That's Fit

What makes your high-rise box in the sky a healthier living space? Unless I'm camping at high altitude, I'm not a fan of living where the birds fly, but a whole lot of people call a high-rise home. To be fair, city living is often more conducive to daily walking compared to my soccer mom-suburban sprawl lifestyle.

Don't just examine the space layouts when shopping for a high-rise home, consider the health of the entire building and surrounding area. The Chicago Tribune had fun applying these five criteria -- admittedly unscientific -- to a few of the largest residential towers in Chicago:

• Walkability: Pop in your address at Walk Score to find out how close you reside to walkable destinations such as stores, schools and parks.
• Conservation Efforts: Does your building recycle, use green lighting, rehab with green materials?
• Access to Green Space: If you live across from Central Park, you're golden. Beyond looking out over greenery, you must be near it to reap the physical benefits.
  
• Fitness Facilities: On-site, affordable fitness is critical, especially if nearby green space is filled with hoodlums after dark. Unless you own the penthouse, you probably don't have space for a home gym either.
  
• Healthy Eating Options: If a gas station is the only food source in the area, you're in nutritional danger.
  
  

Wonder how the nearly finished Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago will score.

The Rockwellian image of the nightly family dinner is becoming harder and harder to create for American families. Commitments to jobs, school, outside obligations, and irregularly scheduled meetings frequently place barriers between loved ones. Similar obstacles are also placed (or land with a thud) in the way of daily exercise, allowing unhealthy behaviors to enter -- and take up temporary residence -- in the home.

Thankfully, there still are many ways to spend quality time with your family and, as a very healthy bonus, burn some calories in the process. The folks at Parents.com have come up with a great list of ways to do just this, in their article 10 Ways to Exercise as a Family.

• Go for pre- or post-dinner walks
• Crank up the music and boogie down!!
• Make a game out of household chores
• Sneak workouts into other activities
• Turn TV commercials into fitness breaks
• Have a weekly sports night
• Walk or run for charity
• Put kids to work in the yard
• Team up for gardening
• Walk the dog

For a detailed description of each of their ten great suggestions, visit the Parents.com website by clicking here.

What are you supposed to do if your kid won't eat his or her veggies? Over at Well, The New York Times' health blog, they're talking nutrition with two leading experts, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and Dr. Joshua Sparrow. Their recommendation? If your child won't eat vegetables, don't worry about it.

I know what you're thinking ... WHAT?!?!

A house that makes you lose weight. Wouldn't it be awesome if, just by stepping foot in your own home, you'd be on your way to a healthy weight? It's not so simple, I'm afraid.

But AOL Home has a slideshow of some pretty wacky house designs that surely must help their owners live a healthier lifestyle. How about a ten-story home that's only equipped with stairs? Or a house that's built like a jungle gym? Or a house on an island that can only be accessed by rowboat? The sheer act of getting to and/or around these houses is a workout.

If you look around your home, you'll likely see less extreme ways that it can help you get fit. How about making two trips every time you have to go up the stairs? Or playing a game of basketball with that hoop you have outside? You can also engineer additional fitness opportunities -- like putting up a rock wall in your garage just like one of the families in the slideshow did.

Have fitness questions? Fitz has your answer. Our ThatsFit.com fitness expert -- and now your own virtual personal trainer -- will help you get fit, increase your overall health and do it in a fun way. Drop your questions here in the Comments section below and we'll choose one per week to publish on That's Fit! Learn more about Fitz here.

Q. Hi Fitz, I'm 26 years old and have never been happy with my upper body. My arms are lanky and my chest is soft. I have a demanding job as an attorney, and simply don't have the time nor the know how to get involved in a complicated training regiment. I know I have to "earn" a good body, so I was hoping you could dumb things down for me. A simple routine I can do in a hurry. P.S. I love your fit tip videos! Thanks. Tim

A. Hello Mr. Tim! Training for a guy with "no time" huh? That' my specialty! Glad you asked. Look pal, I wish I could pull off the persona as a rocket scientist, because I'm on top of this stuff ... but I can't. Fitness is painfully simple, and you can achieve your goals without much complexity.

I'm so excited to share with you the recipe for my Protein Power Potato. It's something I've been eating several times a week, and it really has served me well. I insist that my food be: low cal, low fat, high fiber, often high in protein and overall nutritious. This Protein Power Potato fills me up, and gives me the energy to get through tough workouts or wild days with my kids. (It keeps me really trim too.)

I've included an option for making this a vegetarian or carnivorous option as well. Since I understand food, and know what I want out of it ... sometimes I just look in my fridge and concoct something that's going to give me what I need. That's how we got this meal. Did I mention this thing is delicious too? Mmmmm. I could eat it every day!

To give it a try, visit the Recipe section available at Fitzness.com, page 42.

There are chemicals everywhere in our every day life. Though some are absolutely necessary from a public health standpoint -- chlorine to sanitize drinking water, for one -- others have been linked to certain health issues.

Though it's impossible to avoid chemicals altogether in our modern world, there are steps you can take to reduce your own "chemical load," or the amount of chemicals that you carry around with you in your body. At Mark's Daily Apple, they recently suggested 8 different ways to reduce you chemical exposure in your day-to-day life.

We gave up household cleaning solutions several years ago in our house, because they'd often trigger my asthma. Instead, we use a variety of natural ingredients like vinegar (great odor absorber), baking soda, and good old hot, soapy water. When I smell a chemical fragrance or cleaner now, it doesn't smell "clean" to me, it smells toxic.

Want to learn more? Check out this NYT article on how to reduce chemicals and make your home more environmentally-friendly.

Are your kitchen countertops killing you? Stop laughing -- I'm being serious here. There might be a very real and potentially deadly source of radioactive gas in your home--your granite countertops. According to this article from the New York Times, granite countertops can contain high levels of Uranium, which is radioactive in itself, and when it decays, it releases radon, a radioactive gas. If that's not frightening enough, consider this: radon can cause lung cancer.

Not all granite countertops are dangerous, but have the potential to be. What can you do to protect yourself? Test the merchandise before you buy it by hiring a certified technician to measure your radiation levels or picking up a DIY tester from the Environmental Protection Agency.

(Via Crabby McSlacker)

Remember how happy we all felt when Lay's introduced Baked Potato Chips? I do. It was a feeling of relief for me. I had given up chips in lieu of a hard fit body. Fair exchange I thought! But then, there was this company telling me that they weren't going to fry all of their chips anymore, and yes ... there would be a healthier version for people like me. Yahoo!

Once again, snack lovers get to rejoice. The LesserEvil brand snack company has created an amazing variety of popcorns and krinkle potato sticks to make just about everyone drool. Most single servings contain about 110 calories of which about 20 come from fat. Not bad!

The Classic Kettle Corn is the perfect combination of sweet and salty, and thank goodness my bag was a single serving. If it weren't, I could have devoured nine! It was better than any of the junky stuff they sell at carnivals for sure! The Black and White Kettle Corn made my children's "movie night" here at home an even more special event. Good news for me ... I didn't feel the slightest bit bad about giving it to them. The Zesty Pizza Krinkle Sticks were odd to my husband and I though. Why? Because we could not figure out how they made them taste exactly like pizza! It was both weird and wonderful at the same time.

Here's a random-sounding connection: The older your house, the healthier you are. Confused? I know what you're thinking: How does one factor have anything to do with the other? Don't worry; there's a perfectly reasonable explanation.

It's not so much about the age of your house--it's about the age of your neighbourhood. You see, old neighbourhoods tend to be more walkable, whereas newer neighbourhoods tend to be built around this unfortunate habit we've developed of driving everywhere. And not so surprisingly, how walkable a neighbourhood is has a direct impact on the levels of obesity in the area.

So next time you're in the market for a house, consider buying into a older neighbourhood--or at least one where you can walk to the store.

Women's Health magazine just sent me a release with some fun tips entailed, and I thought I'd share this one with you. Four fabulous moves useful for those of you guilty of missing morning workouts to sleep in late, and then missing the gym after work due to fatigue. As your online trainer I want to make this clear to you: skipping your workouts on a regular basis is detrimental to your health!

Of course, early morning workouts can be tough. They're also what keeps you full of the energy you need to get through each day with vigor! Check out this gallery, and next time you go to hit the snooze button ... get your fanny up and do the Cat Cow pose instead. (No moo-ing necessary!) These four easy moves will give you the energy to get to the gym and start your day off right!

Medicine cabinet is actually a terribly misleading misnomer. Contrary to popular belief, bathroom "medicine" cabinets are among the worst possible places to keep medications, which seems to call for a name change, if you ask me.

Due to the regular warmth and humidity in a bathroom, many prescription and over-the-counter drugs can break down over time. That's why it's best to instead keep medicines in a cool, dry place -- preferably somewhere that is locked up and out of reach of children and pets.

For more examples of some of the worst places for your health, check out this slide show from our sister site, AOL Health.

While incense is often linked to meditation and tranquility, it's now being linked to something much, much different -- cancer of the upper respiratory tract.

To clarify, only use over long periods of time appears to increase the risk, and it does not increase the overall risk of lung cancer. A study found that "Incense burning almost doubled the risk of developing squamous cell upper respiratory tract carcinomas including nasal/sinus, tongue, mouth and laryngeal. There was an increased risk both in smokers and in nonsmokers, pointing to an independent effect of incense smoke."

As scary as this sounds, as long as you're not filling your room with incense every day, year after year, you're probably in the clear. However, it's good to be aware that burning incense or candles introduces environmental pollutants into your home, which isn't the best thing in the world for your health. If you yearn to burn, do your homework first!

I have a total love/hate relationship with medicine. Although I value science and medicine, quite often I can't stand the affects they have on me. I simply can't stand to be drowsy, foggy or affected in any way. Prescriptions are great if they fix what's wrong with you, but all of the side effects are for the birds. I suppose if we all took each drug correctly, we may have less. So, I was particularly intrigued when Women's Health posted a study regarding drug labels.

According to a survey in the Annals of Internal Medicine, almost half of the participants misunderstood drug warning labels, and most ignored the directions altogether. This gallery provides some of the most common instructions you'll find on those little stickers slapped on each bottle and what they really mean.