger themselves, but more my own frame of reference or, shall I say, where I was at at the time.
The difference with all of these triggers is that most of them are not visible to the naked eye in real life.
Pregnancy, however, is. Continue reading “Triggers of a Different Kind”
I think of the seven deadly sins, envy is quite possibly the worst.
All too often, we see what others have, who others have become, and we admire it. That’s a natural human sentiment.
If we leave it at that — admiration — we might discover something good. (ex. — a friend gets a new job; it encourages us to leave our dead-end job or go back to school).
But sometimes admiration turns ugly, and envy rears its ugly head. Envy makes us feel bad about ourselves; like we’re not good enough. Envy is not a pretty thing.
Which brings me to this little tale.
There’s a girl at my gym that I’ve noticed has lost a lot of weight over the past few months.
I see her slaving away on the step-mill each night when I’m there, and each week she looks leaner and leaner (not sickly lean; she looks fit and toned).
She is probably a college student or just out of college maybe — my guess, she looks about 23, 24.
And she looks fantastic. Continue reading “The Envy Monster Ducks Her Ugly Head”
Let There Be Light 