The Purpose:
What's another fitness blog for anyway? Well, several things:
1). It's for me (the author) to be able to document my ideas, beliefs and findings on food & fitness and be able to track this over the years (yes I plan to do this for years!)
2). It's for you (the reader) to be challenged, questioned, and to be able to argue about your own fitness and food related beliefs.
3). It's for the sharing of current and past ideas about the science of lifting, training, building muscle, running, cardio, health, fitness, clean eating etc etc.
4). It's a place for all the questions you and I both want to learn about to be put out there and hopefully, one day, answered.
5). Most of all, its a place for like-passioned people with different ideas to discuss, convinced, be convinced and offer helpful hints and advice to each other.
If at this point you aren't as motivated as the whole Braveheart army, that's ok. I'm no Mel Gibson. But hopefully you are as excited as I am!
The Author:
Location: Durham, NC
Occupation: Graduate student in physics at Duke University (5th yr)
Hobbies: Lifting, Running, Baking (not cooking!), Dog Training, Physics
I spend most of my life in the lab, in the gym, and around the house. I live with my wonderful, handsome boyfriend, my amazing roommate of two years and three pretty, playful, precious and sometimes rambunctious puppies. My Aussie is almost 3 years old, my boyfriend's Boxer/JRT/BC/lab (aka mutt) mix is 10 mos and my roommates Lab/Pitt is 2 yrs. They all get along amazingly well and training/playing with them keeps me sane.
In terms of fitness, it's a long story. Here are the highlights:
- During childhood I played many sports including soccer, street hockey, frisbee, touch football and basketball
- During high school I continued soccer, track, and crew but during the winter season took a fitness class where I was introduced to lifting. This basically involved letting 20 students into a weight room and telling them to go for it. I didn't learn technique, but I did learn that I loved certain machines.
- Along with beginning to workout I also began to watch my diet more. I wanted to lose a little extra weight, but unfortunately my obsessive personality got the better of me. Sophomore year in HS I developed anorexia, lost about a 1/3 of my body weight, and began a battle which I still fight today between my brain and my body. I debated on whether to share this or not, but when I look at many of my attitudes towards food and fitness and health a lot of them have been influenced by my eating disorder. It has been there ever since I became a lifter and a dieter and although there are times when it gets the best of me, there are other times where I have managed to silence it. I think it's important, in any good experiment, whether in the lab or on a blog, to have all of the information, all of the variables before making accurate assessments.
- College brought about a slower time. I gained way more than the freshman 15, got very overwhelmed with my classes (I was attempting to double major in biology and physics), and stopped working out full stop.
- After deciding to lose some of the weight I had put on the first two years of college I went back to the gym, became obsessed with working out and again, threw myself back into the world of the eating disorder. In retrospect, it always seems that my most severe bouts of restrictive eating have begun as a good, honest effort to become healthy and have gotten carried away.
- College was also where I began << to love >> running. Although I had run track in HS, it was just something to do to fulfill my sports requirement. I began to run in college as a way to get away from studying. It soon became the only escape that really could clear my mind. Because I went to school in Boston, every year I also got to stand around mile 20 of the Boston Marathon and admire all of the runners, young and old, who trained and pushed themselves to complete the amazing feat of finishing a marathon. Although long distance running isn't my thing, I love the atmosphere of races and have plans on racing next year (hold me to this!).
- For the past 4 years I have been working at getting my Ph. D. in physics at Duke U. I have had several month periods where I have given up on healthy eating and working out, but for the most part I have continued running and recently have gotten back into lifting. I love it. It, more than anything other than the puppies, has kept me happy and sane through the long hours in the dark lab and the sometimes (o.k. almost always) frustrating life that is the life of a graduate student.
So that's where I will end and hopefully all the other posts will have less to do with my personal life and everything to do with healthy, delicious recipes, killer workouts, burning questions and fun facts!
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