The Hottest New Adult Exercise:
"What was once a popular grade school game has made a huge comeback among adults. Not only is dodgeball a good workout, but also throwing a ball hard at someone else relieves a lot of tension."
What a sick fucking game; watching Freaks and Geeks reminded me how horrifying this elementary school PE requirement was for me and so many others. But hey, if grownups want to do it I guess it's great since its voluntary rather than compulsory.

To balance out the picture in my last entry, here's one with the cortisol enhanced belly playing a less prominent role in the photo:

Cortisol, Stress, and Weight Gain:
While waiting for a tanning bed to open up, I picked up one of those girly magazines I so rarely delve into and found an article about abs in your twenties, thirties, and forties. The article talked about the way most women's abdominals change as they age and provided supposedly the "best" ab exercises to target each of those age group's abs.

The most interesting thing in the article applied to the thirties crowd. Apparently we release a hormone called cortisol when we're stressed out, and cortisol makes you gain weight ESPECIALLY in the tummy (this is where I carry most of my extra baggage, right around my middle). By the time we're in our thirties the article said many of us can have chronically high cortisol levels.

I came home and looked up more info on cortisol's relation to weight gain. It's fascinating to ponder the ways our mindset and attitudes influence our physical health and well-being.

So . . . I'm not going to allow things to bother me and get me all worked up since that spike in stress has such a long-term effect on my body, especially since I have that "bad" kind of fat as far as its location (in the torso) being linked to heart disease.

I'm not sure if I can attribute all of the belly you see below to stress - some of it might just be nature taking her course. But yeah, the majority of it I owe to choices I have made to sit in front of the computer working or wasting time rather than being more active and consciously choosing to respond to trivial frustrations with unnecessarily high levels of anxiety, tension, and stress.

All About My Vagina : smell (1/1):
"Washing makes my vagina smell less strong. Going several days with no washing results in a more pungent vagina. Most people could probably have guessed that."

MyVag.net is a fantastic matter-of-fact website by one woman writing frankly about all aspects of her "vag". Her entry on its smell goes on from the quotation above to describe the aroma as similar to "raw potatoes" and "white glue".

We need more of this type of honesty regarding our genitals instead of dumbing things down, or covering them up, or just plain lying about them and promoting sheer stupidity.

Sometimes I cannot believe how little people know about vaginas, but this chick is one smart cookie. Her intelligence blesses us with greater accuracy than we're used to (come on, raw potatoes and white glue aren't words you've ever heard used to describe the smell of pussy, but they are so APT) without being clinical.