I knew that that four hour Jersey Shore marathon on Thursday and the six hours I spent watching True Life on Sunday were rotting my brain, but I didn’t care; those shows are heaven-sent. And besides, after the Jager shots I guzzled on Saturday night, I was sure a 6-hour TV sesh was the least of my problems.

Little did I know that all couch time might actually be killing me.

A new study out of the UK has found that “Individuals who spent hours watching television greatly heightened the chances of dying early from heart attacks and strokes.” Apparently all that laziness contributes to heart and cardiovascular illnesses, and even increases our risk of cancer! And that’s for everyone – even people who exercise regularly and are at a healthy weight.

But it’s not just SVU marathons that are rotting our bodies; any activity that keeps us sedentary – from that office job to intense Facebook-stalking sessions – contributes to an overall decline in our health!

“Technological, social, and economic changes mean that people don’t move their muscles as much as they used to – consequently the levels of energy expenditure as people go about their lives continue to shrink.”  Read More »

I don’t know what it is about MTV, but I am addicted. Those crafty little sons of b*tches in Times Square know their target audience. They have me – and everyone else in the 12-30 age bracket – convinced that what we should really want to watch on TV are really attractive, dumb people saying really dumb (and totally unscripted) things. There’s really nothing quite like a mind-numbing “Next” marathon when you feel like death on Sunday afternoon and they know this.

However, I’m able to cut MTV some slack because they aren’t always the network that shows hot people doing dumb things 24/7. Every once in awhile they cook up an awesome little nugget of TV goodness with some real substance. For example, they devote a decent amount of airtime to True Life. I’m pretty sure the only way you’d not know about True Life is if you had been living under a rock (or without basic cable) for the last ten years, but just in case you don’t know, every ep of True Life tells the entirely true story of 2 or 3 young people who are dealing with a particular issue. Sometimes its personal (“I’m Afraid of Intimacy”), other time it’s situational (“I Have A Summer Share ”), but either way it’s always AWESOME.

The only problem with True Life? There are just so.many.amazing.episodes – and equally as many that never air more than once. Actually this story ended up taking me a lot longer to write than originally planned because I spent more time watching the episodes online than writing about them. (Which reminds me – thank you MTV for putting these all online!) However, I was eventually able to peel my eyeballs away from the episodes and back to my open Word document to write up this list of my faves: Read More »