5/18/2006

Cheap Hydration System

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 pm — Filed under:

On those long bike rides, it’s good to keep water nearby. When your hands are busy with driving the bike, a hydration system like the Camelback makes it easier, but they are so expensive. This writer made a hydration system out of $7 worth of tubing.

We don’t need the fancy toys to get healthy and strong. All we need is a little ingenuity and some aquarium tubing.

Via: MAKE: Blog: Cheap hydration system

Skateball Looks Like Fun

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Worth 1000 had another Photoshop contest where you combine sports. Here is the complete list of entries here:

This one looked especially fun, Skateball. I love new ideas about extreme sports.

Skateball from Worth 1000

Next time you are uninspired by your workout, just think about Skateball. Practicing basketball and shooting some hoops would help you do better at Skateball. Practicing with a skateboard would help you do better at Skateball. Thinking about all the weird things that might exist in the future inspires me to keep fit now so I can try them out when they actually come along.

5/17/2006

Victoria’s Secret Sports Bras

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 pm — Filed under:

Sports Bras aren’t supposed to be sexy. They’re supposed to hold things down and prevent chafing.

Considering that all Victoria’s models are so obviously fake, why would they even need sports bras? Fake boobs stay aloft on their own. It’s us girls with the real thing that need sports bras.

I have all this anger at this move by Victoria’s Secret, but I do love their bras. Their underwire bras are the first I’ve ever enjoyed wearing. Why do I feel like they are completely unprepared to take care of me when I’m running 6 mph?

I guess it’s the advertising. I see those models and they don’t look fit and strong to me. They look fake and emaciated.

Try again Victoria…

Via: adfreak: Victoria’s Secret gets into sports bras

U.S. versus U.K. – How Do We Compare?

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, noticed a study on health care in the U.S. and U.K.

“The United States spends $5274 per person, per year, on health care and the United Kingdom spends $2164, or substantially less than half as much. The question is—what do we get, in terms of health, that for extra $3100 a year?”

It turns out that on all levels, Americans are less healthy than Brits. If you think obesity was the nail in the coffin, think again and read his weblog:

The truth of the matter is that you can’t buy health. You can’t buy it at the doctor’s office, the hospital or the drug store. You have to give it to yourself every day.

5/16/2006

All I Have Is Now

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 pm — Filed under:

Click here to see the video You’re still my workout buddy and I talk to the camera, imagining you seeing me workout on the treadmill. Here is a little clip from one of my workouts. I was walking during my warmup and I realized that all I have is today. I can eat healthy today. I can exercise today. I can’t change yesterday and tomorrow isn’t here yet. All I have is now.

What the heck is Dance Dance Revolution?

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 3 with DancepadI have talked quite regularly about Dance Dance Revolution and how fun it is to burn a bunch of calories. I kind of thought the whole world knew about it by now. Not so…

CBS has announced that they are making a Saturday Morning show about DDR. This description on Yahoo! News makes the show sound like a modern version of American Bandstand, where people compete each week. I can just imagine kids all over the nation fantasizing about being on this television show and practicing thier legs off at home. EXCELLENT!

If you would like to start practicing to get your moves on, you can do it now. Just go to any arcade or play it on a gaming console in your home.

5/15/2006

The Question of the Week: Eating Healthy

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Yesterday, I talked about eating healthy and how it can be fun like a video game.

If Eating Healthy were a video game, what activities would give you a high score?

What activities would lower your score?


The Question of the Week is meant to be an Inner Workout for you. Find some time during the week and allow yourself to write the answers to the questions posted. You can write them on paper, on a word processor or here in the comments section. Whatever works for you as long as you do it.

Keep writing until you find out something about yourself that you didn’t know before. I’ve also heard that it works to keep writing until you cry, but that doesn’t really work for me. Whatever works for you. Just keep writing until it feels right.

5/14/2006

Eating Healthy Can Be Fun

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

Lofty title, huh? Considering all my struggles with eating healthy, I can understand if you’re skeptical. In fact, I’m sitting here right now thinking, “How can I explain this?!”

The truth is, eating healthy CAN be fun. I KNOW this because I see it in other people all the time. I’m talking about those people that you know. None of us want to admit it, but we hate them sometimes because they purposely make us feel bad about what we’re eating.

I’m talking about vegetarians.

Not the vegetarians that live a quiet life and eat healthy without imposing their beliefs on anyone else. I’m talking about the rabid vegetarians. I’m talking about the vegans. I’m talking about the raw food enthusiasts. These people have made eating healthy like a video game. There are stages for you to achieve and you get to feel more and more justified at each one. Vegans are “better” than vegetarians and raw foodies are “better” than vegans. All of them are “better” than us.

They piss me off and I sometimes wonder if their ideas are truly healthy, but the fact of the matter is, they have made healthy eating fun. Even though it’s not fun for us, it’s obviously quite fun for them. So the question is:

How Can Eating Healthy Be Fun?

What if eating healthy was like a video game? What if each time you checked off a box for vegetables, you got a score? What if you could display your score to the whole world and they would know that you’re a “fifth level eater”? What if being able to announce that you’re a “fifth level eater” felt as good as saying, “I’m a vegetarian”?

There HAS to be some way to quantify eating healthy. There HAS to be some way to get a high score in eating healthy and the scale isn’t it. The scale is a cumulative score. You need a score for every day.

I don’t know the answers yet, but there HAS to be some way to harness the feeling of accomplishment from eating healthy.

5/13/2006

Exercise VS. Eating Healthy

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am — Filed under:

I was looking at Google Trends to find out what’s going on in the world. I compared Exercise with Eating Healthy and I was surprised to see what I found:

The blue line shows the activity surrounding “exercise” and the red line shows the activity for “eating healthy.” It seems that “exercise” is getting a lot more news media and search activity than “eating healthy.”

For me, exercise was the first step. I had decided to never diet ever again and I was just going to concentrate on walking and running. I was going to be strong and active, even if I was going to be fat. I lost a little bit of weight from this determination.

It wasn’t until I learned how to truly eat healthy, however, that I started to lose weight. It’s a two-fisted approach. Just eating healthy might help you lose weight. Just exercising might help you lose weight. Both together and you are guaranteed.

So why is “exercise” so much more popular in the searches and news articles than “eating healthy?”

Because exercise can be fun and eating healthy just sounds boring…

There are so many ways to be active that are truly fun, but no one has really come up with a way for eating healthy to be enjoyable. It seems like eating healthy is just a matter of taking away “good” things from our lives instead of giving us a benefit like stronger bodies.

Tune in tomorrow to find out why I think eating healthy can be fun.

5/12/2006

Why Women Should Be Allowed To Compete

By Laura Moncur @ 5:00 pm — Filed under:

National Women's Football AssociationIf you missed it, there has been a heated discussion about why women should be allowed in the NFL on my previous entry:

I believe all sports should be integrated and women should be allowed to compete with men and against men. Adjusting the rules of team sports games to be more like softball where there must be an equal number of men and women on a team is probably the most efficient way to accomplish this.

Segregating the sports isn’t the answer. Women’s football doesn’t provide as much access to corporate sponsorship because it doesn’t get equal time on television. Women’s basketball is filled with amazing athletes that aren’t allowed access to the financial opportunities that the players in the NBA are.

If you don’t believe this, log on to ESPN.com and try to find women’s sports. There is no mention of the WNBA on the front page at all. You have to hunt and search for it. Hunt and search ESPN.com for NWFA (National Women’s Football Association), and you will find NOTHING. So much for separate but equal.

There are no articles about NWFA within ESPN.

In the end, segregation HURTS sports.

WNBA's Maryland's Marissa Coleman via ESPN.comThere are women who would have been the next Michael Jordan, but they were discouraged from entering sports because, “No one will watch you play,” or “There’s no money in that for women.” Just like when racial integration took sports to a whole new level, gender integration will do the same. Excluding half of the human race from participating in a sport makes the sport “gene pool” smaller, less diverse and ultimately poorer for it.

Just saying it amazes me. Half of the human race is not allowed to even try out for the NFL, the NBA or major league baseball. It doesn’t matter how good they are, they are just not allowed to play. How did we let it get to this point?

Every father who has a daughter should boycott all sports until they allow women to compete. How could we support an institution that rejects half of all our children just based on a 1-6 inch flap of skin?

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