2Health: How to take care of yourself.

7 DIY Art Projects to Cure Your White Walls

Welcome to Make It By Monday, GOOD's weekly DIY feature in which we curate, demystify, and add our own tips for craft projects from around the web (and our apartments). This week: Deck your walls with big-think art.

7 DIY Art Projects to Cure Your White Walls

Welcome to Make It By Monday, GOOD's weekly DIY feature in which we curate, demystify, and add our own tips for craft projects from around the web (and our apartments). This week: Deck your walls with big-think art.

GOOD Books: Are You Ready for Some Football?

GOOD Books: Are You Ready for Some Football?

Why Weight Maintenance is Harder Than Weight Loss, and How to Help it Along

An estimated 80% to 95% of people who lose a significant amount of weight will gain it back. It sounds high, yes, but I believe it. This is because I’m slowly becoming one of those people.

Full disclosure: about four years ago, I dropped 30 pounds to get to a (too) low weight of 132. Between then and now, my scale readout has slowly crept up to about 153 pounds.

On one hand, I think I would have gained the weight back much faster had it not been for this blog. Undoubtedly, it’s helped my eating habits change for the better. I drink water, cook at home, scarf lots of produce, and avoid processed foods like it’s my job. My heart, lungs, and various other organs are in excellent shape, and my sister gets thoroughly annoyed that we can’t eat a meal without me adding some kind of crazy vinegar or seasoning. So there’s that.

On the other hand … I’ve put on 20 pounds in four years. I’m not in crisis mode (yet), but what the heck?

I know my faults. There are ongoing issues with portion control and dining out, and my reliance on cheese has grown from an occasional treat to an everyday occurrence. I just didn’t expect those factors to make this much of an impact on the circumference of my backside.

But, as the opening statistic demonstrates, I’m far from alone. Maintaining a weight loss is difficult for everyone. In fact, I would say it’s even harder than losing the weight in the first place. Why? Well, once you’ve dropped the pounds – once you’re no longer getting measurable results on the scale, and weight loss morphs from a happy goal to a ho-hum product of the past – things change. Over time, enthusiasm fades, behaviors slack, and long-ignored temptations are indulged with abandon.

In other words, eating salad for 40 days is easy. Eating salad for 40 years is hard.

Enter the National Weight Control Registry. Comprised of PhDs, MDs, and other experts in the health and obesity field, it monitors the habits of thousands of people who have lost at least 30 pounds, and have kept it off for a minimum of one year. (The average is 66 pounds over 5-1/2 years.) Workers conduct studies, publish journal articles, and are widely considered The Authority on diet and weight maintenance. And while they don’t claim to have concrete guidelines that will keep the pounds permanently off for everyone, they have discovered a few actions common among successful maintainers. (Note that these findings imply correlation, and not necessarily causation.)

In order of popularity, they are:

1) Exercise, on average, about one hour per day.
90% of successful maintainers do this.
Far and away the most common factor for weight maintenance among respondents, exercise prevents you from binging, draws you away from the television set, and … y’know, does all the good things it’s supposed to. Movement must be for life, not as part of a temporary diet plan.

2) Eat breakfast every day.
78% of successful maintainers do this.
The researchers gave three reasons for this: “First, eating breakfast may reduce the hunger seen later in the day that may in turn lead to overeating…Second, breakfast eaters may choose less energy-dense foods during the remainder of the day. Finally, nutrients consumed at breakfast may leave the subject with a better ability to perform physical activity.” Of the 2959 successful maintainers in a 2002 NWCR study, only 4% never ate breakfast.

3) Weigh yourself at least once a week.
75% of successful maintainers do this.
The NWCR calls this “consistent self-monitoring,” and claims it allows maintainers to, “catch weight gains before they escalate and make behavior changes to prevent additional weight gain.” I have not weighed myself in over a year. This explains a lot.

4) Watch less than 10 hours of TV per week.
62% of successful maintainers do this.
In a 2003 study, the American Heart Association found a strong correlation between the amount of TV one watches, the amount of fast food ingested, and the propensity for obesity. Turning the boob tube off can help sidestep this, as it allows for more activity and less mindless grazing. (Personally, I believe this point is incredibly important for kids, since they develop habits in childhood that they’ll have for the rest of their lives. Subsequently, I’d lump video games and computer time in the same category.)

The good news is, the longer you maintain your weight, the more likely you are to keep it up in the future. So, adopting these behaviors can only help. I would also suggest that beginning the whole process with long-term intentions (“This is not a diet. This is a lifestyle change.”) makes all the difference in the world.

As for me, I have to drop some pounds again. Then, I need to concentrate on maintaining it for the rest of my life. It’s gonna be tough, but I feel a responsibility to readers, the Husband-Elect, our future kids, and myself to do so. Fingers crossed, these strategies will help.

Readers, how about you? What’s been your experience with maintaining weight loss?

(Photos courtesy of the University of Maryland and Documenting Success.)

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Watch Your Mouth: Is Eco-Certified Sea Bass a Sham?

Attention shoppers: The fresh Chilean sea bass in the seafood case—that filet of Marine Stewardship Council-certified “best choice” fish—might not be Chilean. In fact, it may not even be sea bass.

Earlier this year, biologist Peter Marko visited ten different supermarkets and bought 36 filets of certified sustainable Chilean sea bass. In a letter published last week in Current Biology, Marko explains how he extracted mitochondrial DNA samples from the fish and matched them against the distinct genetic fingerprints of the certified population. How did the genes in the retail samples stack up against the genetic material collected from a certified batch of fish in the sea? Thirteen percent of the sea bass appeared to be from another, uncertified stock, and another 8 percent were an entirely different species of fish altogether. If these eco-certified fish were Dior handbags, one in every 12 would probably be a knockoff.

Even before Marko's discovery, the fish was already swimming in controversial waters. In the 1990s, the fish—also known as Dissostichus eleginoides, or Patagonian toothfish—was rebranded as Chilean sea bass, prompting a quick rise from relative obscurity to become a succulent status symbol. That new identity was no good for the toothfish: The explosive growth of sea bass dishes across Europe and the United States nearly drove the fish to biological extinction. Environmental groups urged cooks to “Take a Pass on Sea Bass.” Because the animals mature slowly and can live to be 100 years old, one biologist told Nature, netting them is almost like denuding a forest.

In 2001, after considerable debate, the Marine Stewardship Council—the only global sustainable seafood certifier—approved a single fishery off of South America as “sustainable.” If, as Marko’s modest sample suggests, other fish are masquerading as sustainable Chilean sea bass, the news could further tarnish the MSC’s reputation as the gold standard for environmentally-friendly fishing.

The slippery business of fraudulent food labeling isn’t confined to fish—items like Champagne, Vidalia onions, and Parmesan all contend with less expensive imitators that hail from someplace other than eastern France, Georgia, or northern Italy. But seafood mislabeling is pervasive, affecting an estimated 30 percent of the U.S. market (and up to an estimated 80 percent with easily replicated fish like red snapper). And deliberately swapping names has a particularly long ichthyological tradition. Take the sardine, the former staple of the workingman’s lunch. When the first canning factories popped up on the coast of Maine in the 1870s, canned herring sent to New York was sold as a product of France—even through French “sardines” are an entirely different species. Today, it’s just as confusing; the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization says 21 different fish species can be called a sardine. 

Sometimes, the seafood pseudonym is just a clever marketing fix for a fish's unappetizing given name. What fine diner wants to eat stumpknocker, toothfish, or Asian carp? But much of the eco-mislabeling tends to be driven by backwater economics. When there isn’t enough of a valuable and desirable fish, unscrupulous marketers substitute less desirable or less expensive species for the real deal. This outsized demand means fishermen pull more from uncertified fish stocks, undermining the principle of certification and further perpetuating the problem.

Short of ordering a DNA sequencer to pair with your seafood dinner, it's buyer beware. And the rule of caveat emptor has its limits. “It’s very unlikely that having people primarily engage as consumers is a likely way as solving anything,” Jennifer Jacquet, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia, says. In 2010, Jacquet co-authored a commentary suggesting that the Marine Stewardship Council’s donors might get a better return on their investment by eliminating subsidies or establishing marine protected areas rather than supporting a multi-million dollar certification program. “Some people say, ‘This isn’t harmful,’” she says. “But when you have the limited resources for conservation, we need to be very critical.”

If neither eco-certification nor pocket seafood guides can guarantee a fish’s identity, the next best hope might be broader access to the same DNA technology researchers are using to expose systemic mislabeling. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration plans to begin field testing the tools this year. Even Oceana and Greenpeace have armed high school students and citizen scientists with sequencers. “The technology exists,” Bob Hanner, a coordinator with the Fish Barcode of Life Initiative (FISH-BOL) project, says. But creating library of fish DNA  doesn't come cheap. And Marko says the relatively inexpensive cost of DNA testing dwarfed the already exorbitant cost of buying certified fish fillets, so system-wide testing remains primarily a matter of political and financial will. As Hanner says, “The question is whether there is sufficient market demand aside from a handful of inspectors and a few bourgeois consumers who want to test their fish.”

These sea changes mimic our increasingly complicated relationship to authenticity on shore, where consumers navigate counterfeit wristwatches, plagiarized journalism, and pirated DVDs. Whether we're consuming a cherished fish with a sketchy provenance or pulling on a pair of fake designer jeans, imitations of luxury don't come without consequences. In one 2010 study, psychological researchers found that people who wore counterfeit sunglasses felt like fakes and were more likely to behave dishonestly. Eating a filet with a familiar name and an earnest claim of sustainability might allay our concerns about the Chilean sea bass, but it doesn’t let us off the hook. There’s a compelling reason for ending the name game: These fish are in distress.

Dealbreaker: He’s Dated Men

In our Dealbreakers series, exes report on the habit, belief, or boxer brief that ended the affair.

I knew all along. I’m talking about the entire time we dated. From starting e-mail to final phone call, I was beyond certain that he was gay. Or at the very least, gay-adjacent. Women in similar situations will always say that they knew as a backhanded attempt to cover the tracks of embarrassment. Me? I knew.

I knew when a friend introduced him with the ambiguous epithet “unavailable.” Her explanation only made it worse—“Oh, he just got out of something. I’ll let him tell you.” Then, there was the Facebook album evidence. I sent an email to my bitchy brain trust with the subject line “Exhibits A through C.” Inside were pictures of him standing very sweaty and very close to a shirtless man (they’d just run a marathon), him channeling Zoolander in suspenders, and an iPhone self-portrait of just his eyes. The Sherlock Homosexual in me was piqued.

But weeks later he showed up to a party in pants so bespoke the women in the room refused to shut up. Who is he? Where’d he come from? What’s his deal? I got elbowed so many times that night my side screamed. Every horny chick within arms length inquired about his empty ring finger. This is unheard of in Washington—a black man in a suit who you’ve never even seen before. He came out of nowhere. He was hot. He was older. He was sexually mysterious. And at that point, he had to be mine.

When I tip-toed to his sports car for our first date, he was grinning like a kid in a candy store who just got his braces off. Wrapped in a bright orange dress, it was clear I’d caught him off guard. He had paired slacks with a “vintage” Modelo Especial T shirt. So maybe this wasn’t a date?

Later that night, he led the back of his hand up the back of my leg from Achilles tendon to that crazy sensitive skin behind my knee. Yes, it was definitely a date. I disappeared into the bathroom with shivers up my spine. They multiplied when I got his text message. “Hurry up and pee. Sheesh.” It took six seconds for him to miss me.

From then on, there was no denying that there was something going on. Soon, I had met all of his friends. On most women’s “what’s our status” radar, that would rate a 7 or an 8 on the “in a relationship” scale. But for me, those meetups tipped things in the opposite direction. We walked into one "meet-the-girl” summit holding hands and giggling, a couple. Then his homeboy showed up. When the two of them hopped their chairs closer together, I might as well have been half a world away. As I sat and watched, they talked watches. He grasped his friend’s wrist, turning it over ever so gently to examine the new piece he’d just bought. Then he slid it off to model it himself. I’ve done the same thing with a girlfriend’s bracelet, but I’m a girl. When I mentioned later that that scene might be a little too close for comfort for some men, he laughed it off.

And when I complained to my best friend, Stella, that I still had my doubts—not about his affections but about his previous predilections—she told me to shut it. “This is 40-year-old man game we’re witnessing here,” she assured me. “Think James Bond’s Speedos.” Showing up on time every time, always paying, wanting to buy me clothes and being willing to dog sit when I was out of town was just what grown-ass men were about. And if a little proverbial Speedo-wearing was happening, then so be it. Stella argued that, as usual, I was looking for a way out by outing a man who was just fine where he was. I was a relationship-phobe hiding in the closet of a homophobe, she reasoned.

Then I got “the email.” Stella and I had been planning “a celebration of the number 30” tour of Florence, Barcelona and Marrakech for months. I’d be gone for two weeks and felt like Mr. Bond and I needed to talk before I went wild with my girls European-style. That night on the phone, he asked me about my expectations, about my past relationships, about my goals for the future. And while he gave me directions to the best grilled octopus in Barcelona, all I could think about was how “European” he was and how “American” I felt, despite my mother’s best efforts.

My mother has been an out and proud lesbian since before I was born. As we searched for the perfect place for a black gay single mom to settle down, we spent our lives running. We left Los Angeles for Catalina Island by way of a botched move to Madrid when my family couldn’t accept her “lifestyle,” and returned five years later when that small town couldn’t, either. My friends call me “the nomad.” I have always considered myself more evolved and enlightened then most, always ready to hop off the “normal life” train and declare the whole nuclear family thing a scam. I spent the night telling him all this, talking over the little voice in my head that questioned whether I’d ever really jump off the rails.

I was on the bus when I got the email, a bold line in my inbox with the subject, “Reverse Russian Roulette.” In took a few lines of e-hemming and e-hawing before he finally came out with it: “I’ve dated guys before.” He said that our talk the night before had convinced him that he should reveal more about his own past. He’d thought about telling me for weeks but hadn’t found the courage. He told me he didn’t want to “shoot what we were building out of the sky.” He was being honest, which was actually really really hot.

“Funny thing is I’ve dated guys before too,” I wrote back. Sarcasm, my involuntary tic, would help smooth things over. We talked in person that night, and were inseparable the nights following. His bravery emboldened me. My grown-up life was finally aligning with my free-love resume. I grew up handing out water bottles at gay pride parades. I was weaned on bad lesbian beatnik spoken word. There was a tambourine involved in my high school graduation ceremony, for Gloria Steinem's sake. I could date a “formerly gay man.” That would be a cinch.

When he dropped me off at the airport, I left knowing that I would fly back to him on solid ground. His Facebook status message said something about how he was releasing me into the ocean and hoped I’d come swimming back. “I think he’s incredibly brave,” I told Stella one night in Barcelona over cava. She “umm-hmmed” her assent and gulped the rest of her glass down. If he was brave, I thought, then that made me brave to date him.

Then, walking through Florence, we passed by the chain store that he loved so much, and I peered through the glass to assess the origins of his tight jeans—the same pair that got hearts pumping that first night we met in person. Tight pants? Who cares? Apparently, none of the Italian women clinging to their size-28 men in toilet paper-thin T-shirts. In Italy, those pants were everyday, but in the States, they still functioned as tell-tale signs. “Eurocentric” had always been mine and Stella's code word for “possibly gay.” It made us sound more sophisticated than intolerant.

Truth was, I had to swim thousands of miles away to see what was right in front of me. It wasn’t his past that had me super-sleuthing all those months before: It was mine.

And that's when I knew it was over. Not because he was “sexually free,” as he called it that night after “the email," but because I wasn’t as evolved as I’d previously boasted to myself and to him. All that time, I thought my “eccentric” personality would trump his “Eurocentric” tendencies. And maybe in Barcelona it could have. But back in Bloomingdale, it wasn’t just another adjective—it was a wedge between us. Or between the me that I thought I was—tolerant, free-thinking, above-it-all—and the me that I really was—heteronormative and stereotypical.

I fought the obvious for a few weeks—showing up at co-worker dinners and laughing through corny movies. I made a show of dragging Europe with me back to U Street, but he could sense I’d changed the moment I stepped off the plane. Eventually, neither one of us was happy pretending that I was into it.

I’d told him from the start that I wasn’t looking for a relationship, and fell back on that tired line when he asked me why we weren’t “connecting.” If he was shocked, he didn’t sound like it. Yes, I was doing this over the phone. “I mean, I told you this months ago,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. He said he understood. When we hung up, I was relieved.

I remembered when I first looked into his eyes on Facebook, then forwarded the photos around in an attempt to justify my own hang-ups. I didn’t want to know what he’d see if he looked into mine. In the end, he had been the honest one and I was the liar. And that’s one thing I hadn’t known all along.

Illustration by Dylan C. Lathrop

High Minded: The Perfect TV Commercials for Stoners

I have appeared in a couple of commercials, and as a result I now watch them, rapt, as if they are interesting. I mainly watch television ads to see if they feature people I know or to get jealous and wish I were in them, but I wind up getting particularly involved when I’m high. Mad Men has only fueled this stoner line of inquiry. What’s the message? How was this pitched? Are all of the U.S. McDonald’s commercials really shot at that one fake McDonald’s? Did he just book that because of his crazy eyebrows? 

I’ve also become highly aware of how stoners are targeted, subtly (eye drops; any commercial set in a basement with two people in grubby T-shirts watching TV; Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut “It’s Morning Somewhere” spots; Justin Long as the Mac guy) and not-so-subtly (Taco Bell). There are a few benefits to designing a commercial that appeals to stoners: (1) we are a sort-of-large TV-watching demographic; (2) even ten seconds of audio and visual stimuli are enough to blow our minds; (3) we might be convinced to pay $30 for Jerry’s Deli to deliver us an entire carrot cake and several gallons of soup.

But so many other products have missed the opportunity to market to high me. Here are some commercials I’d like to see at night when I’m staring at the tube, breathing through my mouth and highly receptive:

Coconut water. Open on a scientist who explains, using archaic cartoon figures, what percentage of water makes up my body. Show me a desert, then a cave made of salt, then a pair of chapped hands rubbing against each other and making a scraping noise. Finish with a clip of a coconut being drunk through a straw by a monkey sitting next to a waterfall and four seconds of an MGMT song where they aren’t talking about trees. Flash me a graph illustrating electrolytes and their benefits. It doesn’t have to be a real graph as long as it’s up there for one second only.

Toyota Camry. Open on a school parking lot. Our hero is sitting in the car. The digital clock reads 8:01 a.m. We see him start to open the door, then change his mind. He reclines the seat all the way back. He opens the sunroof. A butterfly flies in the sunroof and lands on the hero’s nose. Dozens of butterflies follow, and the car becomes a spaceship, and then a logo appears made of stars that says “FUTURE,” underneath which would be a meteor tugging a banner that says “IT’S SAFE IN HERE.” We zoom out to find that the hero is hurtling through space and skipping school at the same time, which is aspirational. The space ship becomes a bed and everybody goes to sleep to dream about safely playing hooky, not brake failure.

Soup. This one takes place in a bomb shelter. We have a young family, shivering and miserable but with good hair, nearing the end of their rations. A baby is coughing on the dusty floor. Someone cries, “I don’t think we’ll live! Everything has expired, and now so will we!” Someone else digs up a dusty can of soup, and we watch each family member slowly sip his allotted tablespoon. As we fade out, a drop of soup falls to the floor. Everyone bursts into tears.

Homeless cats. Show a slideshow of the faces of homeless cats over a dramatic voiceover (Oprah, if she’s available; if not, perhaps the woman who does the radio spots for Pavillions) explaining their circumstances. Give each a name, a human name like Bill or Mr. Shaw. Show a photo of an elderly cat with milky eyes and then explain that a person cannot have too many pets, because that would be like having too much love, and that landlords never look into these sorts of things.

Tourism boards. Explain slowly and with photos exactly what I can eat when I visit your city. Emphasize foods that feature oozing cheese. Show a person swimming with dolphins and exclaiming at how warm the seawater is, and then imply that the state in which I reside is overdue for an earthquake. Then show a phone number.

Fake meat. Spell out, in 30 cinematic seconds, how to construct a Big Mac out of Morningstar patties. Hire someone to reassure me that the texture of frozen soy alternative does not suggest a futuristic housing project in some shut-in’s bleak fantasy. Show the actress enjoying a fake burger while she pets a cow, applies relish, wears a comfortable but classy cotton dress, toasts her bun in veggie margarine, watches the sunrise. Flood the 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. window with this.

Household cleaners with bleach. Zoom into the grout. Show me the microscopic animals who travel in amphibious herds across the wetlands of our toilets. Zoom in on a group of teeny predators, then a lazy hand squeezing a trigger at them and immediately raising a cold soda out of frame. It would be great if there were a shot of someone scrubbing away at a stain that won’t depart and then zooming in on the germs all over his hands. The first marketing agency to conceive of zooming in on a bathroom microbe was headed by Don Draper and Albert Einstein. Zooming. Microscopes. Zooming. Microscopes. I see the eyelashes of the parasites; I get so itchy I consider adding laundry detergent to my bath water. I will buy this product, unless I forget.

Enter High Minded, where Tess Lynch revisits previously forgotten epiphanies, drags her lazy, leaden body on adventures and—whoa. I think this pudding's texture might improve if I added a handful of popcorn and some, like, canned blueberries. Look for a new column every other Friday at GOOD. Collage, as always, by Beth Hoeckel.

Spa Weekend in Miami: Mandarin Oriental, Canyon Ranch, and Aveda Spa

Seriously I think I need to temporarily hibernate in South Beach this coming winter. My parents have had a condo smack in the middle of all the action for nearly a decade now and this past weekend was my first time staying at their place. It sounds crazy now that I think about it, but I’ve always assumed that a vacation can’t be relaxing unless I’m staying in a hotel. So, last year when I went down to Miami for Art Basel I stayed at the Four Seasons and the time before I went I was at the Delano. I met Alexia and Melisse of Well + Good NYC at an event a few weeks ago however and they told me that you could get day passes to a number of the best hotels or get pool/beach access by booking a spa treatment. With that in mind I booked a four day trip and stayed at my parents place, which thankfully was even nicer (and bigger!) than I thought. Best of all it has a washer and a dryer so leaving the place in as good of a condition as when I found it wasn’t a problem. But let’s get back to the relaxation goodness!

The first treatment I had was at the Mandarin Oriental, which is about a 10 minute cab ride from South Beach. It’s located in Brickell Key and if you’ve been to the Mandarin Oriental spa in NYC you’ll be super psyched to see how spacious the Miami spa is. 17 treatment rooms and six suites are spread over 15,000 square feet and overlook the water. I had a two hour massage that included some deep tissue work and I have to say I felt like a new person afterwards. The therapist could tell I had serious tension in my upper back and neck just from the way my arms were lined up against my body when I was face down (in an unnatural way apparently), so she focused on those tension points using relaxing oils and a mix of massage techniques. Usually after a massage I’ll feel relaxed that day, but with this one I literally felt at ease up until my first full day back in NYC where all the stress of being back to work brought the back pain back! Actually I credit the amazing massage for allowing me to calmly deal with some drama that occurred with a friend while I was in Miami (that’s a whole other story!). Now I see why people get regular massages! Jump for more on Canyon Ranch and Aveda.

While I was in Miami I also spent a day at Canyon Ranch. I have been dying to take a vacation at Canyon Ranch, but didn’t know anyone who had personally been so I figured a day would be a good way to test it out. Unfortunately I got caught up in shopping (if you go to Miami stopping by The Webster is a MUST), and was in such a zen mood after my two hour massage the day before at the Mandarin that I didn’t make it there till the early afternoon. Once I got there however I was in complete awe of the zen space, which includes a 70,000 square foot wellness spa with 54 treatment rooms (yes! 70,000…it took me awhile to figure out how to get where). I’m not sure, but I think the whole place is sprayed with some kind of calming mist because I felt so relaxed from the moment I stepped foot inside. They have a gorgeous pool overlooking the beach and countless classes (I’m talking about three offered every hour). July is off season for Miami, so it might be more crowded if you go later in the year, but the first class I took I was the only person in (I ended up leaving it because it was more pilates than cardio/weight training, which is what I was looking for), and the second one only had two people aside from myself. The instructor of the second class I took, a weight room class, was super friendly and made it a point to accommodate each of us. After leaving the class I lounged by the beach for a bit. I hope to go back soon, try out some more of the classes and eat at their restaurant which is supposed to be fantastic!

Just before returning back to NYC I stoped by the Aveda Spa at the Palms Hotel and got a wonderful manicure and pedicure. The nail specialist and I immediately bonded because we were wearing nearly matching Cartier watches (seriously, she was the most stylish manicurist I’ve ever had and I’ve been to countless mani/pedi spots in NYC!). I love that the spa is eco-minded and uses SpaRitual vegan nail colors. After my nails were taken care of I wandered around the Palms’ pool area which had all kinds of fun tiki set-ups, rocking chairs, and parrots, for a real retreat feel.

I’ve only been back in NYC for a day and I already wish I was back in South Beach….