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One of life's mysteries is how a two-pound box of candy can make a woman gain five pounds.
For this and other jokes about dieting, dieting excuses, and more, visit butlerwebs.com.

What is the Riot?

The ultimate question for this blog is to figure out why everyone is so interested in dieting (myself included). If you google diet, it reads there are 156,000,000 search matches. The United States’ population just reached 303,000,000 and if you google diet there are 156,000,000 search matches related. This totals half the amount of websites for dieting as there are people in the country. If this was possible, you could look at it as if one of every two people in America has made a website that includes the word diet. This of course is not the case but the numbers are surprisingly high. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you see related links to diet. One link reads how to lose weight. Is everyone concerned about losing weight?

Look at the entertainment industry; it is clear that celebrities are worried about being skinny. From Lindsey Lohan to Paris Hilton, these famous figures are skinny and constantly focused on losing weight. On the home page for E online, the new video up right now is about how celebs quickly slim back down after having a baby. Not only is there an stress on being skinny, but being pregnant, or just having a baby is no longer an excuse to pack on a few extra pounds. There is the constant emphasis on how skinny or fat a celebrity looks in a picture. How can Americans escape the reality of how today’s culture is so focused on being thin? It is all around, on TV, online, in advertisements. While watching The Today Show on NBC one morning, six out of eleven commercials that came on were advertising either a weight loss product or a product that promoted a healthy weight. The constant reminder of the way a person looks is inescapable.

With such a strong emphasis on dieting, it also creates an easy target to make fun of. Jean Teasdale, a writer for the satirical newspaper The Onion, has written an article about her own experiences with dieting. Her story is funny because she faces many of the problems everyone deals with while dieting, which include not being able to stick to a diet, or getting sick of the same old diet everyday. It pokes fun at all these dieters, but reading it makes you stop and think about what dieting has come to. Why are people always focused on losing weight? Do people diet just to say they are dieting to make it seem like they are trying to lose weight? Obviously I do not know, but many people including Jean and myself struggle to understand the ways in which to diet.

Tired?

Can exercising actually make you more tired? If you are an endurance athlete the New York Times article entitled “Sleep After Hard Workouts? You Must Be Dreaming” says yes. This could be a problem for many busy people trying to stay awake at work. The answer? Sleep all day and not go to work? Of course that is not possible, but is there an a practicable answer? If you find your most tired an hour after your workout, plan to exercise an hour before you want to go to sleep for the night, that way it does not interrupt your plans. If that does not work try to take a power nap during the time you feel most tired. If there seems to be no solution that fits your needs, do not give up on exercising. You may be a little tired now but the benefits will last a lifetime.

Fast food is a difficult subject. For families on the go, students and traveling business workers the fast food option is inevitable at times. It is a quick alternative to a home cooked meal. This speedy alternative, however, is a quick way to eat a lot of calories. Fast food chains like Mcdonalds, Burger King and Starbucks give their health information on-line. Subway often advertises their calorie menus at their stores or on-line. This is not enough for city health officials in New York, however. The New York Times’ article “City Tries Again With Labeling Fast-Food Menus” discusses the new proposed plan that would make restaurants with 15 outlets or more across the country have to show their calorie information on their menus.

They want to have this information posted to help obesity. What I do not get, however, is how this will help. The general public knows how bad fast food is for you, yet they still resort to going there. Calorie information is publicized on television and can be found on the internet. If people care about the calories they consume they will not be going to fast food. If they must go to one of these restaurants and want to know the calorie information they will look it up. Once the customer is already making the stop to this restaurant they probably already intend to buy something, so why would the calorie information influence their decision. It is obvious that the more fries or the bigger the burger you have, the more fattening it will be, so who needs a menu to tell them how much more. If this menu is what people want to see then it should be posted, but I do not this it will help obesity.

Fast food is not the only factor in obesity either. If the person’s lifestyle lends itself to ending up with fast food every night then I would say it is the life style that is poor, not necessarily the fast food. Not saying that fast food is not bad, but if you have fast food once in a while it is not going to cause obesity. Obesity starts with bigger issues like genetics or poor habits and fast food adds to these issues, probably does not cause them. There are much greater factors that play into becoming obese. Trying to decrease obesity must begin somewhere, but I am skeptical this step will help much.

Do Research

Before exercising do your research.

Calories:
If your goal of exercising is to burn calories the first thing to do is learn about what a calorie is. Your body needs certain calories. Every diet needs to be healthy and should not be over done. Before starting a diet plan of counting and cutting calories, you should always learn about what you are actually doing to your body and if it will be beneficial.

Exercising:
If it is the calories you are worried about, however, a simple activity such as playing tennis will do the trick. The American Heart Association has a very helpful chart that indicates about how many calories a person would burn doing a particular exercise for an hour. This chart can give insight to how valuable each exercise can be.

Health:
The American Heart Association website is a very helpful site to refer to with other questions about diet and exercise as well. The tips they have are coming from a health perspective, and are all very important to keep in mind when choosing to diet. There are short and long-term benefits of diet and exercise, all of which should be motivation in helping pursue your goals.

Spice up your routine

When you decide to begin your diet plan, while it is good to have a schedule and stick to it, this routine may become boring. To stay motivated and engaged in your exercising plans it is very beneficial to mix it up. If you have decided to do your exercises through buying tapes or dvd’s to watch and work out to that could be best for you. After a while, however, you are going to become a pro at what you are doing and you might not even get as much out of it as before. Some fun alternatives might be:

Invite a friend over:
Be the instructor for the day and do all your favorite exercises while trying to challenge you and your friend.

Go outside:
Set up music and find a place in your backyard or somewhere flat where you can do your exercises in a different atmosphere.

Find other videos:
Dieting has become such a craze that it is so easy to find information. Diet.com has so many quick exercise videos. Take one day, go through many different videos and see what other ideas people have to add to your plan.



Stay creative:
Once you are bored of the same old routine, don’t be afraid to mix up different exercises from different sources to create your own routine. The benefit to making your own routine is that you can target the areas YOU want and you can pick and choose the exercise YOU like. This way when you go to exercise, it is what YOU want to do and can be fun!

Search the web:
The internet has so many websites out there that offer dieting tips, from eating right, to exercising right. Many of these sites can be helpful. Browse few some and one just may spark your interest and may make your diet complete.
A few ideas to start with:
An on-line fitness magazine
WebMd
Diet.com

Training outdoors

In light of recent events, running is on the mind. After the Chicago Marathon was stopped due the excessive heat, runners around the country have been worried about their own race. It would be awful to have been training for years to compete in a race and get stopped half way through. Having just completed my first half marathon, I was certainly dreading waking up that morning to a hot, humid day. Luckily October 13 in Hartford Connecticut was a crisp, cool beautiful fall morning.

While training, athletes should try to accommodate for any condition that they may face. If your event is outside training in the heat or the cold is very crucial. There are many effects heat could have on a person that range from dehydration, to heat exhaustion which could eventually lead to heat stroke. The cold, however, can be just as bad. If you are working hard and sweating, the water on your body could lead to pneumonia. Either way you can prevent your body from getting hurt by the weather just by training in different atmospheres. If you have an event that takes place outdoors where you can not predict what mother nature is going to bring that day, you have to prepare for anything.

The New York Times addresses this issue well with a list of other ways to prepare before a race as well.