09/17/09

Hello and welcome to the new Your Shape blog! I’m Laurel House, your official Your Shape blogger, and in the months ahead I will be sharing my personal tips on fitness, health, nutrition and how to live a healthy, balanced lifestyle. I will also be sharing my experiences working out with Ubisoft’s Your Shape fitness game for the Nintendo Wii, which will be available to the public this November.

But first a bit about myself. I’m a 31-year-old born and bred Angeleno, though I’ve lived in Kansas City, Missouri (giving me grounding) and New York (giving me edge), and I am thrilled to be part of the Your Shape team as the resident blogger voicing my opinions on fitness as a lifestyle!

So… who am I really?...

I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a hermit. I like my routine, I like my space, and I like my me-time. Sure, I like to hang out with friends and emerge from my house to socialize too. But only when in the mood. Fitness follows that philosophy. On rare occasions I’ll head to my favorite group exercise class for a serious dose of social butt kicking. On weekends I hike with my friends. But generally speaking, I work out alone (with the company of my trusty iPod), on my own time, when it fits into my schedule. In between conference calls and passionate bouts of writing, in fact, I tend to workout during times of writer’s block - which is great since exercise has been proven to get the mind going (I knew there was a reason I would do 100 jumping jacks before every test in college).

My other regenerating activity? Video games. If, when I was 11 years old and obsessively playing Super Mario Brothers in a desperate attempt to save the princess, you had told me that 20 years from now I’d be using my gaming system to get my butt in gear and burn calories, I would have thought you were nuts. Exercise, in the “olden” days, was all about belted leotards, leg warmers and step classes. Not anymore. My two favorite mind-menders/pastimes have merged into one. Really… life doesn’t get much better.

...And why should you care what I have to say?

As a longtime exercise enthusiast, and resident of body-obsessed Los Angeles, I’ve always had first-look access to the fitness industry as an in-the-know insider of up and coming trends, products, and personalities. My passion came from a 14-year competitive ice skating stint that folded into a Dance (and English) Major in college. A few injuries later, I became a writer. Since then, I have published three books (two fitness books and one stress-reduction book published under HarperCollins and Wiley), became an in-print and online healthy lifestyle magazine editor and writer with hundreds of articles printed in dozens of publications including Fit Magazine, First for Women, Men’s Journal, Women’s Health, Fit Yoga, Yahoo! and Discovery’s PlanetGreen. My in-print expertise led to regular television morning show appearances including: the Today Show weekend, Soap Talk (Soap Network), Daily Buzz, Modern Girl’s Guide to Life (E!), KTLA Morning News, CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC Morning News shows both locally and nationally.

In 2007 I launched GreenIQ - an online carbon and environmental calculator that measures how green you are, driving hundreds of thousands of unique visitors to the site each month to learn their GreenIQ and find out how to incorporate more green into their daily lives. I’m currently working on my ChickNotes Guide book series- a Cliff Notes-ish guide to chicks.

More than anything, I’m an advocate for a balanced, albeit obsessively driven, Fitness Lifestyle.

Check back daily for my new blog posts, videos, and insight. And by all means, please email me your questions, post your comments, and share your thoughts! I’m excited to be here for and with you.

Check out the welcome video I made for you guys in the Gallery section!

posted by: Laurel