Hello from intermittently sunny Boston

[cosmia]

Hello all! I found this forum through a link to Spezzy's success story on Fitocracy. It looks awesome here, so I thought I'd join and spend the next few weeks reading up on everything and asking you guys over 9000 questions in preparation for the next 6 week challenge in December.

So, about me. My name is Alicia and I'm 26. Why am I here? A few reasons, One, I've been a naturally thin girl most of my life, but over the past year I've started to develop a little belly. It's definitely not that bad, but I want to take action now rather than when the problem has gotten much worse (when I assume it would become much harder to reverse). My eating habits haven't changed, so I can only assume my crazy metabolism has started to leave me. But my eating habits definitely do need to change, whatever the case might be. I've never eaten quite enough (pure laziness, nothing to do with trying to keep weight off), and what I do eat is rarely as healthy as it should be. So one of my goals is to eat better and eat more. I'm intrigued by paleo, which I'd never heard of until two days ago, and I'd really like to try it.

I'm already somewhat physically active. I adore biking and I always bike to work, and also bike everywhere else on non-work days, so that's at least 8-10 miles of biking a day. Also, I love yoga. I used to do it only infrequently, but over the past month I've gotten up to doing vinyasa three times a week. I used to think that was all the exercise I needed, but now that I'm reading up on everything, it's becoming clear that I need to balance out all that cardio with strength training. So I'm hoping to learn more about that and get started soon. Not only would I like to look better, most importantly I'd like to feel better. I've always hated feeling physically weak. In short, the overarching goal here isn't to lose weight (in fact, I would very much prefer not to, as I would probably look like a skeleton before long); it's to gain muscle weight and reduce body fat.

I have a bunch of questions about so many things, but I'm going to do some more reading before I start harassing everyone. (If I have multiple questions that are unrelated to each other, should I start a catch-all thread in the general fitness/diet subforum? Or is there a better place for it?)

In conclusion... hello!

[ETFnerd]

hello......

[Rick]

Hey Alicia. Welcome to The Rebellion!

There's a place for every question between the different sub-forums. You'll have a better chance of finding the person who wants to answer your question if you go to the relevant sub-forum. Your catchall will be a natural fit under some personal thread (see ETFnerd's and my signatures), but if you only ask there you're hurting your chances of getting the question answered (unless you become a forum celebrity!).

[Knightwatch]

Heya from Worcester, your neighbor to the left. Welcome aboard!

(a bunch of us are from the Boston/MA area. go us!)

[HenryFnord]

Small world.

Did 4 years at WPI.

Then I fled to the west coast!