I'm pretty ruthless while grocery shopping. In fact, I make an effort to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible. Hey, walking really fast while pushing a cart full of canned beans and a whole watermelon is resistance training, right? And sometimes this method fails me because I don't take the time to do the math and identify whether or not I'm making a good decision with my grocery dollar. I end up buying a lot of precut stuff, which is just wasteful because we all know it's cheaper if you do the chopping yourself. And we all know that many of the store brands are the exact same product as the one with the fancy label (and catchy commercial jingle) but in some cases, spending a little bit more can make a big difference in the quality of your groceries. Cheap Healthy Good breaks down some items where spending just a little bit more will pay off when it comes to taste, texture or general edibility (is that a word?) of your chow. Her list:

• Coffee
• Pickles
• Premade pasta sauce and salad dressing
• Lemon juice
• Garlic
• Pasta
• Beer
• Chocolate
• Fish
• Cheese

I think most of us would say that we exercise for our health; for robust hearts and bellows-like lungs, big strong bones and big strong muscles that help us kick ass and take names. But I think a secret reason people exercise that we dislike talking about--because it makes us look vain, as if we don't care about our health, as if we are buying into the beauty ideal that we ought to be kicking to the curb--is that we exercise to look better. Especially naked. I submit this: there's not a thing in the world wrong with that.

Do you know how many times, when I've been running on the treadmill, I've knocked my headphones out of my ears and sent my iPod crashing on the floor? Many times. A hundred thousand times, at the very least. And if I managed to not slap my player off of me, then the earbuds would start slipping out anyway, and go flapping around and neither of these things is, believe me, conducive to a productive workout that gets your heart rate up and keeps it there from healthy exercise. Though it is possible your heart rate may be elevated with rage.

That's why I'm eyeing the Sennheiser MX75 Twist-To-Fit In-Ear Stereo Sport Headphones. Not just because they have the best and longest name of any headphones ever, or come in a cheery green color that makes me happy and is totally fashion-forward, but because they're guaranteed to stay in your ears and the cords clip to your top, so that you don't get all tangled and feel very, very stupid when you have to stop the treadmill and go pick up your music player across the room. It all seems very revolutionary to me, but that might be the aftermath of the rage talking.

We all love lists of good foods (bonus: it's like someone wrote your grocery list for you) and the thing that struck me about Self's recent "20 superfoods for weight loss" is that the foods on them aren't just a good idea for dieters, they're a good idea for just about anyone.

• Steak. Do you really need to be convinced to eat a big juicy steak? Vegetarians obvs get a pass, but order that tenderloin or New York strip...no guilt allowed.
  
  
• Eggs. I find I'm much happier if I have an egg every morning, because I'm not cranky or chewing on a stack of Post-It notes during my daily 10:30 conference call. A super simple thing to do would be to boil up a dozen eggs and then grab one on the way out the door. And have you seen these adorable Bento supplies that allow you to make your hardboiled eggs into shapes, even into Hello Kitty? Squee!
  
  
• Kale. Wendy McClure convinced me that I could actually eat this typical garnish and whaddya know, it's actually pretty good mixed with black beans and brown rice.
  
  
• Oats. Anyone who has had to feed themselves off a college scholarship living allowance knows that you eat oatmeal and stay full for approximately two years. It's seriously impossible to eat too many calories of oatmeal, because it's coming out of your ears before you get to the 500 mark. But unlike other simple fillers, oatmeal stays with you even longer than eggs, which means that if you, like me, have a busy schedule, you can put off lunch until later in the day, which is just about when you needed a break from work anyway.
  
  
• Lentils. I was always afraid of lentils, but then I kept staring at Heidi Swanson's amazing lentil soup with saffron yogurt and I hooked myself up. Dayam! You'll never go back to bean soup, folks, and apparently it's good for you too. Shhh...don't ruin my illusion that I'm eating high-end super-rich French food, mmmkay?
  
  
• Goji Berries. Er, I'm sorry, Self, but these things are naaaaasty. I'd honestly rather eat a raw cranberry without any sugar. Next!

There's a down side to weight loss. Boob loss. Look, I am not ashamed to declare I love my own boobs, they're the best! They're the only thing I've ever gotten for free that other people have had to pay for. Unfortunately, once my weight dips below 145, my full bosom starts to more closely resemble cow utters than the sexy-fun-time-appendages I enjoy so much. When I started shooting The Daily Special I weighed around 168. Now, after training for a stair climb, doing the SELF Challenge, and losing some old relationship weight I weigh about 136. 

I should be doing cartwheels in the street, right? I mean that's a good 30 pounds lost mainly by living my life, yet my deflating boobage causes me some extreme sadness. I mean, I pay a lot for bras. When the nice woman at Victoria's Secret told me that I was a B-cup, I looked at her with a look of such harrowing sadness that she said, "Well, you could still wear a C...I mean it's a full B." Great, I've got saleswomen trying to make me feel better. Obviously a B-cup is nothing to be ashamed of, but having always been a C it was hard to see my girls go.  I had to do something about this.

It's 100 degrees right now, in Utah. But that's okay, because it is a dry heat, right? It's a heat that starts building up around 9:00 or 10:00, by noonish reaches its apex, and then, from noon until 4:00, it settles in, feels thick, implacable, unending. Those four hours are the longest and the heaviest of the day. When I'm home, I lie as motionless as possible in the coolest room of the house with all the blinds down, sprawled so that no skin is touching any other skin, breathing shallowly and letting the giant industrial fan blow hot air over me. The cat sprawls on the tiles in the hallway, which I have tried, but it is not good for my back.

I am looking forward to moving, this weekend, to my apartment with the central system that blows cool, forgiving air and lets me believe in life and the possibility of happiness again. But I am going to miss the best part of the day, when I am in my third-floor apartment. The early morning, around 7 a.m., before the sun has really started to work at it, and things have finally cooled off, overnight--it takes all night, for things to cool off. It is beautiful. It is cool and crisp, even a little chilly, and the slant of the light is luminous, and the crazy people who walk by at night are all still passed out in the back seats of their cars.

Ready to mingle? Join Kim as she gets some helpful pointers from dating coaches Jordan Harbinger and Johnny Dzubak on how to pick up and be picked up. Photos via Splash.

The first meal I ever cooked for Esteban was a re-creation of my mother's spaghetti sauce. It was, well, kind of a disaster, in a wacky hijinx kind of sitcom way. One of the first meals he ever made for me involved an enormous pot of overcooked spiral pasta, ground beef and so much Kitchen Bouquet that the entire thing tasted like industrial sludge.

Since then, we've gotten a lot better in the kitchen and Esteban has absolutely perfected several dishes, so I leave all manner of Italian or tomato-based dishes to him, because his ragu sauce is unbelievably amazing. Bonus: unlike me, he never ever messes up the angel hair pasta. He doesn't follow recipes, so each batch is a new discovery, a little unpredictable and sometimes widely varying, depending on what we have in the house. Sometimes he uses portobello mushrooms, sautéed in garlic, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Sometimes he throws vodka or whiskey into the sauce, sometimes there's tofu instead of meat. Sometimes he cooks pepperoni until it has the consistency of crispy bacon and then crumbles it into the sauce for these little spicy flavor bombs that make my mouth happy. You never know what you're going to get, but sometimes, like last week, his 7-quart batch is so amazing that I eat nothing else until it is gone and then go to the store to buy more ground round and tomato sauce so that he can turn around and do it again.

One of the reasons I love cheesecake is because it combines the two foods that are closest to my heart: cheese, and also cake. And then, it is bound with a graham cracker crust, which makes it somewhat pie-like, and that's just adding another layer of exactly how to win my eternal love. The only problem with cheesecake is that, despite the fact that I am a pretty decent baker, every time I bake one it cracks and crumbles and while it is tasty, its ugliness breaks my heart. A no-cook blueberry cheesecake bar recipe sounds like the thing to paste it back together again, and then fill my belly with deliciousness, and then all my organs are in good shape! And that is a good way to have your organs be. I also love that it's so easy to throw together and will impress your guests, but doesn't involve instant pudding and store-bought crusts. Take that, Sandra Lee.

Whenever I visit California, I always find myself thinking, "Man, I would lose SOOO much weight if I lived here." And I wholeheartedly believe that, because even with all of the vodka drinks and cha siu baau buns, I still find myself walking much more and opting for the vegetarian fare and delicious, perfectly ripe fruit over fatty and carby options. When I get home, my jeans are loose. But the simple fact is that in California, it's just much easier to find excruciatingly healthy food as you go through your day than it is if you're living in Wisconsin (particularly in the non-summer months), when the only place you're going to find edible vegetation is at one of the grocery stores in the suburbs.

A group of scientists at the California Center of Public Health Advocacy have quantified my own observation and put it into a measurable statistic. God, I love those folks in the white coats! Check it: they calculated the proportion of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores near each adult's home compared to grocery stores and produce vendors. From our bffs at Slashfood:

Based on their analysis of 40,000 people, the study's authors determined that the average California neighborhood has an RFEI of 4.5. According to their data, adults who live in an area with an RFEI of 5 or higher have a 23% higher chance of developing diabetes and a 20% higher chance of being obese than those who live in an area with an RFEI of 3 or less.