"Where shopping is a pleasure"

Before last summer, I had never experienced life without a Publix grocery store. In March of 2006 my parents moved to North Carolina and the grocery store scene there is not a pretty sight.

How are Bi-Lo and Ingles supposed to stand up to the brightly-lit, well-organized aisles of my local Publix? Whenever my mom comes to visit me at school, she comes up with any excuse to go to Publix. She relishes taking me grocery shopping to stock my house, a formerly hated task.

If you visit the three stores Web site's you can see that the other two do not hold a candle to Publix, even it's Web site is the prettiest.

But now down to the nitty-gritty of a grocery store. While browsing the aisles of one of my favorite Publix's (located at 34th Street and University Avenue) I found myself in a very happy place; the dairy aisle. The selection and quality of the food at Publix cannot be beat. I find myself taking things off the shelves at random, just because they are so pleasingly packaged. When I'm buying the "Publix brand" food I don't feel like I'm buying an off-brand, like I do when buying food from Bi-Lo.

I just love Publix, because even though shopping there inspires me to fill my cart with only healthy foods (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), everything I buy looks delicious under those bright lights.

If you're looking for me...

I'll be at Florida-Georgia, the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party! I'll be eating tailgate food and filling my stomach (and liver) with delicious beverages. Hopefully this weekend will be safer than previous Fl/Ga weekends, and in light of recent events unfolding at my school, hopefully the Greek community will be able to represent itself as it truly is: leaders in service that our school couldn't do without.
I'll keep you updated on the craziness when I get back!

My feelings exactly

I've always been the person who gets angry when they hear about celebrity weight loss. I mean how difficult can it be to drop five or 10 pounds when you have a personal trainer, trained chef and top-of-the-line gym equipment at your beck and call?? I was not surprised when Heidi Klum dropped her baby weight in what seemed like hours after birth. Renee Zellweger's post-Bridget Jones weight loss seemed effortless to me, and I was glad to know that someone else shares my frustration.

A recent article in the New York Times discussed viewer's reactions to NBC's "The Biggest Loser." Obese people compete on the show to see who can lose the most weight by the finale. These 18 people work out with a trainer and compete in challenges very different from the workouts of the average dieter.

People watching at home are at first inspired by the contestant's weight loss but quickly become discouraged when they see someone lose 31 pounds in one week. The reality of this reality show is that most people are not going to have the same weight loss experiences as the "normal people" on the show.

If I lose one or two pounds in a week when I'm dieting and making the effort to exercise, I feel accomplished and motivated to lose more next week, so I can't even imagine the sense of achievement the people on "The Biggest Loser" have.

I wish every overweight person in America could have all the necessary resources to lose the weight they want to get rid of, but the reality is that most people don't. Therefore Americans need to stop thinking that weight loss for themselves is going to be just as easy as weight loss for celebrities. Because it's not.

Powerthirst

My roommate keeps our mini-fridge stocked with Sugar-Free Red Bull so on my quest to out-energize her I stumbled across a new kind of energy drink, Powerthirst.

I certainly hope you clicked on the link and throughly enjoyed the ridiculous video. And for anyone who's interested, there is Powerthirst 2, also found on YouTube.

But other than Powerthirst, I've never had any desire to drink energy drinks. I started this school year off strong with an expensive and frivolous addiction to Vitamin Water. You know that water that 50 Cent and Kelly Clarkson advertise for, it has just as many calories and as much sugar as Gatorade but without the full flavor.

I began to drink it when my roommate over the summer was real heavy on the stuff. She never had less than three bottles of Vitamin Water in our refrigerator at a time and I mean come on, the bottles just look so cool. So I decided I would try one or two flavors and before I knew it I was on a quest to taste every single one.

Some were delicious, like Focus (kiwi-strawberry), XXX (a mix of blueberry, acai and pomegranate) and Rescue (a green tea flavor). And some were just downright disgusting, like Revive (fruit punch) and Energy (tropical citrus).

However, the Bi-Lo in Black Mountain, N.C. is very limited in its selection, so my interest was waning until I got back to school and discovered the wall of Vitamin Water at the 34th Street Publix. Then, with all the new flavors to try, my addiction blossomed into absurdity. I bought all the flavors I hadn't tried yet, along with the flavors I had grown to love over the summer.

Whenever I felt a little tickle in my throat or a runny nose coming on, I convinced myself that I was sick because I wasn't drinking enough Vitamin Water.

But I finally cured myself of my addiction when I realized, without a steady paycheck coming in, I couldn't afford the two-dollar-a-day habit it had become. That doesn't seem like much, but the disapproving looks I got from cashiers when my grocery bill turned out to be half Vitamin Water were almost deterrent enough.

Journalism and Anthropology?

I never thought that the classes from my minor would have anything to do with the classes from my major, but apparently I was wrong.

In health and fitness writing we're reading a book called "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." Oddly enough, one of the anthropology classes I'm taking is introduction to forensic Science. In my forensics class we learned about the University of Tennessee Medical Center and its "lovely, forested grove" that is actually a hillside dedicated to the study of human decay (Roach 61). The researchers lay human bodies out in the sun or shade to study the way the bodies decay based on the environment they're in. I also read about this in the book and was shocked to actually recognize some information in a book about cadavers.

I think this is a pretty disgusting tactic, but then again I do have a pretty weak stomach. I was very disappointed to learn that I would be dealing with dead bodies and remains in my sanctuary from the strange and disgusting, my journalism classes.

But to my surprise, I like the book. So far, so good. It's well written and actually kind of funny. The author, Mary Roach, looks at cadavers with a mixture of humor and respect and it works for her.

???

Fatblogs. What is a fatblog? Well gentle readers, I was wondering the same thing. Apparently there are people out there who find it fun and rewarding to share their weight loss experiences with the world at large. Jason McCabe Calacanis is a blogger who enlisted the help of his audience in his quest to lose weight.

The LA Times called it "Weight Watchers for the blog set, with a dash of public humiliation for incentive."

You might be wondering what's so humiliating about posting your diet or workout schedule on your blog. Well the answer is... not much. What's really humiliating is that he posted his weight, whether it was up or down, on his blog every day.

Now I used to go to Weight Watchers. It's a great program for people who want to lose weight and can't do it on their own. You're held accountable because every week, someone is looking at that number on the scale and writing it down. The key word here is someONE. Not however many people look at your blog, but just one person. And that is the reason for the question marks in the subject line of this blog. Never will I ever allow my weight to be known in such a public forum.

So readers, if you're logging on every day to see what fun and surprising subjects I'm posting about, keep logging in, because I will always be posting about fun and surprising subjects. But if all you're looking for is a number, I suggest you look somewhere else.

Functional Fitness

Functional fitness was a term I had never heard before I started this class. I never thought about exercising for any reasons other than competition or weight loss. Matt Herring, the strength coach for the University of Florida men's basketball team, described functional training as keeping in mind the way the body actually functions, not doing some crazy exercise just to improve your physique.

Functional exercise mirrors the body's actual movements, according to Renata Du Plessis, a trainer at Gainesville Health and Fitness Center, in Gainesville, Fla. She listed six exercises that mirror the movements we make in everyday life: squats, lunges, pulls, pushes, twists and bends.

I think functional fitness is a very interesting concept, especially since I hate the weight room at the gym. Everyone is looking at you, and since I have always avoided it at all costs, except when coaches have forced me to go, I really have not idea how to use the machines. But all the exercises Renata listed are ones that I know how to do and can do without the judgmental stares of the residents of the weight room.

Eighty percent of Americans complain of lower back pain, Renata said, and a way to cure that is to work on abs and improve core strength. This is a great example of functional fitness, exercises I can do to improve my body in a practical way. Sit-ups and crunches are some of my favorite exercises to do, ever since my swim coach went through a phase when she would make us do eight-minute abs, we would do abdominal exercises for eight minutes and change the exercise every 30 seconds.

So I'm not going to pull any moves like the pre-Kevin Federline Britney Spears (rumor had it that she did over 1000 crunches every day) but I do plan on doing more sit-ups and crunches in hopes of reducing my back pain.