Here are a few links from around the web that I’ve enjoyed reading this week. Perhaps you can check them out over the weekend :)

• Roy from Emerge Fitness is a regular visitor to our blog who just happens to be a fitness trainer and all round awesome guy. He has written an excellent post on starting and continuing a fitness-driven lifestyle. Good reading! FIVE Simple ways to begin and enjoy a fitness-driven lifestyle

• I really enjoyed this post especially as I’ve planned quite a few adventure vacations this year. Bring it on! 11 Adventures Anyone Can Use To Spice Up Their Life

• In a bad mood? Try these tips to get that smile back on your face :) How To Get Yourself Out of a Bad Mood

• Own an iPhone? I don’t but if I did there are quite a few applications on this list I would be using. 100 Fabulous iPhone Apps for Your Health and Fitness

• Keeping hydrated is essential to your health, check out these great tips. 10 Tips To Grab On The Run For Staying Hydrated

I’ve got a few links to share with you today that are worth visiting.

• 15 Ways to Get More Fit
  There are some really great tips here to help you keep your fitness goals on track.
• How to Fight Depression this Winter
  Winter can really make you feel depressed and you can quickly lose motivation to maintain your health and fitness, some good advice in this post.
• Do You Have An Action Plan to Get Healthy & Fit?
  Action Plans are a great idea especially when used to help achieve your health and fitness goals.
• Low Carb Sample Menu
  Mark has an excellent sample low carb menu available. Sounds yum!

CNN reports:

HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) — Rob Sandler comforted his infant son as he lifted him out of the crib, cooing in his ear while he walked to the living room.

If his baby had needed to be soothed three months ago, Sandler, 36, of Houston, Texas, might have handed the baby off to his wife and then found an excuse to leave the house.

“Honestly, it felt like when I was at home, the walls became very, very close in. I wouldn’t say claustrophobic, but very cabin feverish,” Sandler said.

It turned out that Sandler, a medical device salesman, had more than cabin fever. He recently got an official diagnosis: He has a male version of postpartum depression.

“This comes as quite a shock to men who are expecting this wonderful time of baby bliss with the new baby and a time of bonding,” said Will Courtenay, a San Francisco, California-based psychotherapist and founder of Saddaddy.com, who is a leading expert in the United States on paternal postnatal depression.

Read rest of article

If you haven’t heard of it before, StumbleUpon is an application that helps you discover and share great websites.
You can set up categories you are interested in so when people Stumble and rate a site, you see only sites that are of interest to you.

Some rated sites are quite frankly terrible but most times it’s pretty brilliant. If you haven’t signed up then get on over to StumbleUpon.com and register. It’s easy and I’m sure you will enjoy it. Be sure to add me as a friend and Stumble any of my posts that you enjoy :)

This might be a complete disaster but I am going to share one daily Stumble with you. It will be from my health or nutrition category so hopefully the sites I list are great. I’m not going to pick and choose, it will be the first Stumble that comes up. So it might be good OR really, really bad. It should be fun, I hope!

So, on to the very first daily Stumble. I hit the button, put my hand over my eyes and peeked through. Thankfully, it was a great one to start with..yay!

And the winner is

The Beat Post. The post is all about the humble banana. After reading this post I know now that banana’s aren’t so humble. They pack a mighty punch, health wise that is.
The post is really good, head on over and read it.

That wasn’t so painful. Check back in tomorrow for our next random Stumble.

For those of you who respond well to forcing yourself to commit to exercise or weight loss, this website might be for you.

stickk allows you to make a contract with yourself with penalties if you don’t honor it.

You can setup a contract to exercise so many days per week or commit to losing weight over a period of time. You then select the type of penalty you wish to receive should you fail.

These can include donating money to charity which you setup when you initially establish your goal or paying a friend or foe.

You can also include a friend in your commitment to verify whether you succeeded or failed. Of course, our readers don’t lie so this won’t be an issue ;)

The guys behind stickk, both from Yale University found through testing that people who put stakes on the table are far more likely to achieve goals they have set for themselves.

Visit their website and give it a shot: stickk

I think we all know just how frustrating and time consuming it can be to try and find credible health information on the web. There are few sites out there that I regularly use to find and source health and wellbeing information from because I have spend considerable time and effort to research the organisation behind them.

I came across this site the other day called OrganizedWisdom.com and was immediately interested in their concept.

The site utlizes both content from registered users who share their health wisdom and a team of expert health guides who then organize the user-generated health content and those sourced from the web in one location.

I like this concept and think that having centralized and organized content, especially health related is a positive step forward for consumers.

It will be interesting to see how this site evolves as more users start to share their health stories.

The site is easy to navigate and not overwhelming like so many health content related sites these days.

Keep up the good work guys! OrganizedWisdom.com

I found this website earlier today while searching for a completely unrelated topic to do with my work.

Gimme20.com looks like a really great community site utilizing social networking tools that I think many of you will find very useful. I quite often get a fed up with my workouts and like to mix it around a bit. With this website you can either search existing workouts or build your own based on what the community has commented or voted on as having worked for them.

Community members post their workouts and what I really like about this site is that it appears that many of the people using it are not heath or fitness experts. The workouts are done in their homes or in places you would be able to visit (parks, beaches, etc) using regular exercise equipment or in some cases, no equipment.

You can choose to create your own workout by browsing all the exercises and adding them to your workout list. You can choose to make your workout either public or private, this means that other community members can comment and hopefully motivate you if you choose public.

Once setup, Gimme20.com helps you along by tracking your workouts by sending reminder emails which you can set on any given day and time.

Joining is free and the registration is straight-forward. You can also create your own webpage under the Gimme20.com site so that you can share your progress or read your blog.

I’m pretty impressed with this site, I need to use if for a while so I’ll do a follow-up in the future. In the meantime, no harm in your going over and checking it out: Gimme20.com