And One, Two, Three!

I have several friends right now who are trying to take better control of their bodies through diets. There are some pretty creative ideas out there on how to lose weight. How about the Alternate Day Diet, where you basically alternate between starving and indulging. Just thinking about the Cabbage Soup Diet makes me nauseated. There's all those single food diets, where you pack your gills with one food, like watermelon or grapefruit. There's a million choices: Adkins, Weight Watchers, low-carb, low-calorie, pills, powders...it is a dizzying array.

Here comes confession time. I have gained 20 pounds in the last few months. *cheeks blushing, head shaking side to side* Excuses aside, my health needs to be kicked in gear once again. Here's some interesting things I found on Psychology Today:

The government has long espoused moderate daily exercise—of the evening-walk or take-the-stairs variety—but that may not do much to budge the needle on the scale. A 150-pound person burns only 150 calories on a half-hour walk, the equivalent of two apples. It's good for the heart, less so for the gut.

I don't like where this is headed.

"Radical changes are necessary," says Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Waistland. "People don't lose weight by choosing the small fries or taking a little walk every other day." Barrett suggests taking a cue from the members of the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), a group of more than 5,000 successful weight-losers who have shed an average of 66 pounds and kept it off 5.5 years. They had one thing in common: vigorous exercise for at least an hour most days of the week. She estimates they burn an extra 2,800 calories a week.

Did you catch that? Vigorous exercise for at least an hour most days of the week. I didn't think this was going in the direction I was hoping, which involved more Heroes watching and blog writing. Well, alrighty then. I want to be motivated. I want to be healthy. I want that for my friends as well. So let's get to it, shall we?