Originally posted at Morning Cup of Joe.

Sure, it’s tough
to commit to regular exercise. There are just so many other things that
require our undivided attention. Or maybe it’s just easier to feel
sorry for ourselves and find something better to do.

“I don’t have time”

“My elbow/knee/back hurts”

“It’s just too hard”

“I didn’t sleep well”

“(enter your favorite exer-scuse here)”

I admit, there are days that I consider skipping my workout. But I
have a li’l trick for getting past the “poor, busy me” syndrome – I
think about some of the people I met who had every possible reason to forget about training, yet they soldiered on…

– One guy was in a wheelchair, his shriveled legs resembled
overcooked linguine. Since squatting and running were out of the
picture, he competed in bench press contests (quite successfully, I
should add). He’d train just as hard as any able-bodied person would -
probably even harder. I remember watching him with awe as he did rep
after rep of pull ups with his wheelchair strapped to him.

Did he have a valid excuse to not exercise?

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Originally published on Gild the Voodoolily.

Last weekend Scott and I went to the coast for the night. I had been having an uncharacteristic jones for the hubbub of Seaside and its bumper cars, corn dogs, caramel corn and salt water taffy, but we couldn’t find a room there and so settled for Astoria. A couple of hours of walking around Seaside and taking in the delicious smells of childhood was enough to sate me, and the crowds made me glad for our reservation in the sleepy history of Astoria.

Our hotel was adjacent to the marina, and if you wanted to spend ~$200/person and 12 hours on a cloudy sea you could partake of a charter fishing trip for tuna, salmon, halibut and/or dungeness crab. Even better, you could just walk down the pier and buy fresh albacore from a dude on his boat for only $1.50/lb. Having had some foresight, we had packed an empty cooler and bought an 18-lb schoolie from the guy.

“You want me to fillet it for you?”

“Nah, I think I can handle it,” I say smugly, having seen that one episode of Top Chef where the Quick Fire Challenge was to fillet fish.

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Originally published on The Great Fitness Experiment

Well, you can’t trust them. That’s the first thing. They’ll lie to your face, tell you anything you want to hear, to protect their compulsion. It’s not that they’re bad people. It’s that they’re scared and the eating disorder is their coping mechanism. They already think they’re nothing. Without it, they’re worse than nothing. At least that’s what the voices tell them.

But don’t give up – they need you. Incidence of eating disorders are rising among almost every group, with a surprising (or not, depending on your level of media consumption) surge in adult women. It has a 6% mortality rate. It has only a 50% cure rate.

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Originally published on Kalyn’s Kitchen

This time I’m writing about one of my very favorite summer vegetables, spagetti squash (also spelled spaghetti squash), so it’s luckily for me that WHB can be about any type of herb, vegetable, plant, or flower. I learned from Wikipedia that spagetti squash is also called vegetable spaghetti, vegetable marrow, noodle squash or squaghetti. Squash is something I’ll be eating a lot of over the next few months as my garden starts to produce it in copious amounts.

Squashes are divided into winter squash (which ripen late in the season, can be stored through the winter, have hard outer rinds, and must be eaten cooked) and summer squash (which can be eaten rind, seeds, and all, and which can be eaten raw.) I like every type of squash, but in my garden I mainly grow summer squash since the winter squashes produce huge vines and take a lot of space. Winter squash is something I’ll be buying from the Salt Lake Farmer’s Market later in the season.

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Originally posted on Former Fat Guy Blog.

Today’s weight loss tips are about exercise and how
to best use your time in the gym to get more work done, stimulate more
muscle and burn more fat. They say that building muscle while burning
fat can’t be done, and that you should focus on one or the other, never
both. That said, what if you just wanted to burn fat as efficiently as
possible, end workout boredom make your time in the gym as quick as
possible. These three weight loss tips are the very thing to take you
in that direction.

Weight Loss Tips

1 Focus your training on the largest muscle groups:
The largest muscle groups of the body are the legs, back and chest. By
working the largest muscle groups, primarily, you end up putting a
larger demand on your body for energy and nutrition. Then a larger
demand on your body for repair of that muscle tissue. You burn fat
twice, first when you’re actually training and secondly when your body
is busy rebuilding the muscles.

Arms (tricep and bicep) are smaller muscles, and where training
certainly makes them look good and allows you to work harder on pushing
and pulling movements, they don’t burn as much fat as the larger
muscles.

As my trainer says, even if you don’t specifically train arms, they
still get worked when you’re doing chest and back movements.

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Originally published on The Leftover Queen

This is one of my go-to recipes, one of those early recipes I devised out of leftovers which has since then given me the title of “Leftover Queen”. I have been thinking a lot lately about my food philosophy, where it came from and how I have become the kind of cook that I am. I am a cook born out of passion combined with necessity. I learned from an early age from my grandparents and my mom that leftovers can be a wonderful thing. I come from a big Italian extended family and so we were always cooking for large groups of people, which meant that we usually cooked more than was necessary which ultimately left us with a lot of leftovers.

It was a tradition in my mom’s house that when the fridge was too overwrought with leftover containers that we would have what we called a smörgåsbord, which is actually a Swedish word meaning “sandwich table”, but has been translated into English vernacular to mean a buffet or variety of hot and cold dishes.

It was my favorite time of the week as I got to have little bites and tastes of all the foods I had enjoyed over the course of the last week, and it allowed to experiment with different flavor combinations – like mixing corn into mashed potatoes or combining various dishes together to create a completely new meal.

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Originally published on Cranky Fitness

Since this is Cranky Fitness, what are the chances you’re going to be reading some incredible new weight loss method guaranteeing permanent results?

Yep, you guessed it: pretty much zero! However, it’s time again for Crabby to climb up on her soap box again and offer…

Advice about Self Improvement that You Already Know.

Today’s question: What’s the Secret to maintaining weight loss (or any other self-improvement achievement) for the long haul?

The answer: Accountability.

Yawn. There’s nothing sexy about Accountability.

Making a commitment to Accountability is sort of like getting married to Mr. Rogers, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Walter Cronkite. Accountability is not Hot and Hip and Hilarious. You’re not going to have the rollicking good times you’d have going out to party with Blissful Ignorance, I’ll Start Tomorrow, Hell–Why Not, or “LA-La-La I Can’t Hear You.” But you’re also not going to wake up in some scuzzy stranger’s seedy apartment with your underwear on your head, reeking of White Russians and Kentucky Fried Chicken Nuggets and hating yourself. Accountability will cut you off and call you a cab before you self-destruct entirely.

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