1. Photographing my cats. Yes, I know — weird.

2. Flannel. Wear with clear heels and you will suddenly feel much sexier. Just don’t tell anyone.

3. Don’t diet. Ever. I hate “no”. I get rebellious, and I really don’t like challenging myself to stay away from Buttercup Bakery. I think the cookies must get lonely, begging for a belly to love them. The best part? Learning to love the badass exercise session the day after—a different kind of high that burns off the frosting and keeps me and my body in check. Plus, cupcakes makes me much nicer and easier for others to love me.

4. Getting up today, feeling achy, too tired to move. By evening, total running euphoria, muscles nice and pliable, thanks to exercise.

5. More Running. I covet being a gazelle, so running for speed and beating previous times/miles is important to my training. I continue to challenge myself by perfecting my stride, but my darn lower back can keep up. I still practice…being sweaty makes me feel good.

6. Walking around NYC with the confidence in your stride knowing that you strong enough to resist a push or pull.

What are your 6 things?

Jillian Michaels wants you to write down your weight loss goals. She needs to shut it.

For some reason, I’ve always been resistant to things like writing down goals because it feels so motivational speaker affirm-y to me, like I’m some 80’s go-getter in a power suit trying to scramble my way up the corporate ladder, or a New-Age-y lady in flowing pants determined to find my myself via the spirit of a monkey.

But I am open minded enough to see how writing down goals might be a very sensible thing to do, as it makes what you want more concrete in your mind and gives you some direction and all that. I just don’t get it when it comes to weight loss goals. And I don’t understand how it’s any different than say, your everyday to-do list.

Do you want to know what I never hear when I talk to fat person, a skinny person, a man or woman?

When I started exercising, back when I gained 20 pounds boozing my ass off, my list would have said this: Lose 20 pounds

When I lost the 20 pounds, I would make a new list and it would say: Lose 5 pounds

When I talk to someone that’s super thin about their exercise goals, I get this answer:
Lose weight

Like them, I didn’t give a sh*t about healthier or stronger. Those words were never in my vocabulary. I just wanted to wear my skinny-pants again. I wanted to lose weight.

So here we are, 7 years later. I got so much more out of exercise that “just weight loss”. The jiggles disappeared, I could run much faster, I was three times stronger, my muscles were defined, and I gained the baseline fitness level and confidence to try anything physical.

Listen, I love Julian, she is amazing at what she does. However, there is now a responsibility to our fatter-than-ever society: it’s not just about being thin, the other factors are way more important. Weight-loss should be a side product of exercise, not quite a goal.

From this day on, instead of starving yourself thin or getting your colon washed out with that crap they stick up there, try getting on the treadmill for half-hour. If you don’t feel better, email me and we can talk through it.

Bread..looks suspiciously like fat cells…

Q: Is it true that I’m stuck with the fat cells I have? Or is there some way I can lose them?

A: No, you’re not stuck: You can shed fat cells, but you won’t find it to be a stroll in the park. When we gain weight as adults, we are mostly enlarging the fat cells we have instead of adding more. This process has a medical name: hypertrophic obesity. Reversing this type of weight gain requires shrinking the cells, but they don’t put up a huge fight when being shrunk from plus size back to normal.

While not exactly easy, this type of weight loss is more doable than reversing the other kind of obesity: hyperplastic.

When we quickly put on a lot of pounds in early childhood, at puberty, and sometimes even as adults, we can grow new fat cells. Known as hyperplastic obesity, it poses a daunting challenge. The only way to be thin if you have an excessive population of fat cells is to shrink them below normal size, which is where things get really tough.

The cells begin to produce less leptin, a hormone that signals the brain when you’re full. You’ll end up feeling ravenous all the time. If you find the will to lose more than 10 percent of your body weight (more than 20 pounds for someone who weighs 200), eventually you’ll induce a process called apoptosis—cell death. You could begin trimming your population of fat cells. Once you do, you’ll find that maintaining a lower weight gets easier.