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  • Is there a wrong way to exercise, or approach fitness? Sure. There are a three common wrong ways to approach eating and exercise. 1. Shortchanging yourself on nutrition, particularly by eating too little overall or by eating too little protein. This can cause your body to try to compensate for the lack of balanced nutrition…

  • Danielle took this photo at a road race, was astonished to see it go viral, and decided to find this runner. She succeeded, and she interviewed him for her blog. This is a story with lots of little examples of a health-focused attitude and motivation through shared experience (in this case, father and daughter) —…

  • Do I have to do sit-ups? If you have a physical fitness test coming up (in the military, police force, fire department, etc), you may well have to do sit-ups, but if you’re just interested in having a strong core … nope! You’re off the hook! Core strength and stability is important. It helps you…

  • Should I Care About My BMI? Sort of. You should take an interest in your health, and BMI can give you a mini gut check on “at-risk status.” It’s probably fairly rare that someone learns something new from their BMI, though — if your BMI is high enough to be important to your health, you…

  • You don’t have to join a gym or create a brand-new routine to make your daily life more active. Think about the things you already enjoy — especially the things you might like to do better or for longer — and let them be your guide. The CDC has guidelines for how to tell how…

  • Is Yoga Dangerous? A couple of years ago, The New York Times published How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body, a discussion of serious injuries — even fatalities — resulting from yoga practice. The Times got lots of angry letters! In the US, yoga is often touted uncritically as a healing restorative, and a safe alternative…

  • Staying on Track When You Travel Travel, especially for work, can really trash your food and exercise plan. Hotels with “fitness centers” often have limited equipment, and if you have time to explore outside, it can be hard to know where to start. Flowing Data published a wonderful set of maps that show where RunKeeper…

  • Bri at Run Lift Yoga has issued a challenge — post a “real gym selfie”, by which she means a smiling face (instead of a painfully carefully lit and posed definition shot). She notes that the proliferation of carefully staged shots can have a similar, demoralizing impact on viewers that airbrushed media images have, and…

  • Enough with the Negative Self-Talk We are more likely to believe something we’ve heard before. It’s a cognitive bias — our brains do a lot of pattern-matching, trying to save us time so we can get around in the world efficiently, and they give priority to things that have been repeated, more readily believing or…