I’m an official bitch!!
Hooray! Stumptuous.com is in Bitch magazine — an awesome interview with me by Yael Grauer. Check it out! It’s not listed in the table of contents, but it IS there. I get to say that women’s magazine workouts are “100% useless bullshit” in print! Suck on that, Conde Nast!
The Stumptuous Eats project
Gentle readers: I am hunkering down to put my crazy culinary ideas to paper. (Or, truthfully, ideas to electrons.)
Tell me: What do you want to see in a Stumptuous cookbook?
Any and all ideas will be entertained. Hit me with the comments or email me directly at mistresskrista [at] stumptuous [dot] com.
I’ll put out a call for recipe testers soon.
Higher BMI and risk of death in sumo wrestlers
We’ve looked at BMI and risk of death/morbidity in heavyweight NFL players; here’s a study released yesterday that examines the same issue in sumo wrestlers.
Artificial sweeteners not a “get out of bad habits free” card
An interesting piece in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association raises one of the concerns that I’ve long had about artificial sweeteners: that calories alone are not the only problem with sweet tastes.
No body is an island
Hot on the heels of my “bring fitness to the people” ideas comes this brilliant (as usual) essay from the folks at Exuberant Animal…
Giving her old life a knockout
I’ve been lucky enough to know the incredible people at Toronto Newsgirls. They are a fantastic, brilliant group of folks who are life transformation magicians.
Jacqueline Scott has gone from a life of hard knocks to delivering knockouts in the ring. The 29-year-old single mother, who grew up in foster care, is on her way to becoming a plumber with dreams of competing in the 2012 Olympics. She credits the Shape Your Life boxing program, run out of the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club for giving her the strength to turn her life around.
Please don’t comment about how boxing is mean and violent. Nothing could be more mean and violent than the shit some of these women have gone through. Hand-holding “let’s rap about our feelings” does not work when you are struggling to get off drugs, kick out your deadbeat abusive boyfriend, and get food on the table in a very tenuous day-to-day existence. You need to find a safer, welcoming space where people let you smash inanimate objects and release your anger in a healthy way.
Follow up on “A for effort, F for execution”
Well, it seems that the folks who wanted over-fat students to take mandatory exercise have re-thought their strategy…
I think (about dessert), therefore I am (taking up sugar)
Even the anticipation of sweets may cause our muscles to start taking up more blood sugar, say researchers reporting in the December issue of Cell Metabolism. That message is delivered via neurons in the brain’s hypothalamus containing the chemical known as orexin and the sympathetic nervous system, the studies in mice and rats suggest.
20 min a day to sanity!
A large-scale observational study shows that physical activity improves your chances of staying happy. The more you exercise, the better you feel.
At least 20 min/week of any physical activity (including domestic, walking or sports activities) meant a lower level of psychological distress. Participation in sports helped the most. [clicky to read the full study abstract plus discussion…]
Exercise and preventing weight gain in premenopausal women
A recent study shows that even fairly moderate regular activity helps maintain a healthy body weight.
Researchers examined the relationship between physical activity (PA) and weight maintenance/weight gain in a large group (46,754) of premenopausal women (aged 25 to 43 years old). Participants signed up for the study in 1989 and checked in again in 1997. 62% of the population gained more than 5% of their baseline weight by 1997.
One important difference between weight gainers and weight maintainers was physical activity. [clicky to read more…]