I’ve abandoned my morning walk around the neighborhood. I’m not a morning person to begin with, so about the fourth time I hauled myself out of bed and headed outside to find it cold and rainy it just started to seem more frustrating than not.
Then there was the day my walk turned into a [...]

Last week I did such a good job of taking morning walks. Every morning I ignored the siren call of my alarm clock’s snooze button and lugged my sagging butt out of bed to pound pavement for nearly a half-hour.
This week?
I haven’t done squat.
Part of the reason is my innate laziness: sweating to the [...]

Since deciding that I’d start walking occasionally to lose weight, I’ve actually been somewhat good about it.
I didn’t even let the overdressed women who walk scare me off, although I admit I now wash my face then brush my teeth and hair before leaving the house. And, yes, I’m now wearing my “good” sweat [...]

I’d said before that I plan to get more exercise and hopefully lose weight by taking up walking this Spring. So this morning I did just that: I went for a walk. Oh, it hardly feels like spring around here yet — in fact, it was so foggy outside that I couldn’t see the end [...]

I’ve had bad foot pain for the past two years. So bad, in fact, that my foot problems were part of what led to my diagnosis of fibromyalgia, although apparently the two things aren’t actually related. Instead, I have Morton’s toe, which basically means that my first two toes move upwards as I walk. The [...]

I’ve always loved the thought of jetting off to one of those fancy weight-loss spas — the kind where a 4-star chef turns ordinarily salads into culinary masterpieces and, between rounds of seaweed wraps and Swedish massages, you still manage to drop 15 to 20 pounds. Unfortunately, my budget can barely stretch to cover [...]

I believe it was Einstein who defined insanity as repeatedly trying the same thing in the hope of producing different results. Or something like that.
Well, my friends, I confess that for years now I’ve been insane.
I’ve tried cutting calories only to find myself standing in the gaping, incandescent-lit maw of the refrigerator at 2 [...]

I ran across an article this morning which really sent my blood pressure spiking. Doctors, it turns out, commonly prescribe placebos to patients, with over half the doctors in a Chicago study admitting that they’d done so in the past.
Sure, there are valid uses for placebos. Take, for instance, the recent study that put [...]

My fingers resemble Vienna sausages, swollen round little pink things that refuse to type without misspellings. My eyes feel like I’m peering through a big glob of Vaseline on my contact lenses, but even when I switched to glasses the haze didn’t disappear. All day long I’ve felt like I’ve had a hangover, although I [...]

For years now, my doctor and I have been sporadically trying to pinpoint the reason for my fatigue, aches and pains. I say “sporadically” because my pain itself isn’t a constant: there are days when even brushing my teeth seems like a Herculean task, and weeks when so full of energy my body practically vibrates. [...]