Make a hard run at it - Benefits of running and exercising

I was an overweight person, who was also extremely inactive couch potato. COVID-19 ended up hitting the nation, shutting down the country and I ballooned my weight even more. I started becoming more fatigued with myself, and I did not have enough energy to last throughout the day. I went to the doctors, and the short story to it was that I needed to be more active. I went on a diet, but I want to talk about how I started running more and more, and it brought me to the point where running has become a part of my life. I am going to go over the benefits of running, as it is one of the easiest exercises one can do. 

One of the three biggest benefits that running can do for you is that it improves your health. Running helps you reduce your chances of getting sick with a major health problem like heart diseases, blood clots, improve your immune system, and many more! Those are just the beginning of many benefits that running can do to your help. A second benefit is that it improves your muscles. When you run, it works out many muscles in your legs like your quadriceps, calves, and hamstrings. While running mostly works out leg muscles, your joints will actually get stronger over time, which is really an important part to your body. Lastly, this is the biggest benefit that I see from running. This benefit is improvement in your mental health, mood, and confidence. People that have experienced issues with their confidence, or deal with forms of depression, especially from the pandemic resort to running to remedy these issues. I can personally say that I can validate that, running helped me feel more confident and help me with my self-efficacy that was really bogged down by the isolation that COVID caused. 

Running was one of the biggest things that helped me lost weight. Back in high school, I HATED the idea of running. But however, I never realized how much good it brought me. Now, I feel sick if I do not even run once a week. Throughout my weight loss journey, running became the foundation of my positive mindset. Now, I am not telling you guys to go out there and exhaust your self. If you have the chance, go ahead and run, run a lap or two, improve your mile time, or go do some increment running. But however, I am just telling you to just take a breath, and go out on a walk. That is the least that you can be doing to overall help yourself. Go on a hike, go to the park with your friends and family. This will help your mental well-being as it can relieve you from the stress you are encountering. Your mental health is an important part of your life, and that is one my biggest concerns with everyone. 

What do I think of these people? (My reaction post to heroes and villians)

 Hi people of the internet,

The hacker group Anonymous I believe is a hero from the public standpoint. I think they reveal a lot about the dark side of the Internet. For example, they do some good things such as hacking the child pornography sites and exposing the users. I feel like that is a good in the sense to attack predators. Other examples where I see good coming out of the group is getting into cyber wars with the Ku Klux Klan, which is detrimental to the diversity of our society. I believe that a lot of the stuff they do and plan are good, and it can even go as far as doing good deeds for the people of society so it categorizes them as being heroes. However, some of their actions can also categorize them as villains since they do a good amount of attacks on many companies such as Amazon, PayPal, Sony. I see that as ridiculous to be honest, and I do not see a clear point as to why they would hack those corporations. But if I had to choose, in my personal opinion. They are villain's cause they seem to do these things with no authority, it seems like their actions are based off of their own intentions, not because they are caring. But that is what I personally think. 

Now moving on the person Edward Snowden. I think he is a villain. He basically used his skills and knowledge that do not bring any benefit to him and it exposes a lot of information that only officials  should have access too. He took over 1.7 million files from the NSA and he wanted to expose the government for what they wanted do, trying to reveal how the NSA operates, having information about the military and their operations and logistics, and much more. Reading what he has done really just makes me believe that he is a villain. Reading his motives however, made me think differently to a degree. I get that he wanted to shed light on what is going on behind the scenes but I just do not think that is a great justification to go ahead and steal information. It really just depends on how you view the whole situation, but I will stick to my decision of considering him a villain.

Another person I will be talking about is going to be Chelsea Manning. This person was an active member of the Army. Considering her position as the Intelligence Analyst, she practically used her power of having access to databases to leak everything. Horrible things could have happened to everyone else with the choice she made. I feel like it could have put everyone on her side in harms way. So that risk to me, is really all that it takes be a villain. She revealed a lot of information to Adrian Lamos, who then leaked that information to the public, which is information that the public should not know. Gathering the information I have read about her, she classifies as a villain to me. 

Finally, the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange is really interesting. I am going to consider this guy a villain since he was practically trying to spread information about the democratic party. He also had a lot of responsibility with different war logs. He even admitted that was the lightning rod to the whole thing so it just shows that he had a lot to do with this whole situation. 

At the end of the day, I can at least see their perspectives on why they did the stuff they did, so I can see why these people can be looked at as heroes. They are really trying to stand up for what they feel like is right. However for me personally, if I had their power, I would not do what they have done. I just feel like there is a lot more downsides than benefits to leak a lot of those high class information. I would lose much more of my life than to gain something out of it. If there was a way to take stand, I feel like we would have to advocate for what we believe rather than doing everything from the inside looking out, or using illegal methods. We can use our freedom of speech to gain momentum, in my personal opinion. If our lives are being affected, then that is the perfect time to speak out on certain issues. An example of this is if our lives have changed significantly, or a portion of our freedom was taken away. Resorting to illegal methods, I feel like is not the way. 

Hi, nice to meet you!

Hello people of the internet,

My name is Justin. My parents are Filipino but I was born and raised here in Tacoma, Washington. I am a college junior, currently attending the University of Washington. I am a Psychology major while also minoring in Teaching, Learning, and Justice. My ultimate goal is to work in an education system as teacher or a high school counselor. 

I like watching sports, specifically football and basketball. I should however, I only played tennis! My other interests are some casual video gaming (I am not too big on video games cause I do not have time). I play a few online games with my friend, madden, and some animal crossing. I also am very intrigued with cars. I had an old sports sedan as my first car and that drew my interests in them. I really like Japanese cars like Honda and Acura. I think American cars like the Mustangs and Camaro's are cool but I just do not see myself driving a muscle car. I also love hanging out with my friends and family whenever I get freedom from work and school.