The Complex System That Is Our Bodies

Another great article I found about how our bodies work and how to work with them in order to keep our weight and health in check.  I like that there are a few small changes you can take from the article that could potentially have a big impact on your weight.  I mostly want to show my husband the section about how the brain doesn't know the difference between walking in the mall while shopping or walking on a treadmill.  He laughed at me when I used to walk in place while watching TV.  I was still moving!

Help Yourself And Someone Else

In our everlasting battle against ourselves and our weight, take this time to help yourself and someone else in need.  Instead of buying that unhealthy lunch or whatever your vice may be...use that money to feed hungry children around the world.  The wefeedback Calculator is simple.  Input your favorite food, how much is costs and how many servings you would eat.  The calculator will then tally your amount and tell you how many hungry people that could feed.  Then instead of you spending that money on an unhealthy choice for yourself, you can choose to donate the money to the organization and actually help those children.  Go on, you'll feel good!

Overcoming Nature with Nurture

My future children aren't even a twinkle in my eye yet, but my fiance and I already have aspects of their life planned out.  We know between the two of us they are going to be prone to weight problems, and that terrifies us.  We don't want our children to go through everything that we have.  We were talking the other day about getting them involved in sports and other healthy activities at a young age.  We also talked about implementing what we call Family Exercise Time, but what they would simply know as some fun activity that we all do together.  What are some fun and creative ways to pull this off?

I fear one of my biggest hurdles in keeping my children healthy is going to be to get them to eat vegetables.  Sadly, my fiance does not eat them.  AT ALL.  He refuses to.  How am I going to get my kids to eat them when they don't see their father doing it.  My mother did buy me a cookbook on how to hide vegetables from children and I'm hoping that it will work on him too.

I just already feel like the odds are stacked against my children.  But I pledge to do my best by them!  Does anyone else think about this sort of thing too?

How Arizona Inspired The Birth Of A Blog

I have to admit, while there are many things in life that I consume heavily, news stories are not one of them.  However, yesterday, I stumbled on an article about Arizona's proposal to tax smokers and the obese on Medicaid.  I didn't pay too much attention to it until I was at work and noticed that one of the newsletters that I was responsible for sending out prominently featured a blog from one of our writers supporting this proposed legislature!  After reading the post, I became hot, red and extremely tense.  In other words I was pissed!  There are so many reasons why this proposal is both unfair and offensive.

The proposal is based on the idea that people should be punished for not taking proper care of their health.  But does this cover ALL people who are unhealthy?  Do they tax those on the other side of the eating disorder spectrum such as anorexics and bulimics?  How about other unhealthy behaviors like drug use or excessive drinking?  There are SO many unhealthy behaviors in today's society that it would be impossible to impose taxes on all of them.  Although if the government wants to try and regulate that I wish them luck.  If you in turn look at this proposal as saying that anyone that puts their health at risk should be taxed then we open a whole new can of worms.  There are people that partake in extreme sports, people with high risk jobs and since we're getting silly here, our very own soldiers...because last time I checked the dangers of war are not good for your body or your mind.

There is another opinion piece I read here that had yet another great point about this proposal.  They talked about how just recently Arizona gave preliminary approval for a law that would make it illegal for any governing body to restrict toy giveaways that promote fast food consumption.  Here is a quote from that article that I particularly enjoyed.

Low-income people eat the most junk food. And the legislature and the Governor in Arizona could not care less. Keep the high-calorie meals coming. There are taxes to be collected. 

 I don't want to go on and on here, even though I probably could, but let's get to how this prompted me to start a blog.  There has been a lot in my life going on recently that has brought my weight and my issues with my weight to the forefront.  These are all topics for later blog posts.  But with all of this being in the front of my mind and with the addition of all this Arizona hoopla, I came to the realization that maybe I had an opportunity to not only share my own experiences, but provide facts and discussions on all topics of weight.  I felt that just sharing my life would not only get boring, but wouldn't provide any hard, scientific evidence of the plight that someone with weight issues faces on a daily basis.  As I mentioned earlier, I don't read the news a lot...if at all.  But with deciding to start this blog, I've dedicated myself to reading up on a subject very close to home.  I've already set myself up on a news aggregater searching for stories with the tags obesity, nutrition,

weight loss, body mass index and body image.  Please feel free to suggest more!

In closing, I hope that I can not only help others with these resources, and maybe change some peoples minds about us fatties, but hopefully I can help myself.  So please, send me your articles, your stories, your tips, your recipes...anything that you want to share!