I’m here at Healthy Writer today to share my love for the Wii. The coach at my elementary school bought one for Fun Fridays, along with Just Dance. He gets all the kids to follow the moves and picks the best ones to take the controllers. Cool, right? I tried with the kids and just couldn’t get it, but I really was intrigued. When the Wii went on sale at Thanksgiving, I bought one and my own copy of Just Dance.

Y’all. It was hard to get used to. On Just Dance, it grades you on three levels: Missed moves, OK and Great. For the first week or so, my dominate percentage was in missed moves. Oh, it was awkward. But slowly I improved, learned to interpret the little symbols that showed the upcoming moves. And my percentages were more in the “OK” range.

And I was getting a better workout. I was able to get 10 songs done–about 30 minutes–before dinner, and I was working up a good sweat. The goal is always 10 songs, but it’s a fun workout, so sometimes I’ll play just one more.

The one downfall I find is the controller. Because you hold it in one hand, one arm gets way more tired than the other. And you have to hold it just so to get the right results. Maybe the Kinect is better because of this.

And it makes me sad when I can’t “get” some of my favorite songs. “Heart of Glass” and “Lump” are songs I don’t do well on. I have mastered “Wannabe” and “Groove Is in the Heart.”

I like it so much I bought Just Dance 2, which is SIGNIFICANTLY harder. “Jump in the Line” about killed me. And a lot of the Just Dance 2 songs can be played by 2 people, though no one in my house wants to try it (at least not when I’m around.) I like the first one best.

Does anyone else love this game? Any other Wii games you’d recommend? (Other than Glee, which I also have!)

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Visit MJ’s website to find out more about her books including Bluestone Homecoming and Bluestone Song, the first two books in her Welcome to Bluestone series.

So with that excuse at the center of things, of course there was a temptation challenge filled with everyone’s favorite foods. The winner (the person who consumed the most calories) would get to reshape the teams any way they wanted to while staying anonymous. Let me just say that I don’t like these temptation challenges because they encourage contestants to do the very thing that has made them all ill — eat too much.

Five people ended up eating, but Daphne consumed the most calories at 1,890. That’s a lot of peanut butter cups, people. But the only thing she did with her win was switch Jeremy and Conda, putting Conda on her black team and sending Jeremy to the red team. That left a lot of people, including me, scratching their heads. It wasn’t a strategic move but rather a personal one. But even that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. It sent one of the only two guys the black team had to a team full of guys (aka the people more likely to have big losses) and left the red team with only Chism and the rest women.

As you might expect, drama ensued as four of the five eaters admitted it. But Daphne lied to everyone, saying it wasn’t her. Oh yeah, that’s going to end well.

The next challenge was a big puzzle, and the prize was two-week stays at the Biggest Loser resort for every member of the winning team. The red team, led by Mark, won big.

The one quote I wrote down from this week, from Dolvett: “Sometimes the best way to take care of the people you love is to take care of yourself.” This came out while he was talking to Kimmi, who is a nurse, mom and all-around caregiver like so many women are.

Okay, the weigh-in. This is where I wanted to yell at the TV, asking the members of the black team if they’ve ever watched an episode of Survivor. You throw a challenge and it will come back to bite you in the butt, big-time. But that’s what they did. They willingly allowed themselves to have small losses or even gains in order to lose the weigh-in and send Daphne home.

I have mixed feelings about how things went down this week. Throwing a weigh-in defeats the entire purpose of being on the show. It’s supposed to be about health and fitness, not petty games and personal attacks. A lot of people are forgetting that this season. I understand people were upset about the change, but what did they expect? It wasn’t like they made any secret of the fact that Daphne would be sent packing at the first opportunity. Don’t expect to back someone into a corner and them not fight back. While it wasn’t a wise decision on Daphne’s part to do what she did, I can understand why she would act out in her position.

At the weigh-in, the black team’s numbers were dismal. The most anyone lost was 5 pounds (Chris and Chism), and Conda gained a pound. So I was all ready for Daphne to lose a big number and be safe from elimination. But she gained 2 pounds. Even with all her extra work this week, all those peanut butter cups came back to haunt her.

The red team, by contrast, had a good week. Five pounds was their lowest loss (Kimmi), and Jeremy (11) and Buddy (12) were both in double digits. Kim (7) went under 200 pounds. Their team’s percentage of weight loss was 3.39% versus the black team’s awful 0.75%.

I hate when challenges/weigh-ins are thrown, and I hate when the people doing the throwing can’t admit it and instead lie about it. How is that lying any different than Daphne’s lie about what she’d done? I am continually baffled by how great everyone thinks Conda is. Granted, I know she has problems and I truly want her to get healthy, for her sake and her little girl’s, but good grief the girl doesn’t know when to zip it. At the elimination, she didn’t seem to be able to resist getting in a few more digs on Daphne. It will be interesting to see if she continues all the drama and who will be her next target now that both members of the aqua team are gone.

What did you think of last night’s episode?

Steamed veggies? Yes. Death By Chocolate dessert? No. At least not beyond small portions and on rare occasions.

I mean, I know when I’m eating something I shouldn’t. I will often even feel the guilt and the voice inside my head saying, “You shouldn’t do this. It isn’t good for you,” before I eat it. Sometimes even before I prepare it or buy it at a drive-through window. And yet I do it anyway. And I feel like smacking myself immediately afterward. It’s frustrating, and it’s something I fight often. Why? Laziness. Mood shifts. Stress. I’ve got to just flat out stop it. Three months ago, I was closing in on the halfway point to my end weight goal. Now I’m re-losing several pounds, and it’s frustrating. I just have to not allow myself to let that frustration lead me down the path to more bad eating choices.

What do you think are some strategies for forcing ourselves to remember what we should be doing and to actually do it?

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Beginning next week, The Healthy Writer blogging schedule will be shifting a bit. Never fear, all your favorite Healthy Writer bloggers are sticking around. You’ll even be hearing more from some of them. As of next Monday, here’s the adjusted schedule:

Mondays — Michelle Butler (no change, still her fabulous and inspiring posts)

Tuesdays — Mary Curry (moving her wonderful food posts from Saturdays)

Wednesdays — Trish Milburn (The Biggest Loser recaps during the seasons, then other topics when the show isn’t running)

Thursdays — Rotating between Tawny Weber, Anna Sugden and guest bloggers

Fridays — Sally Kilpatrick (going from twice a month to every Friday)

If there are topics we’ve not covered that you’d like to see us blog about, please let us know. We’re here to help inspire you to live your healthiest life possible.

That piece of advice really struck me, but thankfully not because I’m struggling with a broken heart.  I am struggling with having hope and optimism about my weight loss journey and chances to become a healthy weight.  So much of this struggle is mental and emotional.  When you realize just how big you’ve gotten, you recognize how much you’ve been backsliding, or you just can’t break the plateau you’ve been fighting, those old thoughts of this is impossible and you’re just meant to be fat can come back.

I’ve battled those thoughts a lot recently, and it seems like Saturday, February 11 was all about the world shouting back at me, yes, you can do this!  It started with an email from a friend and former diet buddy.  She had lost more than 50 pounds in 2008 and inspired me to give it my all in 2009.  Sadly by the time I’d lost more than 30 pounds, she had gained that back and more.  This year, she started another Weight Watchers run and wanted to tell me she had lost 12 pounds in the first 5 weeks.  She had found the courage to try again, and it was working.

Later that Saturday morning, I went to my local RWA chapter meeting.  This is always a fun, educational time, and I love catching up with old friends.  I saw one I had not seen for several months.  The last time I’d seen her she was showing off a 40-pound loss.   She now has lost 70 pounds since the fall of 2010 (if I remember the timing correctly).  I went to talk to her and make a fuss about her success and ask her about her journey.  She said she was doing a medically-supervised diet that was about the right protein and fairly low carb.  She also told me that I had been her role model and inspiration.  There’s a lot of power and even responsibility in that, and it’s very moving.

But, she was not the only friend who was taking huge strides to get healthy.  I went to lunch with a bunch of friends, and it seemed like at least half the table was making diet changes for their health.  One friend had become vegetarian.  Another had started to meet with a dietician and had lost more than 10 pounds.  A third had started a diet that came with prepared meals and guidelines on how to eat a few other times a week.  Everyone around me was taking care to order correctly, and it inspired me to do the same.

That night, I got together with the fabulous boyfriend.  We are trying to eat out less and cook more to help jump start some more forward progress. We cooked a very healthy meal and could feel good about the food choices we had made.

The world surrounded me with positive examples of people trying to be healthier, and it game me inspiration and even some hope and optimism that I can do the same.  I lost 1.2 pounds at this week’s Weight Watchers weigh in and am trying to get back into the game.  My dream to reach a healthy weight has not died, and my journey to become and stay a healthy writer continues.

How do you find your hope and optimism again when you might have lost it for awhile?  What gives you inspiration to keep on keepin’ on?

In a sense this is related to the “Everything Bad is Good Again” series because it’s about revisiting things we’ve been told as fact.

Today’s source of frustration is about the relationship between salt and high blood pressure.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard that salt causes high blood pressure. My mom had high blood pressure almost all of my life so restricting sodium in the diet is something I’ve heard about for a long long time.

Except now I read that it’s wrong. And not only wrong but that restricting sodium is actually more dangerous.

How’s this for conflicting information:

Just last January (2011), the New York Times ran an article on healthier eating that included this reference to the   recommendations regarding dietary salt.

Under the guidelines released Monday (1/2011), about half of the populace should consume 1,500 milligrams of sodium or less each day. That includes children, African-Americans and anyone who is older than 50 or has hypertension, diabetes or chronic kidney disease. Everyone else may consume up to 2,300 milligrams, about a teaspoon.

But today I read something that completely contradicted that so I went searching out info and found this:

European researchers found that people with low salt intakes were more likely to die of heart disease than people with higher salt intakes.

That Study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last May, but Harvard nutritionists say the study should be ignored because it contradicts 25 years of research that correlates high salt intake, high blood pressure and the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Want to be even more confused?  One of the participants in that study said this:

“Our findings do not support the current recommendations of a generalized and indiscriminate reduction of salt intake at the population level,” said Stolarz-Skrzypek, a cardiologist at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Krakow, Poland. “We believe that the consumers should be informed about risk related to low- or high-salt diet and be free to choose the consumed food. However, our findings do not negate the blood pressure-lowering effects of a dietary salt reduction in hypertensive patients.” (Medicine.Net)

So what? Know the risks but lower your salt anyway?

And then there’s some more confusion. The same Times article said -

In 2005, the last time the guidelines were revised, the government urged Americans to eat more whole grains and less sugar. It was the first time the guidelines recommended replacing refined grains with whole grains, and it prompted major changes in the ingredients used by food manufacturers.

And CNN reported:

Eating too much sodium can push your blood pressure into the danger zone. Now, researchers are reporting that eating too many sweets–or drinking too much soda–may have a similar effect.

People who consume a diet high in fructose, a type of sugar and a key ingredient in high-fructose corn syrup, are more likely to have high blood pressure (hypertension), according to a new study.

According to what I’m reading today, the reduction of sugar is very important, but supposedly replacing them with whole grains is not really any help. It’s still too many carbs.

So what’s a person to do if they’re trying to live a healthy life and eat a healthy diet?

Well, I’m not all doom and gloom. 

The one consistent report is that our best bet is avoiding highly processed foods and sticking with natural, simple foods like fruits, vegetables, organic, grass-fed meat, grass-fed eggs and butter, etc.

So, what do you think?  Does all the conflicting info make you want to scream?  How do you handle it in your diet?