200th Post! ...What Have I Been Doing?

19 days into 2012...hopefully you are still on your path to achieving New Year's resolutions (if you made any).  If you aren't, you could always make some changes and restart the path (whose life doesn't feature adjustments on the fly?).

The last 19 days (and the weeks prior to that) have been eventful for me.  I spent the last few days of 2011 and the start of 2012 on vacation in New York and Punta Cana with family (see the pictures below).  After that, I moved (within Phoenix...my new apartment's balcony view is the picture at the top of the post) and have started spring classes for my masters program.

Now, to put the "health" back in Health-Actualization, here are the blog-relevant projects that I am working on:

• I'm putting together a study at ASU that will look at a specific the effects of a specific strength training protocol on flow-mediated dilation (if that last term sounds foreign, check out my flow-mediated dilation posts from this past month).  The study will occur over the summer or fall, and I will report the results here when finished.
• We may not be getting fatter as a country!  I have been looking at epidemiological studies (the NHANES data) from 1999-2008 and it has shown that there is no significant upward trend in obesity [1].  The average percentage of obesity has risen and fallen a few percent in recent years, but there is no consistent direction.  Obesity in this research is based on body mass index measurements (weight in kilograms divided by height, in meters, squared), so it's certainly not perfect - very muscular people could fall into the obese category.  However, the advantage of this research is that the height and weight were measured by the researchers, which makes it more reliable than height and weight data self-reported by the study subjects (people tend to report themselves as lighter and taller than they truly are...what a surprise...).  
• Future posts will include new information on healthy eating practices and how strength training benefits various health markers that I have not discussed before, such as inflammation. 

Post 200!

As the title says, this is the 200th post of Health-Actualization.  I am truly grateful to all of you who have followed my work over the past three and a half years.  I enjoy sharing my thoughts and findings with you.  More importantly, I have enjoyed the emails, comments, and personal connections that have come as a result of this blog.  I stated in the 150th post that my best work is yet to come, and I still believe that is the case.  I look forward to providing you with more information and getting to know you better over the next 200 posts.  Thank you.