Eve posts fitness, food, and science sites she reads

Every modern fitness blogger knows that part of the fun of doing a new workout routine, getting new exercise clothes, and working toward a greater goal is telling the internet all about it in a post that takes at least twice as long as the event in question. Before I was a Fanci Fun girl, I kept a fitness journal off and on for several years. I love participating in fitness and health communities, and I love what awesome resources you turn up from recommendations.

I finally deleted This Is Why You're Fat from my RSS. The food looked both repulsive and somehow delicious. Enough with the awful temptations! However, I added This Is Why You're Thin! on the suggestion of this Fanci place.

A few days back, a friend shared an article from Eat This, Not That, which is a subsite of Men's Health. It's a daily article dump that provides easily digestible breakdowns of the differences between similar dishes among restaurants, has a love affair with ranking foods and beverages in the format Number Blankiest Blank, and highlights comparatively healthier alternatives to dishes at chain restaurants and in your grocery store. It seems mostly geared toward casual users, but its constant turnover of articles and suggestions for variations on how to use ingredients or reviews of new products can help healthy eaters out of a food rut. It's a handy resource you could probably access from your internet-ready smartphone as you sit with your work buddies at Applebee's. Or at least, that seems to be the crowd toward which it's geared.

Several years ago, I used to post regularly on a general interest forum that has a geeky skew. I wasn't a great fit, and I stopped participating there. Since then, I've been casting about for new forums - not exactly to get as involved as I was in the other, but just because it's nice to be in a community with people who hold similar interests. Looking for other fitness enthusiasts, I was on the Self forums (mostly full of newbies and people who couldn't spell) for some time during my first stab at the Self Challenge and lurked on Runners World back during my brief flirtation with the Couch to 5K program five years ago. And now, I'm a lurker at JP Fitness. They run a subforum specifically for people doing the New Rules of Lifting for Women (a book I looked up and eventually bought due to high praise from the commenter community at the Gawker Media site Jezebel), and the other subforums are definitely worth reading. Great resource for dietary advice and reviews, recommendations for injured athletes, great inspiration with photos and videos of weightlifters of all experience levels, the posters are civil and helpful, and the moderation seems great, which is important for keeping a community running smoothly. I just haven't had anything to say that I felt warranted posting there yet.

Another favorite is Science Daily. Science tends to cheer me up, and these science PR folks certainly know how to grab your eye with pithy headlines about the latest studies, with dire warnings, bleak negations of previous hope, and best of all, guardedly-worded maybes about the end of diseases and conditions, the key to the solving of so many problems. The future is coming! Of course, the future's been coming for a long time, as you can see from the archives when you look for articles related to the article you've just read. The other day, when I was searching for a link to a story I read about studies that promise new non-addictive pain reliever based on research done on hot peppers, I found several other articles that said just about the same thing (along with related studies about capsaicin, metabolism, and weight loss). Science Daily is basically a repository for press releases about studies recently published, and some of those studies may be redundant, may contradict other studies, or may be examined in a new way for that particular release. Overall, I feel better informed glancing over the quite healthy RSS feed several times a day, plucking out promising-sounding stories from the 45 new items that have shown up in 8 hours' time. Huzzah for the progressive march of human knowledge as it pertains to being alive and all that rot.

I used to read Scientific American, but one of its regular pop psychology contributors irks me endlessly, and the crap shoot of "Will this contain a video, or will it hopefully be something I can just read?" was a frustrating roulette of information denied due to inability to update Flash and other video-displaying programs, not to mention it's against company policy to watch internet videos. No matter. I try to keep my RSS fairly simple and do regular pruning.

Feel free to share some of your favorite, blog-pertinent links.