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Start the new year off right! Let 2013 be the year you lose weight once and for all. This seminar will highlight habits that cause weight gain and provide diet tips that may lead to a healthier you. Popular and fad diet plans will be reviewed along with recommendations for diets that go the distance to meeting health goals, slimming down, feeling energized and improving your health.
Kathleen Zelman, MPH, RD
Jan. 1 – 12:30 p.m. (ET), 11:30 a.m. (CT)
Register now.
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Here's an easy way to keep your get-fit resolution: Sign up for one of these runs or workouts on January 1st. Done aaaand ... done.
RUNS
Commitment Day 5K
When: January 1st at 11 a.m.
Where: Fairmount Park, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive near the Art Museum, Philadelphia.
Cost: $39.
Hamilton Hangover 5-Miler
When: January 1st at 12:30 p.m.
Where: Veterans Park, 2206 Kuser Road Hamilton Township, New Jersey.
Cost: $20.
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Say goodbye to that post-holiday bulge. Here, five tips from Philly fitness guru Brian Maher for setting realistic goals—and actually achieving them.
Happy New Year, Be Wellers! Are you ready to get 2013 started on the right foot?
For many, the New Year means a fresh start, a new beginning, a clean slate. It also means a new resolve to finally (finally!) lose some weight. The sober truth is that while many will vow to take better care of their bodies, the vast majority will fail miserably within the first 60 days. (Womp, wommmmp.)
Now for the good news: You don’t have to be one of those people who fail. No, really. Keep reading, because I’m about to give you five simple rules for making (and keeping) your New Year’s lose weight, get fit resolution.
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Weight-loss coach Jessica Procini is hosting a post-New Year's girls' night with a workout, dinner and more.
 Jessica Procini Okay, so you’ve made a resolution: You’re definitely, positively, abolsutely going to shed a few pounds in the New Year. That’s great! But, um, exactly how are you going to do it?
Weight-loss coach Jessica Procini will take out some of the guesswork at her Healthy Girls Night Out on January 7th. It all starts with a workout at Pure Barre in Center City from 6 to 7 p.m. Then, once you’re feeling all ballerina-like, you’ll head down the street to Pure Fare for a healthy dinner. There, Jessica will share her weight-loss tips and advice to help you get on the path toward better health. You’ll have the chance to ask her questions and learn more about her weight-loss coaching, too—how she works with clients to come up with a plan for losing weight that they can actually stick with. Read more about the event and get your tickets here. (Ticket covers the cost of the class, dinner and lecture.)
$40, January 7th at 6 p.m., event starts at Pure Barre, 1701 Walnut Street, fourth floor, Philadelphia.
>> Have a health or fitness event you’d like to share with Be Well Philly readers? Email eleaman@phillymag.com.
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Let's count 'em down.
 The Color Run 1. We had a blast at The Color Run.
Remember that time in July when 26,000 of you descended on the Art Museum to get blasted with colored cornstarch during a 5K run through Philly? And remember how awesome that was? Okay, that is all.
2. We maxed out The Broad Street Run.
Who knew so many people were itching to get out and run 10 miles? The race’s five-hour sell-out in February took everyone by surprise, including Broad Street organizers. Those of us who were able to make it through the monumentally slow registration process (Remember? Everyone logged on at the same time, remember, and we were thisclose to crashing the servers.) felt like we’d just won the lottery. Which, you know, is exactly how runners feel next year, when the race officially moves to a lottery-registration system.
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A big development on the gluten-free front.
 • Just as the lactose intolerant have Lactaid pills, celiac sufferers may one day (soon?!) have a pill that allows them to eat gluten worry-free, researchers say. They’ve been working on engineering a naturally occurring enzyme that would break down gluten peptides into teeny tiny particles that might be more easily digested by celiac sufferers. Reports Science Daily: “The new enzyme (called KumaMax) broke down more than 95 percent of a gluten peptide implicated in celiac disease in acidic conditions like those in the stomach. ‘These combined properties make the engineered [enzyme] a promising candidate as an oral therapeutic for celiac disease,’ say the researchers.” Of course, there’s still work to be done to see if the remaining 5 percent of the gluten peptide is still too much for those with celiac disease to handle. But that’s a question for further research—and, I’m assuming, a bit more laboratory tinkering.
• Hey parents, here’s another reason why you should sit down to family dinner: new research found that family meals encourage kids to eat more fruits and veggies. More here.
• For those who’ve ever wondered, here’s why you look terrible when you’re exhausted. (Yes, there’s a scientific reason for it.)
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The cafe is now offering an expanded menu at its Main Line location.
Philly.com’s Michael Klein posted this afternoon that Philly’s eight-month-old raw-food eatery, Jar Bar, has shuttered its 12th street location. The good news is, owner Jennifer vanHeeswyk Richmond and co. haven’t left the area: they’ve simply moved the operation to Radnor’s Philadelphia Sports Club gym, where they’ve had a cafe counter since the summer.
“While it has been a pleasure to serve our wonderful customers at our Philadelphia restaurant we are relocating our kitchen and expanding our offerings at our Radnor location,” reads a post on Jar Bar’s blog. “As heavy-hearted as we are in delivering the news about the Philadelphia location, there remains so many successes that we plan to focus on and celebrate, and are grateful to have had the support of so many people in Philadlephia and will miss our regular customers.”
For all you Catalyst Cleanse lovers in the city, the juices will still be available for Philadelphia pick-up, according to the website.
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Free classes through January 1st
 Photo courtesy orangetheoryfitness.com Attention MontCo readers: You’ve got a new fitness studio to check out. Orangetheory Fitness, a franchise of small-group training studios with over 60 locations across the country, will celebrate the grand opening of its first Pennsylvania facility on January 2nd. Located in Willow Grove, the studio is offering free classes from now until opening day so you can see what the 60-minute workouts are all about.
Here’s a teaser: Orangetheory uses a specific format for each 60-minute class, featuring four 10-to-30-minute intervals per session. The intervals are a mix of cardio, weight- and suspension-training and rowing to keep your muscles guessing. Each class can accommodate up to 25 people at the absolute max. The Orangetheory website claims you’ll see a noticeable difference in your body in just four to five sessions. Dang.
So why the orange? I wondered, too: “It invokes energy, youthfulness, vitality, and health,” according to the website. “Orangetheory Fitness uses science to stimulate the same responses in your body.”
I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s totally on my post-New Year’s to-do list. If you’re chomping at the bit, check out the schedule of free classes here.
Orangetheory Fitness is located at 164 Park Avenue in Willow Grove. New clients get their first class for free, and individual classes after that are $25 each. Or, you can sign up for monthly passes, ranging from $59 for four classes to $159 for unlimited. Class cards, which are good for one year, are available, too: $180 for 10 classes, $320 for 20 and $450 for 30.
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Here's what I'll be listening to during my holiday workout.
Guess what I’m looking forward to most on Christmas Day? Not the presents, or the enormous dinner, or even the day off from work. (Although, that last one’s pretty darn sweet.) It’s the early morning run I plan to do around what I hope to be a deserted Center City on Christmas morning.
See, this will be the first year of my adult life that I’ll wake up in my own house, in my own bed, and in my own city on Christmas morning. Every year before this, I was traveling for the holiday, so I’d wake up in a guest room of some relative’s house somewhere. But when my husband and I decided to spend Christmas morning, just us, in our own house this year, my first thought wasn’t all the cuddly, romantic, awwww-how-cute kind of stuff. It was, “Oh, sweet! I can’t wait to go for a run!”
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Or, "Why It’s Better to Be a Beatle Than a Bieber"
 If you saw the Stones or the Who at the recent Sandy benefit concert, you probably wondered: Sheesh, how have these guys stayed alive for so long? The answer may be that they stuck with their bands instead of solo careers.
BMJ Open reports that a group of researchers examined the lives—and deaths—of 1,489 rock gods from North America and Europe who achieved fame in the 50 years between Elvis Presley’s first number-one hit in 1956 (it was “Jailhouse Rock”) and 2006. They determined that solo stars were twice as likely to die young as those with bandmates. Almost 10 percent of European solo performers died early, compared to 5.4 percent of those in bands; in America, the numbers were 22.8 percent prematurely dead solo artists to 10.2 percent of group members. Katy Perry, you better hook up!
The researchers dug into authorized and unauthorized biographies and websites, Top 40 charts and more and wound up determining that 137 members of their sample died over the 50-year span. Short-lived Americans outlived short-lived Europeans, with the former dying at an average age of 45, compared to 39 for the latter. (So much for socialized health care.) Neither gender nor the age at which an artist hit it big affected life expectancy, but ethnicity did: Non-white stars died at an earlier age.
The researchers noted that fame increases access to risky behaviors like drug abuse, but also that such early-life stressors as sexual abuse or living with a mentally ill or substance-abusing parent doubled the odds of early death. The good news for Jagger and Daltrey et al.? After 25 years in the limelight, European rock stars live just as long as their fans do. The same didn’t hold true, alas, for their American counterparts.
Photo: Featureflash / Shutterstock.com
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