Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

Last week’s runners were awesome and it looks like we have some stiff competition going.

mplant is the clear Level 1 winner and she has enough mileage to graduate to Level 2! Good job, mplant!

On Level 2, stuckinord beat us all by almost four miles! Way to lead the pack, stuckinord!

SLBplus is a regular reader and commenter on Starling Fitness. He kicked everyone’s butt on Level 3 this week!

The Level 4 Challenge was a tight race and Sareybabes squeaked ahead of RicC with less than a half mile lead.

tamaswing busted out of the Level 5 mileage and graduated to Level 6 with this week’s win.

The true king of the heap is the winner of the Level 6 challenge, Rasmus! With an average of over 10 miles a day, he is the man!

Congratulations to all the competitors! Join us at Runner+ and show off your mileage!

If you exercise by running or walking, you can compete in the Starling Fitness Challenges on Runner+. All you need is an account at Runner+ and you can log your miles there. If you have a Nike+iPod kit, then your runs will automatically be added, but the site will also allow you to add your runs manually. If you would like to compete against runners on your level, here are the links for this week’s challenges:

Level 1 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 0-10 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 1 (09-17-07) – RUNNER+

Level 2 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 10-20 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 2 (09-17-07) – RUNNER+

Level 3 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 20-30 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 3 (09-17-07) – RUNNER+

Level 4 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 30-40 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 4 (09-17-07) – RUNNER+

Level 5 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 40-50 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 5 (09-17-07) – RUNNER+

Level 6 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 50-60 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 6 (09-17-07) – RUNNER+

“Okay, I’m at the thrift store and there are a bunch of golf clubs here. What do I need?”

“You’re where?”

“I’m at The DI.”

“You’re going to get golf clubs at the DI? Why don’t you just use your mother’s?”

“I want to get into this golfing thing and I need clubs if I’m going to do this. What do I need?”

“Well, the big ones are called woods. You need a 1, 3 and 5 wood.”

“Okay, this set has that.”

“The little ones are called irons and you need a 3, 5, 7, and 9 iron.”

“Okay, this set has a 4, 6 and 8 also.”

“That’s good. Now, you’ll need something called a P or an S. They are wedges. You probably only need one of those. Best to go with a P.”

“Got it.”

“Then you need a putter. They’re like the clubs they hand you at minature golf.”

“They don’t have any of those here. I guess I’ve got to go to another thrift shop.”

“How much are you paying for those used golf clubs?”

“Thirty-five dollars for the whole set. It has everything but the putter, plus a lot of tees and golf balls in the bag. Oh, look! Gloves! The left one has a hole. She must have been left-handed.”

“Nope, if you’re right-handed, you wear the glove on your left hand… prevents blisters. Thirty-five bucks?”

“Yeah, is that too much?”

“New will cost you anywhere from $200 to $900. Sounds like you’ve got a good set there.”

“Yeah, the name on the bag is Evelyn Banks. Is it wrong to use a dead woman’s golf clubs?”

“She might not be dead. Maybe she just got a nice set of Pings and didn’t need those ones anymore.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m going to imagine. She’s playing with her Pings and gave away a full set of clubs just so I could find them.”

I liked this article from the Complete Running Network. Give it a look:

• Top 10 Questions Asked by Beginning Runners » Complete Running Network

I wish I had something witty to say, but I’m all empty right now. Sorry…

It looks like the company, Transdermal Products International, have been caught making false claims regarding their patches.

• Weight-Loss Patch Manufacturer Banned From Selling Weight-Loss Patches, Will Pay $180,000

According to the FTC, Transdermal Products International Marketing Corporation and William H. Newbauer sold a supposed weight-loss patch to about two dozen domestic and foreign retailers, and provided them with sample deceptive advertising and bogus substantiation materials, including purported expert endorsements and clinical studies of their weight-loss patch by Marvin Kaplan. The retailers in turn used these materials to sell the weight-loss patches to consumers in the U.S. and abroad. The sample advertising made false or unsubstantiated claims about the product, including that it caused weight loss and that the main ingredient, sea kelp, had been approved by the FDA for weight loss.

There are over two million search results on the Internet for the words “weight loss patches.” Transdermal Products International surely isn’t the only company that is lying. They’re just the only one the FTC was able to catch.

Don’t trust any advert that tells you that you can lose weight just by taking its product.

Via: Consumer Health Digest, September 11, 2007

I just finished watching this video from Jennifer Lopez. The song is called Do It Well. It’s a pretty good song, but it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the video.

In the video, Jennifer is roaming the back rooms of a fetish bar to rescue a young lad washing dishes. While looking for the child, she explores various rooms depicting fetishes: a man wearing makeup, a man being whipped by dominitrix and a man watching a obese woman eat food. The clip goes by so quickly in the video that you might miss it, but I grabbed a screen shot here:

Has it gone this far? Is eating now a perversion?

What is the matter with our society? VH1 gives a television show to a gossip blogger named Perez Hilton. Here is an example of his writing:

• Celebrity gossip juicy celebrity rumors Hollywood gossip blog from Perez Hilton » Blog Archive » An Open Letter To Britney Spears

If you clicked on the link and were able to get past all the f-bombs, you might have noticed the postscript:

P.S. Your beer belly looked hot!

He reamed her for a lackluster performance and scrawled derogatory terms over her photo:

After all that, he made the crack that she has a “beer belly.” Sorry, Perez, she doesn’t have a beer belly. Time for some REAL perspective.

All of this coming from a man who looks like this?! Why did VH1 give him a television show? Is this the image they think is appropriate? Why does anyone take him seriously?

Britney has had two children back to back and her figure has bounced back considerably. It’s true that her performance was less than spectacular, but that doesn’t have anything to do with her body.

Seeing talk like this is so discouraging to me. If Britney Spears is considered fat right now, there’s no hope for me. Why should I even try?

There has been a big push to “Buy Local” food. I was told that it’s better for the environment because it costs so much fuel to ship food. It turns out that might not be true. According to this article from Financial Times, the cost of growing the food far outstrips the cost of shipping it.

• FT.com / Home UK / UK – Planes, brains and automobiles

They explain the theory behind eating locally:

Today, of course, the “question of transportation” has become caught up in worries about the quantities of carbon dioxide being generated by an increasingly mobile food supply. The further our food travels, so the theory goes, the more damage it does to the climate through transport-related carbon dioxide emissions. In short, globetrotting food stands accused of helping destroy the planet.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple:

“Transport has been taken out and highlighted,” says Rebecca White, a researcher at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI). “But you can’t single out one part [of the food system] and say something that’s come from thousands of miles away is automatically less sustainable – it’s much more complicated than that.”

Ken Green headed a team of researchers at the Manchester Business School. They were hired by Great Britain’s Defra (Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs) to determine whether transportation is a factor in the environment:

After 199 pages of detail on everything from automatic picking machines to consumer packaging, the researchers find no strong evidence that locally sourced foods are better, in environmental terms at least, than global produce – and in some cases the opposite is true.

In fact, WE have more of an impact than how far away food is shipped:

And it turns out our own part in the chain is often the most damaging, since when we drive to the supermarket, we might come back with only a few of bags of food in the car boot. Such a trip is far less fuel efficient than the one taken by that same food on its way to the supermarket in a truck packed with the assistance of load-optimisation software, which determines how to stack cargo so that barely an inch of empty space is left in the back of the vehicle.

In the end, “Buy Local” has less impact on the environment than we thought. Now it seems to be solely an economic entreaty.

Via: Determining the amount of energy it takes to bring food from… (kottke.org)

If you exercise by running or walking, you can compete in the Starling Fitness Challenges on Runner+. All you need is an account at Runner+ and you can log your miles there. If you have a Nike+iPod kit, then your runs will automatically be added, but the site will also allow you to add your runs manually. If you would like to compete against runners on your level, here are the links for this week’s challenges:

Level 1 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 0-10 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 1 (09-10-07) – RUNNER+

Level 2 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 10-20 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 2 (09-10-07) – RUNNER+

Level 3 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 20-30 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 3 (09-10-07) – RUNNER+

Level 4 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 30-40 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 4 (09-10-07) – RUNNER+

Level 5 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 40-50 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 5 (09-10-07) – RUNNER+

Level 6 weekly challenge from Starling Fitness. This level runs between 50-60 miles a week.

• Challenge: Starling Fitness Level 6 (09-10-07) – RUNNER+

Last week’s runners were awesome and it looks like we have some stiff competition going.

I didn’t give RicC much of a challenge here. If you run between 30 and 40 miles a week, join Level 4 and give RicC a run for his money!

Level 5 had no competitors, so you could ace that one if you joined.

Congratulations to all the competitors! Join us and show off your mileage!

This postcard from PostSecret is like a lifeline to me. I know that part of me is beautiful. If I could just cling to that part of myself, I wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of me.

I know eating healthy and exercising is supposed to be about living longer and having better days when I’m alive, but for me it has been about appearances for so long that I STILL have trouble separating them.

When am I going to let the beautiful part of me win?

---

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

According to The Institute of Food Technologists, organic food is no healthier than conventionally grown foods. They published their study here:

• Journal of Food Science – Organic Food

They admit that there are differences in the levels of pesticide residue and natural toxins, but there is no scientific evidence that these levels can harm humans.

“While many studies demonstrate . . . qualitative differences between organic and conventional foods, it is premature to conclude that either food system is superior to the other with respect to safety or nutritional composition. Pesticide residues, naturally occurring toxins, nitrates, and polyphenolic compounds exert their health risks or benefits on a dose-related basis, and data do not yet exist to ascertain whether the differences in the levels of such chemicals between organic foods and conventional foods are of biological significance.”

Considering organically grown food can cost more than twice conventionally grown food, it looks like the only bastion for organic food is taste. Sometimes, organic food has tasted better to me, but now I’m wondering if that was just me trying to convince myself that it was worth the extra cost.

As it is, the health benefits of organic food have evaporated under scientific scrutiny.

Via: Consumer Health Digest, September 4, 2007