Getting Better One Step at a Time
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Is it meaningful?
Anythingcomic demonstrates an important part of success: having a specific goal that is meaningful and appealing to you. Anythingcomic.com is offline. If you know where this artist moved their work, please let me know!
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Snackcercise!
Miss Piggy got in on the aerobics craze in 1982 with her own special take, featuring this item from her workout album. This was in a simpler time, before Cookie Monster was limited mainly to fruits and vegetables. Nowadays, banana splits are, I’m sure, strictly a “sometimes move.” Still from the video for one of…
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“What was I waiting for?”
It’s easy to see problems with a new plan, particularly when you have no experience to draw on. And it’s valuable to consider the potential problems. The old saying “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” describes a pretty good way of doing the pre-problem-solving that will keep you on track even if events…
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Rude Treadmills
Dr Lahiri of The Mindy Project is offended when the treadmill asks her how much she weighs, but it thinks it has a good reason. It’s planning to use that information to estimate calories burned during the session. Unfortunately, calorie burn varies so much from person to person that the simple physics-based calculations gym machines…
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The Habit Loop and the Golden Rule
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks extensively about the “habit loop” and the “golden rule” of habit change: a habit has a trigger, a routine (the habit itself), and a reward. The trigger is sometimes referred to as an anchor (as in, “when I wake up, I always…”), and the reward may be,…
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Life Hacks and To-Do Lists
“Life hacks” entered the language around a decade ago when Danny O’Brien talked about them in the context of programming. In programming a hack is “a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix.” This idea has exploded in popularity and has inspired contrarians, who deride life hacking as…
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Are Energy Bars for Women Different?
Men don’t need to avoid “women’s” bars. Some of these bars do emphasize nutrients that “women need,” like folic acid, but while women can often use a boost of some of these ingredients, men can use them, too. The biggest difference between bars targeted at men and women is that women’s bars tend to be…
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How Do I Get My Partner to Exercise?
Johns Hopkins has presented data for a large group of middle-aged couples, who were asked about exercise habits at two medical visits conducted roughly six years apart. If one was getting at least the recommended amount of exercise each week at the first of those two visits, it was quite likely the other would be,…
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How to Think About New Studies in Medicine
One of the big disconnects in the way we share information comes between the general-audience publication (newspapers, magazines) and the scholarly journal article. News outlets want to report the news — information that is new — and business considerations often conspire to make them do that in a shallow way, without devoting space to helping…