Irreverent Fitness

The Thinking Person's Bathing Suit Bible

Beautiful Readers,

So I just returned from this summer's first real visit to the beach...no kids...no older relatives...just me, the boyfriend, and no reason to wear a more demure bathing suit. I'll be honest, I try to keep most of my blogs sassy enough to be a little interesting, but adequately P.C. on the whole to keep me out of trouble. And I am quite careful not to write anything that makes Beautiful Fitness sound like a lot of other naughty fitness operations, as in the kind that make people feel critical about their bodies (hell, they are just bodies after all-it's not like a flabby stomach affects the quality of your soul or anything), but sometimes I think our readers might like a tiny dose of that good old fashioned, "What do I do about wearing a bathing suit so that all of me is not coming out of it?" advice from an expert. So here goes.

Issue? Stomach, butt, and thighs, right? Ever since they invented the elasticized bathing costume, these body parts have concerned men and women wherever there is sand.

Let's start with abs. There have been tomes written (mostly a waste of pixels and paper) about abs and ab exercises. Abdominal muscles come in two types that matter to people who are trying to make theirs look firmer. Don't worry about all the other kind of abdominal muscles unless you are a medical student, or a personal trainer.

There are the Rectus Abdominus, and the Obliques (yeah yeah there are internal andexternal obliques but don't worry about 'em, you do the same stuff to make them behave). Rectus abdominus-make your stomach look flatter, Obliques-make your waist look smaller. Rectus abdominus are in the front of your stomach, and Obliques are on the sides. Nuff said.

Two exercises:

Crunches: I like mine best on a big fitness ball which I find is more fun, more comfortable, and ultimately, once you figure out what's going on in there, can give you better control of the resistance you are using to work your abs. Don't have a ball? or just don't like them? No problem. Do them on the floor.

Lie on your back (or with your back pressed into a fitness ball balancing yourself with your feet on the floor) with your hands behind your head and your elbows out to either side. Looking at the ceiling, raise your head, neck, and shoulders slightly off the floor (or ball) continuing to look at the ceiling. Focus on engaging your stomach muscles to help press your torso up instead of using your neck and shoulders to pull you into position, also, attempt to keep your engaged abs pressed down towards your back instead of allowing them to stick out into the air (as they will want to do). Lower to floor or ball. Repeat a whole lot of times. Seriously. More reps equals more firm ab muscles. Feel free to quit at 80. If you are new at this, don't worry about doing 80 or even leaving the floor, raise your neck and head up to the ceiling slightly and just focus on engaging your abs very tightly on each raise. Try not to lift your shoulders while you do this exercise, it doesn't help, and it could give you very stiff shoulders or potentially a pinched nerve. 

Now for Obliques, then we're done with abs.

Bicycles: Remember these guys from gym class?!? They'll work your obliques in a very direct way, and really, they're kind of fun once you get the hang of them. Lie on your back with your hands placed behind your head, this time you'll be using your elbows, so don't worry about where they are positioned for now. Then bring your right knee in towards your chest while keeping your left leg extended and bringing it off the ground about a foot (or two, if you prefer), with your legs in the position I just described, rotate your torso to the right and bring your left elbow towards the bent knee (or touch it with your elbow if you can), then switch to perform the exercise the same way (right elbow to bent left knee with right leg extended about a foot of the ground). As with crunches, really focus on making sure you are doing this exercise with the right body part, namely your Obliques, instead of using your neck and shoulders. I also recommend actively engaging your obliques on each side as you use them (presuming you know where your's are--don't worry in time you will if you do this exercise)

Now for hips, thighs, and your butt. Let's cut to the chase. These muscle groups all cohabit in basically the same part of your body, and therefore, they find it best to work together too. That's good news for anyone who need to wear a bathing suit soon. The best exercise ever that puts all of these fine fellows to work, is squats. Two kinds.

Squats:  With or without holding a weight in your hands (call Beautiful Fitness if you want to talk about where to put a weight 212-380-1277), separate your feel approximately three feet apart and bend your knees while keeping your abs engaged. Keep your position like that of a skier by making sure that your weight is far back (so much so that you could lift your toes up) and your knees are always behind your toes. Raise to standing and squeeze your butt. Do endless reps without hurting yourself.

Plies: Ballet term. Comes from the french word Plier meaning to bend. It's a squat. With your knees out to the side. And your toes pointed away from each other. Same as Squats. Stay upright on both the up and down motion, and consciously engage your inner thighs to come up and your outer thighs to go down. Again, do tons.

And there you are. That's all you'll need to look pretty good in your Anne Cole black one-piece suit, your Missoni reversible triangle bikini (which, by the way, includes a warning that you can not, in fact, swim in it- tee hee!) or your favorite Speedo racing tank. And whatever your body may be doing these days--have fun on the beach!

Fondly,

Alix Florio   President   Beautiful Fitness

 www.beautifulfitness.com

Neurotic but with Nicer Nails

Beautiful Readers,

Sometimes you just gotta have a nervous habit. Over the years some of mine have included, too much shopping, nervous eating, nervous eating of something in particular like chocolate or a hundred little teeny slices of cake, nail biting, undue fascination with being thin, obsessive split-end trimming, and recently, a mild obsession with fake nails, filing them down, prying them up a little, gluing them back down again, and sometimes replacing them. 

It all started out innocently enough. On a recent trip out to my mom's place in NJ, I visited a nail salon there, and was convinced by the 23 year old hipster Vietnamese male owner that my normally thin and short nails would look great with the application of UV gel. They'd be longer, stronger, and gee whiz, they'd look perfect for weeks, unlike the three day disappointment of most salon visits. 

He did a very good job applying coat upon coat of powder and gel over the polish I had selected. In between layers of goo, he placed my plastic coated fake talons inside the little UV light box next to me. An hour or so later, Voila, better nails than I have ever had in my life, a little thicker than my own, they didn't look entirely natural, but they were stuck to my fingers with a tenacity that felt like it would last. Buh-bye for two weeks nail salon!

So four days later I chipped one. Which might be explained by my wiggling the corner of it back and forth between my teeth all day. Hm mm....I couldn't get back to the place in NJ to ask them to fix it, so I tried my luck with a non-descript place in my Brooklyn neighborhood called Polish Nails. I love this name. For the longest time I believed it was a Polish owned nail salon. It seemed so exotic. But after going inside I discovered that it was Korean owned, and realized the Poh-lish, Pah-lish pronunciation thing had tripped me up, and that they were probably referring to the stuff that goes on nails.

In any case, after half an hour of being fast-talked by the desperate seeming owner (nearly empty salon)who quickly whisked away my raincoat so I couldn't escape so easily, I finally made out that UV gel was something that they didn't really do at Polish Nails, but that the eager owner was trying to sell me on some other kind of wrap or something that she was sure would be just as good. Better even, she explained animatedly, because it wouldn't make my nails all--I guess the word she used was messy, but not any ordinary kind of messy, the face she made conjured images of some combination of acid and sandpaper reeking havoc underneath my UV coated nails. 

But I was true to UV coating. Now that I had been initiated into the Cadillac of nail services (and had 9 perfect digits to prove it) I really couldn't go back to a more pedestrian kind of nail covering. So I left. I also left my Blackberry there because I was in such a hurry to get out.

After returning to get the Blackberry, I hung my head low and went to Dashing Diva. Dashing Diva for those of you who don't know is the Pretty Pretty Princess of nail salons. Everything is nicely designed and glassy pink inside-part Magic Kingdom, part 1950s fantasy salon (the staff wear white lab coats). Dashing Diva also charges twice as much for everything they do as other nail salons, and I have discovered very little difference in quality.

But they have UV gel. So I spent an hour with Angela, who after impressing me thoroughly with how realistic her own French Tipped UV gel nails looked, got me to have all my red ones removed and try UV french tips. Angela was a perfectionist. Really. It was great. If you have the time,  that's exactly what you want in a nail technician. I was amazed by her delicacy as she painted the gel so carefully again and again over the crescent moons of the french tips. All I could think was that after a long day of doing such precising work she must want to run around a lot once she gets home.

Then those nails began to come up on the edges. I returned to Angela three days later to have two replaced (which she did for free and with the same care with which she had put them on the first time) . The next day a fourth one fell off, so I decided to keep the detatched nail in my purse, and take matters into my own hands (so to speak). I would buy some nail glue and reapply it. If I was going to be a UV gel lifer, I should have all the necessary equipment at home.

CVS only carried nail glue in packages with fake nails. Aha! I thought, I could buy fake nails with french tips that looked just like the UV gel nails so that if one got broken or fell off I could temporarily replace it. The nail kit only cost $8 as opposed to the $60 I would be spending to get the UV nails done every two weeks--It would be great if I could extend that time a little just by applying the occasional fake nail at home!

And then it came to me... UV gel nails look exactly the same as fake nails. But it couldn't be so! There had to be something super special about having a coating that was set under a purple light, cost $60 and took an hour to apply! As much as I wanted to believe that the artistry involved in applying the UV gels and powders made for a more natural or elegant looking product--it just didn't. The fake nails looked exactly the same as the one hour to apply $60 UV nails.

So now I have fake nails. They look great. If one gets chipped I peel it off and in two minutes I have replaced it. They come in packs of, like,100. They protect my nails which seem to be growing remarkably well underneath. Not only do I feel virtuous in a recession-era kind of way by gluing my nails on at home instead of going to a salon, but I have got myself a fine new nervous habit that I am all in all quite satisfied with. I play around with the fake nails when I'm bored, I take them off it they are looking dull, I file them, and I replace them often.

Thanks for reading,

Alix Florio     President    

Beautiful Fitness

Springtime is for Lovers

Beautiful Readers,

The minute the temperatures start rising there's a certain nervousness and excitement in the air which can make that first cup of coffee almost unneeded, but like anything that feels like newness, there can be a sort of springtime emotional unevenness that needs some balancing . In the past month I have received several little notes and calls from exes--more than I have for a very long time, and normally the flurry would seem strange, but then -- it is spring, so nothing seems very strange, and certainly not a little rush of sexual interest and daring. (The boyfriend didn't like it very much though.)

Ayurvedic medicine has an answer to all this flightiness. For those of you who don't know, Ayurveda is an ancient Indian system of wellness that divides the human condition (and beyond) into three essential states Vata, Kapha, and Pitta. In brief (and this is very brief-there are many years of thought describing how these three qualities make up most of existance) Vata is the state of thinness, dryness and airiness, think thin clouds drifting through the sky, Pitta is the state of transformation usually involving heat, or combining of things to create a third product. Pitta also encompasses the passion that comes with creation or drive, think chemicals being combined. Last, Kapha is the state of heaviness, slowness, accumulation and holding on, think, the way you may feel at the end of the winter at the beginning of spring.

Now, according to Ayurveda, the trick to getting peaceably through the spring, enjoying a sense of renewal without getting depressed or being too manic is to gradually shed any excess Kapha (fatness, slowness) that we have accumulated in the wintertime and to get up to speed with the season of transformation, movement, and growth through increasing our level of activity, losing a bit of winter weight, getting to a lighter, faster, place mentally-- gradually enough so that it happens without feeling like a failure for not being in fighting shape already, or overdoing it, thus causing a sudden overabundance of Vata, and making us feel all top heavy and nervous. I tend to be quite Vata. I know nervous.

So here are some classic Ayurvedic suggestions for moving sweetly into the Spring without agita, plus a suggestion or two of my own

1. Begin to eat lighter foods and eat less frequently. For those of you who snack a great deal, try to decrease the number of snacks to once every three hours or so.

2. Do some twisting exercises, they will get you body moving in a gradual way and will offer a kind of internal massage to organs and muscles that may have been sluggish throughout the winter.

3. Try to enjoy some foods that are bitter or sour. Lemonade. Grapefruit. Orange peel.

now my advice:

4. Exercise more frequently, though possibly for a shorter duration. Little sprints. Not to total fatigue. (to ensure you'll want to exercise again soon)

5. Stay hydrated by sipping water throughout the day--you may find at this time of year that you can not down the same volume of liquid all at once that you can in other seasons.

6. Feel free to give into that crazed spring feeling, but be sure to balance it with even breathing and rest. Resist the temptation to thoroughly exhaust yourself with the feeling of spring rush.  Moderate your energy. Exciting spring mania can be followed by a not-so-good-feeling crash afterward.

7. Have more sex. We're kind of designed to do that at this time of year (but then-- isn't that always my advice?)

Thanks for reading and enjoy the warmer weather!,

Alix Florio        President        

Beautiful Fitness

Clarisonic Skin Brush works great.

Beautiful Readers,

As you may have gathered from the title of today's post-- I think that the year old Clarisonic Skin Brush, an electric razor-sized device that uses a vibrating brush-head that resembles a toothbrush, is the bees knees. I have no idea why it works so well to smooth out my ordinarily pretty good but occasionally pimple-marred complexion--but it does.

 I spend a fair bit of time thinking about my skin, and while I consider myself kind of an expert at all the different laser/filler/injectible things you can do to your face (tried a few, read about others),  I resent spending the big bucks that are required to stay on a steady diet of that stuff, and I love to try things out at home. I think there's something so charming about the long history of women at home in hot rollers with cold cream on their faces, doing things that terrify their husbands and make themselves look so un-beautiful, just so they can have fewer visible pores the next day. It seems sweetly nonsensical and human to me and I love that kind of thing.

Now about the brush. About six months ago I got acne, like real acne. It was a nightmare. It was a classic case of acne in adults. It appears mostly on my chin and the sides of my face, it gets better and worse relative to my menstrual cycle, it can be brought on by stress (oh, gee, what stress?), and it sometimes leaves red marks that can last for months, while the outbreaks themselves tend to last for 2 to 3 weeks. Great. Radiant skin meets 40-something zits.

I would love to say that this brush is the cure for acne, but I'm not sure that's true (though it might be--I just started using it) but I must admit that after a week of cleaning my skin with it twice a day (and this has been quite a week too) my skin is looking better. In fact,  just now, my boyfriend walked in to ask if I was wearing makeup, because he said, my skin is looking great (how's that for a convenient testimonial!)

I know this reads like an infomercial, and at first I found the clams about this thing too good to be true too. I always presume that someone is paying someone to write good things about a product, but then after the acne debacle, I was desperate and started buying up everything that Blisssells in their Acne category. And this was one of the things they sell. It kind of made sense--brushes tend to clean things pretty well, vibration can give a decent massage, massage plus cleaning could theoretically release more dirt from pores, and Voila! Clarisonic skin brush.

And so far so good. The acne's not totally gone, but I'm not getting it at the same rate (believe me, after you have had acne for awhile, you quickly become familiar with the whole, which one was there yesterday, which one was not, thing), and overall (including fine lines ((part of Clairisonic's claim is that they can "improve the appearance of fine lines", and frankly the fact that my wrinkles are improved by this big shaky toothbrush, is really spooking me))), my skin is looking damn good, with not a cent spent at the dermatologists office. Bravo!

Thanks for reading!

Alix Florio    President    Beautiful Fitness    www.beautifulfitness.com

Four Fast Tips and Tricks For Getting Fit

Beautiful Readers,

How's that title for alliteration! (now try to say it five times fast). That's what happens to folks when they start to Twitter. Suddenly the world becomes a place of instant cleverness forced through 140 characters or less. If you want to hear me Tweet (that is, presuming you know what Twitter is, or care) you can "follow" me by going to Twitter, joining up, and finding my handle alixatbeautiful and electing to "follow" me. You will then begin to experience the rapturous joy of knowing what I'm thinking about things like, the bus, my nails, the gym, my kids, and all kinds of other navel-gazing sorts of stuff. Hooray!

So here are my quick fit tips:

1) If you go to a gym and use the inner thigh machine (the one where you squeeze two platforms together with your legs)--I bet that half of you are doing the exercise with your calves instead of your inner thighs. Try this test: attempt to do the exercise using only your thighs (well, inside of your knees, really), just take your feet completely off the machine and put them in front of you (like you're riding on the back of a bike, trying to avoid touching the pedals with your feet) and see if suddenly you have to drop the weight down a lot. I recently discovered that, like, half of the 90 lbs. I believed I was pressing with my thighs was actually being pushed by my calves. I now set the machine at 50 lbs.

2) I am convinced that green tea, drunk throughout the day, contributes enormously to weight loss. Every time I have tried to shed some pounds and have drunk green tea I find it comes off faster. For awhile I thought it might be the caffeine in it speeding up my metabolism, but coffee does not seem to work as well. There's some scientific research that seems to support this idea, but nothing conclusive. Here's what Mayo Clinic has to say about Green Tea. I love Mayo Clinic. They do a ton of original research and as much as they want to believe in alternative medicine--they always give you the straight dope. They give Green Tea a 'C' (in an A through F scale) for quality of research on weight loss benefits.

3) Use music for motivation for exercise. Lean on it heavily. Every trainer I know will tell you that music plays a huge role in their ongoing workouts. I have walked home from the gym (10 minutes from my house) to pick up my Ipod and walked back again. I have bought extra earphones when I have forgotten mine. I now own three Ipods and, like, five sets of headphones and keep them in every bag I might conceivably use at the gym.

4) Meditation works. Like, really, no joke. There is no single thing which seems to improve people's lives quite as substantially (I'd say exercise, for non-exercisers, is a close runner up). It lowers blood pressure and cortisol levels, even in small doses, which corresponds with greater feelings of wellness in general, greater weight loss (high levels of cortisol trigger a stress reaction that tells your body to retain fat), and over time, a greater ability to manage stress in one's life coolly.

Thanks for reading! Happy spring!

Alix Florio, President, Beautiful Fitness

www.beautifulfitness.com

Fight the good catfight.

Beautiful Readers,

Women are catty and jealous, right? They begrudge each other's achievements, and feel insecure when confronted with other women's successes. They are threatened by other women's ambitions, and generally prefer not to help each other out. They don't like to get too chummy with women they perceive as "better" than them in any one of a number of categories of life because it makes them feel badly about themselves.

Even if you don't recognize yourself in this description, if you are a woman, don't some of these tendencies sound familiar to you? Have you never seen another woman you felt was more beautiful, happier, and more successful than you, and you really had to work hard to get past an initial "Eeew." response?

What if I told you that you can embrace this natural discomfort around women you perceive as "better" and that to feel this way is totally normal and fine, evolutionarily advantageous even, and can be very positive--if you know what to do with it. 

First, let's presume that people have a natural comfort with folks they feel are "like them", similarly rich, smart, happy, and good-looking. Ok, that's easy. So just hang around with the people who seem no better or worse than you are. Super-comfy.

Yet in modern life one encounters people of a diverse range of abilities, looks, social standing, wealth, and confidence. Then the whole "I like them because they are just like me" thing goes haywire. First you are forced to confront a natural human tendency to feel afraid of people and things that are "different" in general. Then, if that perceived "difference" takes the form of someone who might get the job you want, buy the house you can't afford, attract the member of the opposite sex you want noticing only you, you've got a double dose of discomfort. And don't be fooled, that perceived threat that they might unfairly reap advantages that you might like to have, is true.

Now this is the critical moment where you get to make a choice. As I see it there are 3 distinct options about how to react to your immediate (and natural) feelings of jealousy:

1) Try to ignore any feelings of inadequacy, set them aside, force them out of your mind, stop yourself from making any comparisons at all, and accept deeply that you are who you are, and that they are who they are. Focus on being at peace with yourself. The Dalai Lama is probably great at this.

2) Hate them, avoid them, try not to think about them. Whisper to your friends about them later.

3) Acknowledge that they really do have an edge in some way that makes you feel annoyed and competitive, take this as a sign that you may want to improve some aspects of yourself, or your life. Work hard and make changes accordingly. Dare I say---try to be more like them.

Now, choice one, is super and all but mighty hard to achieve, at least consistently, and also frankly whether or not that is the best choice depends on what you are looking for in life. If your goal is ease and comfort, work on choice one, but as someone who has never been a big fan of stasis, I am always more interested in what I see as improvement, as opposed to rest. Through fitness and other things, I am also increasingly convinced that there is no real stasis, that things overall are either improving or deteriorating all the time. And that's where jealousy can be your friend.

I think that jealousy and competition may be that little Darwinian gift that just keeps on giving. If you accept that encounters with people who "seem better than you" make you tense, there's a certain energy in that. Now, you can always just sublimate that energy, but there's a good chance you'll end up feeling bad. However, you can also take that opportunity to capitalize on that threat-rush to fuel your own drive. This environment can make you work harder on improving your own shtick so that next time you encounter the threatening individual (or someone you percieve as like them) you can say to yourself "Well, they may have a big house in the Hampton's and way nicer hair than I do, but I just wrote an awesome poem on the back of my newspaper, I'm a much better poet than I used to be." and you'll be right.

I love this approach, especially because of the effect it has socially. Instead of hating the Sag Harbor redhead, you may actually feel slightly grateful to her because in a certain way she helped you write a better poem. Does it guarantee that you will be comfortable being close friends with the woman you are jealous of? Not necessarily, there are certain jealousies and perceptions of difference that can be very hard to overlook, but at least you have leveled the playing field a little, and if given the chance, perhaps someday you can look past your differences to focus more on the people you both are inside.

Thanks for reading!

Alix Florio\ President     Beautiful Fitness

Don't relax!

Beautiful Readers,

Sometimes I think I'm a genius. Not about everything, but about certain things like men, women, popular trends, and what's good for you. Does this help me in my own life? Not a bit. But it sure does leave me feeling mighty smart sometimes.

So just try to guess what can be helpful to you that I predicted long ago was getting a bad rap it didn't always deserve! Stress! Yes that's right folks-- that fine chemical cocktail that courses through your body when you are being chased by a tiger or even just thinking about one.

Now don't get too excited, there are several common categories of stress that you should make every effort to avoid.

1. chronic stress
2. feeling that you are being forced to do things you hate (also known as hating things you have to do)
3. being stuck in a situation where you feel powerless or invisible

The above kinds of stress are bad. In fact they are so bad that they can literally affect your brain in a way leaving you less smart--the chemicals that are released in the above situations just go right ahead and shrink your neurons. These kinds of stress are also malevolent enough to increase your blood pressure and your risk of heart attack. You should work proactively to adjust your life so that you are not experiencing these kinds of stress.

But normal stress, that good old spike of adrenaline, and maybe a little follow up of cortisol now and again, can be just ducky! It can temporarily help you access information that you had previously forgotten, can build brain cells, and can make your muscles activate--as long as you have a reasonably good attitude about your stress.

What got me thinking about good stress versus bad stress recently, was the familiar sight of a woman about my age (that would be middle-aged for those of you who don't know) running through Prospect Park and looking absolutely miserable. Not the invigorating kind of "hurts so good" kind of miserable that you see on some runners, where you can tell they want to puke and that they are damn proud of it, but more of a "If I don't keep running, I will have failed." kind of thing. Depressing and with all my good fitness-y intuition, it felt wrong--with a capital W.

Now, some fitness types say that you HAVE to love your exercise to get through it and to get the most out of it, and, of course, that would be great, much like loving to floss would be great, but I have also seen people make huge improvements in their lives by starting to exercise regularly and just living with their hatred of it for awhile. 

In my experience, it doesn't seem to matter much what attitude you start out with, love, hate, whatever,--the people who ultimately get past the misery while they are exercising do seem to benefit more. Clients who take ownership of the experience and believe that exercise is something that they personally want to do, even when it seems hard, overall benefit far more than the folks who may be exercising to please someone else, or because they think they have to. Exercising to appease a coach, husband, doctor, boyfriend,or that little voice in their head telling them they're fat, never seems to work out for long, and often has a weirdly un-relaxing effect, which always seems strange because positive exercise is the most relaxing thing (besides meditation) that I know of.  

And now I know why. This weekend I ran into Newsweek's cover article Who Says Stress is Bad For
You  which, while careful to clarify the pitfalls to ongoing stress, also illuminates some of the thing that can mitigate it's negative effects, and also describes how we can use it to our advantage.

This quote in particular seemed to describe the plight of the runner in the park.

For all of the science's shortfalls, there's animal research that suggests why something that should lower stress can actually cause stress if it's done in the wrong spirit. In a classic study, scientists put two rats in a cage, each of them locked in a running wheel. The first rat could exercise whenever he liked. The second was yoked to the first, forced to run when his counterpart did. Exercise, like meditation, usually tamps down stress and encourages neuron growth, and indeed, the first rat's brain bloomed with new cells. The second rat, however, lost brain cells. He was doing something that should have been good for his brain, but he lacked one crucial factor: control. He could not determine his own "workout" schedule, so he didn't perceive it as exercise. Instead, he experienced it as a literal rat race.

Our runner probably felt like she "had to run" that morning. Maybe it was the only time she would be free to do it that day, maybe she was tired and didn't feel like doing it at all. My advice? If I were her, I guess I would have tried to adjust either my schedule or my attitude--and if I couldn't have gotten over the misery, I probably would have headed home. A fitness coach recommending bailing on your morning run? Certainly. Sometimes.  But not being able to work through what is sometimes known as "the suck" should be a lesson about the importance of making sure that you are feeling that your exercise is working for you and not vice versa, because with the right attitude and opportunity, fitness should make you feel great.

Fondly, Alix Florio, President; Beautiful Fitness

Like Skating on Ice

Beautiful Readers,

I have been afraid to ice skate for over a decade. A totally irrational fear of falling on the hard cold ice, and maybe getting run over by someone in ice skates, has made me resist every invitation for years. It would not be enough to say that I just didn't like it (though that is certainly what I said whenever I was asked) but I was really afraid. Of course, my resourceful eight year old daughter somehow managed to get to the ice without me, fell in love with ice skating before I could thoroughly frighten her, and so, I was faced with a problem. Several skeptical friends have asked why I love having kids. And I think this is why. They make you do all kinds of things you don't want to do. 

If you have seen this blog before, you may notice a difference in the title. For a long long time I was committed to starting each post with a collection of B words, like 'Beautiful Boys Bowling' hoping that it would amuse readers and help them remember that the name of our company was Beautiful Fitness (which, as you may notice, also starts with a 'B'. Gosh.)

But I've given that up  because I was finding it too limiting. And without thinking much about it, I believe I may have made a kind of internal New Year's resolution this year. I will give up more easily on restrictions, rules, people, fears, and things, that require more effort than they offer reward. I have kept too many clothes that don't fit right, and stuck with too many plans that just didn't work.

 A few things have conspired to put me in this state of mind. One, the recent move, while harrowing at first, has done the thing that any big move does--it shook things up. Bad in some ways, good in others, but we got through it and things are settling down differently both physically, and in my mind. And then, before our very eyes, the world became a slightly different place. The first African American president was sworn in, and on TV we all were able to watch a black man, who not 150 years ago would not have had the vote, give this inauguration speech. Don't ever again try to tell me that people can't change. Even if this ends in tragedy or failure, it happened at all, we know it is possible, and that is huge. 

I'd also like to give some props for my new lighter state of mind to Seth Godin

self proclaimed author, entrepreneur and agent of change, author of The Dip

The Dip, among other things, talks about companies making it through that phase of life that can feel like being a snowboarder discovering that the run you are on leads to a long, extra flat, stretch of catwalk where you sit on you butt for a bit thinking about whether or not to unstrap your board and take a walk to the bottom of your snowy hill. I think that's the kind of dip Mr. Godin was referring to.

But at that moment (or if you are very clever, perhaps before you hit the really big dip) you make a choice, you take action, and refuse to be paralyzed by a fear of failure. In fact, Seth Godin suggests that you could transcend a feeling that quitting, in a situation like the one I described, constitutes failure at all. In fact, sometimes quitting is just the right thing to do. It can lead to all kinds of nice things like, better runs next time, tasty hot chocolate at the bottom, not ending up tumbling down the hill instead of merely walking down the hill, or spending that precious time that would be spent in agony, doing something you benefit from more-like taking a lesson maybe, so that next time you can manage the cat walk better.

Anyway, my daughter had an ice skating party recently. I planned it and hosted it, and because there were so many unsteady eight year olds to shepherd around on the ice I gave up my fear of skating. Just like that. No bravado. No whining. Just did it, like they say in the advertisements. And then last weekend I went skating again, and then tonight I took my daughter to her school ice skating party. I'm actually a pretty good skater. But more importantly it reminded me again of what freedom from fear really feels like and how easily attained it can be-how sometimes it's just a question of letting go.

Beautiful Back in Business

Wow. It's been a long winter. The economy tanked. Beautiful Fitness moved. We regrouped. And now we are forging ahead in this brave new world as every good company should. We're healthier, more focused, more organized, and we pay more now too.

Our company has always done great. From the beginning. Better than our wildest expectations. We quickly became a sort of industry insider darling. A gem-like find among a sea of mediocre service providers. But I'll be staight with you. We just weren't charging enough.

See, I'm a perfectionist. And a perfectionist CEO is great to have around because if they care about you and the the service you are recieving, you can be sure that they are pulling all kinds of strings in the background to make sure that everything goes your way. However, perfectionists can also be kind of demanding.

They likely want to be working with the very best staff, who show the very best results consistently, and they expect optimal performance from those people. the perfectionist encourages clients' to have high expectations, both for their own progress, and for quality of the experience they will be recieving.They want each client to feel that they have gained something valuable from each session they pay for. This experience can only be provided by folks who are the best at what they do.

The best personal fitness coaches, massage therapists, boxing instructors, or meditation instructors, are similar in some ways. They totally love what they do for a living and are great at it, but are not zealots, they care profoundly about their client's experience every time, they treat themselves and others with total respect and dignity, they show up on time, all the time, give their full focus to their job, nurture their clients through all different challenges, and are sensitive and flexible to their clients changing needs and schedules. They rock. But there are only so many of them, and we want them all.

My inner perfectionist has been set free. We're changing. And now you can come to Beautiful Fitness (just a one page right now-we're revamping the site too) and know that you will recieve the best at-home fitness and wellness services--anywhere. And given the value we provide in terms of helping you manage your daily stress, allowing you to improve your feelings about yourself, guiding you through the challenge of getting enough of the kind of exercise that will keep you looking and feeling great, and leading you towards a greater sense of wellness overall--we're an awesome value. Give us a call at 212-380-1277 and you'll get me personally on the phone, as we come back as the best.

Fondly,

Alix Florio      President;  Beautiful Fitness

Beautiful Bumble and Bumble

Beautiful Readers,

Sometimes a girl's just got to get a decent haircut.

And that is especially true when that girl went once again to her local salon and paid way too little money to get her hair highlighted, telling them to "do whatever they thought was best" suggesting that "darker" might be better and ignoring the hairstylist who prior to using the dye insisted that her hair looked perfectly fine already.

And moreso if that same girl went home, looked at herself in the mirror, and squinting, thought "damn, I look 20 years older than I did this morning" and couldn't get over that feeling until she decided to take matters into her own hands. Afterall, she thought, how bad could it be, at least it will be cheap.

Then perhaps that girl went straight to Right Aid, bought the highlighter dye with the most attractive model on the box and went home to do-it-herself; "after all, I am rather artistic" she thought. And maybe that girl left the bleach on too long. And maybe ended up with a lot of yellow-orange hair. And then perhaps went to the other local salon around the corner to get it fixed by the stylist named Angie who's own hair was long in tight ringlets and displayed a rainbow of mismatched colors and prominant dark roots. 

That's the kind of girl I'm talking about who might be in need of a particularly nice haircut.

Ok-- if you're finding yourself a bit annoyed by the repetitive use of "girl" by now instead of women, youre not alone--so let's move on.

So after the above debaucle--I headed straight to Bumble and Bumble on the East Side and plunked down the appropriate Bumble and Bumble money to have their star colorist Michelle look over my now straw-like and frizzy orangish-yellow do and give me her sage opinion before getting it cut by the coolist young man named Spencer. I literally almost cried as she waved her hands around my botched hair and told me all the things I had known in my heart. I should not be too blonde, kind of ashy brown, just a few bright highlights around the face, and any other combination would make me look older.

Michelle would not do anything to my hair until I had allowed it to "rest" for a month. Only then could I book an appointment. I was impressed and eagerly await my visit in September.

Spencer, with not a lot to work with, did a phenomenal job on my lackluster hair, making it look better perhaps than it had even before this nightmare with some incredible alchemy with scissors. He helped pick product and his manner was just perfect. Upbeat, professional, funny, nurturing.

This experience reminded me of  the reason I love being able to run Beautiful Fitness the way we do. Because awesome service provided with a tremendous amount of heart plus professionalism and expertise is a beautiful thing and can bring real joy to people's lives that goes well beyond the sum of the parts of the experience. I think pride in one's work and respect for the client is a terrific antidote for the factory like anonymity of the chain stores and big boxes that have taken over the New York scene.

Thanks for reading,

Alix-Beautiful Fitness