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I don't watch Jackie Warner's Work Out regularly (but I admit, there's something appealing about her, in a bi-curious yeah-I'd-hit-that kind of way) so I totally missed the huge controversy surrounding last week's episode. It seems that Warner was snarking with her assistant about one of their trainer's client's fake boobs. Drama ensued when the client's boyfriend overheard them and explained that his girlfriend was a breast cancer survivor and had implants as part of her reconstructive surgery. FACE! This somehow led to Jackie firing the trainer in question. So, not only was the client, famous fitness model Jamie Eason, getting hated on because she had implants due to cancer, now she's got to either find a new trainer or switch gyms? Sucks to be Jamie Eason.

And it also sucks to be Bravo, who is being pummeled by emails from angry viewers who vow to cease watching the channel (what, no Runway?) and also, to boycott the advertisers' products. And it's worked: Gatorade has ended its relationship with the show. Ooooh. Harsh.

image via evany

We are all very aware of how bad artificial sweeteners are for us, by now, I hope. It's gotten me to cut down on my Diet Pepsi consumption--and yet, I'm still consuming it at a rate that is heading me down the on ramp, merging on to cancer highway. What are we supposed to drink a whole lot of, instead? Water! Of course.

The problem with water is that--well, it's water.  And I have trained my idiot tastebuds to require flavor and artificial sweetness in my thirst-quenchers. I'm working to retrain the little suckers, and I've found water with lemon in it goes a long way toward making me way less meh about the whole endeavor. And evany, wise inventor, has come up with a "why didn't I think of that, damnit," way to make lemoning up your water as easy as opening your freezer: slice up lemons in big batches, wrap them up and stick them in deep freeze for extraction as needed. I know from experience that I tend to only do things if they are easy--could this mean I'll become a water-drinking fool? Well, I'm already halfway there.

aries (Mar. 21st-Apr. 20th)
You're one of those people who tries to assemble the eighty-seven-piece toy before reading the instructions, aren't you? You work out without stretching, eat half the cookie dough before baking, pop the microwave before it dings. And you cannonball into the deep end before waiting the full fifteen minutes for your Creamsicle to digest. Fool, don't rush in--especially when it comes to romantic engagements this week. Best to pop a patience pill and chill.

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photo via TheWhyFiles

Scientists continue to search for the biological mechanism behind weight gain and loss and one of the cool new findings is that the body regulates the number of fat cells in your body, meaning that the 100 pound version of you would have exactly the same number of fat cells as the 300 pound version of you. According to The New York Times:

In a way, Dr. Flier noted, the discovery is a sort of back to the future moment. There was a time a few decades ago, before the current interest in how the brain regulates how much is eaten, when obesity researchers spent all their time studying and discussing fat cells. Investigators discovered that fat people had more fat cells than thin people and that fat cells shrink with weight loss and bulge with weight gain.

I have to say, I'm crazily excited about the release of the theatrical version of Mamma Mia the Musical to the silver screen. You see, I have a not-so-secret love of all things ABBA and all things musical theatre, so the combination of the two? Blammo, my head explodes with sheer joy as I soak in all in the campy goodness. The plot, if you haven't seen the stage version, is, er, not exactly deep, ok? In fact, it's a weird stitching together of all the best ABBA songs, so much so that some of the interruptions in the song medleys for supposed character development made me roll my eyes just a little bit (but not want to stab myself, the way that Across the Universe did, with its main characters named Jude and Lucy... gee, I wonder which Beatles songs will be in that movie?), but at the last curtain call, I still found myself flushed with excitement at having spent a lovely time with some of the best songs of the 70's and 80's. Besides, at one point, there is a male chorus line of guys in snorkels and swim fins, singing "Lay All Your Love On Me". If you fail to see the awesome in that, you might just be dead inside.

photo via ReadySteadyGo

It has been previously documented that I'm a girl who likes her trashy, delicious food stuffs to be as trashy and delicious as possible. You can take the girl out to sushi (and she will be so grateful and love you until the end of time, because she sure likes sushi) but you can't take the love of trashy Americana out of the girl. You know: your cheetos, your mac and cheese, your green bean casserole, your fast and disgustingly delicious food.

I try, I do. I try to cook fresh and healthy. And then into my lap falls, with a satisfying splorch, a new recipe that reaches new heights of trashy and delicious and I am lost, all over again.  Helen calls My Dad's (Or Maybe My Grandma's) Sweet-and-Sour Meatballs basse cuisine. I call it kind of digusting in the best way possible. And accidentally, I might have bought ginger ale and ground beef at the grocery store this afternoon.

I may love all things pink and sparkly, but sometimes I swear, I am a boy with boobs. I laugh at fart jokes, love to watch football, and will almost never opt for cuddling over going to sleep after sex. And when it comes to fitness, I kind of love toys. A LOT. Now that the weather is heating up, there are a lot of fun unexpected fitness opportunities if you explore venues outside of traditional feminine fare like pilates or powerwalking.

• Skateboarding might be a little rough and tumble, but padded up, it's on par with rollerblading, only cool to the nth power. You might have visions of the little Sk8t Betty of your youth, but today's boards are seriously high tech. Take one look at the RipStik Caster Board and try to tell me you wouldn't give it a run? Did I mention that it even comes in PINK.

I missed my mom a lot this weekend. I mean, it was mother's day, so I am contractually obligated to miss her, you know, as a dutiful daughter who does not have a heart of stone.  But I also realized that it's been about a month since I've seen her, and it's going to be another five months, probably, before I see her again, and that made me sad. I called her on Sunday, and got her voicemail; she called me back, and got my voicemail. We keep missing each other. You know what I mean.

I missed her a lot Sunday afternoon, when we went to E's family's barbecue--all twelve million people in his family, flying through the house with giant bowls of potato salad under their arms, and baskets of chips and dips and fruits and wine and more fruit and more kinds of salad. They were grilling steaks the size of my face. That is not an exaggeration for comedic effect. There were stacks of hamburgers and platefuls of hot dogs and a bunch of chicken and everything was covered in Cajun spices and more delicious than it had any right to be.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a paleontologist and hack my way through the jungle, discovering lost cities of gold and fighting dinosaurs. I didn't have a very good idea of what paleontologists did, as it turns out.  When I got older and I figured it out, it sounded almost as cool as it did when I was a kid. Almost. So in college I spent a long time waffling between anthropology and geology. Sometimes, I regret going with the monkeys instead of the t-rexes.

It's nostalgia that crops up when I visit the Natural History Museum, or run into one of those cool CGI dinosaur shows on the Discovery Channel, and which hit me especially hard when I came across this OMG SO TOTALLY AWESOME dinosaur necklace. I cannot express to you how much it completes me--my love of shiny things, my love of nerdy things, all wrapped up in one item of shiny, nerdy jewelry. It would take a very special person to rock this necklace, and I, personally, am willing to try.

In Half-Assed, Jennette Fulda talks about things that tend to be glossed over in weight-loss memoirs. Generally, you assume that the attitude of someone who is dedicated to weight loss, to the point that they've written an entire book about it and their success at the whole endeavor, is absolute delight in the fact that they're not fat any more. You assume the prevailing attitude is going to be that fat is bad, thin is good, and the fat acceptance movement is a bunch of hooey. Why would you lose weight if you accepted your fat, right? There's no happy medium: you're in or you're out of the FA movement.

Fulda's got her own take on the idea. She writes: