Posts Tagged ‘fitness’

Fitspiration, Thinspiration, and Personal Health at Odds

December 8, 2023 — Sounds great, looks great, not helpful. That’s how we would sum up the evidence for “fitspiration” social media posts and their influence on personal health. Oxford defines this genre as “a person or thing that serves as motivation for someone to sustain or improve health and fitness.” But a recent systematic review puts a harsher […]

Posh Fitness Culture for a Healthy Lifestyle

January 14, 2023 — What exactly is a healthy lifestyle? If you dig into a certain corner of public health research, you are likely to come up with healthy patterns of eating, physical activity, sleep, and stress management as the answer. But Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation, has a different answer for you. Fitness culture defines a […]

A Boom in Fitness Trackers, a Bust in Fitness

May 28, 2022 — Worldwide sales of fitness trackers increased from US$14 billion in 2017 to over $36 billion in 2020. The skyrocketing success of these gadgets suggests that more people than ever see some value in keeping tabs on the number of steps they take, flights of stairs they climb, time they spend sitting, and calories they burn. […]

Continuous Glucose Monitors for One and All?

February 12, 2022 — To each his own – because truly, one size will never fit all. We can find no better illustration for this than the idea that perfectly healthy people might want to wear a continuous glucose monitors. And yet we have a crop of new tech startups that want to put these glucose monitors on all […]

Pandemic Fitness: Peloton Takes a Dive

January 25, 2022 — The pandemic rearranged the landscape for many industries, and it certainly did that for the fitness industry. In 2019, it was a $97 billion industry. Then it shrank to $54 billion in 2021. Facilities closed and suddenly the big trends were fitness apps, home fitness, and outdoor workouts. Proving that luck matters, Peloton soared in […]

Has January Morphed into Anti-Diet Season?

January 18, 2022 — It is something of an underground PR triumph. What has long been a season of short-lived diets and unused gym memberships now seems to be a season for mindfulness and intuitive eating. It is a season for beating up on diet culture instead of beating up on ourselves. A descriptive title for the mood of […]

The Hazard of One Size Fits All

November 14, 2021 — It’s hard to miss the zeal that people bring to matters of health, wellness, and fitness. We’re part of it. Believing that health systems should, can, and will do better in helping folks with obesity, we devote silly amounts of time to writing about it daily. The motivation is simply to share information that might […]

Nope, Nutrition Can’t Replace a COVID Vaccine

October 1, 2021 — Can healthy people with good nutrition and exercise skip the COVID-19 vaccine? A research scientist and fitness enthusiast explains why the answer is no. I’m a fitness enthusiast. I also adhere to a nutrient-dense, “clean” eating program, which means I minimize my sugar intake and eat a lot of whole foods for the purpose of […]

Setting the Bar Too High at 10,000 Steps Daily?

September 13, 2021 — We’ve known all along that 10,000 steps per day is a goal for physical activity that came to us out of thin air. People latched on to it because it was a nice, round number. It was memorable. But the fact is that it’s arbitrary. In fact, evidence now tells us that one size does […]

HIIT Takes a Hit in an RCT for Certain Heart Patients

February 10, 2021 — High intensity interval training (HIIT) is hot right now. It mixes short periods of very intense exercise with less intense recovery. Even before the pandemic, interest in HIIT had grown dramatically. Then it spiked when pandemic lockdowns began. But a new RCT published yesterday in JAMA suggests that it might not be a panacea for […]