Bee’s Musings

WiiFit comes out on Wednesday. After I finally got my Wii (after annoying the living crap out of several area stores by calling on a daily basis to see if they had any), I’ve been pretty content with my small arsenal of games. I play:
* Guitar Hero 3
* Lego Star Wars
* Super Mario Galaxy

And, of course, some of the sports games that came with the Wii. I’m not the kind who will go the day a new video game comes out, but I’m tempted to do just that this week. WiiFit is supposed to get us off of our duffs and onto the WiiFit board for some interactive workout fun. Its got Mii Games (similar to the sports games) that will get your heart rate up, simulated jogging (which sounds like even less fun than real jogging), and balancing games. It will also test your fitness, and assign you a “FitAge.” (Move over RealAge… there’s a new game in town.)

I think the part of the WiiFit that I might be most interested in is the yoga modules. As you go through Yoga classes on your FitBoard, the system gives you alignment tips and tells you when your weight is off balance. That’s something difficult usually for a yoga instructor to do. In traditional yoga classes, alignment tips tend to be generalized for the whole class, not individualized to a specific student.

The truth is, I’m not likely to pick up WiiFit this week because I’m in the midst of moving, and I need a new desk and a vacuum cleaner a great deal more than I need a new video game. But come later in the year, you can be sure it’ll be on my wish list.

PS. Might not hurt to read a review of WiiFit from MSNBC.

Hula Hooping! Now that’s a way to get a smaller waist!

I’m a big fan of snacking. I joke that I only have one meal a day, and it lasts all day. (Ok, so maybe I’m not quite that bad… but I do have a fair number of snacks that I keep around in case of munching emergency.) So, when I found this list of 20 foods that help boost productivity, I had to share it. And after this post, I have to go to the grocery store to pick up some of these delightful goodies.

Walnuts. These are full of omega 3 fatty acids to help you think more clearly and keep you focused. Excellent source of protein, but be sure to chew well.

Strawberries. As with carrots and flaxseeds, strawberries surprisingly aid in better eye sight. Eating strawberries has also been linked to preventing cancer.

Papaya. The colorful fruit helps protect you against the potential damages of secondhand smoke, rheumatoid arthritis, and even the common cold.

Pear. Usually only available during the pear season and when they come out, I always get them. They taste good, they’re cool in the mouth and they are hypo-allergenic.

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Since I’m a registered iPod owner, I get the fun, promotional emails from Apple. Despite the fact that they break every best practice that I’ve learned for designing promotional emails, (They’re all images - very attractive on the surface but impossible to read without an HTML-enabled email program… but more about that will appear on eMedia Daily) I enjoy looking at their campaigns.

The campaign for their new iMac left me wondering about the consiousness of Apple, however.

The primary tagline? “You can’t be too powerful or too thin.”

Granted, we’ve all heard that before. You can’t be too rich or too thin. You can’t be too anything or too thin. But the fact is, in our society that is driven by how thin you can be, there is such a thing as too thin. Take, for example, Nicole Ritchie, Mary-Kate Olsen, and Kate Bosworth… all good examples of how we are obsessed with weight. It goes beyond the celebrities as well. At my office we have a “biggest loser” competition, which is often populated by the people who need to lose weight the least. I’m not sure if its supposed to be motivational for someone with 25 pounds to lose to be egged on by someone who wants to lose 5.

Either way, you can be too thin. You can be so thin that your body shuts down. And while I accept that this is just a marketing ploy from Apple to promote the thinness of their recent iMac release, it pays to be socially conscious.

In yoga, we talk a lot about prana, or breath. Working with your breath can help you get deeper into postures, and can help you maintain a difficult posture longer. It also can affect how you react to stressful situations, and maintain body temperature.

As it happens, most Americans breathe “wrong.” For most of us, when we inhale, our shoulders raise, and our belly sucks in. Then when we exhale, our shoulders drop, but only slightly. If we’re truly using our diaphragm and lungs to breathe the way we should, our bellies should rise with an inhalation, as we bring air into the very bottom of our lungs, and it should lower as we exhale, constricting our diaphragm and pushing air out of our lungs. I’ve been trying to breathe correctly, to see if I can actually feel a difference in my body.

What made me write this is simple: while I was working on my other website, I looked down to see one of my cats sleeping next to the chair. I realized that she breathes correctly - and it made me a little sad that our society teaches us to breathe in such a way that we “stay skinny” and tighten our shoulders up around our ears. At least, we can still find instances of breathing correctly, and with some practice, we can bring our shoulders down, and our bellies out, and learn to use our lungs again.

Yes, you read that right. I think I’m giving up food. In the past week, I’ve had more “bad food” experiences than I’d like to recall - including at least 3 incidents of cold chicken from well-known (and often well-liked) restaurants. Maybe I shouldn’t get chicken - and maybe grilled chicken is especially prone to being bad. But when you bite into something that is supposed to be hot, and is instead decidedly cold, it ruins the whole experience.

This isn’t just isolated to chicken, either. I had a nice, safe, veggie wrap for lunch yesterday. The artichoke hearts tasted fishy. I don’t know if they were just stored next to the tuna salad, or if they were truely rank, but either way, they were less than appetizing. One half of a wrap later, I’d had enough.

Now sure, I’d like to lose some more weight (and keep kicking butt in the Biggest Loser competition at our office), but I didn’t want to do it because the mere thought of food grosses me out. I’m truly starting to wonder if I want to integrate any food into my life that doesn’t just come from the produce section of my grocery store - that I can come home and wash, and determine if it’s edible.

Bleh.

One brave couple is trying to live on $10 each for 2 weeks for food. They’re doing this in honor of the people in third world countries who make less than $1.00 per day. I’ve read through most of the comments, and I have to agree that the one thing they are not taking into consideration is the fact that a dollar goes much farther there than it does here. If you’d like to follow their stories, here are the links to their individual blogs.
His
Hers

Since I’m always looking for ways to burn extra calories without extra time at the gym (or in my case, any time at the gym), this seems like a good option: The No-Workout Workout.

Of course, I’m not at all sure how well some of these really fit into every day life, without having people look at you and think “What the heck is that crazy person doing!?”

Ever wondered what 300 calories looks like? Well, it could look like a package of Swiss Cake Rolls.

Or, they can look like actual 300-400 calorie meals. They look pretty tasty to me. Now, all I Need is someone to cook for me.

“I gotta work out. I keep saying it all the time. I keep saying I gotta start working out. It’s been about two months since I’ve worked out. And I just don’t have the time. Which uh..is odd. Because I have the time to go out to dinner. And uh..and watch tv. And get a bone density test. And uh.. try to figure out what my phone number spells in words.” - Ellen DeGeneris

Note: I had to edit this post because someone mistakenly thought the previous title “I’m with Ellen” meant that I had decided to change my side of the fence and had replaced Portia De Rossi as Ellen’s muse. That is not the case, and shall never be the case. But Kev - thanks for trying buddy.