I Have Found the anti-Tiffany and She is My New Hero

I actually tried to post this yesterday, but the site was apparently having server problems. Having no post actually wasn't my fault this time :)

So I’m trolling through Tom Veneto’s site, reading some back articles, and came across a question someone asked about good fitness sites for women. Tom listed a few and among them was one called Skwigg’s World, which he said was funny and informative. I took a look the other day and loved it – Skwigg (whose real name is Renee, I think) is a real fitness buff and has a ton of articles, blog entries, pictures, etc. about health and fitness. She seems like a fun and down-to-earth person, although I’ve noticed we are such complete opposites, we’d probably either kill each other or be immediate kindred spirits. Besides the obvious difference – she’s straight and I’m gay – I have Katie, she is afraid of kids. She can’t cook, I can’t stop cooking. She watches 60 hours of television a week, I can’t be bothered unless it’s FitTV or PBS or Nickelodeon (give me a break, I have a 15-month-old). She is highly caffeinated, I get dizzy spells when I consume caffeine. She does extreme martial arts in which she gets the shit beat out of her on a routine basis, I cry if I break a fingernail (although I do plan on starting Taekwondo later this year. God help the instructor). But trust me on this one – Skwigg rocks. I’ve spent some time reading her blog and I even went all the way back to start at the beginning (about three years ago) because I think, in addition to being funny and intelligent, she has a lot of sensible, educational things to say about fitness. Like Tom, she tells it like it is and I love that – and I can see where I can learn a lot from her. This is stuff everyone should hear, so go check it out.

I was jazzed to see one of Skwigg’s most recent posts is on N.E.A.T. – Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. By sheer coincidence, I was reading something about this last week. Basically, N.E.A.T. is your “fidget factor.” It explains why a person like Strutt, someone who is constantly in motion and never rests, is far less likely to gain weight than someone like me, who can stay calm and still for long periods of time. N.E.A.T. is all those calories you burn off when you aren’t sleeping/resting and you aren’t doing some type of activity or exercise. In essence, people with a high N.E.A.T. factor burn off lots more calories than people with a low one. For example, Strutt is never still. S/he is constantly moving, twisting, fidgeting, tapping, and twitching, even when s/he’s asleep (yet one more reason we have a California King bed … LOL). And s/he’s never been overweight a day in hir life (unless you count the period of months right after s/he quit smoking, which I don’t). I never was a fast gainer, even when I became a resident of PCOS-land, but I will gain weight faster than s/he does under the same exact circumstances – but I’m also a much more physically serene person. So, the theory of N.E.A.T. makes a lot of sense to me.

I don’t know if this can be a learned behavior … I need to do some more reading. Frankly, I don’t know how you would re-program your basic personality to become inherently more spastic, but who knows? To burn an extra 200 or 300 calories a day, I'd probably be willing to do a lot worse :)