by Maggie Hendricks
Today, we look at Mike Dolce, the peak performance coach who is known to help fighters improve their nutrition, and in turn, the way they fight. After working as a strength coach for 20 years and appearing on the seventh season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” Dolce has worked with fighters such as Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Thiago Alves, Chris Leben and Vitor Belfort. Cagewriter: What is your job like on a day-to-day basis?
Mike Dolce: I’m running multiple training camps from afar. Right now, in Vegas, I’m running Vitor Belfort’s training camp and Mike Pyle’s. I also have Thiago Alves coming up, and I’m his head coach. I cover so many hats with him, but Vitor and Pyle, I work specifically with their nutrition and weight management issues.
I say more peak performance coach because I do the meals, I do the weights, I do the overall training management. I’m the filter for the other coaches. I set up the training schedule from day to day. I even structure in their business meetings and social function as they get closer to fight time. CW: Thiago, for example, you set his day?
MD: With Thiago, I literally set up his 24 hours, seven-day a week schedule. Which coach to go to, when he’s not allowed to train, because that can be a problem with him, so I have to pull him back a lot. I have to schedule in massage therapy or alternate therapies to make sure he’s not going to go to the gym.
On Sundays, I would schedule “Man-Day.” He and I would go have a nice breakfast, and then go to a spa. We’d get a haircut, massages, get our feet and hands fixed it, even the random facial. It’s important. I incorporate all those things to make sure my fighters are well-rounded.
I try to keep what I call “the positive bubble around fighters” and not let any negativity in. With Mike Pyle, I would get breakfast ready as he watched a fishing show on Versus, but now the Tour de France is on. It broke our rhythm, so instead of watching fishing, he switched to another channel with Maury and the Jerry Springer show. I’m in the kitchen, 20 feet away and I can feel the negative energy come out of the TV. I had to change the channel just to watch something more positive. You can’t start your day with that kind of negative mind frame. CW: What is a fight week like for you?
MD: I try to get to town a day prior to the athlete, then I set up the hotel room and do the food shopping. For Chris Leben, he got into town on Monday night, and before he even got here, I packed a huge cooler with the proper foods that Chris was going to need. I made sure he had everything he was going to need, coordinate with his team, talk about what his weight cut process is going to be. On weigh-in day, I will be with him through the weigh-ins, and then go back to his room for the rehydration process. That carries all the way through to the minute he steps in the cage, performs, and then even afterwards, when I give him the food and fluids that need to go in his body to help him repair and recover from that. My job typically doesn’t end until Sunday morning. CW: What is the best part of your job?
MD: The best part of my job is spreading health. My primary focus is not world titles, and it’s not money, or any of those things. It’s to make my athletes as healthy as possible. That’s the most rewarding part: seeing kids like Thiago Alves, not so much go out there and have a dominant performance, but it’s for him to feel so good and be so happy with himself because his body is in a positive state. Performance is just a by-product of that. CW: But what’s the worst part?
MD: I wouldn’t point to a worst part and say that it’s bad, but the hardest part is dealing with the ups and the downs of the sport. You can work with an athlete, and have a great training camp and he’ll go out there on fight night, and something doesn’t work. I’m so emotionally attached to my fighters that it’s a hard roller coaster. For me, it’s multiple times in a single night.
Actually, the worst part is the time away from my family, but it’s a choice, but I’m not going to be a victim to it. It’s something we’ve decided over the next few years to do this.
Original article posted on Yahoo Sports here
By Dr. Joseph Mercola
Researchers have been investigating a number of powerful natural agents that can help you stabilize your blood sugar, and once again, cinnamon has proven itself as a viable contender in the fight against diabetes, as the study in Diabetic Medicine reveals.(1)
One of cinnamon’s most impressive health benefits is its ability to improve blood glucose control.
For example, just half a teaspoon of cinnamon a day has previously been shown to significantly reduce blood sugar levels, triglycerides, LDL (bad) cholesterol, and total cholesterol levels in people with type 2 diabetes. (2)
The more you can make use of natural therapies such as nutrition and exercise, the better your health will be.
However, as helpful as supplements like cinnamon can be, they should not be misconstrued as cures. They are not substitutes for proper diet and lifestyle choices. You cannot properly address your diabetes if you still maintain a sedentary lifestyle and poor dietary choices — cinnamon supplementation or not!
How Cinnamon Can Benefit Diabetics
Below are five known ways cinnamon can be helpful to your metabolism:
1. Cinnamon can increase your glucose metabolism about 20-fold, which significantly improves blood sugar regulation. (4)
2. Cinnamon has been found to have “insulin-like effects” due to a bioactive compound, qualifying it as a candidate for an insulin substitute.
3. Cinnamon slows the emptying of your stomach to reduce sharp rises in blood sugar following meals, and improves the effectiveness, or sensitivity, of insulin.
4. Cinnamon actually enhances your antioxidant defenses. A study published in 2009 stated, “Polyphenols from cinnamon could be of special interest in people who are overweight with impaired fasting glucose since they might act as both insulin sensitizers and antioxidants.” (5)
5. A bioflavonoid found in cinnamon called proanthocyanidin may alter the insulin-signaling activity in your fat cells.
Other health benefits of cinnamon include:
• Supporting digestive function
• Relieving congestion
• Relieving pain and stiffness of muscles and joints
• Reducing inflammation and symptoms of arthritis
• Helping to prevent urinary tract infections, tooth decay and gum disease
• Relieving menstrual discomfort
• Stimulating circulation with blood-thinning compounds
Clearly, adding ample amounts of cinnamon to your diet is incredibly safe and inexpensive. Just remember, unless you are adding it to a proper diet — high in vegetables and extremely low in fructose and grains — it is unlikely you will experience any benefit whatsoever. Original story posted on HuffingtonPost.com Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder and director of Mercola.com.
I have had great success with 3W2S. I quickly hit my goal weight and have now started to gain more from lean muscle mass. Started at 214lbs then went to 190lbs.I have been holding at 193 for 3-4 wks now. My family has taken notice and have decided to follow suit.
My sister and brother in law have gotten on The Dolce Diet and now my 17 yr old nephew as well.My wife is not a big workout person but she has really supported and enjoys when I cook for her, especially fresh locally farmed greens. Bloomsdale Spinach is my favorite I eat it non-stop.
Love all the videos that Mike is doing and am looking forward to the Living Lean book.
I started pulling out some of my favorite cookbooks and I modify some of the recipes to fit my new lean style. Great feeling, being more involved with what I am eating.
Ok, have to go, need to drink some more water.
By Todd H. on MikeDolceMMA.com
The Dolce Diet now has its own YouTube Channel! Take a look to get behind-the-scenes access to news, events, nutrition, recipes, workouts and much more, only available from Mike Dolce & The Dolce Diet!
Just want to give a big thanks to Mike and Brandy Dolce for their tremendous support!!
I’ve been a size 10 since I can remember, like high school days…
This week, I fit into a size 6, and literally cried. It was a huge moment in my life. For the past 6 years it’s been a hassle getting ready in the mornings and having nothing fit and everything TOO tight. Barely squeezing into jeans made for one HORRIBLE day and frame of mind. But Monday morning when I fit into a pair of jeans I had from long ago, with nothing hanging over the sides, no jumping up and down to pull them up, just slipping into these cute pair of jeans that I’ve kept in the closet for motivation, was a damn good feeling.
For 2 months now, my boyfriend and I have been wearing clothes that have literally been falling off of us, and we finally got a chance to order some new jeans and shorts. We both ordered one size lower than what we had been wearing, and guess what? Their Loose!!
Anyone who hasn’t tried this lifestyle out but is interested in getting healthy, and loosing weight in the process–this is the real deal. Its simple common sense that WORKS!! It changes your body into a healthy being, while giving you a whole new perspective on life. I’ll be 26 this year, and in the past 4 months I’ve learned more about myself than the past 26 years. I look at my life totally different. I am more conscious of every thing I take in and am happy about the new me. For the first time I can look in the mirror and actually LOOK at myself and LIKE what I see. Not only is the physical aspects wonderful, but the frame of mind I am in now is going to add years to my life. We don’t even count the weeks anymore, it’s just healthy eating and striving to make our bodies in the best physical shape possible.
All the while, anything that we have posted on twitter about our progress, gets a positive response from Mike or Brandy, and that is a HUGE deal to me. Getting support from the source of our change is the best inspiration. Their dedication to their “product” says a lot about the type of people they are, and shows that they really care. So thanks ya’ll, I appreciate all that you do!
by Kenny Rice, Inside MMA
He was never a 98 -pound weakling or the chubby kid picked on in the playground. That separates MMA fighter/trainer Mike Dolce apart from many weight loss, get in shape authors. His book “The Dolce Diet: 3 Weeks to Shredded” is tearing up the MMA world where weight loss to a fighter means so much more than the average guy. It can mean the difference in winning and losing, in keeping a career going. And those who have read the book and worked with the man himself are a fast growing number including some of the top names in the sport. It seems so simple, and perhaps that is why it works.
“Whole foods, vibrant ingredients. If it wasn’t around 200 years ago, don’t eat it,” Dolce explains from his home in Las Vegas where he moved to last year. “I’m not anti-supplements but I encourage fighters, people to go backward and use the earth again.”The ripped Dolce is the best example of his diet. It is the concept he arrived at in 2007 when he dropped as he says “42.8 pounds” in six weeks to get ready for an International Fight League bout with Antonio McKee.
“I’m a regular guy, basically started in the mail room (of MMA) and worked from there. I don’t know anything more than you know but I break it down easy to apply the format for weight loss.“When guys would see me in the gym, I was always in shape, usually the strongest guy in there regardless of weight class. Other fighters would ask me how I got in shape and stayed there.
“Two years ago Dolce applied the self learned principles for staying in shape by putting it in writing with the book. And when others started seeing some of the fighters who were paying attention they did as well. Though he had worked with Duane Ludwig, Chael Sonnen and “probably 30 UFC vets” over the last few years with their diets, it wasn’t until Quinton “Rampage” Jackson had to lose 45 pounds to fight Rashad Evans that notice was duly served, Dolce’s diet works.
“The Rampage fight, how good he looked at the weigh-in got people talking. Everybody saw him and thought no way (when we started) and then he was in the best shape of his life, fighters started picking my brain about how we did it.”
Proving it wasn’t a fluke or as Dolce puts it “if they thought we were just lucky, they woke up to the fact I was not blowing smoke the next time around. That was his high profile training of Thiago Alves for his UFC 124 win over John Howard.
“Thiago had missed weight before, Dana (UFC boss White) was threatening to fire him or make him change weight classes. He was at a point of turnaround in his career. But he didn’t fail and he might have had his best win ever.” He has also worked with Sonnen for his fight against title holder Anderson Silva, a last round loss after dominating the champion. “Chael was in tremendous shape. For all but 2 minutes of the 25 his conditioning was amazing.”
More fighters and average folk are finding Dolce’s plan amazing. It is all based on getting back to the basics, fruits, vegetables, and lots of water. “We are seventy percent plus water (human body) to me it’s like oxygen. You have to have both,” Dolce stresses.
Athletes from other sports are now taking interest in his diet plan, including some major league baseball players. And the people sitting at their desks each day are as well.“It’s simple and it can be done. Being Italian I am all about flavor,” he laughs. “And you enjoy eating in this diet. You don’t have to buy any special plan, any prepared food that is being sent out. It’s about getting back to the basics, paying a little more attention to what you eat. If you hate eating the food it would never work. Because I like to eat, it’s about eating smart.”
Dolce hasn’t retired as a fighter “I’m always interested in the right spot,” but his new career as MMA’s diet guru has had a profound impact, a new chapter.“I still have the fighter spirit but I have to take care of my family and can’t be selfish with my own goals. Right now we are growing business branding. It’s a diet that works, it can been seen in the fighters. And the average person too can get shredded.”
Check out Mike Dolce along with Joe Riggs and Phil Davis as they join Kenny, Bas, and Ron on Inside MMA. See video interview here. Original article published at Inside MMA.
Vitor Belfort weighs in for UFC 126 via The Dolce Diet
by Ben Fowlkes
When Mike Dolce’s cell phone buzzes with an unfamiliar number a few days before a major MMA event, he already knows what’s coming.
Dolce’s primary work is as a nutritionist, managing the day-to-day food intake of pro athletes with precision focus. But the creator of “The Dolce Diet” is also known to be something of an expert at temporary weight-cutting, and a last minute call to Dolce means that somewhere, some fighter is panicking.
“I get phone calls the week of, or the night before weigh-ins sometimes,” Dolce said. “I’ve taken same- day requests. I’ve gotten there on the day of the weigh-ins, got in there and gotten it done. I’m able to work a little magic then, but if they’re calling me at that point, they already screwed up.”
For almost every MMA fighter, from scrubs to superstars, cutting weight is just part of life, even if fans rarely get a glimpse of what goes into it. For men who want to be as light as possible on Friday afternoon and as big and strong as possible on Saturday night, making weight isn’t as simple as showing up and stripping down to their underwear. Doing it the wrong way can hamper their abilities on fight night. Even doing it the right way can be tough on the mind and body, all at a time when fighters need both to be at their best.
According to a recent study at Cal State Fullerton (courtesy of Maggie Hendricks at Yahoo! Sports), cutting weight is even more likely to affect a fighter’s mental state than his physical one. In a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, wrestlers who lost more than four percent of their body mass before a match showed “significantly higher levels of confusion on the day of the competition,” even though the weight loss had no adverse effects on strength.
However, that doesn’t take into account the stress it puts fighters under in the days leading up to the weigh-in, when they should be concentrating on the fight itself.
“It sucks just as much every time,” said UFC light heavyweight Phil Davis. “But once you have it in your mind that you’re going to make weight, you just have to have the mental fortitude to make it through.”
As an NCAA national champion wrestler at Penn State, Davis was familiar with the torture of cutting weight well before he became an MMA fighter. Back in his college days, Davis said, it was a different challenge. He was weighing in twice a week for thirteen weeks, and couldn’t afford to get too far over the weight limit.
“Now I’m doing it once every two or three months, so I can afford to be a little looser with it. When I was wrestling in college I couldn’t afford to lose twenty pounds all in one day, then wrestle that night and do it all again the next day.”
In many ways, the fact that MMA fighters usually go months between fights can work against them when it comes to weight issues. Those who are less diligent about their diet tend to balloon up while waiting for their next fight offer, resulting in a stiffer challenge for guys like Dolce, who get called in to clean up the mess when the fighter realizes he likely won’t make weight on his own.
For example, when Quinton “Rampage” Jackson needed to lose the equivalent of a third-grader in two months’ time, it was Dolce who got the call.
“That was one where everybody – even guys on his team, his management – they wrote it off as being nearly impossible,” he said. “…But I was able to get him to lose forty-five pounds in eight weeks, step on the scale, feel great, then go out there and compete with Rashad [Evans] the entire time.”
Or when welterweight Thiago Alves got on UFC president Dana White’s bad side by missing weight yet again before his bout with Jon Fitch, Dolce was brought in to make sure it never happened again.
“What [Alves] was doing wrong was, he works as hard or harder than anyone in the game, so it wasn’t a matter of work ethic. In fact, he was probably working too hard, but he was following the wrong program. This is common with a lot of guys, even main event fighters. I see them backstage or in the hotel, and the stuff they’re doing, it’s like 1980s bodybuilding. They’re following bodybuilding diets, and they don’t understand that it’s not just about making weight, it’s making weight and then performing at your best twenty-four hours later. Most of these guys see it like, let me make weight, and then I’ll worry about the fight after that.”
As Josh Ford – a featherweight fighter and nutritionist to many of the fighters at Denver’s Grudge Training Center – explained, a short-sighted view of making weight results in many fighters leaving their best stuff in the gym. That’s why the weight-cutting experts almost unanimously advise clients to avoid lengthy stays in the sauna, which had been a favorite method among the old school crowd.
“The guys who use the sauna to cut ten or twelve pounds, you’re forcing your body to expel so much water so quickly that it’s not discerning what water is safe to cut from the system and what water isn’t. It’s just taking it from wherever, and it becomes dangerous. That’s where you see guys who don’t recover from their weight cut. They look sluggish in their fight, and they defeat the whole purpose of all the training and the conditioning from their fight camp.”
Some fans might think of making weight as purely a discipline issue, reasoning that any fighter who wants it badly enough can force himself into the sauna until the weight comes off. Some fighters, like Anthony Johnson, still rely on the sauna. After making weight for his fight with Dan Hardy, “Rumble” described being locked inside it for so long that he was threatening his coach with every manner of violence he could think of in order to get out.
But the problem with a grueling stay in the sauna, Dolce said, is that it puts the body in exactly the wrong state for dropping weight, upping cortisol levels as the fighter’s stress increases.
“That’s when the mind games start. I know, I’ve cut thirty or forty pounds. I know what goes on behind the eyes during the weight cut process. I know how it feels to be locked in that sauna when you’re twelve pounds over and that single bead of sweat falls in slow motion. Then it hits the floor and you’re praying for the second bead of sweat to come. That is a painstaking process in a 180-degree room. Most people don’t get that or understand that.”
For fans, weigh-ins are typically only interesting if someone misses weight or shoves his opponent during the obligatory staredown. But for many fighters, stepping on the scale is the culmination of a stressful experience that involves bringing the body into a weakened state right before they need it to be at its best. And just because almost everyone has to cut weight before a fight, that doesn’t mean they’re all going about it the right way, according to Dolce.
For instance, many fighters are under the impression that they have to stop eating and drinking much sooner than they do, he said. The problem is, they’re still doing light workouts, wrapping themselves in plastic suits and hitting mitts with their coaches even when their bodies are running on caloric deficits.
“Those calories are vital to organ function,” Dolce said. “You have to keep the brain functioning, the kidneys functioning. You have to keep essential organs functioning, or else the body goes into shock mode, into freakout mode, and then it stops everything. That’s why some guys will hit that wall when they’re still four pounds over and end up sitting in the sauna for half an hour to maybe only lose half a pound. The body freaks out and goes into high-stress mode and locks everything down.”
This was one of the first changes Dolce made to Alves’ weight-cutting routine, he said. Instead of starving the bulky welterweight’s body, he was fueling it.
“[Before] the John Howard fight, I had him eating five meals on Thursday before weigh-ins, and that’s arguably the best he looked on the scale and in the cage. He didn’t eat five meals in the entire week before the GSP fight or the week before the Jon Fitch fight – two of his worst performances. He wasn’t eating, he was drinking distilled water, and pretty much living on protein powder and handfuls of spinach. That’s how this poor kid was cutting weight!”
But getting fighters to abandon their own weight-cutting system in favor of a strange new one isn’t always the easiest sell. Take UFC welterweight Mike Pyle, for instance.
Pyle first got a UFC contract by agreeing to a fight against Brock Larson on about ten days’ notice in May of 2009. He had just finished shooting a film and hadn’t been training much, but he felt like he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to get into the UFC. He was 193 pounds when he took the fight, Pyle said, which meant he had about a week and a half to drop twenty-two pounds.
“My body wasn’t ready for that. It wasn’t even ready to be training. When your body is ready and you’re sweating every day, your body is used to that fluctuation in your weight. But this was devastating. It was so hard.”
Pyle made that cut his own way, rubbing the make-up remover Albolene on his body to help draw out moisture, then putting on a plastic sauna suit – the kind that’s been banned in NCAA wrestling since 1997 – and covering up with a layer of sweats before going off to hit mitts or grapple.
The weight came off, or at least most of it did. But when Pyle walked in to weigh-ins that Friday afternoon in Las Vegas, he was still a couple pounds over and barely able to stand.
“I went down, passed out in the bathroom of the MGM Grand as I was walking in to try to get to the weigh-ins,” he said. “I just couldn’t make it. I was hurting. That was a nasty, ugly cut. It sucked, but it will never happen again.”
For his most recent fight against Ricardo Almeida at UFC 128, Pyle hired Dolce as his nutritionist. He’d seen the good work Dolce did with Vitor Belfort, who usually struggled to make the middleweight limit before hiring Dolce, and figured that it might work for him as well.
But when Pyle stepped on the scale the day before weigh-ins to see how far off he was, he saw a terrifying number staring back at him: 195 pounds.
With twenty-four hours to go, he was twenty-four pounds over – more than he’d weighed when he began the worst cut of his life, and this time he didn’t have ten days to do it in. This is about where Pyle started to wonder if he’d made a horrible mistake, but Dolce was perfectly calm.
“That’s exactly where I wanted him because I knew exactly what we had done during the lead-up,” Dolce said. “He was fully hydrated, fully fed, and he felt and looked great. But he stepped on the scale and was expecting low 180s because he was so ripped. He saw that number and he thought the scale was broken. He started to have a little mini-breakdown, saying, ‘What the f—k? How am I going to make weight?'”
Pyle can laugh about it now, but at the time it seemed like a disaster.
“I was freaking out. He was like, ‘Nope, you’re right on point.’ On point was something I heard from him a lot in camp. It was always, ‘Mike, you’re on point.’ After a while I just trusted him. Okay, I’m on point.”
That night Dolce took Pyle down to the hotel’s hot tub and sat in it with him for about thirty minutes.
“And it wasn’t like I was holding him in there,” Dolce said. “We were just sitting there, talking, and in thirty minutes he lost eight pounds.”
Then they went back up to the room – where Dolce had surreptitiously turned the heat up – had a small meal, and returned to the hot tub once more before bed, dropping another eight pounds in about a half-hour.
“What I liked about this cut was, I didn’t have to exert any energy to do it,” Pyle said, “That state of being tired and being depleted from having all that water taken out of you and then still trying to hit mitts or wrestle, you just can’t put energy together into anything. What was cool about Mike’s perspective was, you don’t burn any more calories than you need. You just sit there and sweat, and that’s exactly what we did.”
The strange thing about the whole process, Dolce said, isn’t that fighters are able to lose weight without expending energy. The part that really confuses him is that so many people at the top level of this sport are still doing it wrong, putting their health and their chances of success on fight night in jeopardy.
“I remember being at a fight with Ed Herman, and I see a big name guy who we all know, who I had looked up to, and he’s doing it all wrong,” Dolce said. “I was like, I’ve been trying to figure out how to be like this guy, and this is what he’s doing? Then I see him the next day, packed into a sauna suit and a hoodie and sweatpants, going in and out of the sauna, and his face looked like death. It was a double punch to the gut to me.”
The weigh-in is itself a bizarre little ritual unique to combat sports. Ostensibly, it’s about fairness, ensuring that fighters get to face someone their own size. But when the weigh-ins take place more twenty-four hours before a fight, some are always going to be better at taking weight off and then putting it back on in a hurry.
The question is, can they do it without harming themselves and their own performance? Can they show up on fight night not only heavier, but physically and mentally better than they were the day before?
It’s the question fighters face every time they agree to a bout. How they choose to answer it can make all the difference when the cage door closes.
By Maggie Hendricks, Yahoo! Sports
Mystery surrounds elite fighters and their ability to cut weight. How is it possible for Georges St. Pierre to drop 25 pounds by Friday afternoon before his fight with Jake Shields but gain most of it back and be full-strength by fight time on Saturday night?
It’s no guessing game. Smart fighters treat nutrition as a science, carefully regulating their diet before fights. GSP’s main trainer Firas Zahabi talked about what the UFC welterweight champ does to ensure a healthy weight cut.
Now he’s on a protein and vegetable diet. Right now his exercise is significantly cut, but he’s going to shed water. It’s only temporary weight loss. It’s not real weight loss. You’re not dropping fat. (The final weight-cut) lasts about six days . . . By Friday he’ll have six or seven pounds left and we’ll put him in the sauna. I don’t recommend this to anybody, even professional athletes. This is somebody who’s very seasoned.
After GSP steps on the scale on Friday afternoon and weighs in at 170 lbs., his team will give him a carbohydrate-laden recovery drink. Then, he will eat normally and drink water to rehydrate. He’ll weigh around 192 lbs. by the time he steps in the Octagon with Shields on Saturday night for UFC 129.
Some fighters start their eating plan months in advance. Mike Dolce, a nutritionist and former contestant on “The Ultimate Fighter,” works with fighters to ensure a complete eating plan that helps fighters cut weight without the sauna. Like Zahabi, Dolce does not recommend sauna use.
“The guys who use the sauna to cut ten or twelve pounds, you’re forcing your body to expel so much water so quickly that it’s not discerning what water is safe to cut from the system and what water isn’t. It’s just taking it from wherever, and it becomes dangerous. That’s where you see guys who don’t recover from their weight cut. They look sluggish in their fight, and they defeat the whole purpose of all the training and the conditioning from their fight camp.”
A recent study on wrestlers found that severe weight cuts could hurt their mental abilities in a match. Without using proper methods, fighters can find themselves in bad shape for their bouts.
CW: Thiago, for example, you set his day?
A BLOG POST by Lyndsey Foreman
