Category Archives: Health

SXSWi – What you probably already know

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Every year around this time, approximately  14,000 geeks venture down to Austin, TX for South by Southwest Interactive. And every year, a good handful of those people write snarky blog posts about ‘what you need to know before you get to SXSW’. In fact, I myself wrote one just last year.

So at the risk of being redundant, here are some tips that you may or may not have heard already.

  1. I usually to say forget about the schedule. What I mean by that is don’t worry about making it to all the panels or all the parties. Just go with the flow, you’ll have more fun that way.
  2. But a certain amount of scheduling can be good. For example: If you really want to spend some quality time with people, put a meal on the books. Schedule time to meet up, sit down, and eat something.  This way you will actually get to spend time with the people you want to see. I will be holding Ohours at SXSW for this very reason!
  3. If this is your first time going to SXSW If you are going to SXSW, you should fully expect to be worn out when it’s over. Make sure to drink lots of water and take extra vitamin C, to prevent getting really sick when you return home.
  4. You will walk….a lot! Everything is usually close to the convention center, but that’s going to mean a lot of walking for you. Be sure you are comfortable with what you are wearing.
  5. Enjoy the serendipity. South by can be a very serendipitous place. Crazy things happen, you end up in awesome conversations with amazing people, and when this happens just enjoy it and stay in the moment. You don’t need to take pictures and tweet while this is happening (let’s be serious, you can tweet about it later)
  6. Don’t forget to eat! It sounds silly, but with everything going on it can be very easy to forget to eat. My advice, schedule meetings around meals. This insures that you give yourself a brake, and get a chance to eat.

A little tip on what to eat at SXSW from your friendly vegan friend, Sarah Cooley (hey, that’s me!).

Remember to eat your veggies! At SXSW, there will be tons of free BBQ to partake of (in fact MapQuest will have a bus trip to Salt Lick BBQ) So I understand that it might be more difficult to fit veggies into your meals. But do your best to try and eat some greens at least once during the day. Trust me, you will feel better because of it!

I’m thinking of putting together a small casual vegan meetup at SXSW (vegans and non vegans welcome). If you would be interested, leave me a comment below. If there is enough interest we can figure out a time and day in Austin that works for everyone.

If you want to meet up in Austin, feel free to sign up for one of my Ohours slots. Or you can try more traditional methods of tracking people down at SXSW, but that usually doesn’t work.

Vegan Month of Food!

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Year after year, I see friends of mine signing up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November. Now, I wish I had a novel to write, but alas November has come around again and I have no desire to write a novel. But today I discovered that November has been declared the Vegan Month of Food by the folks at Post Punk Kitchen.

While there are no set rules, the goal is to post something related to vegan food at least once every week day or approx. 20 times in the month of November.

Challenge Accepted!

I figured it was a good enough idea as any to get me back into the swing of blogging regularly. While I don’t consider this a food blog, I am a vegan who loves food so why not!

Stay tuned for all the vegan awesomeness to come this month!

Losing the next 25

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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As many of you know, back in February I decided to make a change in my diet in an attempt to lose weight and get healthy. I made the commitment to a vegan diet and it was once of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Since then I’ve lost 25 lbs. I know that’s a huge accomplishment on it’s own, but I don’t really feel like its the end for me. I lost the weight mainly through diet, there was very little exercise. I did a little yoga but that was about it.

While I do feel much better, I’m still at an unhealthy weight for my height. I realized that losing the next 25 lbs is going to be much harder than the first 25. So I decided that I was going to have to shake things up again in order to get the weight off and really get into shape. So a few months ago I started swimming again. I was a competitive swimmer in high school but I hadn’t been back in the water in some time. It was good to start swimming again but I needed to do more if I was really going to kick my body into shape.

Working out alone is hard! When you are on a sports team or you have a personal trainer, you always have someone pushing you to work harder. But when you work out alone it can be difficult to push yourself. I decided that I needed a goal, something to work toward, that would help me push harder in my workouts.

I’ve decided to train for a triathlon (I know it sounds crazy to me too). Just a short one, the sprint distance. It’s a .5 mile swim, a 13 mile bike ride, and a 3 mile run. I’m not a biker and I’m certainly not a runner, so hopefully this training will be good for me. I’ve been using RunKeeper on my iPhone to keep track of my walks, runs and bike rides. It’s encouraging to see stats on my workouts, and it helps to keep me motivated to push harder.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress as I train. I don’t have an actual race in mind yet, I’m just training to condition myself toward that goal.

Yoga: Getting Back to my Practice

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Ok, I have a confession to make, I'm pretty sure I suck at yoga! Sure I tweet about it, and I like it, but I'm not very good at it. When I realized that I wasn't very good at it I stopped doing it for a while because it was discouraging. But after losing 25 lbs I realized that in order to lose the rest of the weight it was going to take some serious excersising to do it.

So I decided to start doing yoga again. I've always enjoyed yoga but I've never really taken it seriously in the past. Sure I would drop in on a class from time to time, but mostly I did yoga at home. Doing yoga at home is nice but it can be hard to push yourself when it's just you alone in your living room. I realized I needed to find a studio where I can regularly attend classes and really start to take my practice seriously (even if I still think I suck at it). Last night I went to a class at Laughing Lotus Yoga Center, it's only a block away from my office so it was convinent to go there after work.

The class was a basics class (which I thought I could handle, but I was totally sweating 10 minutes in) and it was an hour and a half long. The instuctor said something that really struck a cord with me, he was talking about doing inversions:

"it's kind of like dating, you just have to keep trying it, keep courting it, until you get it".

I realized that I was afraid to really try most yoga poses, I knew I couldn't do them, so why even try. Well if you try a little bit more every class, eventually you will get there.

I bought a week long unlimited pass to Laughing Lotus, so we will see how I feel after the week is up. Today I am sore, but I'm going to stick with it and go to class again tonight.

Being Vegan

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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I got a great question from Ralph on my Formspring.me account about my diet:

Ok, Sarah, I need to get serious about getting healthy and losing weight. I've got 2 beautiful daughters that are the joy of my life & I want to see them grow up, get married, etc. Can you tell me some more (specifically) about your vegan diet?

Ok, so being vegan…

It was a hard choice for me and I usually tell people that it's not always the right choice for everyone.
You can still be vegan and not be healthy (believe it or not). So I set out to address all the issues with my current eating habits, and it's important for you to do this before you decide to change the way you eat.

My main issues were carbs and cheese. This came in many forms. Bagels and cream cheese, pizza, pasta with cheese, cheese and crackers, nachos, and the list goes on. These were some of my favorite foods, my comfort foods. I was already a vegetarian so giving up meat wasn't an issue, but giving up cheese and dairy seemed almost impossible.

Then I decided to really be aware of my intake of white flour and processed foods. Not because they weren't vegan, but because they were bad for me and they would hinder my ability to lose weight.

I eat a lot of dark leafy greens, which is where I get a lot of my iron from, particularly in the green juice I make in the morning. I make sure I get my needed carbs from whole grains like brown rice, barley and whole wheat breads. I get creative with salads, I love adding new things to my salads. And I make sure to eat my legumes for protein. This includes beans, tempeh, tofu, & meat/dairy substitutes.

Here are some great resources: Vegan Food Pyramid, Vegan Health FAQ's

I'm the kind of person who need's hard and fast rules if I'm going to stick to something, so that's why I decided to go vegan. Recently I've hit a bit of a rut in my weight loss, I started eating white flour and I honestly feel like garbage when I do that. I've lost 22 pounds so far, but I've been stuck here for a while.

I've made the commitment to lose 50 pounds and I'm almost half way there, so I can't stop now! I'll keep you updated with my progress, and I hope I've answered your question.

If you have any other questions I would be happy to answer them.