Author Archives: Bobby Fernandez

My Happiness Waits for Nothing and No One (What is YOUR happiness waiting for?)

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Reblogged from healthdemystified:

Today was a day of celebration and of remembrance. Of whole-hearted joy that reminds us how great it feels to be alive and of little sorrows that ask us what could have been.

Today was a beautiful moment. Today was the graduation and commencement of the graduating class of 2012, my pharmacy class – or, rather, the class I was part of until about 4 months ago.

Read more… 1,720 more words

I've been impressed with Eric Wang since he first commented on one of my blog posts. He's a man wise beyond his years who just gets more and more insighful with each post. His thoughts on happiness and adversity are worth far more than the short amount of time it will take to read this post.

Dieting ain’t no picnic…or is it?

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It's the picture of Italian ice-cream in a sho...

“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”

- Woody Allen

Perhaps one of the first lessons we learned in life is that everything we enjoy is bad for us. In a juvenile utopia, an ice cream breakfast would be considered the most important meal of the day. As we mature, we begin to make peace with denying ourselves what we want for what we ought to do. We begin to make more healthful choices of our own volition as we age. It’s called being responsible right?

But why do we sacrifice instant gratification for some uncertain promise of more birthdays? Aside from the grander goal of self-improvement, there is another drive that is at work in our daily decisions.

Weather we realize it or not, we don’t really make healthy decisions out of fear of an early demise. A successful “dieter” acquires information over time from the subjective experience of their food and activity choices. Consciously or not, they begin to sense the subtle improvements on how they feel as they make more healthful decisions in their daily life.

We’d like to think we are self-disciplined enough to proactively delay gratification simply because we know it’s what we should do to live a long time. We pride ourselves for our triumphant displays of will-power and self-discipline. Deep down in our hearts, however, we know that tomorrow is not promised to us. Try as we may, we can not let go of the fact that we don’t know if we will meet our maker because of our sweet tooth or because of a drunk driver. When presented with each individual culinary tempation, each possibility seems just as likely.  And so we enter this internal struggle between what we want to do and what we ought to do…..

…and it’s no picnic.

PIC/NIC and the ABC’s of behavior modification

The business world has utilized a theory of behavior modification simply referred to as A-B-C. The letters stand for antecedents, behaviors and consequences. Simply put, it’s a theory that explains motive for behavior in the context of not only the observable action (behavior) but also the circumstances before and after the action. With the additional identification of these antecedents and consequences, the behavior modifier can categorize any given system of A-B-C’s for the purpose of predicting adoption of behavior.

A simple example is that if the antecedent is the offer of a raise for improvement of sales (more sales is the desired behavior) than the subject is to expect a positive (P), immediate (I) and certain (C) consequence. Such a situation (PIC) has a high likelihood for an increase in behavior. Change that positive (P) to a negative incentive, or punishment (N) and you have a NIC situation. An observable reduction in behavior can be expected under NIC circumstances.

Health choices are rarely either PIC or NIC because the consequences, positive or negative, of eating right, exercising and staying away from toxins, are rarely immediate. What’s worse is the consequences of making healthy decisions are not only mostly in the future but they are relatively uncertain in nature. If you are a lifelong smoker, it’s not exactly guaranteed that cutting back or going cold turkey will buy you x amount more years of life. The same is true with each menu selection when you are out to eat with friends. Each individual decision to pass on dessert and spend a few extra dollars on organic carries with it very little certainty that it will be of very much consequence, one way or another. This is why we are able to rationalize every one of our dietary indiscretions away with the infamous words, “everything in moderation”. But what would happen if the ill effects of unhealthy decisions were much more immediate and certain?

Image: Alli

Long before we were graced with horror stories of stained sofas and clothing, I fantasized about a candy bar that would taste great but immediately induce a stomach ache. Aside from some masochists out in the market, this would allow consumers to condition themselves to pass on that 2pm trip to the vending machine for a sweet and salty snack. The message we would learn is that the acute pain experienced immediately after consumption is proportional to the low-level, chronic pain and stress we inflict on ourselves by eating junk food.

What?..pain from eating junk food?…chronic stress?…

Yes, you heard me. Junk food causes acute injury to your body. It is just on such a subtle level that it goes unnoticed. This injury occours as inflammation in the blood vessels (amongst other places in the body). Dr. Dwight Lundell paints a rather vivid picture of this process:

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

read more about this from Dr. Lundell here.

Senseless eating

I remember a patient story from one of my professors of Ayurveda. He was describing to us, the importance of being present and conscious of our food when we eat. He described the typical middle-aged, overstressed American male who came to him for help. He had nothing clinically wrong with him and was given a clean bill of health by his primary car doctor. He just wasn’t feeling 100%. Dr. Suhas conducted a normal intake interview and realized the man would need help in many areas of his life. The one assignment he gave to the man was to stop his lunchtime ritual of eating in his car. The man routinely ate lunch on the go. Needless to say, he ate fast food almost daily. He rejected Dr. Suhas’ first recommendation to eat a home cooked meal for lunch because he couldn’t imagine life without a cheeseburger. Dr. Suhas retreated and simply advised that he eat his cheeseburger in a quite place with few distractions.

The man did so and returned to Dr. Suhas to report that he was astonished to discover that he didn’t really like the taste of cheeseburgers. Consciously eating, chewing and truly tasting the cheeseburgers brought the man to find that he actually wasn’t too crazy about cheeseburgers. He had also been sensitized to the way the food made him feel afterwards. Having cleared his mind from other distractions, he allowed himself to feel the negative, immediate and certain consequences of his dietary decisions.

I recently became even more convinced that consciously consuming good food can overpower our attraction to junk food once we are sensitized to how it makes us feel. My daughter is the most picky eater (I’m sure she isn’t that much different from most 9-year-old girls). She recently came to me with a request after a particularly hectic week. My wife and I didn’t make it to the market that week so it was dinner in a bag for a few days straight. My daughter asked, “can we have real dinner tonight? I don’t feel sick but I’m just not feeling right.” I couldn’t have been more proud and ashamed simultaneously. I was elated that my little girl knew her body well enough to listen to its cries for real nutrition but I was upset that we had allowed distraction to keep us from putting real sustenance on the table during that week. Now that we know she’ll let us know when she is nutritionally deficient, we don’t fuss so much over the nightly struggle with her to finish her vegetables.

The same sensitization to the NIC consequences is possible in the positive direction (PIC). Once we limit our distractions and pay attention to what we eat and how it makes us feel, we disprove Woody Allen’s assertion that the things that are good for us are also not enjoyable. Good food makes us feel good. I’m not talking about all the rice cakes and soy milk the industry tries to tell is health food.  I’m talking about real food. Food like your great-grandparents used to eat. There was no such thing as “diet food” 50 years ago; there was just food.

Diets do not have to be agony. Once we stop listening to what others tell us is healthy and start listening to our genes and our bodies, we can find our optimal diet while not sacrificing gustatory delight. The key is to resensitize ourselves to be able to hear our “body language”. That very subtle feedback we get when we make good decisions and consequently feel great can be leveraged as a powerful motivator for future behaviors. This is at the heart of wellness. The state of wellness is not simply absence of disease. It is thriving at your full potential and harvesting all the fruits of your labor.

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Caloric Bargaining

Caloric Bargaining

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Caloric bargaining

These stairs in Norway attempt to make the point that if you take the stairs, you may enjoy the extra calories in regular Coke. Seems counter productive for Coke to remind us that one is bad for us and the other is supposedly better (Movers don’t do “diet” drinks either). The beauty for Coke is that rather than reminding us that we shouldn’t be drinking sugar sweetened beverages, they show us that we deserve the reward for completing our activities of daily life. It’s bad enough when we binge after a workout because, “we deserve it” but now we’re giving ourselves “calorie credits” for taking the stairs.

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Is Eating Meat Ethical?

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Gorilla. Close Up.

"I wonder if that branch has feelings?" (Photo credit: vladdythephotogeek)

The following is my essay submitted to the New York Times for their contest on the ethics of eating meat:

There are few acts more intimate to a person than eating. That which we choose to build our most recent versions of our selves needs to be carefully selected and responsibly cultivated. We must consider, as all civilizations have before ours, not only what our meal will do for our bodies but also how to ensure sustainability of the process for the generations to come. In the end, it all comes down to transferring the harnessed solar energy on your plate in to the powerhouses of our 7 trillion cells.

At this point in the history of the world, humans have been able to run every type of dietary social experiment imaginable. We have managed to draw enough energy from nearly every terrestrial habitat to allow for generations to thrive on every corner of this planet. We not only know how to survive on the natural resources of any given region but we can do it without sacrificing our human desire for gustatory diversity.  Modern medicine has confirmed what vegetarian cultures before us have exhibited; that humans do not need to eat meat to survive.

But are we as humans meant only to survive?

All spirituality aside, we are still more than just more highly evolved apes. Whether they are products of man-made constructs or divine inspiration, human beings have exhibited virtues, ideals and abstractions either absent or unarticulated in the rest of the animal kingdom. There certainly is something unique to being a member of the homo sapiens sapiens species.

Enter the carnivore. Anthropologist Leslie Aiello points out that, “You can’t have a large brain and big guts at the same time.” Many scientists like her say that it is our discovery of fire and, consequently, more widespread consumption of meat that served as the evolutionary catalyst to the creation of what we now call a human being[1].  The premise is based on our study of the GI tracts of our vegetarian cousins in the simian family. Gorillas and other mostly-plant-eaters have massive intestinal tracts. This is obviously necessary to breakdown all the tough cellulose in their diet. This means the Gorilla evolved to be able to sustain itself on the ever-present plants around them. Food scarcity is now pretty much eliminated as a threat of extinction amongst the Gorillas, but all that energy used in the digestion and absorption of their food left the Gorillas with relatively small brains. It’s too bad too because since the Gorilla must remain sedentary most of the time to allow his leafy meals to digest, he could be doing some serious thinking; if only he had a larger brain.

The accepted theory is that our very division from that branch came about largely due to the diversion of nutritional capitol towards cognition (our brains) rather than absorption (our intestines). The brain is incredibly expensive to run from a biochemical perspective. It needs a supply of certain macronutrients (mostly fat) that a plant-based diet cannot easily provide.  In other words, one of our early ancestors decided to spend more time thinking up a clever plan to ensure her next meal rather than sit around all day and wait for her body to breakdown and absorb the ubiquitous grasses below her. Our evolutionary advantage is our ability to reason, feel nuanced emotions and have the capacity to even make ethical decisions.  If not for the consumption of meat, we would eventually render ourselves physiologically unable to even think in terms of ethics and justice.

Reward: $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of this murderer. (Image credit: Herbert Johan)

[1] Stringer and McKie (1996) African Exodus, page 35, quoting Leslie Aiello (Ev)

Authority and Autonomy

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What or whom would you say has a substantial amount of authority over you? Sure the government and police have authority over us all (We are 10 days away from Tax Day…) but aside from that, we really don’t have much else to hold us accountable.

Although Liberty is an ideal I hold very dearly to, I question whether or not it is a good thing to have such freedom from scrutiny. We as humans crave security and guidance and until recently, we have maintained at least some semblance of respect for our elders and cultural hierarchy to make us feel like we are never “out there” all by ourselves. The baby boomers learned to “question authority” and “never trust anybody over 30″ during the 60′s and 70′s. In my lifetime, I have seen elementary teachers go from Mrs. Stevens and Mr. Brown to Sally and Bill. Children are constantly told by adults to call them by their first names and give them a high-five rather than a handshake lest they make them feel old. Since when did being old become something ugly?

How does this relate to the life of a mover you ask?…

Sports can provide a person, young or old, a sense of healthy respect for authority. Even the professionals who can buy and sell their coaches and referees ten times over maintain respect (for the most part) and operate under a hierarchical system to perform at an optimal level. So too does a perpetual dieter know the authority that scale has over them if they fail to make their temporary healthy diet a lifestyle change. We all lose that performance potential as the everyday athletes that we are as we eliminate the authority figure in our lives.

Authority need not come from a person. You don’t have to pay someone to scream at you when you come up short. If you are religious, you are accountable to your deity and your religious community. If you are involved in a book club, you are committed to the others for the sake of rich participation at your next meeting. I won’t even mention the work dynamic in this post because work is just that….work. The sad truth is that the majority of us are not doing something we love or would otherwise do for free.

This is where the opposite side of the authority coin comes in; Autonomy. Autonomy is central to your very human experience. It is the subjective enjoyment you get out of doing whatever it is you want to do. This is seemingly paradoxical to authority, but it is not. Authority and autonomy actually co-exist in the healthy psyche of a healthy human being. We need a sense of authority for the aforementioned reasons. We also need autonomy as a way to keep us motivated to practice our trade, stick to that diet, er…ahem…lifestyle change and to keep us curious. Autonomy fosters engagement and does not undermine authority, rather it internalizes it and insulates it from our ethereal social environment.

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Move To the Past for your Health

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I work day after day with the chronically ill. I help coordinate their medications, labs and general care plan to help them live their best lives possible under the circumstances. I sense so much frustration in their voices when I speak to them about their health that I almost start feeling as hopeless as they do. There is so much conflicting information out there that even the most savy of independent health investigators (such as you and I) can feel lost.

The more I learn about modern medicine and our healthcare system in general, the more it becomes evident that there truly is nothing new under the sun. So much of health and wellness depends on where we have come from as a species. For this reason I am happy to bring to my readers the ultimate in Ancestral Health.

My good friend & popular health blogger, Sean Croxton, has just put
the finishing touches on the first ever online PALEO extravaganza.

Whether you’re hardcore into paleo, just getting started, don’t
really know anything about it, or hate it and think it’s all hype –
this event has something for you.

Sean recorded presentations from the top experts in the
health & nutrition wellnessphere about the Paleo diet – putting their
knowledge to the test – and created The Paleo Summit.

Mark your calendars, because this event (all 8 days of it!) starts
Sunday, February 26th.

Oh, and it’s FREE to attend.

In this first-of-it’s-kind online event, you guys are going to see:

* Primal living expert Mark Sisson discuss EXACTLY what ancestral
living means – as well as what to eat, what not to eat, and why.

* For parents – Sarah Fragoso will show you how to transition your
family into the primal lifestyle – while keeping it fun for the kids
AND the adults

* Dr. Thomas O’Bryan give you the scoop on gluten – why it can lead
to autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, and muscle pain!

* Get the scientific perspective on Paleo from Ivy League research
biochemist Mat Lalonde – so you can differentiate between the
rampant paleo extremism and what’s truly backed by science

* Get the scoop from independent health researcher & blogger Matt
Stone on why he thinks the Paleo diet is bunk!

* Paul Chek give you the six foundational principles for abundant
health – and how you can break your social conditioning to truly
become the healthiest version of yourself.

And that’s just a SMALL taste of what’s happening starting on
February 26th.

As an added bonus, when you register today, you’ll also get an
awesome video interview with Mark Sisson regarding why we should eat
like our ancestors, as well as a 40-minute interview with Gary
Taubes on why we get fat – I know you’re going to love them!

Pre-registration begins TODAY – so make sure you head over to
the sign-up page right now.

Here’s to your Ancestral Health!!!

Real Food is ALIVE!

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Think about it…

If you are a living and breathing person, you are nothing but a colony of specified cells that themselves, are living and breathing. Sure, there’s that little old thing called a soul but that’s another topic for another blog.

I have spent the better part of the last decade with one foot in mainstream medicine and the other in the study of traditional health systems. Still, with as much study and practice as I have committed to the pursuit of health, I find myself at a loss when people ask me about diet; not for lack of knowledge on the part of either party but simply because we are seldom even speaking the same language.

When it comes to making food choices, it seems American public is fixated on just a handful of parameters; Calories, fat, carbohydrates, taste and cost. It’s no wonder we talk about food in such myopic terms. Watch enough daytime television and you will see doctor after dietician after celebrity trainer giving a nutrition sermon using this language of dietary dogma. They’ve got us focused on the minutia so we never stop to think about what real food is and why we eat what we do.

Dr. Catherine Shanahan deems this language, foodspeak (a play on Orwellian newspeak). She describes how and why we willingly abandoned our cultural relationship with food in her book Deep Nutrition. Dr. Cate makes the case for reverting to a more traditional language about food for the benefit of our health as well as that of future generations.

Like everything else, foodspeak has to meet the requirements of a sound bite culture and is limited to grunting imperatives such as “eat your veggies,” “watch your carbs,” and “avoid saturated fat.” Having lost the old ways of talking about food, we’ve also lost the physiologic prosperity that once endowed us with the gift of perfectly proportionate growth.

Catherine Shanahan M.D.

Food, as our ancestors understood it, was a most sacred gift. Be it from a deity or the plant/animal itself, that which was consumed as food was seen as pure life to be incorporated in to the person. This type of “new age” (ironic) language that our ancestors used does not lend itself to our overly cerebral health authorities today. In fact, scratch the word, “today”. This concept of food didn’t lend itself to the health authorities of last century. Why not? Well because it is only in the last half century or so that food production has become so consolidated in to a few corporate interests. As Dr. Cate says, foodspeak had to be invented so that they could fit the message in to an ad. Since industry drives research, it was only a matter of time before the medical schools were chock full of studies and statistics that cast these new “processed foodstuffs” in a good light. Ever since then, they have been coming out with new research that seemingly contradicts itself as time goes by. This constant supply of novel dietary advice is no failure of science. It is intentional. As the saying goes, “keep them rowing so they don’t have time to rock the boat.”

What we need now is the mind of a child.

This little girl is smarter than most people at the USDA. In fact, I’d go so far as to say she is more wise  than even the top health and medical authorities in the nation in reaching the conclusions she did from her experiment. How can this be you ask? Because she possess the mind of a child that is immune to analysis paralysis and is able to use common sense.

Gary Zukav calls this “a beginners mind“. In his 1984 classic, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Zukav reveals how “the new physics” (Quantum Mechanics) was discovered by forgetting what we think we know of the world, and accepting what we observe as the truth. He notes that Einsteins genius had minimally to do with his brain power and more to do with his ability to see possible alternative explanations that his contemporaries didn’t. When we discuss diet and nutrition with our respected health authorities it is almost as if they are intentionally diverting our attention to calories and fat content while we yearn to cry out, “the farmer is naked.”

A scientist should accept reality as he sees it, even if that lands him in contradiction and nonsense; a scientist must have a beginner’s mind…. a childlike ability to see the world as it is, and not as it appears according to what we know about it.

Gary Zukav

 

Organic? But studies show “no health benefits” to organic food

We intuitively know that organic food (formerly known as food) is what we should be eating. There are many forces that keep us from bringing organic food to our family dinner table. For some it is cost. Others don’t like the shorter shelf life of organic food. Perhaps the largest reason these unadulterated genetic information packets don’t make it to our homes is because we haven’t been convinced it is worth it.

We are a society that is rarely convinced of anything unless we can either see it with our own eyes, or we see enough studies to prove it. The problem with the issue of organic food is that no study is possible to show the benefits. The only tests the FDA runs on our food is to see if it will cause you to keel over and die after consuming (see GRAS laws). To add to the problem, headlines like this make for a great story because it goes against common sense.

The reason the debate about organic still exists is twofold. The harm of industrialized food is only seen in the chronic degradation of health throughout the course of ones life as well as throughout the generations. Also, the benefits of organic are not measured in the short-term outcomes our current food regulatory system is monitoring. It all comes down to how you define health and sickness. If you are merely looking for acute infections and quick-onset disabilities, you could pretty much eat anything non-toxic and it would pass the GRAS standards of the FDA.

It is impossible to expect to create a healthy, vibrant individual from dead food. There must be life in your food. Every bit of processing and every additive is for the expressed intent of rendering the food undesirable to microorganisms that may want to eat it before you do. If they won’t eat it, why would you?

Bugs won't eat it, why would you?

“Muscle Musolini” and A New Years Resolution Warning

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...maybe he wasn't so muscular after all

Happy New Year!  I love to see all the new faces in the gym during this time of year.  Sure it’s packed but that only forces me to get more creative with my workouts and how I use my body in the given space.  I do elicit some stares as I conduct my movement experiments but I don’t let that stop me from getting work done in the gym.  Perhaps it was a little reflection on the crowded gym or maybe an article by a chef/MD I read today, but I felt especially inclined to provide a word on new years resolutions today.

Spend enough time in the fitness industry and you will run in to your fair share of trainers I like to call “Muscle Musolinis”.  You know the type.  They are the super motivational, dogmatic purists who tell you exactly what to do and how hard to do it.  These guys and gals are full of fire and love to inflict pain for the betterment of your waistline.  They know how to get results and are with you every step of the way to motivate you when you let up in the least bit.

This works well for most people seeking personal training however, it is hardly sustainable.

We’ll delve in to that specific dynamic in the near future.  For now, I would like to explore an analogous dynamic that takes place in the doctors office.

There is no question that modern medicine has brought us great scientific advancements over the last 150 years.  The most revolutionary development of modern medicine, however, has nothing to do with any of the core sciences at all.  Medicine, as it is most widely practiced today, is based on the premise that when we fall ill, the body is actively destroying itself and nobody but the physician knows how to stop it.  This makes sense since, afterall, this person spent nearly a decade eating, drinking and sleeping nothing but the core sciences.  Whom better to come to the rescue but they physician?

I had never really given this concept much thought before my exploration of more traditional modalities.  What I found was that never before the creation of what we call Conventional Medicine, has there been a power shift from the patient to the physician.  Though lacking in the technology of today, traditional medicine has been effective at building health (as opposed to treating sickness)  due to the belief that the body knows what is good for it and the physician is simply there as a facilitator.  For better or for worse, we now go to our doctors office ready to report a basic chief complaint and provide a few brief symptoms.  That’s it.  We actively remove ourselves as much as possible from the care team.  We then expect another human being to tell us how to rid ourselves of our ailments.  

This is why, as much as I criticize modern medicine, I don’t fault physicians for our failing health status in this country.  For as long as we continue to deny that our bodies inherently possess the potential to heal themselves, and that we know better than any other human being what is best for us, we will continue to flounder in a perpetual state of sub-clinical sickness.  As long as we aren’t sick enough to notice, your doctor and the healthcare system at large, is happy….

…but where does that leave you?

geek speak for "this changes that"

Cost/Benefit

Nearly everything in life is a balance between the good and bad.  We find this articulated in the writings on morality in holy scriptures throughout history as well as Newton’s 3rd law of motion. The most obvious example of this in medicine is the balance between the potential benefit of a drug vs. the side effects.

There is a grander implication of this perpetual balancing act to which we are condemned. We all pretty much know what is good for us in terms of diet and exercise.  I opened up with the image of a drill sergeant personal trainer because we all know that as long as we put in the work, we will get the results we desire.   We all know what to do.  It is the how that causes us to fail.

The easiest way to abandon a new year’s resolution of any other commitment to get healthy is to sacrifice too much of that precious commodity called quality of life (QOL).  Sure, you may see some initial results and feel pretty good about yourself but if you don’t maintain and experience a healthy quality of life throughout the process of self-improvement, you will be faced with that inevitable question: “Why am I doing this?”

The spice of life

An article in The Atlantic hit my own personal Twittersphere today.  It is a piece written by an interventional cardiologist who works as a professional chef.  He goes by, “Dr. Mike” on his blog titled, “Grassroots Gourmet“.

Dr. Mike shares his opinions about the latest policy move by the FDA to reduce the amount of dietary salt available to the public.  Not only does he elucidate the QOL costs of painting salt to be a villain with such a broad brush, but he also questions the science behind the governmental recommendations set forth.

As is usually the case, my favorite line of the article comes at the very end:

The government needs to leave the recipes and the cookery to the chefs. And leave the salt on my pommes frites.

In the end, we must enjoy life.  This isn’t the usual declaration that moderation is the key to your fitness goals.  Let me make that clear lest you accuse me of holding such a simplistic position.  No, there are some things to be added and subtracted in varying degrees if we want to achieve any goal in the realm of health and fitness.  The key is to know which guilty pleasures are ok and which will derail your efforts.

Part of that entails hard work (personal training) to right the wrongs of life of corporeal neglect.  The other part of the balanced equation is informed strategizing (wellness coaching) to make sure YOU maintain the power and don’t put yourself at the mercy of the cookie-cutter plan some other human devised for you.  We are all infinitely unique and require someone to help us ask the right questions of ourselves so that we may uncover our true potential.

We all make resolutions from differing starting points.  This is why, as much as I love to see people just get up and move on their own, I always watch with a bit of morbid curiosity as I know that if they are anything like most people, they will sacrifice too much QOL for the sake of the image that comes to them as the clock strikes 12:00 every December, 31st.

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2011 in review

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This year has been one of transition.  The blog got a new look, some new subscribers and helped me zero in on the subject of my graduate studies.  There will continue to be an evolution in 2012 as I continue my studies of Kinesiology and Sport Psychology.  I thank you for your readership, comments and encouragement.  I hope you continue to share your thoughts, wisdom and passion for wellness and performance with me in the coming years.

Below is a little “year in review” feature the good people at WordPress were nice enough to create for me.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 40 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Pumagility for wellness

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I can’t say I have always been a fan of Puma.  They’ve always been more about making a fashion statement than performance in my opinion.  I have been known to sport some of their shoes while throwing around some weights but as far as doing anything athletic, they all fell a bit flat.

That said, I have fallen in love with their latest shoe.  Not so much for its utility, but more for the message surrounding it.  The tagline is “Get a Move On”.  Sound familiar?  This is the type of mentality/lifestyle I began writing about in my very first post (titled, “Get Moving!”) on this humble blog.  When I first saw the television commercial, I immediately thought that if MFW were to run a spot, that it would look very similar to this: