The Very Best Podcasts on iTunes

This post seems to have gotten a lot of traffic from Google, so I'm going to keep updating it as I find more excellent podcasts. Leave your finds in the comments!

I am not the biggest fan of exercise, primarily because I find it boring (I climb stairs, go for walks, or use the elliptical or erg machines), and my boredom draws attention to the fact that exercise is less comfortable than sitting on the couch drinking wine and watching The Dog Whisperer. But I believe exercise is important, so I combat the boredom with podcasts. The following podcasts are so good, I go to the gym just to be able to completely focus on them.

Gawker says you should never take exercise advice from the NYTimes. Seconded!

The NYTimes is at it again, trying to figure out exactly what it is we need to do to be thin.  In addition to many other problems, the article cites that same crazy weight loss study that followed women starting at a mean age of 54, and found that only those who started thin and exercised for an hour or more a day stayed thin.  Because, as a 54 year old, being thin should of course be the ultimate goal of your existence.  Even though we have no reliable studies on what happens when women do (or don't) put on weight after menopause.

Gawker's Hamilton Nolan issues an appropriate takedown, in a story titled "Never Take Fitness Advice from the New York Times:"

"Does working out really help you lose weight?" ...This is hardly the first time the NYT has asked some slight variation of this maddening question. But this latest story clearly distilled these fundamental premises from which the journalism proceeds:
1. Weight loss is the goal towards which you should strive.
2. Exercise therefore has value to the extent it helps you lose weight.
3. Your goal is to become thin.
Thin. "Thin!" That is exactly the word this story uses. "The newest science suggests that exercise alone will not make you thin, but it may determine whether you stay thin, if you can achieve that state."

Nolan rightly points out that there's no reason the point of an exercise regime should be thinness, and in fact that thinness could be counterproductive:

Opting out of exercise

There are plenty of hardcore exercisers writing for this blog, sometimes myself included, and I’m sure plenty of readers, too.  We've posted exercise tips in the past, and likely will in the future, because exercise is a part of our and many of our readers' lives.  I understand the power of exercise, and the excitement surrounding it, and the benefits for one’s health.  That said, amid this chorus of “wheee, exercise,” I want to take some time to offer a different perspective: you don’t have to do it.

I say this because when obesity, and the health problems surrounding it (note that these are often drastically overstated), are so often in the news, it's easy for us to get caught up in a culture of healthy eating and fitness to such an extent that we begin to associate a value judgment with something that is, at its core, self care.  We don't tend to associate values with getting a manicure or not, but deciding to go to the gym or not can determine whether we feel "good" or feel "bad."  The same way marketers describe desserts as "sinful," we feel that lying on our couch catching up on Lost instead of hitting the treadmill is "lazy," "indulgent," or just plain "bad."