Working out at home

I've been going to a Pilates mat class one night a week and spending the rest of my time exercising at home. Mat classes are usually around $17/ea., at least in New York, so that's $68/mo., which is nearly the cost of a gym membership. To save money, I've purchased several DVDs to help guide my workouts at home once I've learned the basics in class. I've found two that are outstanding.

If you're looking for weight training, I've been really pleased with Kathy Smith's Lift Weights to Lose Weight 2. (I haven't tried volume 1 yet.)

Vol. 2 features two 20-minute workouts for the upper and lower body. I've enjoyed doing one 20-min workout each morning before work. It's just enough time to see a difference in your body, but not so much time that you can't fit it in before you head out the door.

If you'd like a 45 minute Pilates routine for home, I can't say enough about Karen Voight's "Pilates Core Power: Abdominals & Back." She does some slight variations from traditional pilates moves, but everything is well-paced, and she makes sure to counter-balance all exercises with their opposites so all muscle groups are attended to.

I've done this workout at least 20 times by now, and Karen Voight never gets on my nerves, unlike Kathy Smith, who is occasionally grating with comments like, "Sue back there is looking at the camera. She's trying to steal my thunder."

I didn't know that Karen offered this DVD in combination with another, so you might want to check out Total Body Pilates instead. It features the same routine, plus an additional 45-min lower body routine. However, that routine requires that you have a magic circle.

I would stay far, far away from Jennifer Kries' Pilates Method: Perfect Mix. This video is far from perfect--the production values are dismal, and it's more like aerobics than pilates. Also, she provides no instruction whatsoever--you pop in the DVD, and off they go, hitting the mats like crazy people with no narration or instruction so you have no idea what's going on on how to keep up. Yuck.

I am looking into purchasing other Kathy Smith and Karen Voight DVDs and will post reviews. I've grown to love working out at home, and it's definitely worth the savings.

Gluten-free Omega Smart Nutrition Bar

Found a new product about a month ago at the Good Life Market in Pittsburgh (which, incidentally, has the best selection of gluten-free foods in one store that I've ever seen). Anyway, it's a gluten-free nutrition bar by Omega Smart that is also vegan.

Most of the flavors contain soy or nuts, which I avoid, so I was only able to try the Banana Chocolate Chip bar and the Pomegranate Strawberry Colada. I don't plan on eating the Banana Chocolate Chip bar again (I'd give it a 4 or 5 on a flavor scale of 1 to 10), but I quite like the Pomegranate bar, and I just bought 12 of them to tide me over before my Pilates classes.

The combination of the agave nectar (to keep your glycemic index low) and the Omega-3 fatty acids from the flax seeds make this an impressive nutritional choice. I bought them from AD American Diabetes, whose prices are good. They arrived in a couple of days, and I'm very satisfied. Try them out.

Odds 'n ends

It's about time I get myself back to writing. The Xmas break threw me off my game. I don't have a specific topic at the moment, but here are a few things on my mind of late:

Politics
I realized that following all this political stuff is kind of a head-case exercise. It's all about untestable hypotheses. One of the predictions I read: if Bloomberg decides to run as Independent in February, it will split the vote between him and Hillary and McCain will win the presidency. It's all wheel spinning until the election results are in. It sort of reminds me of my mental state when I get too intellectual and disconnect from my feelings. It's as though the culture is doing that at large with no way to ground itself. I'm coming to view it as an unhealthy cultural sickness. All of this time spent on conjecture is time all of us could be doing other, more relevant things with our life. But, what else do we really have to do with our collective time, and how else can we construct a national dialog that anyone can participate in? I guess it fills a gap in between moments when we're shopping.

Television
The L Word is a freakshow horror. It makes Cashmere Mafia look like Shakespeare. Ilene Chaiken should be ashamed of herself. She couldn't write her way out of a paper bag. I think so poorly of this show that I'm not even going to construct an argument as to why it's such an embarrassing piece of drivel. Watch it for yourself to see how trashy, lame, and boring it is. It was never particularly good, but it has gone from bad to worse. There's no "so bad it's good" factor at work. It just blows chunks. Plots and characters are constructed in a way that is illogical, choppy, and inconsistent. If this represents the most talented of the Hollywood lesbian writers, no wonder we're stuck in a cultural ghetto. And with this shit as what we have to offer to the larger world, clearly we deserve to be right where we are.

Exercise
Pilates is a joy. So much better than yoga. What was I thinking? I was spending time on yoga when it turns out I didn't have to be stuck in downward dog. Instead I can be strengthening my muscles and having a good time, too. More exercise with less pretense. Hooray!