Category: Fitness
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Punchdancing
I ran back through the gates of my hall of residence and immediately stopped. It was getting dark and the bright lights of the dining hall lit up the faces of my peers inside. I had no desire to join them. I was too pent up. Too nervous about exams, too on-the-edge with my friends.…
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Fitbit – friend or foe?
I was recently gifted a smartwatch. And the first thing I did with it was turn off all of the health tracking features. Seems a bit of a strange move, I know. Having something so fancy and expensive on my wrist but only using it to alert me to select calls and messages… Why not…
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Why you should stop making New Years resolutions
When I was 19, my older brother bet me that I couldn’t go three months without consuming added sugar. My stubborn adolescent self began the challenge immediately. For the next three months, I watched wistfully as my family ate perfectly ordinary things like spaghetti and cheese toasties (added sugar in the spaghetti), my mum’s homemade…
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Growing older doesn’t mean growing old
My preschooler shuffled around on his seat until his face was almost pressed against the glass of the gondola. The whir of the cables serenaded us over rocks, grass and the odd sheep, until a small shudder rocked the gondola and we stopped. “Why have we stopped?” My son asked, clearly slightly worried that his…
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There’s vegan and there’s vegan
Many years ago, I visited a friend of mine for a few days while she was staying at her parent’s place over summer. Her mother had recently gone back to Weight Watchers, and her father was enthusiastically supporting his wife. They were the most welcoming, delightful family, but I was devastatingly hungry the entire time…
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Gym culture has changed for the better… and the worse
I started going to the gym in 2010 and, at the risk of sounding like an old lady, things were different back then. The gym I attended was split into two floors – weights room down the bottom, cardio equipment like treadmills and exercycles up the top. In practice that meant that guys went downstairs…
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Does Action Man have bigorexia?
Barbie gets a lot of shit for having a body that’s simply impossible to reconcile with good health. Since she came onto toy shelves in 1959, Barbie’s gotten thinner and thinner and her boobs have gotten bigger and bigger. I think it’s pretty well known that if Barbie were human-sized she’d be a freak. She’d…
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The gentlemen’s powerlifting competition
My breath rose in misty clouds in the air in front of me and I snuggled deeper into my blanket. It was 2010 and I was in a typical student hovel in Dunedin, having transferred universities to pursue nutrition studies. We were too cheap to turn the heat pump on in my flat, so I…