Jenny Simmons did a blog post earlier based off of the crazy stuff that brings people to her blog. I tweeted the other day a short list of more ridiculous search terms, but . . . here are some more crazy search terms and commonly asked questions that lead people here [with answers!].

Point of decision prompts: These are exactly what they sound like: signs that prompt a healthier choice at the time the decision needs to be made. Frequently, these signs are posted by elevators encouraging use of the stairs [I.e. Burn calories, not electricity], or in prompting healthier food choices [i.e. like sweets? Try fruit!]. They can be used in a variety of situations, and can be created to prompt a positive decision even within your own environment–just be creative! [See the image below for a point of decision prompt example about the stairs]

The MedicAlert conundrum: I get a surprising amount of traffic for people searching about the MedicAlert Canada price increase. I’ll post more on this tomorrow, but essentially MedicAlert increased their membership fees, and people are pissed off. The reasoning, from MedicAlert, is that it “costs more to run a business in Canada than in the US”. As a nonprofit, MedicAlert strives to make membership accessible to the “most people possible” [and offered me a slight reduction on my membership had I chosen to renew, which I did not, but only because I complained.] I also have beef with the fact that identification products that are exactly the same as the American products are 50-75% more expensive. What gives?

Giant Nutella: Yes.

I want to train for 10K runs but I have asthma: Go for it. Asthma may modify how you do things, but it shouldn’t modify what you do. I have trouble running, so I walk, but that is a choice I’ve made, just as choosing to train to run 10K is a choice, too. Start with a slow pace and work yourself up. If you haven’t yet, starting with a 5K is probably desirable, and I know many people who have been successful doing the Couch to 5K plan. One of my favourite fitness-weapons, however, is dailymile.comadd me as a friend! Make sure to take your inhaler with you, and if you’ve been instructed by your doctor, take it about fifteen minutes before you head out to work out. Also, ensure you do a long, gradual warm-up [walking, for example] and some stretching for about 10 to 15 minutes before you run–a long warm-up is imperative to success running with asthma because it allows your lungs time to adjust to the greater demand on them more gradually then if you just go out and start running hard right away.

Jay Greenfeld [and variations of his name, and references to his guest post]: Jay is a counselling psychologist and university professor, and is the author of My Choice – My Life: Realizing your ability to create balance in life. He also wrote a guest post about living with type 1 diabetes. I was fortunate to have the experience of having him as my Physical Activity: Promotion and Adherence prof last Fall. [If you’re googling “Is Jay M. Greenfeld awesome?” the answer is yes, googling student — and don’t worry, I pre-google my profs too, sometimes.]

Playing in leaves: Jay told us to. Legit.

Literal exercise: Literal exercise is the opposite of figurative exercise. I.e. literal exercise is the exercise you are actually doing, whereas figurative exercise is exercise you could be doing but aren’t and are instead sitting on your couch eating Cheetos? [I don’t know. I’m not an English major here, I am majoring in the literal exercise that is kinesiology. I may have had to look up figurative in three dictionaries.]

Cute edges of a cube: I have no idea what this is about.

Taking the stairs: is always a good idea. I made this slide on the subject for when I talk to grade elevens about asthma and physical activity sometimes. It tries to make a good point in pretty colours. Oh and look, a point of decision prompt!

10 flights of stairs a day can equate to 3.1 pounds of body fat lost over a year

Run stairs instead of escalator: You should!

Is physical activity important for a young child: YES! First, play is the way kids learn, and active games and play help to engage kids physically, affectively [socially and emotionally] and cognitively. Physical activity not only helps a child’s body become stronger and more efficient, but also builds thinking and problem-solving skills and helps build motor pathways. Playing in groups helps kids to work together as a team cooperatively, develop moral understanding of right and wrong, and in turn, helps kids to understand their own emotions and feelings, and those of their friends. Physical activities present a host of potentially new experiences for a young child and should be encouraged as much as possible!

AND . . . one of my favourites:

Sphinx wearing a tutu: I can’t even explain. I love the stuff people Google, for real.

I’ve received some good advice on the topic of failure, probably for the best that I received this advice prior to actually accomplishing my first university failure. Unofficial anatomy marks went up last week, and realistically, not even a curve can save me–I got an F.

The word failure, though, to me implies that I didn’t try my best. That I didn’t work hard and that I didn’t engage as deeply as I could. That I didn’t work for it. And I worked for it. I worked for the 37% that I got.  I did two tutoring sessions a week for a month. I did hours of revision and notes. I consumed a ton of iced coffee [caffeine doesn’t do much for me, so this was purely to add some joy to the agony within the form of a venti iced white mocha].

And fortunately, as it always seems to cycle back to all of Jay’s words in Physical Activity: Promotion and Adherence: I am more than my grades, and my grades do not define who I am as a person. And at least I know 37% more for when I re-engage in the journey of anatomy for September.

Experience is what you get, when you didn’t get what you wanted.

Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Experience. I got it.

Here is another one of those iamtheworstbloggereveritsbeenforeverandileftyouallwithacliffhangerohmygod posts. Now that we have that over with . . .

Appointment update. I saw the doctor on Monday. My iron is way lower than it should be, so I am supplementing with essentially as much as my body can tolerate [which is essentially the nice way of saying: take as much as you can because this is not good, a nutritional re-vamp is not enough alone, lady. Fine then. At least chocolate milk has iron in it?]

As for the thyroid, my TSH [thyroid stimulating hormone] is borderline high. So when we go re-test the iron in August, we will re-test the thyroid. Essentially, and it is kind of confusing, high TSH = lower thyroid hormone production; low TSH = high thyroid hormone production. So there you go.] The short story is that while I do not fully have hypothyroidism yet, however, it could go either way: best case, it corrects itself [this is what the internet tells me might happen, so I am not overly optimistic], otherwise, my thyroid hormone production will keep dropping, therefore my TSH will keep going up, and I will have hypothyroidism. So it is the game of wait-and-see, which kind of sucks more than just getting the diagnosis over with.

School update. So alongside this, I am also failing anatomy. I’ve been doing twice-weekly tutoring sessions with my friend/now-coworker Danielle and making flash cards and filling out charts, and all that supposed goodness. There is just so much stuff to remember, and this class is hard. I have five days left, so fingers crossed I make it through this and don’t have to repeat come Fall. I filled out eight pages of muscle charts today, and there is more to come, plus a tutoring session tomorrow. I am so close, but so far from being close enough. I’ve had so many of these close calls with dumb classes this year, like Principles of Coaching, but this is by far the closest aside from Intro Kinesiology where I failed pretty hard early on and then pulled myself up to a B. So there is hope to pass, but I’m just riding it out and not holding my breath on anything. i’m working hard, but it’s just nerve-wracking to have 50% of my grade riding on a 27-hour span of time. Three. More. Days.

Also thanks to studying, I’ve eaten like a third of a pan of rice krispy cake today [my mom put chocolate chips in it. Who can resist chocolate chips?]. And likewise have gotten no exercise.

QUEBEC. The Asthma Society of Canada booked my flight to Quebec City for August. I am so amped. Except I need to probably learn some French beforehand. it’s going to be a whirlwind trip, as I will be in-and-out of Quebec City in 33 hours and back home in just over 40. Or something. [I’m bad at math at the best of times and it’s currently 12:10 AM.]

Race training. And, another exciting bit! As soon as this exam is over, I’m kicking up the training for the Canadian Diabetes Association 10K walk in September! Wanna support me in the race and support Canadians living with diabetes? Hit up my fundraising page! Live in my area and want to race with us? Shoot me an e-mail.  I’ve got hopes to get “team” shirts made, and hopes to rock a blue tutu on race day!  With props to Jay, we’re going to be called Good Things Run on Insulin, and it’s going to kick ass.

Speaking of kicking ass . . . This is me on Friday. Rocking my You Can Do This Project t-shirt, kids’ scarves [one of which happened to be blue for Blue Friday ;)] and my sweet new ID necklace from Lauren’s Hope! :] [To follow up on a previous entry, I am not continuing my MedicAlert membership after August. They offered to decrease my membership fee from $5 to $4 a month, but why should I when that doesn’t help anybody but me? i’ll be rocking my cool Lauren’s Hope ID, hunting down an epic interchangable bracelet, and sporting some Road IDs [I can get multiple Road IDs for the same price as a MedicAlert sportband. Boooom!]  Anyway, oh my goodness, look how kick ass this necklace is!

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When I finished tutoring at the end of Winter term, I said to the student i was working with “You know this stuff now. Implement it — make it happen”. The guy I was tutoring had a lot of really good, creative reflections on the course content of Issues in Health. He knew the content. He knew how to implement the content. Now it was beyond ‘course content’ and had become ‘choice’, and was in his hands.

I am the first to admit that knowing it is the easy part. Doing it, on the other hand, is another story. Some more than others, but we all are aware, to some degree, of which activities/behaviours promote our health, and which behaviours are detrimental to our health. I’ve said it before, that I spend all day (and sometimes night) long some semesters learning about health and wellness. Today, for example, though not the most wellness-promoting, I wrote an anatomy exam, wrote a lab quiz, then came home and ate Sweet Chili Heat Doritos while on Skype for hours.  Still, I am in the same environment as I was the past two terms, but the content around me has changed and thus my behaviour has changed. February and March, for example, I spent tons of afternoons in the gym for class, plus regular exercise outside of class. Last May I was in a physical-activity oriented class.  Each hill and valley in the below graph I have either an understanding of why I was successful, or an excuse for why my numbers [kilometers] are lower:

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I think often that my last year seems to have been in two parts: Before Promotion and Adherence and After Promotion and Adherence, with a transition period in between when the course was occurring. The transition period was like my intervention. I was surrounded by Good Things two days a week, by words and motivation and people who were fighting the same battles as I was: the balance of school, work and maintaining a specific level of physical activity. Some also with the additional mixer of unpredictable chronic disease affecting their routines.

This said, my environment on the whole did not change. I was still surrounded by the same people with the same goals [or a different array of the same people with the same priorities] but it wasn’t freely discussed. We weren’t bouncing ideas off each other all the time, like the discussions about reading textbooks on the stationary bike, or having accountability partners, or eating five bowls of cereal a night [that happened. Not to me, but to people in my class. So good.]

It is not about that that class is done. it is not about my asthma sidelining me for over two weeks. It is not about the anatomy midterm sucking the proverbial life out of me.

It’s about me. It’s about my choices. It’s about me finding ways to continue that process that started nine months ago and do what i am capable of, and then some.

It’s about getting back into it.

I know it. I know what I should be doing and I know how to do it. Now I just have to implement it.

Make it happen.


note: there is some crazy thing going on with my tags. i’ve got tech support and my friend Mike on it :].

On the 12th of each month, a bunch of bloggers from around the world take 12 pictures throughout their day and blog them. Here are my pictures from March 12th, 2012!

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9:37 am – bedroom. Yeah, honestly. Now, where’s my backpack at?

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12:54 pm – kitchen. Forgot to take any pictures at school, but canned pumpkin is far more exciting. Also it looks gross. Also it got turned into something delicious.

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1:25 pm – kitchen. One of my best friends, Donald, making hot chocolate from scratch.

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1:41 pm – kitchen. Baking is done and we didn’t even burn anything down!

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1:46 pm – kitchen. Hot chocolate is done now too!  So. Good.

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1:56 pm -kitchen. Not as good as it sounds.

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2:13 pm – kitchen. Pumpkin Pie Brownie from Chocolate Covered Katie!  Better than it looks. And moderately healthy, too! We even subbed the oil for apple sauce.

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4:06 pm – work. Got called in to work after school because my coworker Jess is sick and Other Kerry [which is what I call her; also known as “Kerry-with-a-Y” and just “Kerry” whereas I get called “Little Kerri”] is in Mexico!  Played NHL Monopoly for an hour . . . my job is hard.

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4:26 pm – work. I owned the Flames for a bit [I traded them], and the Leafs [the second best property, ironically. Yes, I do love them.] for the whole game.

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5:39 pm – work. We have lots of candy and candy canes at work.

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8:40 pm – bathroom. My friend Mike does Mirror Mantras every Monday to fuel him through the week, which I have always loved. So this week, I decided to join in!  I figured my mom was going to take it down as soon as she went into the bathroom, but she actually liked it!

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11:39 pm – kitchen. I have two presentations tomorrow – one on the overhand throw [honestly], and one is group teaching 6 and 7 year olds [aka our classmates pretending to be 6+7 year olds] to dribble a basketball.  We are playing a music game, so I did some fun GarageBand stuff for one of the games in our lesson!  [Kin win? I think so]

12 of 12 was created by Chad Darnell, and is now being hosted here!