Running is perhaps the most popular form of exercise, but that doesn’t mean people enjoy it. The fitness-tracking app Strava recently conducted a global survey asking 25,000 people how they feel about running and the results were… staggering. Only 8% of respondents said that they run because they love it. Apparently, everyone else just kind of suffers through. Half of the total respondents said they flat out hate running, or “can barely stand it.” Yikes. And the people who took this survey are runners! […]

What motivates us to stick with a diet or healthy eating regimen? How do we make healthy eating become a habit and not a chore? All too often, we use fear of what might happen in the future to try and change our behavior in the present. We think, “I can’t have dessert because it will make me fat.” We try to bully ourselves into dieting using negative self-talk and threats. We punish ourselves for failing before we even begin. This method of fear-based motivation is unpleasant, damaging, and it usually doesn’t work. […]

Does consuming caffeine before exercise help or hinder your performance? The verdict is in. Earlier this year, the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) published their official report on how caffeine affects exercise performance. They evaluated all of the available literature on the subject of caffeine and exercise, analyzing information from 420 different articles. […]

Countless studies have demonstrated that dieting takes a toll on our mental health and our relationship with food. Researchers have known this for decades. One revealing study, first published in 1988 in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, found that just two weeks of calorie-restricted dieting led participants to adopt negative feelings about eating. This same result has been replicated time and time again. There is a simple reason that restrictive dieting leads to negative thoughts. […]

Eating spicy food causes a physical reaction similar to how the body responds to exercise. We sweat, we become short of breath, and we might even experience feelings of euphoria akin to a runner’s high. But while eating spicy food sure feels like a workout, can it actually help us lose weight? Is it possible to overheat while eating something spicy? And why does eating spicy food give us a euphoric buzz? Here are the answers to these “burning” questions. […]