Educate Yourself
Should I eat a low-fat diet? Or is fat okay? What about saturated fat?
I just switched to whole grain pasta, and now I’m hearing that I should go gluten-free and cut out wheat completely. What’s up with that?
My friend says I should switch to soy milk, but Fitness Friday Girl doesn’t recommend soy. Plus, commercials say fat-free dairy will aid in my weight loss. Who do I believe?
Whole egg? Or Egg-whites only?
Multivitamins or not?
Long cardio sessions or short, intense workouts?
Did you know that every single day around the globe, people in nerdy lab coats are conducting studies concerning the health benefits and risks of certain foods and lifestyle habits?
Did you know that new findings and updated results are released almost every day?
This has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this post, but I absolutely adore the ladies at the department store make-up counters who wear lab coats. It totally makes me trust them with my make up purchase—even though I’m generally a Target make-up kind of girl. I imagine the lab-coat-wearing-department-store-ladies on their days off, wearing goggles and working hard to produce the perfect shade of pink lipstick.
Anyway…
One of the best ways to get fit and STAY fit is to get educated and STAY educated on subjects related to food, exercise and wellness.
Reading this blog is a good start, but I’ll be the first to admit, I only scratch the service on current issues. And I honestly don’t scratch it nearly as often as I’d like. In addition to this blog, there are hundreds of great resources whereby you could receive a steady diet (pun intended) of health-related news.
Here are a few that I use and would recommend:
Magazines are old-school, but I love ‘em. I’ve read a lot of health-related women’s magazines in my day, and this one is currently my favorite. I subscribe to it, which is way cheaper than the newsstand price.
This is the #1 Natural Health Website—or at least that’s what he claims on the website banner. I subscribe to Dr. Mercola’s newsletter via e-mail, and I really enjoy it. Just be forewarned: The titles of his articles are very alarmist-like. “Make this one exercise mistake, and you will never lose a single pound as long as you live.” But the crazy title is always followed by an article which is current, informative, interesting and backed up by tons of research. This is a free resource.
This is one of those things I found on the sidebar of Facebook. At first, I couldn’t tell if it was a scam or the real-deal. After forking out probably $70 to this program (I know, dumb) I can confidently say it is not a scam—it’s just very poorly marketed. Or perhaps brilliantly marketed…as it squeezed $70 out of frugal-me.
The author of this program is Isabel De Los Rios, a certified nutritionist with a personal history of dropping 30 pounds of excess body fat. She’s all about eating whole, natural foods, which I love about her. Her resources are not free (ahem), but I believe you can get everything you need for a one-time fee of about $40 (I paid more because I requested a hard copy of the book).
The info in the book is good, but honestly, you can get the same info (and then some!) on Dr. Mercola’s site or in Master Your Metabolism, by Jillian Michaels. I wouldn’t recommend this resource if it were the book only. What I’ve come to love about The Diet Solution is the on-going newsletters and e-mails I receive several times a week, containing innovative health information and delicious, healthy and all-natural recipes. In the fall, she gathered all natural soup recipes from all her subscribers and then sent out a wonderful soup cookbook to everyone.
The thing that impressed me the most was the immediate support and response I got when I posted a question on her Facebook page. She’s got a team of people who help her answer questions, and they seem to know their stuff.
Google Alerts:
If you have Microsoft Office, you can set up Google Alerts for any words that you choose and it will Google those words daily for you. For me, I have “Diet,” “Fitness,” and “Exercise” all on my Google alerts, so I can peruse daily the headlines on these topics. I have three folders set up and I direct my daily updates to those folders so they don’t clutter up my inbox. If you aren’t sure how to set all of this up, I can try to create some sort of tutorial…but that’s a little beyond my blog-writing ability, to be honest. I’m so NOT techie.
So, tell me…do you stay up on the latest fitness and nutrition news? What resources have you found valuable? I’m always on the hunt for something new!
P.S. Sorry for the interruption in posting. Blogger went wonky the last few days.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
0 comments:
Post a Comment
So, what do you think?