My name is Corrie Alexander, and I’m a thirty-something Canuck living in Ontario.

I’m what you’d recognize as a textbook homebody. I work from home. I eat at home. I exercise at home. I seldom leave the house save for exercise and errands.

And that was before quarantining was cool.

Like most introverts, it’s not that I don’t like people or going to social functions, but I can only do them so often and have to mentally prepare myself in advance. They’re just exhausting somehow.

Maybe it’s because I find it really difficult to put myself out there in person…

I find myself obsessed with carbs lately. I don’t mean eating them (although I love a satisfying starchy meal as much as the next person), I mean talking about them. Perhaps it’s because Fat and Protein are getting all the glory right now, and the poor Carb has been shunned as the devil of macronutrients and enemy to all things health and fitness.

I feel the need to rush to its defense because today’s obsession with low-carb diets is a direct result of North America’s tendency to overconsume low-quality, refined carbs and live a predominantly sedentary lifestyle.

But for most…

Truth time; I used to despise arm and shoulder day. My upper body strength was severely lacking when I first embarked on my fitness journey and I could barely haul a sack of potatoes from my car to the kitchen, let alone do military pushups and bicep curls.

I far preferred lower body and core workouts, which were hard, but left me feeling like a rockstar.

Arm workouts left me feeling like a sad, soggy noodle.

But if my body were a school, my arms and shoulders would definitely win the most improved student award; I stuck through those awful…

Over the years, I have experimented with different diets, but in the end, I found eating a wide variety of whole foods is the way to go. That said, I found certain foods were particularly helpful at helping me achieve my weight loss goals, and have become a part of my daily diet.

Part of the reason they are so effective is that I actually enjoy eating these foods. I’m a strong believer that you need to like your diet in order to stick to it for the long term. …

One of my favorite hobbies is baking. To me, there is nothing quite like unwinding in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon with a glass of wine and a recipe for baked goods. There’s something so satisfying about mixing a bunch of yummy ingredients in a bowl, popping your creation in the oven, and letting the sweet smell of banana nut muffins wash over you.

But, I have a confession to make; I kind of hate cooking meals. Probably because I have to do it, and at the most inconvenient times.

I’m a busy woman during the week, and the…

Within the last few years, calorie counting has fallen out of favor with the diet industry, with many fitness gurus claiming that it simply “doesn’t work.” Yet, science repeatedly proves that a caloric deficit will result in weight loss. That’s not to say that your health and fitness are as simple as calories in, calories out (aka CICO).

It’s more that CICO is a vital factor in a bigger equation that includes food choices and physical activity. Hormones, nutrition, and exercise all matter immensely. …

When it came to home fitness programs, I was a “serial starter.” I’d start a new workout plan with fresh verve only to fizzle out after a week. Sometimes, it was because the workouts were too hard, and I felt discouraged. Other times, I simply felt like it “wasn’t working.”

A few weeks or months would pass, and I’d start a different fitness program hoping for different results. But I never lasted more than a week.

What I’ve learned since then is it wasn’t the fitness program that was the problem. It was my approach. …

“I don’t want to watch TV.”

I would be in too much pain to focus, even if I did want to spend my last days watching banal soap operas, which I don’t.

Jonah is holding my hand tightly in both of his as I explain this to him.

“I just wish there was something I could bring you to help,” he says. He looks at me with melancholy eyes that reflect many months of hospital visits and bad news.

We are only in our late forties, but it feels like the last 18 months have aged us both by decades…