It’s certainly happened to me. I’ve trained for months to run a triathlon or a plain road race, kicked my own butt on race day, only to find the next bunch of weeks (and at least once or twice – months) I take it far easier than someone committed to h…

A waste of a perfectly good gym?Last week saw a press release from Konami bragging about the involvement of the American Diabetic Association in bringing their exergame Dance, Dance, Revolution to schools across the United States.Demonstrating what I w…

Computing students fight back against forced exercise

Stress can’t begin to describe how it feels to cope with being unemployed. In today’s economy, with soaring unemployment rates, cut-backs, massive lay-offs and a consumerist culture shouts “buy, buy, buy,” it’s devastating to be jobless. Furthermore, our cultural values are out of sync – how we value ourselves and our mental and emotional health versus [...]

Well, it seems I’ve managed to reduce screen time without even trying.  I got sick.  It was a bad cold that really knocked me down and lasted a week.  Then I needed another week to recover.  As a result I…

Including some tips you’ve never heard

Now I do love me my Nike +GPS, but when I saw an article detailing the new app Zombies, Run! I immediately wrote the developers and offered myself up as a reviewer (full disclosure, was provided the app freely for review), reason being, I’m a huge fan …

I don’t want to think about when I last wrote to you. I feel and look like a different person. Inside and out. It is overwhelming for me to explain these differences. They may not even appear to you, but they are shouting loud and clear to me. Yes, I hear voices, all the time. [...]

I have been working out regularly and lately I have been participating in a boot camp session here in our town.  Trying to find the right sports bra is a tough task.  It feels as though you are always compromising something: fit, comfort, support or …

Exercise is by far one of the most powerful medicines – except that we know very little about how it actually works.
So, how does exercise induce all of its many health benefits, especially in tissues and organs that are not even directly involved in this activity?
Surprising new insights into how exercise works come from a [...]

That’s the conclusion drawn by a recent meta-analysis of the impact of after school sports on pediatric obesity and diet.Weight wise, despite what between the lines reading of the paper suggests the authors wanted to find, they were unable to conclude …

Over the past 2 weeks I have been taking part in the MapMyFitness Quaker Challenge. The benefits of taking part in this program are the accountability I have from being part of a larger group of people who are on the same journey as I am. I know that b…

Earlier this week, I reviewed ‘The Cure For Everything‘ by Timothy Caulfied, who presented a rather devastating (some would say sobering) view of ‘personalized’ medicine based on genetic analyses. His take essentially is that little (if any) of the promise of genetics for complex conditions has panned out and little (if anything) is likely to [...]

The alarm on my cell phone beeps to life at 5:44 am. I groan quietly, then slink to the bathroom to pee. I slip my work-out clothes on, brush my fuzzy teeth, rub my eyes and head out the door….

File this under “How could this possibly have been published”, along with, “Really. Really?”.From the University of Tennessee comes a paper that quantifies the calories burned by adults who while watching an hour of television, were instructed to stan…

This weekend I read “The Cure For Everything“, a book by Timothy Caulfield, professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta and research director of the Health Law and Science Policy Group. (He is also a rather cool dude and someone who is quite a bit [...]

If you like your data clean, pretty and predictable, you probably don’t want to read the rest of this post.Researchers from my hometown here in Ottawa recently published a study ahead of print in the journal Obesity. The paper, Relationships Between N…

I’m a perfectionist. So, naturally, I’m attempting to follow the meal plan designed for me in my Eating Disorders Program right down to every teaspoon, gram, ounce and millilitre. I am trying to eyeball my portions, but my eyeballs are slow learners. Plus the stresses of my life make this precarious… I keep forgetting that [...]

Four word review? I loved this book.Slightly longer version?For those of you who don’t know, Alex is a columnist for the Globe and Mail. More importantly, he’s an evidence-based journalist with a penchant for exercise. His book, Which Came First, Ca…

Probably, but first some brief back story to serve as an illustration.I turned 40 in August. And like many with big birthdays I decided to make some resolutions and included among them was weight lifting. I’d been fair to middling at aerobic activiti…