That's Fit

Think you're a healthy eater? Why? Because the foods you eat are labeled as being a "Healthy Option?" If so, you may also be wondering why your waistlines seems to telling a different story.

It turns out that most people will consume 131 percent more calories when they select food labeled "Healthy Option" on menus and on packaging, say researchers from Cornell University. What's more, because they're convinced that their meal choice was low in calories (which, incidentally, researchers also found is seldom the case), many people will go on to have more drinks, sides, and desserts.

At the end of the day, you're Healthy Option can quickly become the biggest challenge to your opting to eat healthy.

For several days now, I've been writing an ongoing series of diet and fitness posts titled "Why the Pounds Are Sticking Around," which are a collection of tips sourced from the health magazine Self. Since the response has been so positive, I decided to forge ahead with an idea I had for a series of healthy living posts. Since exercise and training are more my forte, I sought out information from an outside source -- Men's Health magazine. To that end, I found ten great health and wellness tips that I thought would be perfect for pieces on healthy living.

So, just as I have been doing with the diet and fitness posts, I will also be posting one healthy living tip per day as part of a series I think I'm going to call "Living Well." I think you'll find these tips to be as interesting and as helpful as I did.

Healthy Tip # - Showering shouldn't be a contact sport

If you wear contact lenses, you should avoid doing so while showering, say the folks at Men's Health magazine. Based on research conducted at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wearing contacts while sudsing up can expose your eyes to infection-causing water-borne microbes.

Instead, keep contacts in their solution-filled container until after you're done showering. Then, after you've toweled off, you can throw those bad boys back in.

If you were to guess what U.S. city consumes the most caffeine, which would it be? Me, I'd go with Seattle. Would I be correct? Not quite.

Seattle, while it does rank number one in coffee consumption, still falls short with regard to total caffeine consumption. Surprisingly (at least to me), Chicago was found to consume more total caffeine (coffee, tea, chocolate, energy drinks, soda, and caffeine pills) than Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and every other major city in the nation. These results come from a survey conducted by Prince Market Research.

I've never actually been to the windy city, but if I do plan to visit in the near future, I suppose I should expect to run into a whole bunch of highly energized people while I'm there!!

Curious to know how celebrities squeeze fitness into their daily lives? Want to know the secrets of the stars? Bi-weekly our That's Fit fitness expert Fitz sits down with the celebs we want to know more about, and digs out their great and not-so-great methods to staying healthy.

Hooray for Paige Davis! I just got done interviewing the delightful host of TLC's Trading Spaces and I genuinely like her a lot. We spent an hour blabbing our brains out, and I have to tell you that the girl is as easy, sweet and likable in person as she is on the show. The world of home improvement fans exhaled a collective sigh of relief when TLC announced they were bringing back their beloved Paige.

She's sweet, she's smart, and she happens to have a smoking body. She's been professionally dancing for a very long time, and has some terrific advice to help get the rest of us in super shape as well. Paige's perspective on both life and fitness seems to be on track. Her enthusiasm is contagious. If you'd like to catch a case of her 'perfect life' germs...read on!

Fitz: You've been gone from Trading Spaces for a few years, and just finished shooting the first half of the new season. How'd it go?

Paige: Great! We've shot 13 episodes so far. It's been different, but great! It's wonderful to be back working with all of my friends who were there before. It is so much fun working with Frank. And Doug is like a sibling to me. We have this silly chemistry, and we just poke fun at each other and have a blast all the time. Plus, I've made lots of new friends. I love it.

Fitz: Moving is really hard work. The audience may wonder of you're just the cute perky girl hosting the show, without having to actual pitch in to the tasks. How much physical labor do you actually do while filming?

Fitzness Fiends is a section devoted to you, the reader! We all have learned so much on our path to becoming more fit, and now it's time to learn from and inspire each other! Fitzness Fiends are constantly working to better themselves. Some are perfect, some are not. All have health on the mind. Please send Fitz your answers to these questions with a photo of yourself. Time for you to be the motivator!

Name: Barbara Tripp

Age: 41

Occupation: Dental Office Manager & single mom

How often do you exercise? Five times per week.

What type of exercise do you do? Aerobics, walking, jogging, hiking, bike riding, weight lifting, and most recently added to my routine, yoga. I love it!

The American public ban on smoking has been one of the most successful citizen-led public health campaigns of all time. Think a similar-type ban on cupcakes might catch on?

There's a growing movement out there, spurred by a law requiring schools to alter the nutrition of its students, to help kids eat cleaner, healthier diets. The latest manifestation of this obesity panic comes in the form of a cupcake ban in some Chicago schools. That's right. There will be no cupcakes at a handful of holiday parties across the Chicago region. Parents are asked, instead, to bring veggie trays in lieu of sweets and water rather than juice boxes.

I like this idea. Some don't.

"To believe that denying a couple of cupcakes during the Holiday season is going to make a difference in a child's overall nutrition is idiotic," writes the author of this editorial. "The Holidays are a time for celebration. And for generations of American kids, that celebration has taken the form of treats at school, shared in a true spirit of Christmas, with their friends and classmates."

Banning cupcakes only destroys the notion that holidays are special, says this man. What do you say?

12 "healthy" foods that really aren't:

Why? Click to find out!

This past weekend, a rather brutal marathon was held in Chicago. Brutal, as in the temperature was a boiling 88 degrees during the race. Normally, that's somewhat mild. But, for this time of year and for a long marathon, that temperature makes for unsafe conditions.

One 35 year-old died during the race, and thousands others quit before finishing and many suffered from heat-related problems as well. But, the lone death did not die to to heat exhaustion or another related malady, but from a rare heart condition according to reports this week.

A condition called "mitral valve prolapse" is being blamed in the death of Chad Schieber, although doctors estimate that the birth defect actually affects 2 to 5 percent of the population -- which is millions of people. Unfortunately, the condition is generally undiagnosed unless observed during a stethoscope exam, or in this unfortunate case, a fatality possibly brought on by the running conditions Mr. Schieber faced.

Kelly Osbourne is one celebrity who hasn't really caved to the Hollywood standard of beauty (read: Blonde and extremely thin,) and I think that's very refreshing. Kelly recently lost a bit of weight, but don't worry -- she's not shrinking to Nicole Richie-sized proportions. Kelly recently shed around 15 lbs for her role in the hit musical Chicago. And at 135 lbs, I think she looks great at a healthy weight. Here's what she had to say about losing the weight:

• (On changes she made to her diet) "Instead of having 10 sodas in a day, I'll have one. And instead of having potato chips, I'll have rice cakes. But I'm not one of those people who will deny themselves something they want. If I'm hungry and I want a burger, I'm going to eat it and I don't care."
• (On her best diet tip) "Get rid of your microwave! It's the easiest thing to chuck some three-minute meal in. If you don't have one, you'll pick up something fresh."

Hmm ... I don't know about her diet, but I fully agree with her stance on the microwave. What do you think?

Wahoo! I just returned from my Wiggly adventure and I couldn't be more pleased. My friend Jamie (who came along to help) and I arrived at the Allstate Arena here in Chicago at about 10:15 am this morning ready to interview the the Australian children's group The Wiggles. I wasn't actually scheduled to meet with my first Wiggle until 11:00 am though, so we had a while to wait. The tour manager Trey met us at security and guided us back to the room we were to be meeting the Wiggles in. This room backstage was eerily quiet and the clock ticked slowly as I waited for the guys to arrive. We were right next to the entrance the tour bus was to use, and our door was wide open. Waiting was making me half antsy and half nervous. Lots of goosebumps on my arms which I had no explanation for.

After what seemed like forever, the bizarrely quiet halls filled with chatter and I got my first live glance. Jeff, the purple Wiggle passed by and I felt as though I'd just got a peek at Santa Claus sneaking down the chimney. One by one; Sam, Murray and Anthony passed our open door surrounded by the rest of their cast. They looked like a big team, all dressed in black warm-ups or t-shirts and shorts. My nervousness turned to eagerness and I couldn't wait for them to get dressed and return.

Now of course The Wiggles are just people. But if you have kids you'll understand the connection one could grow to these guys. My children and I sing their songs, dance their dances, and read their books. We have tons of their toys , and quite simply enjoy the heck out of them. The Wiggles are fun for us. Beyond having my professional mission with the fitness segments, I'm just super excited to make friends with The Wiggles. Make friends is exactly what I do.

Throughout my 18 years of teaching fitness around the world, I can imagine I've taught at least 20 million people at some point or another on how to become more fit. Helping people live better and longer is what I do, what I love, and who I am. In an effort to prevent obesity and side effects in the first place, I've spent much time trying to figure out why people become un-fit in the first place. Ninety-nine percent of the time I can specifically point my finger toward each person's up-bringing.

Were sports and fitness activities a part of daily life, or was the television and video game boxes taking prominence in the home? Did Mom and Dad insist on low calorie, nutritious meals and snacks, or were bags of cookies and chips a constant in the cabinets? Kids do what they're raised to do for the most part. Addressing fitness with a passion while raising your children today will allow them to avoid: diets, eating disorders, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, GERD, RLS, and premature death in the future. What a gift to give!

Having said all this. I focus much of my attention on elevating the knowledge of both children and parents on the importance of healthy habits for today and tomorrow. I seek out tools to make this easier and I'm thrilled to announce that I'll soon spend a few days working with one of the best tools available. My unique tool of choice? The Wiggles! I'll be in Chicago August 18th and 19th to visit with and interview The Wiggles while they tour. This awesome group of Aussie men are the children's version of the Beatles around the world, and they should be considered one of a parents' weapons of choice when it comes to teaching healthy habits.

I'm not so sure that I would call it a vacation, per se, but I did recently take a ten day road trip with my husband and new baby to see both our families. We rented a car and went from Brooklyn, New York to Cleveland, Ohio, down to Louisville, Kentucky (my home town), back up to Delphi, Indiana, on to somewhere in Pennsylvania and then back to New York City.

The entire event was mind-boggling. Trying to juggle dealing with an infant, spotty directions, managing an SUV (and gas) and seeing all our friends and family really put a damper on our efforts to exercise.

That said, I did get a few runs in, all of them in Louisville. There is a one mile track all the way around my parents' neighborhood that I ran around over and over and over. It was so repetitive that at one point I forget where I was and thought I'd gone a lot farther than I had; turned out I had just decided to go the other way for a bit of variety. Sheesh.

I knew going into it that it would be difficult to find time--and places--to run on this trip. Since we were spending so much time in a car, which we're not used to doing, we got less time in walking as well. We sat and sat and sat and sat some more. We tried not to eat too poorly but there were times when we had to eat something and the only thing around was fast food joints.

In just a few weeks, the city of Paris will be debuting their new Cyclocity program, putting thousands of rental bikes at locations across the city. Though credit card information is required to rent a bike, the first half hour of each rental is free. Because most rides in the city are under a half hour, users of the system will essentially be able to commute and only pay a negligible fee. By implementing the program, the city hopes to reduce pollution and noise and create a slower paced, more relaxed feel.

France's third largest city, Lyon, put the system into place two years ago and it's been a huge success. I can only imagine, because I think it's a fabulous idea. Less carbon monoxide being spewed into the air, less traffic noise, and all those people out getting fit on their daily commute -- sounds perfect! In testing, city leaders found that when comparing commute by car, bus, biking, or walking, biking was the fastest form of travel in the city.

Cyclocity hasn't caught on in the U.S. yet, but some cities, like Portland, have tried similar programs. And at least one blogger is pushing her city leaders to adopt the program in Chicago, so maybe Americans may get a shot at this program yet!

So maybe the thought of joining a regular old spinning or Pilates class at the gym just doesn't trip your trigger. Maybe you're looking for something more interesting and different than that? Well then maybe, if you're lucky, one of these unique classes are located near you:

• In the Los Angeles area at the Crunch gym try the Rocket Workout. You'll get to use a new machine that is rapidly catching on in gyms all over called the Orbital 360, and the workout includes everything from strength training to stretching to Pilates.
• In Boston at Healthworks try the class called Burn. You'll alternate between walking and running on and off a treadmill for up to 50 minutes. Feel the burn!
  
• The Miami David Barton Gym has a class called Barton Biking where you'll alternate between biking and arm strengthening moves to burn over 500 calories in an hour.
• Chicago's Equinox is home to Chaos, where you'll get to do intervals of strength training and cardio, but with an element of make-believe mixed in.
• And finally, at the New York Health and Racquet Club in New York City you can opt for the Bin Zhou class where you'll meditate and do tai chi, qi gong, and isometrics.

More and more Chicagoans seem to be braving harsh winds and subzero temperatures to continue cycling through the city's brutal winter months. Even when their feet get numb, or they have to pedal down the street in overcoats, commuters, messengers, and fitness buffs push on through the snow.

But, while the sport's seasonal enthusiasts like the less-crowded streets this time of year, that's not the only reason for the increased interest. The Windy City has been working hard to promote bike riding as part of a larger environmental effort. The city already had 250 miles of bike lanes, and as part of Mayor Richard M. Daley's quest to make the Chicago "the most bicycle-friendly" city in the U.S., they've added 25 more -- along with thousands of new bike racks.

If you're thinking about biking through the ice, make sure to take the proper precautions. Wear layers of thermal clothing instead of bulky coats to avoid overheating. Also, make sure you're in bright colors, so you're visible motorists on darker winter days. You can also "winterize" your bike by adding fenders -- both to keep salt off the bike, and to keep yourself dry.

Any winter bike riders out there? Why do you do it?