One of the great pleasures in life can be found in the food that we eat. For me, my relationship with food started out as a challenge for many years. Involved in the very aesthetically-focused sport of figure skating, I was forced to be constantly vigilant about my weight. Consequently, I spent the first […]

Very vividly, I remember the first time I tried to do swizzles. A swizzle is one of the most basic skating moves, where both feet simultaneously trace outlines of coke bottles on the ice. I was 5 years old, and was not a natural born swizzler. I recall the feeling of utter discouragement, and telling […]

I don’t have any children - yet. The closest I have to a child right now is my dog, but as I grow nearer to the age of having children, I feel anxious, nervous, and excited all at once. Well, mostly, I feel nervous. Okay, let’s be honest here… I freak out. I worry if […]

Have you ever caught yourself so immersed and absorbed in an activity that hours pass and you feel as though you’ve only been doing it for minutes? Have you ever experienced the sensation of action and awareness merging together into one fluid state? This experience is called flow. Flow experiences are optimal experiences that provide […]

The Department of Health and Human Services, in conjunction with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, launched a nationwide health promotion and disease prevention initiative called Healthy People 2010. One of the focus areas from this initiative is to increase the amount of physical activity in the largely sedentary population, in hopes of supporting physical health and reducing the staggering number of preventable deaths. For example, in the year 2000, of 2,391,399 deaths, 1,159,000 (48%) were from preventable causes. Furthermore and estimated 400,000 of those deaths were due to poor diet and physical inactivity. […]

 
Gloria Park, MAPP, is a doctoral student in Exercise and Sport Psychology at Temple University. Currently, she works as a Program Coordinator at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and is an Assistant Instructor for the Master of Applied Positive Psychology Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a competitive figure skater for […]