Celia Mendes Photography - New Zealand's BEST freelance photographer

STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING!  Yes! It's THAT important!

Photo credit: Celia Mendes

If you haven't seen Celia Mendes' photos before then you're missing out.  Like whoa.  I've had the pleasure of tramping with Celia before and she is not only a fantastic travel buddy, but also a super awesome photographer.  She was crafty enough to capture this photo of Dunedin today.  Our weather has been very wacky, but she was able to capture the beauty of it all.  Simply amazing.

Check out the Celia Mendes Photography page on Facebook for more New Zealand photos at your fingertips. 

A.I.M. for Health

I've been doing so much searching, reading, and typing lately!  A lot of it has been related to weight gain prevention interventions and Internet-based obesity prevention interventions.  So, it doesn't feel like work to me - I really love reading this stuff.

I'm so excited about doing an intervention that I've started to play around with plopping bits and pieces of others' research onto a free website to get ideas of what my intervention could look like.  In fact, I spent about 2 hours chatting online with an IT guy named "Paul" as we worked together to figure out how to get Tylka's Intuitive Eating Scale onto the site and have it scored correctly.

Poor Paul.

I was having issues. Lots and lots of issues.  I think this image sums up how helpful Paul was when I couldn't find the "+" button to add the test that I made out of Tylka's questionnaire:

I'm not entirely sure if I'll develop the site or if we'll get a sweet grant to pay for a developer, but it's still fun to take breaks from acceptance/intuitive eating/mindfulness literature searches to do something which has a more tangible output.

Yesterday, I met with a researcher at Otago who's running an Internet-based depression intervention.  She was great fun to talk to because she's knowledgeable about the process of testing content for the intervention, working with a web developer, recruiting participants and so on.  She got me really excited for what I could do down the road!  She also got me thinking about all the work involved: running focus groups to discuss Internet-based weight gain prevention interventions, developing content, locating experts in the field to review the content, developing the website for the intervention, testing the content with a sample from the target population, etcetera.

But, I have a bad habit of putting the cart before the horse.  Or, in this case, the intervention before the data to back up the intervention. *sigh* This means I actually need to sit my rump down, re-introduce myself to Stata, and run an analysis or two...or three... to figure out if our hypotheses about intuitive eating, experiential avoidance, psychological inflexibility, and mindfulness hold water (a.k.a. justify targeting these predictors of weight gain in an intervention). *fingers crossed* With some luck (or, a visit from the Motivation Fairy) I will get around to this very, very soon.

RESEARCH IS FUN! 

Orokonui Ecosanctuary

We had a surprise ending to the weekend: after severe weather (rain and wind) warnings for Saturday and Sunday, the sun finally came out!

Today's adventure brought me to a nearby nature reserve.  It was a wee bit windy at Orokonui Ecosanctuary, but in the protection of the forest it wasn't a bother.  The nature reserve is home to all sorts of birds: kiwi, takahe, and saddleback.  I saw tui, fantail and bellbirds.  Here's a video of some kaka:

Not sure what we were hearing here, among the gum trees:

Speaking of the gum trees, one of them, not far from where I took this video, is supposedly New Zealand's tallest tree.  Cool, huh?