In my post a few weeks ago, I lamented my inability to see any real results from my six weeks of dieting.

I’m now very happy to report that thanks to strict adherence to my eating plan and minimal physical activity I can actually suck in my gut.  This is kind of a big deal seeing that for the last few years even the strongest contraction of my abdominal muscles produced no visible results.  While this “feat” is a little pathetic for a fitness blog, I’ll take what I can get.  It also has me wondering what long forgotten feats of physical prowess I may soon be able to undertake.  Touching my toes, climbing a flight of stairs without gasping for breath, or maybe even getting off the toilet without grabbing the towel rack and praying it won’t rip out of the wall.  The possibilities are endless.

The whole getting into shape thing is a very curious process of discovering hidden abilities.  It’s like those kids on Heroes, but entertaining.  Not being a “sporty” kind of guy, I don’t think I’m very likely to ever try rock climbing, parasailing or white water rafting, but should the mood (read: mental illness) ever strike, it’s nice to know that I will most likely meet my end by falling from a great distance onto craggy rocks and not stroking out on the walk from the car to wherever those rock thingies are.

Being able to “suck it in” also brings to light a myriad of fashion possibilities.  The very idea that one day soon I won’t have to dig to the bottom of every pile of pants at the GAP, or could maybe even walk into an H&M with my head held high is a little intoxicating.  I hold out no hope of ever being able to wear anything sold by American Apparel but since heroin addiction isn’t in my immediate future this doesn’t bother me too much.

Rest assured that any new physical abilities I discover will be reported forthwith, but for now it’s time for my afternoon low cal-high protein cereal bar with artificial cinnamon flavor and 3 ( yes, I counted them) raisins.

Mmmmmm, I’m fulfilled.

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.

I’ve always loved the ocean, so beautiful and full of life.  How many times have I dreamt of swimming in the clear, blue Mediterranean, splashing about with my lover, the salty water licking our lips, our legs intertwining below the surface?  There is only one problem with my harlequin romance: I can’t swim and I am deathly afraid of being in the water.

I have spent so many summers sitting on my blanket looking longingly at my children and all the other beach-goers doing what I secretly desired to do.  I knew I needed to get over my fear of the water, or my dream would never come true.  After all, when I did get to the Mediterranean, did I really believe I was just going to jump in and magically start swimming?  I did not want to still be sitting on that blanket watching every one else live my dream.

So this past November, at 44 years of age, I finally decided to take swimming lessons.  I figured I just needed a few lessons to get over my fear and then I could just take it from there.  Swimming didn’t look all that hard; besides, I didn’t want to be Michael Phelps.  I just wanted to be able to tread water and swim about a little bit.  After all, my lover (who happens to be a great swimmer) was going to be right next to me.  He would be my life vest, just in case.

At my first lesson, I learned how to put my head under the surface without water going up my nose (I don’t know why my kids didn’t share this valuable piece of information).  This made a world of difference for me.  I didn’t feel like I was going to drown so I was able to concentrate on learning all the basics and the different swim strokes.  I never thought, at my age, I would learn to overcome one of my biggest fears and in doing so find a new workout regimen I love.

It has been 3 ½ months since that first lesson and I can proudly say that I am now a swimmer.  Although I may never become an Olympic swimmer, I now realize how physically challenging swimming really is. I have already signed up for a swim fit class and I am sure that when I get to the Mediterranean, my blanket will be empty and my lover (no longer my backup flotation device) will just have to keep up with me.

Maribel Torres lives, writes, and now swims in New York.

Jeanine Casler is off today.

Sometimes I find myself just a little jealous of you city dwellers.  To be specific, I don’t mean car cities, those modern, diffused communities attached by crowded superhighways.  No, I mean tightly-packed, sidewalk-and-subway metropolises.  Your grocery store is down the street, and because you walk virtually everywhere, you can afford that chocolate gelato in that cool little ice cream shop the next block over.

Do you even worry about car insurance?

And the biking opportunities!  Sure, you have to dodge the cabbies and tourists, but those actions only make the ride more varied.  I envision a super-charged mountain bike ride.

The smells— ahh, the smells.  Yes, there’s the overripe dumpster at the end of the alley, but there’s also that bakery, the one that perfumes the air with the smell of baking bread, the one that draws you in every time you pass.  Or the coffee shop.  Or the Italian place, the one that smells of sautéed garlic at 11 p.m.  And because you walk, you can enjoy that scrumptious pasta dish.

I live in suburbia, a word that translates, in Latin, to “parking lot.”

We drive to the store.  We drive to school.  We drive down the street to the library.  We drive to the movie rental store.  We drive to the grocery store, barber, soccer field, vet, hardware store, film palace.

And because we’re driving, we don’t smell the chocolate, or the coffee, or the bread, or the sautéed garlic.  Biking— yes, it exists.  But because we’re the only non-motorized obstacles, the cars focus on us even more.  Or worse, they don’t focus on us, in spite of our day-glo reflective colors.

So we sit in our sealed cars, listening to our canned music, ignoring the people in their respective moving boxes five feet from us.

The city is a Jackson Pollock painting— frenetic energy, not always pretty in a stereotypical way, but powerful all the same.

In contrast, the suburbs sometimes feel like a paint-by-numbers Munch.

City dwellers— please eat a good pasta dish for me.

Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.

This past weekend my eyes were opened to an entirely new way of approaching structural imbalances.  For those of you wondering what a structural imbalance is, it can most easily be described as asymmetry in the body— one shoulder higher than the other, a head tilt to the side, a rotation of the trunk.

I took a seminar called Posturology 101 where we learned how to chart.  Charting is an exhaustive method of recording someone’s three-dimensional posture.  Using this method, I can study the patterns in a client’s body and have a record to refer to after treating them to see if my methods are working.

A fellow participant was practicing charting on me and came to the hypothesis that my left femur was about 6mm longer than my right.  I have suspected this leg was longer than the other since childhood, when I would stand still for long stretches at church every Sunday morning, but never had a method to confirm it.  So I grabbed the 6mm thick foot lift they had in the room and placed it under my right foot, stood still and gazed into the mirror.  At first I felt some weird sensation in my lower right back, the same spot my chiropractor always adjusts.  After thirty seconds my lower back settled and felt great, as if I just had an adjustment.  Then I looked closer and realized my shoulders were even.  Cool!  My left shoulder has been higher since I can remember and no matter what I did in the past, it would stay that way.  My neck and head had also straightened out and my back felt wonderful after only one minute of standing with my right foot on a 6mm lift.

(The next thing for me to do is go to my chiropractor for an x-ray shot in a very specific way to confirm the leg length difference.  Then I will get a lift for as many of my shoes as possible.  Maybe then I can run without back pain.)

Before this weekend I knew the skull was made up of several bones and that in a healthy skull the bones shift freely.  But I thought it was to an imperceptible degree.  I now know better.  As the teacher was lecturing towards the end of our third day, he paused mid-sentence and stared at one of the students who was seated with her right leg crossed over her left, causing her hips to tilt.

Do you like to sit like that when you are learning?

Yea, I guess so.

Then he motioned for the rest of the class to stand by him and look at our fellow student’s face.

Uncross your legs and sit flat please.

As she did, something shifted in her face, but I could not detect what it was.

Re-cross them please.

Then I saw it.  When her feet were both flat on the floor, her right eye socket was lower than the left.  But as she crossed her legs, the bones comprising her right eye socket shifted, bringing her right eye nearly even with her left.  Witnessing this, I began to wonder: how does such a shift in posture and bone alignment effect her vision, balance, headaches, cognition, sinuses, and immune system? I was riveted! I still am.

Our teacher related other similar clinical observations and anecdotes about how patients have addressed learning challenges by changing their posture.  Scientific studies still need to be done and clearly the subject warrants more attention and research.  But while I wait for my NIH grant, I really want to practice some more charting.  So, if there are any willing guinea pigs out there, give me a call at 212-FURTHER.

Jamie Dreyer is the Co-founder of Blog Further and the President of Further Fitness NYC.

The drive from L.A. to Las Vegas is a long one and there’s not much in the way of scenery, although I must admit that I never knew that there were so many different shades of brown.  Also the Mojave stinks, really.  This smell almost defies description.  Think of something that died a long time ago and has been baking in the desert sun since the day it gave up the ghost.  But this being my first trip to the famed land of excess, I was not going to let little things like 300 miles of high desert and an unidentifiable smell ruin my trip.

Now I’m not much of a gambler or a drinker but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my vices and Vegas was the perfect place to indulge in them.  I, of course, am talking about food and Cirque du Soleil.  We’ll save discussion of the Quebecois spectacles for another post, but if you are at all interested in the body beautiful, get thee to Las Vegas where whatever you are into is flying, swinging, diving or contorting in one of Cirque du Soleil’s six shows on the strip.

All regular readers of the blog ( I’m sure there must be a few of you) know that I started a diet on New Year’s Day and so of course the best way to keep on the caloric straight and narrow is to go the American city with the highest concentration of celebrity chefs.  If you’ve heard of them, the odds are good that they have one, if not more, restaurants in Vegas.  Long gone are the days of 99cent shrimp cocktails and $8.99 all-you-can-eat prime rib— although according to some roadside advertising both of these things are still available at a casino called “Terrible’s” in Primm, Nevada:

Oh Boy! Cheap seafood in the desert? Let’s all go!

So I have only to choose a Mario Batali or Wolfgang Puck restaurant in “fake Venice” in which to abandon my diet, the culinary equivalent of snorting heroin off a hooker’s ass.  I ate at both.  The rest of the weekend is nothing but a blur of aerialists and fine dining, both no less than 500 feet from a bank of slot machines.

As is usually the case, the drive home seemed much longer than our first desert crossing and so we made a stop along the way in the picturesque town of Baker, CA population 500.  Baker is not only home to the world’s largest thermometer but also boasts a Denny’s, a huge gyro stand and the somewhat obscene sounding “Bun Boy Motel.”

We ate at the Bob’s Big Boy adjacent to the Bun Boy and got the hell out of town stopping only to buy dried meat products at an alien themed jerky stand.  We also stopped long enough to notice a billboard imploring motorist not to dump their pets in the desert.  How many pets have to be dumped before they take out a billboard and what are the circumstances that would lead up to such an occurrence?

Sorry kids but daddy had a few bum hands of Texas Hold ‘Em so say goodbye to Sparky.

Maybe that why the desert smells?

By the time we reached home I was pretty scared but had to drag myself onto the bathroom scale to see just how much damage I’d done.  I hadn’t gained a pound.  Not one.  The wages of sin, indeed.  I wonder what the odds are of that happening again.  I bet there’s a bookmaker in Vegas who can tell me.

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.