Raven-Symone is no stranger to the spotlight. She started acting at a very young age as a child star on The Cosby Show. As she grew up, she also landed her own TV show titled That’s So Raven which was a huge success.
The curvaceous Raven-Symone has always encouraged others to be comfortable in their own skin, no matter what their size. That is a motto that she has lived and continues to live daily. Now Raven-Symone is not only comfortable in her skin, she’s also comfortable in her clothes.
The star has recently dropped 70 pounds from her frame. “It’s great to put on clothes and not wear a girdle,” she says. She started focusing on her health after deciding to take some time off from the spotlight in 2007.
To drop the weight, Raven-Symone started exercising and making big changes to her eating habits. She worked out at least four times per week, including time on the elliptical machine during her sessions. For her diet, she traded in cupcakes and other unhealthy foods for oatmeal and apple slices for breakfast along with salmon and steamed asparagus for dinner.
Read Full Post >
Rosie Battista is a Healthy Body “Builder”, Trainer & Food Maven, committed to helping women entrepreneurs build healthy sexy bodies without starving or spending hours in the gym. She believes that when you feel healthy and sexy in your body, you present your best stuff to the world.Read more from Rosie at CookingNakedafter40.com.
Just profound “ity”. No, it’s not a typo, and yes, I made this word up.
My daughter and I were having a conversation about women and weight loss. Quite an intense conversation which unleashed a profound comment from my girl. She said, “look how easily we go from grateful to greedy“. She was talking specifically about weight loss and our reaction to what happens on the scale. We get annoyed when it doesn’t move down fast enough for our expectations. We’re happy the first week of a diet when the weight comes off quickly. Then after that, it’s all downhill with trashy thoughts that fill our heads.
How many times have you stepped on the scale and complained in disappointment that you ONLY lost one or two pounds? How often do the little thoughts in your head shout out, “I can’t believe I only lost a pound and I was perfect!”?
Read Full Post >
Common self-help suggestions seem to not be standing up to research. Two years ago, I wrote about the Dangers of Positive Thinking. When you try to convince yourself of positive statements, it can actually damage self-esteem. Now research is suggesting that visualizing yourself achieving your goals may make it more difficult to actually obtain those goals.
Visualizing yourself happy, successful, and in great shape is supposed to convince you that it can be true and inspire you to make it happen. However, visualizing yourself happy, successful, and in great shape seems to be so rewarding that we are no longer motivated to work for it. Visualizing it may be enough for us.
The study at Science Direct included four different experiments. What the researchers found was that positive visualizations were “de-energizing”, leading to the relaxation that comes after a goal has been achieved. In one of the experiments, “a positive fantasy about the coming week led participants to feel less energised, and when surveyed a week later, they’d achieved fewer of their week’s goals, than had control participants who’d originally been asked to day-dream freely about the coming week.”
Read Full Post >
Skechers Shape Ups shoes for kids has caused quite the controversy since their release, including a petition at change.org to have the line discontinued. Parents and professionals are disturbed that toning shoes are being made for and marketed to elementary school students.
The commercial aimed at young girls seems to be especially concerning to parents. The commercial in question does not specifically say anything about toning, but it does say that these shoes offer “everything a girl could want, looking good, having fun,” with “extra height and bounce,” which, of course, is too good to be true. Parents are concerned that the thin cartoon characters and emphasis on appearance is encouraging unhealthy attitude towards body image in young girls. Parents are also concerned that the commercial contains a shot of boys dressed as junk food following the singer; it certainly is a confusing image. I would be interested to hear what you think this is communicating to young girls?
Read Full Post >
Jane Rides is the inspiration for See Jane Ride Bicycle Tours (www.seejaneridebicycletours.com or www.facebook.com/seejaneride). You can never be sure where she’ll pop up – New York – or Paris – Fashion Week; a royal wedding; or a Penn State football game. She’s always on her bike, always smiling, and always looking fabulous…at least on the outside. Wherever she’s seen, you’ll know that she’s bringing her philosophy of empowerment by encouraging adventure.
I consider myself a citizen of the world, but I call Central Pennsylvania my true home.
It was on the rolling hills and wooded mountains of Pennsylvania where I first learned about the zen-ness of cycling. There was also that incident at the Tour de France but I’m not sure I’m legally allowed to talk about that yet…
Moving on…
As much as I love riding – a commute here, a single-track trail there – I have to admit I’m still a bit of a girl. A girl who has all the same issues that the girls – ahem, excuse me, women – I meet all over the world have. One of them, my dears, is body image.
You look at me and you think, “Dear Jane, what on earth do you have to worry about. You are perfection on two wheels. The hair! The skin! The figure! The lips!”
First of all, thank you, thank you, thank you. I am quite fabulous looking, aren’t I? But more importantly, I feel great. Not every day, that’s for sure. I am still human – and no human who isn’t overly medicated and delusional feels great every day. That’s just not natural.
Read Full Post >
