Things to read

I think a lot of people look to exercise to help them lose weight, and when they don’t lose weight immediately with exercise, they quit. They return to the couch, and they basically never move again. What is lost in that is that fitness is almost certainly more important than fatness. — Gretchen Reynolds, promoting her new bookThe First 20 Minutes.

On the one hand, this is a bit of a “duh“. On the other hand, there are clearly a lot of people who don’t get it.  From the same article:

Ms. Reynolds makes a clear distinction between the amount of exercise we do to improve sports performance and the amount of exercise that leads to better health. To achieve the latter, she explains, we don’t need to run marathons, sweat it out on exercise bikes or measure our peak oxygen uptake. We just need to do something.

“Humans,” she writes, “are born to stroll.”

While I’m writing about exercise, you may have seen references to the recent study which concluded “[h]ealthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.”  If you’re interested, the full text is here.  (I also realize that not everyone cares ;)

On a different note, Seanan McGuire has a great “Dear girls of the world today” post on her blog:

Collect dolls or knives or books or interesting rocks. Watch horror movies or romances or cartoons. Run races; go to spas. Eat cake or lettuce. Buy yourself a toy light saber and make your own wooooom noises while you wave it around; build a cardboard castle and chuck plush mushrooms at your would-be rescuers. Live your life, the way you want to live it, and understand that no one can kick you out of “the girl club” for doing it wrong, because you’re not.

May is Mental Health Awareness month:

Mental health is about more than mental illness. Please don’t hear “mental health” and just think “crazy people”, or even, more enlightenedly, “people with mental illnesses”. Health isn’t only a topic for sick people, and that’s just as true in the psychological as the somatic. — Siderea

I found this lesson in illustrating wheelchairs from someone who uses one rather illuminating.

Also: May the Fourth be with you!