When It Becomes Normal To Feel Sick

April 4, 2013 in Fitness, Health, Lifestyle, Nutrition, People, Self

There are some people who go through life never feeling sick, and never taking a day off work. I am not one of those people. I would say I average a day off every second month, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it does add up. And it does encourage the observation “You’re sick a lot!” The thing is, I live with someone who has chronic health problems and auto immune problems, this means if anyone is sick even remotely near us he’s going to get sick. And then I’m going to get sick. We have had our diet [...]

Why We Should Allow Drugs In Sports

March 25, 2013 in Current Affairs, Fitness, Sport

Everyday we are learning more and more about the latest drug scandals in our favourite sports. Whether it be Lance Armstrong’s confession (if you can call it that) on Oprah, or the daily revelations about doping cover ups in the AFL and NRL. But have we all got our knickers in a twist about nothing? Maybe. Here are a few arguments for allowing drugs in sport. I’m not saying they are correct, but maybe we should at least think about them. It’s about the competition, stupid! Look, when I watch AFL or Rugby League I want to see a bunch of fit [...]

Bringing An Agenda To The Table

March 15, 2013 in Anecdotes, Fitness, Health, Lifestyle, Nutrition, People

Recently I wrote an article about My Body, My Choice. I wanted to highlight the differences between personal choices that have little or no effect on the wider community, and those that do. When I was thinking about personal choices that have a cost to the community I knew I had to think of some examples. Smoking was one. Binge drinking was another. But I also wanted to use food as an example as well, in terms of the the healthcare costs directly related to  bad diets and our sedentary lifestyle – diabetes, heart disease, bowel cancer – things like [...]

It’s kind of S.A.D (Seasonal Affective Disorder)

January 8, 2013 in Fitness, Health, Lifestyle, Mental Health, People, Self

Get the ‘blues’ in winter? Feel down, depressed, miserable? Most people don’t enjoy large parts of winter and struggle with the lack of sunshine, pleasant temperatures and colour that other seasons afford us. However, you may struggle more than the average person, and your ‘blues’ may not be limited to the season of winter. Seasonal Affective Disorder (also known as Seasonal Anxiety Disorder) is actually a mood disorder that can present as crippling depression and leave the sufferer feeling quite simply, ‘sad’, for no obvious reason. Although not recognized officially until the early 1980’s, Seasonal Affective Disorder has been studied [...]

Where Do Fat Individuals Fit into a Healthy Society?

December 12, 2012 in Body Image, Film & TV, Fitness, Food & Recipes, Health, Lifestyle, Mental Health, Nutrition, People, Self, Society

I’m a little bit torn. Every other day I see the Ashy Bines Bikini Body Challenge or the Michelle Bridges 12-Week Body Transformation lurking in my Facebook newsfeed. Twitter brings me nutrition advice about activated almonds and I stumble over the Michelle Bridges column every weekend upon opening Sunday Life. That woman is seriously everywhere. I start to feel bombarded. I start to feel like I’m living in a society in which my body is everybody’s business. Like the excess kilos that push me to the wrong side of the ‘overweight’ mark are a burden I’m placing on Australia; like [...]

Donating Blood: The Gift That Keeps Giving

November 21, 2012 in Fitness, Health, Human Rights, People, Self, Society

As someone who worked in one of the state’s largest private hospitals in oncology, I saw the positive effects that donated blood could bring. Over a period of five years I worked as an AIN and a Patient Assistant, looking after people with various forms of cancer and other blood based diseases. Some patients would come in for day treatment and receive blood as part of their treatment while others were transfused in their beds. I remember frequently being sent down to pathology where the blood and blood products (plasma/platelets) were kept and having to get bags of blood kept [...]

Advice To My 15 Year Old Self

August 13, 2012 in Body Image, Dating, Fitness, Friendship, Health, Mental Health, People, Relationships, Self

Have you ever wished you could go back in time and give yourself some advice? I know that as I sit here at 32, there are certainly things I wish I could warn my fifteen-year-old self about. I posed this question to my friends on Facebook and the prominent theme in their answers were to not doubt yourself, not conform, that it’s ok to deviate from the norm. As well as some serious fashion advice: no to perms and Tencil jeans. If I had the opportunity to write a letter and advise my much younger self, this is what I [...]

Olympics: Swimming And The Media

August 1, 2012 in Current Affairs, Entertainment, Film & TV, Fitness, Health, News, Sport

Whenever the Olympics is on, I become an armchair expert at the swimming. You see, I was a swimmer as a young’un, therefore my expert hat appears every 4 years.  So getting up at 5am and ignoring all my other TV shows for a week becomes standard fare in my household. I have to say, all my squealing and clapping my hands at the TV (and possibly waking my neighbours downstairs) has not resulted in the plethora of medals the Aussies have been expected to take home. I’ve noticed two things in the media over the last few days in [...]

BBC Website – Plot Yourself on the “Global Fat Scale”

July 18, 2012 in Body Image, Current Affairs, Entertainment, Fitness, Health, Lifestyle, News, Nutrition, Technology

The BBC Website has provided an application that, by inputting your location, age, height and weight, plots how you rank in relation to the world’s population for BMI. The new BBC calculator can tell you if you are a healthy weight for your height and how you rank against others globally. Using your age, sex, nationality, height and weight, it will come up with a number representing your Body Mass Index or BMI. This is a measure doctors use to gauge obesity. The app plots your BMI and shows how you compare to people from your own and other nations. [...]

100 Naked People Changed My Perspective (SFW)

June 20, 2012 in Body, Body Image, Entertainment, Fitness, Health, People, Self, Sex, Society, Stories

The first life drawing class I ever took went as you would expect it to. A bunch of immature people, giggling and trying to look but not stare at the naked woman sitting in the middle of the room. Do we draw the pubic hair? Do we draw her nipples? What is polite and not polite? Oh no, she’s moving! Do we look or not look? By the end of that 3 hours, we were old hats with nudity, and over the next two years we would see more naked people than I can even remember, for at least 3 [...]