This week, I started wearing my Coros fitness tracker again. I didn’t realize until I looked back at my activity log that it had been 11 months since I last had it on my wrist.
For years, I was an obsessive tracker of every single physical activity I did. I’d log my runs, walks, and swims. I’d make sure to click on my watch before each hike and yoga class. Then, immediately after, I’d sync it with the app and obsessively gauge whether or not I’d worked out “enough” that day. Was my fitness improving? Was I getting stronger and faster? Never mind that most of the time I wasn’t training for anything. I just wanted to improve.
But when I got pregnant, my fitness took a nosedive. I was exhausted and nauseous all the time, and I started to cramp up on any kind of long jog or hike. My times were slower, my workouts shorter—and my watch let me know. Training was no longer optimized! My running fitness score tanked! My training load was low! The only stat going up was my recovery meter.
So one day I took it off and breathed a huge sigh of relief. I no longer felt the silent judgment of my wearable tracker. I could go for a light jog and stop when I felt tired, I could swim laps until I got hungry and went home to get breakfast, or I could skip a workout altogether.
For a while I enjoyed this newfound freedom, but now that my son is 15 months old, my body is healed, and most nights I’m sleeping more, I’ve started to try to get back into shape. At first, I left off the Coros. But I found myself obsessively checking my phone to see how long my runs were and then trying to calculate my mile times. So this week, I put it back on.
I hope that after nearly a year away from fitness tracking, I’m able to embrace the parts of it that encourage my growth and physical health without becoming too rigid. I need to remember to give myself a bit of grace when my times are slower or I skip a workout altogether because the baby was teething and we had a terrible night, or I got too busy at work to sneak in a lunch run, or I just felt like taking a day off. Like most things in life, moderation is key.
What I’m reading
One industry that is perhaps not especially good at moderation is the world of wellness food. In this deep dive for Taste, Jessie Gaynor looks at why we’re so obsessed with “clean eating” and “holistic health,” and why that might finally be shifting.
Where I live, in Richmond, Virginia, sea moss is available not only at the local crunchy grocery store but also at Walmart—priced at just under $19 for eight ounces. These foods no longer indicate wealthy kookiness, they just indicate wealth—bee pollen is the edible gold leaf of our time.
“It’s Soylent for girls,” my friend observed when I showed her my research, and it does seem natural that the feminization of meal optimization would mean—instead of the complete removal of effort (ready to drink!)—a hilarious amount of extra work. “Now that you are in the swing of making your own Well Milk every week,” The Moon Juice Cookbook advises, “you undoubtedly have a supply of dehydrated nut pulps in your pantry,” which you can use to make “delicious doughs” for things like homemade Chocolate Chaga Donuts with “sprinkles” made from “activated” (read: sprouted) quinoa, beet and turmeric juice, and coconut nectar.
My experience of wellness food is that the more it attempts to transform its ingredients, the worse the final product tastes. A big salad or a green smoothie free from gluten and dairy and refined sugar tastes normal, maybe delicious. A brownie made of cacao and Medjool dates tastes like Medjool dates, but sandier and more bitter.
Read “Have We Finally Hit Peak Wellness Food?” here.
While Gaynor questions whether the end of our obsession with wellness food has finally arrived, it’s clear that, thanks to increased accessibility and a surge of interest post-pandemic, travel isn’t going anywhere. But as the East Coast is smothered by wildfire smoke and parts of the West are seeing abnormal rainfall, how can we continue to accept the high environmental cost of travel in the midst of the climate crisis? Perhaps it’s finally time for the travel industry to confront its own environmental impact in a meaningful (read: no greenwashing) way.
Puerto Rico is a fitting destination for exploring these issues because the Caribbean is the world’s most tourism-dependent region. The island, which derives about 7 percent of its GDP from the industry, is popular with mainland Americans, and birders who seek some of the more than 350 species found there, including 18 endemics. Yet like many other travel destinations, Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean face a future increasingly prone to disasters that may drive vacationers away. In 2017, for example, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate cost the region more than $1 billion in lost tourism revenue, including for islands that weren’t directly damaged. Yet tourism can also be a force for recovery. After the pandemic slump, Puerto Rico, for instance, saw a record number of visitors in 2021, generating about $98 million in tax revenue and support for many jobs.
Read “Travel in the Time of Climate Crisis” here.
On one extreme side of environmentalism, there’s a movement to wash clothes less… or not at all. I’ll leave it at that, and you’ll just need to read the story for yourself.
For Szabo, the low-wash habit began when he bought his first pair of raw denim jeans in 2010. Travelling from his native Canada to Europe, he brought his jeans for the six-month trip. "It was a quirk about me that I had these stinky jeans," he tells BBC Culture. "They smelled awful." In Budapest he met his future wife, and the jeans became a character in their relationship. "My jeans would be in, like, a pile on the floor at the end of the bed," he remembers. "You walked into the room, you could smell [them]... I was very fortunate that my wife was as interested in me as she was."
Read “The Rise of the ‘No-Wash’ Movement” here.
Last but not least
