.
Every morning I wake up and I have to blow my nose. After every meal, I have to blow my nose, especially if it involves spicy food. If there's dust in the air, I have to blow my nose constantly. I'm definitely thankful I don't have to suffer much in the way of allergies, but I'd still like to not have to mess with all this mucus all the time. Does someone out there have a low-maintenance nose I could use for a while? Or at least do you know some way I can reduce how often I have to blow it? It's always those ineffective blows, too, that really get me, or worse, those times I blow and there's blood and now I've got to stop and let the bleeding stop.
So if you've got a low-maintenance nose, or some way to reduce the maintenance burden of this nose, please let me know. And who knows, maybe I can overcome all the noes for the right nose?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
To Your Health - Part 4
.
Just in time for Memorial Day, I've got the 4th leg of the table I built my effortless weight loss on. In the first three articles, I talked about things you can eat and how to eat them to get effective results. You've probably already got your weight closer to what you want just from doing that, but there's one more thing that must be done to get your weight to the level you want.
That something is called "being active". It's not exercise, it's simply avoiding total laziness.
I'm 6 feet tall. My "ideal weight" is about 175 pounds. I got up to 260 because I sat around all day doing very little, and the only thing that kept me from getting even heavier was because I drank so much water in place of eating and the computer often distracted me from snacking so I didn't eat much. Once I improved my diet and started driving a truck again, I lost 50 pounds over the course of 2009, even though I ate MORE.
That's right, doing a job normally associated with grossly overweight men - truck driving - helped me lose weight. I don't eat a lot of truckstop and fast food, but I do eat some about three times a week. I stop every 2-3 hours and get out to circulate the blood. I park far away from the rest area so I have longer to walk. I get in and out of the truck several times a day. I take a walk in the evening before bed.
I'm probably still less active than the majority of people, but I lost 50 pounds.
For those of you who sit in front of a computer all day, totally engrossed in it, you've got to break away from it once in a while. Practically any job will allow you to stop and stand up and stretch a little every hour, or park in the farthest spot in the parking lot, or walk around the building to get your supplies instead of asking someone else to do it for you.
I've got a list of things you can do to burn off a few extra calories every day and keep your body in reasonable condition. It won't make you a super-athlete by itself, but if you're one of those people who can be described as "sedentary", it WILL improve your health and fitness. This is what helped me, once I incorporated them into my life, and now I don't even notice doing them.
1. Get off your butt every hour. When your watch does its hourly beep-beep, stand up and stretch the kinks out. This takes less than a minute, but it keeps your blood circulation good throughout the day.
2. Fidget. I can't sit still for more than 5 minutes unless I'm really engrossed in something, and even then it just doesn't happen. This developed out of being nervous, and you don't want to do it during a job interview or important presentation or a date because it does convey that you're nervous, but it's great for circulation and burning a few extra calories each day.
3. When driving for long periods, don't drive more than 3 hours at a time. This meshes well with eating about every 3 hours. Don't eat while driving, even if it's just a snack. You can snack and stand or fidget, accomplishing two goals at once.
4. Don't send an errand boy after something on the other side of the building, go get it yourself. If your time is worth a lot of money, this might be a little harder. While I worked as a computer tech in the Navy, I lived on a huge ship (LHD5). A lot of trouble calls could be handled over the phone, but instead, I went to the problem. I probably walked 5 miles every day because of that, up and down several flights of stairs, and it held my weight down before I learned how to eat better. My time was valuable, but the new guys needed to learn the ship and learn their jobs, so it was worth it.
5. When you go to the store, park in the far spots. The farther walk is good for you, and you get another minute or two to think about other things. I often take a walk when I've got some heavy thinking to do.
6. While at the store, go up and down all the aisles, as this is a non-boring way to get a lot of extra walking in.
7. I wore some ankle weights for a while last year. I figured that since I couldn't get a lot of walking in every day, I might as well multiply what walking I did get. It strengthened my legs and helped me lose a little weight. On the downside, I've heard a few people saying it's bad for your knees and ankles, and the weights get torn up pretty easily. I wore boots all the time to protect my ankles from friction, and the weights and boots both got torn up after a few months, so YMMV.
8. If you absolutely must play video games all day, play something that requires a lot of thinking or a lot of moving. The Wii is supposedly good for exercising without realizing you're exercising, but a really deep wargame gets your brain pumping too. Plus, if it's a frustrating game, like Civilization 4, you might get worked up yelling at the computer players backstabbing you or finishing a Wonder you were 2 turns away from finishing.
9. If you play sports, be a go-fer. My dad plays baseball. He can play the outfield (so he walks farther to get there) where it's busy (so he has to chase the ball a lot more). When his team is up at bat, he can play the bat boy, fetching used bats from the field. And he can hit the ball and run around the bases. You can do stuff like that too.
10. When you do any kind of regular exercise routine, make sure you also do something to distract yourself from focusing on how "hard" it is. I find I can jog a lot further on the treadmill if I'm distracted by a TV, even when I can't hear it, than when I'm focused on what I'm doing. When I'm jogging around the block, I focus on telling myself to get to the next driveway, and when I reach it, I tell myself that was too easy and I need to get to the next one. I can about double my jogging distance just by doing this.
The most important thing you can do is put your mind to it. Ask yourself, "What can I do to use up more energy? How can I burn more calories and keep my circulation good?" When you ask your mind the right questions, you'll get better answers, and then you need to put those answers to work for you.
Make a decision to prioritize your health and then stick with it. Make it as important to walk a mile or five miles or jog every day as it is to chat away your life on Facebook. Make it more important. No one's going to make you healthy. Only you can do it.
That's my four pillars: drinking plenty of water, eating better food and less bad food, eating small amounts of food every 3-4 hours, and increasing your level of activity. I'll continue giving out tips now and then because there's TONS to know. I'll also keep you updated on how I'm doing and what I'm learning and be here to encourage you to improve your health and life too.
The next time I'm going to talk about something called "intensity" and how, as I head into this new year, it has helped make improvements to other areas of my life than just my basic health.
Be your best!
- Jaycee Adams
_______
More articles of interest or amusement:
To Your Health - Part 3
Winning the Aussie Way and the Scottish Way
To Your Health - Part 1
.
Just in time for Memorial Day, I've got the 4th leg of the table I built my effortless weight loss on. In the first three articles, I talked about things you can eat and how to eat them to get effective results. You've probably already got your weight closer to what you want just from doing that, but there's one more thing that must be done to get your weight to the level you want. If, like some people, "exercise" is a four-letter-word for you, then I've got good news: you don't have to "exercise" to lose weight. I didn't. BUT, if you sit around on your butt all day, it's going to be hard. I lost 50 pounds without doing any exercise routines, and I've kept it off without doing them too, but if I was also sitting on my butt all the time, I wouldn't be able to keep it off. I don't do what most people call exercise or working out, and I lost and have kept off 50 pounds for several months, but I'm at a plateau and I have to do something about that to get rid of the last 30 pounds I don't want.
That something is called "being active". It's not exercise, it's simply avoiding total laziness.
I'm 6 feet tall. My "ideal weight" is about 175 pounds. I got up to 260 because I sat around all day doing very little, and the only thing that kept me from getting even heavier was because I drank so much water in place of eating and the computer often distracted me from snacking so I didn't eat much. Once I improved my diet and started driving a truck again, I lost 50 pounds over the course of 2009, even though I ate MORE.
That's right, doing a job normally associated with grossly overweight men - truck driving - helped me lose weight. I don't eat a lot of truckstop and fast food, but I do eat some about three times a week. I stop every 2-3 hours and get out to circulate the blood. I park far away from the rest area so I have longer to walk. I get in and out of the truck several times a day. I take a walk in the evening before bed.
I'm probably still less active than the majority of people, but I lost 50 pounds.
For those of you who sit in front of a computer all day, totally engrossed in it, you've got to break away from it once in a while. Practically any job will allow you to stop and stand up and stretch a little every hour, or park in the farthest spot in the parking lot, or walk around the building to get your supplies instead of asking someone else to do it for you.
I've got a list of things you can do to burn off a few extra calories every day and keep your body in reasonable condition. It won't make you a super-athlete by itself, but if you're one of those people who can be described as "sedentary", it WILL improve your health and fitness. This is what helped me, once I incorporated them into my life, and now I don't even notice doing them.
1. Get off your butt every hour. When your watch does its hourly beep-beep, stand up and stretch the kinks out. This takes less than a minute, but it keeps your blood circulation good throughout the day.
2. Fidget. I can't sit still for more than 5 minutes unless I'm really engrossed in something, and even then it just doesn't happen. This developed out of being nervous, and you don't want to do it during a job interview or important presentation or a date because it does convey that you're nervous, but it's great for circulation and burning a few extra calories each day.
3. When driving for long periods, don't drive more than 3 hours at a time. This meshes well with eating about every 3 hours. Don't eat while driving, even if it's just a snack. You can snack and stand or fidget, accomplishing two goals at once.
4. Don't send an errand boy after something on the other side of the building, go get it yourself. If your time is worth a lot of money, this might be a little harder. While I worked as a computer tech in the Navy, I lived on a huge ship (LHD5). A lot of trouble calls could be handled over the phone, but instead, I went to the problem. I probably walked 5 miles every day because of that, up and down several flights of stairs, and it held my weight down before I learned how to eat better. My time was valuable, but the new guys needed to learn the ship and learn their jobs, so it was worth it.
5. When you go to the store, park in the far spots. The farther walk is good for you, and you get another minute or two to think about other things. I often take a walk when I've got some heavy thinking to do.
6. While at the store, go up and down all the aisles, as this is a non-boring way to get a lot of extra walking in.
7. I wore some ankle weights for a while last year. I figured that since I couldn't get a lot of walking in every day, I might as well multiply what walking I did get. It strengthened my legs and helped me lose a little weight. On the downside, I've heard a few people saying it's bad for your knees and ankles, and the weights get torn up pretty easily. I wore boots all the time to protect my ankles from friction, and the weights and boots both got torn up after a few months, so YMMV.
8. If you absolutely must play video games all day, play something that requires a lot of thinking or a lot of moving. The Wii is supposedly good for exercising without realizing you're exercising, but a really deep wargame gets your brain pumping too. Plus, if it's a frustrating game, like Civilization 4, you might get worked up yelling at the computer players backstabbing you or finishing a Wonder you were 2 turns away from finishing.
9. If you play sports, be a go-fer. My dad plays baseball. He can play the outfield (so he walks farther to get there) where it's busy (so he has to chase the ball a lot more). When his team is up at bat, he can play the bat boy, fetching used bats from the field. And he can hit the ball and run around the bases. You can do stuff like that too.
10. When you do any kind of regular exercise routine, make sure you also do something to distract yourself from focusing on how "hard" it is. I find I can jog a lot further on the treadmill if I'm distracted by a TV, even when I can't hear it, than when I'm focused on what I'm doing. When I'm jogging around the block, I focus on telling myself to get to the next driveway, and when I reach it, I tell myself that was too easy and I need to get to the next one. I can about double my jogging distance just by doing this.
The most important thing you can do is put your mind to it. Ask yourself, "What can I do to use up more energy? How can I burn more calories and keep my circulation good?" When you ask your mind the right questions, you'll get better answers, and then you need to put those answers to work for you.
Make a decision to prioritize your health and then stick with it. Make it as important to walk a mile or five miles or jog every day as it is to chat away your life on Facebook. Make it more important. No one's going to make you healthy. Only you can do it.
That's my four pillars: drinking plenty of water, eating better food and less bad food, eating small amounts of food every 3-4 hours, and increasing your level of activity. I'll continue giving out tips now and then because there's TONS to know. I'll also keep you updated on how I'm doing and what I'm learning and be here to encourage you to improve your health and life too.
The next time I'm going to talk about something called "intensity" and how, as I head into this new year, it has helped make improvements to other areas of my life than just my basic health.
Be your best!
- Jaycee Adams
_______
More articles of interest or amusement:
To Your Health - Part 3
Winning the Aussie Way and the Scottish Way
To Your Health - Part 1
.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The War on Cleanliness and Privacy
Labels:
good links,
travel,
unpopular opinion
.
Have you ever been in a Texas rest area? Nice, aren't they, how they've got those really low walls that anyone can see over, and that they make it ridiculously hard to wash your hands after your done, ain't it? Of course, Texas is hardly the only culprit in this regard. Such humiliating public rest rooms are all over this otherwise great country of ours. It's getting so bad you about have to go to a truckstop if you want to take a dump in privacy or wash your hands afterward.
Here are some of the most glaring and disgusting lapses of common decency inflicted upon the public by both the builders and maintainers of public restrooms.
1. Super-thin toilet paper.
Not only is it incredibly narrow, it's also incredibly thin. And the rolls are so heavy and tight that you can't hardly pull more than a couple sheets out at a time any more. You spend more time trying to get a sufficient amount of toilet paper so you're not poking your hand through it than you spend dropping your load. I wind up using about twice as much toilet paper as I would if the paper was of a reasonable size and thickness.
2. Low-flow toilets.
This is such an epidemic that they made a King of the Hill episode about it. Those toilets don't flush with enough water to get your deposit swept off to the next world. I have to flush and flush and flush and I'm still forced to leave the next guy wondering if I'm part elephant. (And not because he saw me pull up my pants, either!)
3. Automatic flushing toilets.
Seems like a good idea, right? Except the stupid things flush about every 2-3 seconds when I'm in there, and that's an awful lot of water waste! But what's really funny is that after all that flushing, they DON'T flush when I'm done and there's still some TP left in the bowl, so I've got to flush one more time manually. And SOME toilets don't let you flush manually AT ALL!!! I left a rather large load in one toilet and couldn't flush it and it wouldn't flush itself either.
4. Poorly placed flushing buttons.
Okay, I think the technology now exists so that we can put the flushing button somewhere a little more convenient. Let's start doing that, huh?
5. Impossible to use faucets.
In their quest to reduce water usage, many public restrooms have made it impossible to wash your hands properly. You can put some soap on your hands, but you've got to hold down some valve to get water so you can only rinse off one hand at a time. Not especially effective, you know. I do like the automatic hand sensors... when they work.
6. Short-necked faucets.
Sometimes the faucets are so short that you can barely get any water at all and you're forced to wipe your hands on the sink. Like everyone else. Do I really want to do that? Not really.
7. Hand Dryers.
Ok, I get that you're trying to save the trees. But come on, how about making them powerful enough to dry our hands within a few seconds, like we can do with a paper towel, AND how about putting enough of them in the restroom that we can use them without having to wait. That means putting in AT LEAST as many dryers as sinks, and since it takes twice as long to dry your hands as to wash them, you really should put in 2 dryers per sink. But I think it's rather telling that in places where paper towels and hand dryers are both present, the dryers are used only when the paper towels are gone.
8. Horrendously close urinals with no walls between them.
Really, do we need to be that close to each other with our pants opened up that it's almost impossible not to look at someone else's pee-stick?
9. Short stall walls and doors.
Last but not least are those obscenely short doors and walls that even midgets can see over. WHAT THE FRENCH TOAST?!?!
So come on, let's complain whenever we encounter those disgusting restroom conditions that discourage people to wash their hands, that waste more resources than they save, and that just plain discourage us from disposing of our waste in a proper manner. Really, I think I'd get more privacy peeing on the sidewalk in NYC than using some of the restrooms I've been in.
.
Have you ever been in a Texas rest area? Nice, aren't they, how they've got those really low walls that anyone can see over, and that they make it ridiculously hard to wash your hands after your done, ain't it? Of course, Texas is hardly the only culprit in this regard. Such humiliating public rest rooms are all over this otherwise great country of ours. It's getting so bad you about have to go to a truckstop if you want to take a dump in privacy or wash your hands afterward.
Here are some of the most glaring and disgusting lapses of common decency inflicted upon the public by both the builders and maintainers of public restrooms.
1. Super-thin toilet paper.
Not only is it incredibly narrow, it's also incredibly thin. And the rolls are so heavy and tight that you can't hardly pull more than a couple sheets out at a time any more. You spend more time trying to get a sufficient amount of toilet paper so you're not poking your hand through it than you spend dropping your load. I wind up using about twice as much toilet paper as I would if the paper was of a reasonable size and thickness.
2. Low-flow toilets.
This is such an epidemic that they made a King of the Hill episode about it. Those toilets don't flush with enough water to get your deposit swept off to the next world. I have to flush and flush and flush and I'm still forced to leave the next guy wondering if I'm part elephant. (And not because he saw me pull up my pants, either!)
3. Automatic flushing toilets.
Seems like a good idea, right? Except the stupid things flush about every 2-3 seconds when I'm in there, and that's an awful lot of water waste! But what's really funny is that after all that flushing, they DON'T flush when I'm done and there's still some TP left in the bowl, so I've got to flush one more time manually. And SOME toilets don't let you flush manually AT ALL!!! I left a rather large load in one toilet and couldn't flush it and it wouldn't flush itself either.
4. Poorly placed flushing buttons.
Okay, I think the technology now exists so that we can put the flushing button somewhere a little more convenient. Let's start doing that, huh?
5. Impossible to use faucets.
In their quest to reduce water usage, many public restrooms have made it impossible to wash your hands properly. You can put some soap on your hands, but you've got to hold down some valve to get water so you can only rinse off one hand at a time. Not especially effective, you know. I do like the automatic hand sensors... when they work.
6. Short-necked faucets.
Sometimes the faucets are so short that you can barely get any water at all and you're forced to wipe your hands on the sink. Like everyone else. Do I really want to do that? Not really.
7. Hand Dryers.
Ok, I get that you're trying to save the trees. But come on, how about making them powerful enough to dry our hands within a few seconds, like we can do with a paper towel, AND how about putting enough of them in the restroom that we can use them without having to wait. That means putting in AT LEAST as many dryers as sinks, and since it takes twice as long to dry your hands as to wash them, you really should put in 2 dryers per sink. But I think it's rather telling that in places where paper towels and hand dryers are both present, the dryers are used only when the paper towels are gone.
8. Horrendously close urinals with no walls between them.
Really, do we need to be that close to each other with our pants opened up that it's almost impossible not to look at someone else's pee-stick?
9. Short stall walls and doors.
Last but not least are those obscenely short doors and walls that even midgets can see over. WHAT THE FRENCH TOAST?!?!
So come on, let's complain whenever we encounter those disgusting restroom conditions that discourage people to wash their hands, that waste more resources than they save, and that just plain discourage us from disposing of our waste in a proper manner. Really, I think I'd get more privacy peeing on the sidewalk in NYC than using some of the restrooms I've been in.
.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Curse cookies!
.
Man, cookies are evil! You know how I went 3 whole months last year without any serious sugar, right? Did really good about it, and then WHAM! Out of nowhere came a craving. Well, after my birthday I again decided to do without. This time I only made it a month before someone started stuffing cookies and chocolate and cinnamon buns down my throat like there was no tomorrow. Yesterday especially, someone really wiped out my ability to resist freshly-baked, chocolate chip cookies, and I'm forever going to be mean to her for it. Or at least for the next 5 minutes.
When you have a serious addiction to something you don't want to be addicted to, you've got to be a lot more proactive in overcoming that. For the most part, I don't even buy the damned things. Other people buy them, and then they're just THERE. Habits can be defeated by replacing them with other habits. Sometimes I make a point of eating a couple dried apricots before I go into a situation where I might want sweets. A big glass of water helps too. And having something else to think about other than "must not eat cookie" is the best. I went 3 months without a serious threat to my no-sugary-crap diet just because I didn't think about it. I can do it again. And I will, very soon. I'm not going to wait for some momentous occasion, either.
A lot of people wait to quit smoking until they've finished the pack, but as soon as that pack is done, they go get another one. If you want to quit, quit NOW, and to hell with the rest of the pack.
In other news, I've got a new website domain name bought and I'm getting some design work done. I've got several prospective clients lined up so that hopefully next month or the month after, I'll launch the thing and soon afterward we'll be taking over the world! Can you imagine what it would be like to be able to go to one single website and get all the information and products you need without having to search the whole internet for it? Me either, but I'm going to come pretty close to creating it. That's what's taking all my free time right now.
I've got the fourth part of the Health series almost done, and will probably get time to post it early next month. In the meantime, thanks for your support, and thanks to those of you who have contributed.
.
Man, cookies are evil! You know how I went 3 whole months last year without any serious sugar, right? Did really good about it, and then WHAM! Out of nowhere came a craving. Well, after my birthday I again decided to do without. This time I only made it a month before someone started stuffing cookies and chocolate and cinnamon buns down my throat like there was no tomorrow. Yesterday especially, someone really wiped out my ability to resist freshly-baked, chocolate chip cookies, and I'm forever going to be mean to her for it. Or at least for the next 5 minutes.
When you have a serious addiction to something you don't want to be addicted to, you've got to be a lot more proactive in overcoming that. For the most part, I don't even buy the damned things. Other people buy them, and then they're just THERE. Habits can be defeated by replacing them with other habits. Sometimes I make a point of eating a couple dried apricots before I go into a situation where I might want sweets. A big glass of water helps too. And having something else to think about other than "must not eat cookie" is the best. I went 3 months without a serious threat to my no-sugary-crap diet just because I didn't think about it. I can do it again. And I will, very soon. I'm not going to wait for some momentous occasion, either.
A lot of people wait to quit smoking until they've finished the pack, but as soon as that pack is done, they go get another one. If you want to quit, quit NOW, and to hell with the rest of the pack.
In other news, I've got a new website domain name bought and I'm getting some design work done. I've got several prospective clients lined up so that hopefully next month or the month after, I'll launch the thing and soon afterward we'll be taking over the world! Can you imagine what it would be like to be able to go to one single website and get all the information and products you need without having to search the whole internet for it? Me either, but I'm going to come pretty close to creating it. That's what's taking all my free time right now.
I've got the fourth part of the Health series almost done, and will probably get time to post it early next month. In the meantime, thanks for your support, and thanks to those of you who have contributed.
.
Friday, April 9, 2010
To Your Health - Part 3
.
Welcome back, sorry for the delay, but I'm here now, so fret no more. Last time, I talked about improving what you put into your body, because when you build your body out of crap, it tends to turn your body into crap. And before that I suggested you drink more water to help lubricate the machinery. Now I'm going to complete the trifecta of input by discussing HOW to eat.
"I figured out how to eat when I was a baby," you cry. Ah, but you learned wrong, and because you're eating the wrong way, you're triggering your body's starvation reflex, which makes it almost impossible to lose weight. The "traditional" way to eat was developed back when we had to do lots of work and sometimes had to worry about whether we'd miss meals; it allowed our ancestors to pack on fat when they needed it and burn it off when they didn't. Ever wonder why so many Renaissance paintings and sculptures are of overweight women? Back then, being fat meant you were wealthy and could afford to miss work; you never missed a meal. Today, though, it means you're not working enough and overeating. So let's change the way we eat to get rid of the unneeded fat.
The "traditional" way of eating is 3 meals a day, spaced about 5-6 hours apart. Breakfast is usually big, then a moderate lunch, then a big dinner, including dessert. Maybe a sugary snack here and there, and maybe a midnight snack. Some people skip breakfast, which is even worse! This is bad because after about 3-4 hours of not eating, the body starts to think you're starving, and so starts conserving energy. It gets rid of the "strong" muscle in favor of the "weak" muscle and the fat.
By simply getting a small snack between your meals and right before bed so that you're eating something no more than about 3-4 hours apart, you stop the starvation reflex. Breakfast is especially important because you've been asleep for 6-9 hours, and you wake up in starvation mode!
We don't want to increase our total caloric intake, we just want to spread it out. Doing this will help out a lot.
To help you figure out how much food to eat, I've come up with a little guide. This will require you to feel out what's needed, because we're all different.
The first meal size is the "Full" meal. When you eat, take note of when you first feel full enough that you could stop eating. Ignore what's on your plate, you want to figure out what it feels like to be full.
I eat a Full meal as my 1st and 3rd meals of the day. For breakfast, this is usually 1-2 bowls of cereal (depends on the size of the bowl). For lunch it's usually a lunchmeat sandwich and some chips.
The next meal size is the "Snack" meal. A Snack is just enough food to kill off your hungry feeling for a couple hours. For me, it's a little less than Full, often about half to two-thirds that size.
I eat a Snack as my 2nd and 4th meals of the day, and sometimes my fifth. Usually I have a banana as my mid-morning Snack and my mid-afternoon Snack will usually be a fruit cup and some crackers.
The third meal size is the "Handful". It's what I can loosely fit in my hand. Usually this is a few dried apricots or a box of raisins or some pretzels, maybe a 1 oz bag of chips. This is usually my fifth and sixth meal of the day, before I go to bed, but sometimes I have a Snack from the truckstop instead. I eat these at the end of the day when I'm settling down and don't need much energy, and their only purpose is to put a little bit on my stomach so I don't trigger the starvation reflex. Occasionally I'll have something like this after I wake up if I know I can't have breakfast soon enough. It's a good way to break the fast.
And the last meal is the "Stuffed" meal. This is any amount of food you eat after you're already full. Most people eat to this point for their supper, during holidays, or if they go to a buffet or a restaurant. That need to clean our plate isn't just something to blame on our poor, starving parents and grandparents, it's built in.
I do occasionally eat this much, but not nearly as much as I used to. Overeating a little bit once a month is tolerable, even 3-4 times a month is okay if you're not having to unbutton your pants, but more than that and you're going to gain weight.
Because I've gotten used to eating less during meals, if I overeat, I'm usually still full 3-4 hours later. In that case, I keep drinking plenty of water, and sometimes have a Handful, usually peanuts or sunflower seeds.
There's a little bit more to this, though. It's called drinking water. While you eat, you should also be drinking water. I don't generally do it while I'm eating cereal, but I have water before and after. The water does several things. It takes up space in your stomach so you feel full sooner. It helps dilute and break up the food so it's easier to digest, meaning you're not as tired after eating. And it slows your eating. You know how when you go to a buffet, if you eat fast, you can eat more, but if you eat slow, you can't eat as much? Use that effect. Eat slow, drink water.
Between meals, drink cold water as often as you feel like. Since your body has to maintain 98.6 degrees, if you drink cold water, your body has to spend energy to warm it up, meaning cold water actually has negative calories!
Here is my typical meal schedule. It's kind of a default for me, but it varies a lot.
In the morning when I get up, I have some water first thing. Then I make a bowl of cereal. I now eat Kashi Go Lean almost exclusively, and I've just tried almond milk with it and it's pretty good together without being ridiculously expensive.
About 3-4 hours later, I usually have a banana, sometimes some peanuts or crackers or pretzels as filler.
About 3-4 hours later I have a sandwich. This is usually 3 slices of Turkey Balogna (3 oz), a slice of cheese, and two slices of Honey Wheat or Whole Grain bread. Sometimes I put some honey on it. I also have a 1 oz bag of chips since I can't eat out of a bigger bag without eating half of it. Occasionally, maybe once a week, I'll have a can of pop with it, but I'm almost off the pop.
About 3-4 hours later I have a cup of mixed fruit (4 oz) and usually a box of raisins or some peanuts or crackers as filler.
And my last meal is usually a handful of peanuts or sesame sticks, or maybe another bag of chips.
Right before bed, I'll usually have a few nuts.
I eat unsalted foods as much as possible. Nuts are especially salted, so you have to be careful and get the unsalted kind. The taste grows on you. If you can learn to like something that looks, tastes, and smells like it came out of a dog's bladder (aka beer), then eating unsalted nuts is a breeze.
While this is the default for me, it's hardly all I eat. I make a point of about twice a week eating lunch at a restaurant, usually a fast-food joint or pizza place, but sometimes a real restaurant. I also make a point of having eggs for breakfast once a week. Eggs have good things you want, but not too much. Once or twice a week seems just about right to me. I also try to make a point of having seafood once or twice a month, usually shrimp.
And of course there's Mongolian. Can't get enough of that. I'll talk about that in a bit.
So, in summary, about every 3-4 hours you should eat SOMETHING. One or two meals should give you a "Full" feeling, and the rest should be smaller, and you can knock out some hunger pangs with a couple mouthfuls of food. Also, drink plenty of water with your meal to improve digestion and give you a fuller feeling sooner. And don't eat a large meal before bed, but DO eat a little bit of something that won't keep you up.
I've got one more leg of the table I built to effortlessly lose 50 pounds last year and have so far kept it off, and I'll tell you all about it next time.
Stay awesome!
_______
More articles of interest or amusement:
To Your Health - Part 2
What you should know about the military before you join
To Your Health - Part 4
.
"I figured out how to eat when I was a baby," you cry. Ah, but you learned wrong, and because you're eating the wrong way, you're triggering your body's starvation reflex, which makes it almost impossible to lose weight. The "traditional" way to eat was developed back when we had to do lots of work and sometimes had to worry about whether we'd miss meals; it allowed our ancestors to pack on fat when they needed it and burn it off when they didn't. Ever wonder why so many Renaissance paintings and sculptures are of overweight women? Back then, being fat meant you were wealthy and could afford to miss work; you never missed a meal. Today, though, it means you're not working enough and overeating. So let's change the way we eat to get rid of the unneeded fat.
The "traditional" way of eating is 3 meals a day, spaced about 5-6 hours apart. Breakfast is usually big, then a moderate lunch, then a big dinner, including dessert. Maybe a sugary snack here and there, and maybe a midnight snack. Some people skip breakfast, which is even worse! This is bad because after about 3-4 hours of not eating, the body starts to think you're starving, and so starts conserving energy. It gets rid of the "strong" muscle in favor of the "weak" muscle and the fat.
By simply getting a small snack between your meals and right before bed so that you're eating something no more than about 3-4 hours apart, you stop the starvation reflex. Breakfast is especially important because you've been asleep for 6-9 hours, and you wake up in starvation mode!
We don't want to increase our total caloric intake, we just want to spread it out. Doing this will help out a lot.
To help you figure out how much food to eat, I've come up with a little guide. This will require you to feel out what's needed, because we're all different.
The first meal size is the "Full" meal. When you eat, take note of when you first feel full enough that you could stop eating. Ignore what's on your plate, you want to figure out what it feels like to be full.
I eat a Full meal as my 1st and 3rd meals of the day. For breakfast, this is usually 1-2 bowls of cereal (depends on the size of the bowl). For lunch it's usually a lunchmeat sandwich and some chips.
The next meal size is the "Snack" meal. A Snack is just enough food to kill off your hungry feeling for a couple hours. For me, it's a little less than Full, often about half to two-thirds that size.
I eat a Snack as my 2nd and 4th meals of the day, and sometimes my fifth. Usually I have a banana as my mid-morning Snack and my mid-afternoon Snack will usually be a fruit cup and some crackers.
The third meal size is the "Handful". It's what I can loosely fit in my hand. Usually this is a few dried apricots or a box of raisins or some pretzels, maybe a 1 oz bag of chips. This is usually my fifth and sixth meal of the day, before I go to bed, but sometimes I have a Snack from the truckstop instead. I eat these at the end of the day when I'm settling down and don't need much energy, and their only purpose is to put a little bit on my stomach so I don't trigger the starvation reflex. Occasionally I'll have something like this after I wake up if I know I can't have breakfast soon enough. It's a good way to break the fast.
And the last meal is the "Stuffed" meal. This is any amount of food you eat after you're already full. Most people eat to this point for their supper, during holidays, or if they go to a buffet or a restaurant. That need to clean our plate isn't just something to blame on our poor, starving parents and grandparents, it's built in.
I do occasionally eat this much, but not nearly as much as I used to. Overeating a little bit once a month is tolerable, even 3-4 times a month is okay if you're not having to unbutton your pants, but more than that and you're going to gain weight.
Because I've gotten used to eating less during meals, if I overeat, I'm usually still full 3-4 hours later. In that case, I keep drinking plenty of water, and sometimes have a Handful, usually peanuts or sunflower seeds.
There's a little bit more to this, though. It's called drinking water. While you eat, you should also be drinking water. I don't generally do it while I'm eating cereal, but I have water before and after. The water does several things. It takes up space in your stomach so you feel full sooner. It helps dilute and break up the food so it's easier to digest, meaning you're not as tired after eating. And it slows your eating. You know how when you go to a buffet, if you eat fast, you can eat more, but if you eat slow, you can't eat as much? Use that effect. Eat slow, drink water.
Between meals, drink cold water as often as you feel like. Since your body has to maintain 98.6 degrees, if you drink cold water, your body has to spend energy to warm it up, meaning cold water actually has negative calories!
Here is my typical meal schedule. It's kind of a default for me, but it varies a lot.
In the morning when I get up, I have some water first thing. Then I make a bowl of cereal. I now eat Kashi Go Lean almost exclusively, and I've just tried almond milk with it and it's pretty good together without being ridiculously expensive.
About 3-4 hours later, I usually have a banana, sometimes some peanuts or crackers or pretzels as filler.
About 3-4 hours later I have a sandwich. This is usually 3 slices of Turkey Balogna (3 oz), a slice of cheese, and two slices of Honey Wheat or Whole Grain bread. Sometimes I put some honey on it. I also have a 1 oz bag of chips since I can't eat out of a bigger bag without eating half of it. Occasionally, maybe once a week, I'll have a can of pop with it, but I'm almost off the pop.
About 3-4 hours later I have a cup of mixed fruit (4 oz) and usually a box of raisins or some peanuts or crackers as filler.
And my last meal is usually a handful of peanuts or sesame sticks, or maybe another bag of chips.
Right before bed, I'll usually have a few nuts.
I eat unsalted foods as much as possible. Nuts are especially salted, so you have to be careful and get the unsalted kind. The taste grows on you. If you can learn to like something that looks, tastes, and smells like it came out of a dog's bladder (aka beer), then eating unsalted nuts is a breeze.
While this is the default for me, it's hardly all I eat. I make a point of about twice a week eating lunch at a restaurant, usually a fast-food joint or pizza place, but sometimes a real restaurant. I also make a point of having eggs for breakfast once a week. Eggs have good things you want, but not too much. Once or twice a week seems just about right to me. I also try to make a point of having seafood once or twice a month, usually shrimp.
And of course there's Mongolian. Can't get enough of that. I'll talk about that in a bit.
So, in summary, about every 3-4 hours you should eat SOMETHING. One or two meals should give you a "Full" feeling, and the rest should be smaller, and you can knock out some hunger pangs with a couple mouthfuls of food. Also, drink plenty of water with your meal to improve digestion and give you a fuller feeling sooner. And don't eat a large meal before bed, but DO eat a little bit of something that won't keep you up.
I've got one more leg of the table I built to effortlessly lose 50 pounds last year and have so far kept it off, and I'll tell you all about it next time.
Stay awesome!
_______
More articles of interest or amusement:
To Your Health - Part 2
What you should know about the military before you join
To Your Health - Part 4
.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Happy Birthday to Me!
.
So a week ago I celebrated the 13th anniversary of my 25th birthday, and what did you all get me? Anything? Gee, all I wanted was the most popular personal website of all time, and maybe for a few of you to click on some ads and buy something at Amazon so I could pay for it. That wouldn't have cost much!
Well, after getting to eat my annual Cadbury Egg, which they started selling at the beginning of this month, I decided that they were WAAAAYYY too expensive to ever get again. The truckstops are charging a dollar or more for them, and even Walmart wants 50 cents. So, like I always do when I get disgusted at the price of something, I quit buying it. I buy pop only when I can get it for $6 or less for a 24 pack of 12 oz cans, I don't buy Doritoes unless they're $2.50 or less per bag, and unless I'm really weak, I won't pay more than 50 cents for a candy bar. Anything higher is a rip off.
The problem comes when they put them "on sale" for the normal price. If your tactic to stop buying crap is to get disgusted at the price, and then the price comes down, your disgust goes away. That's what happened with my previous candy strike. I quit eating it, they dropped the price, then they dropped it again. Then they introduced a new type of candy that I really wanted to try, and so I gave in. But now, even though they're putting the stuff "on sale" again, I've decided I'm going to do without it.
This time, I've got a little more than my disgust at the prices to help me out. I'm also disgusted by the way it robs me of the body I want to have. I lost 50 pounds last year, DESPITE eating candy once in a while (and binging on it a couple times), but so far this year, I've held pretty steady, fluctuating over about 10 pounds up and down. I'm eating better, too. More fruits. I can't hardly stand vegetables, but vegetable juice is surprisingly tasty. My sister turned me on to Kashi cereals, and that's about all I eat for breakfast now. (I'm still working on the next installment of my health series, and I'll tell you more about that then.) But the point is, I've decided that if I don't make my health a priority while I still have it, I'm going to lose it. I've been lucky I haven't gotten sick hardly ever, and that can last forever if I take it seriously.
I've seen the results of my new strength-building workout, and they're unbelievable! An average performance gain of 35% in just 4 sessions spread out over about 8 weeks! If I can find a way to burn fat that fast, I'll be unstoppable. Seeing these results gives me far more substantial hope for the future than I've had in a long time, and if I'm going to be around 200 years from now, I may as well be able to enjoy it, you know? I'll see you when we get there, okay?
One final note: I noticed some sort of browser hijacking going on recently, but I was under the impression that it was the wifi connections I was using. After all, this site is run off of a major internet company, and the chances of them getting hacked are infinitesimal. But that seems to be what has happened. The interesting little plug-ins I had - the interesting things to ponder and the pick-up lines you should never use - seem to have been hijacked, and that was what was screwing up the site. Man, I'm so sick of those hacker/spammer bastards ruining the internet for everyone. If they'd put 1% of the energy they consume into trying to make the world a better place instead of trying to destroy it, we'd probably all be rich by now.
I want to thank that guy I know from one of those Swedish countries for helping me figure out what was going on. When he said the site was trying to send him a trojan horse virus, I knew something wasn't adding up. Thanks, T-bone!
Oh, and hey, could someone please buy something from Amazon through one of these links for me? Please?
So a week ago I celebrated the 13th anniversary of my 25th birthday, and what did you all get me? Anything? Gee, all I wanted was the most popular personal website of all time, and maybe for a few of you to click on some ads and buy something at Amazon so I could pay for it. That wouldn't have cost much!For my birthday, I received a few phone calls, I got to work pretty much all day (a treat, considering the company I work for and the state of the economy), and I ate what might be my last chocolate. A few months ago, just to see if I could, I went 3 whole months without any chocolate or heavy sugar. No cookies or ice cream or cake or anything like that. I've had my pop-drinking down to about 1-2 cans per week for quite a while now, and that was the only real sugar I had in that 3 month period.
The problem comes when they put them "on sale" for the normal price. If your tactic to stop buying crap is to get disgusted at the price, and then the price comes down, your disgust goes away. That's what happened with my previous candy strike. I quit eating it, they dropped the price, then they dropped it again. Then they introduced a new type of candy that I really wanted to try, and so I gave in. But now, even though they're putting the stuff "on sale" again, I've decided I'm going to do without it.
This time, I've got a little more than my disgust at the prices to help me out. I'm also disgusted by the way it robs me of the body I want to have. I lost 50 pounds last year, DESPITE eating candy once in a while (and binging on it a couple times), but so far this year, I've held pretty steady, fluctuating over about 10 pounds up and down. I'm eating better, too. More fruits. I can't hardly stand vegetables, but vegetable juice is surprisingly tasty. My sister turned me on to Kashi cereals, and that's about all I eat for breakfast now. (I'm still working on the next installment of my health series, and I'll tell you more about that then.) But the point is, I've decided that if I don't make my health a priority while I still have it, I'm going to lose it. I've been lucky I haven't gotten sick hardly ever, and that can last forever if I take it seriously.
I've seen the results of my new strength-building workout, and they're unbelievable! An average performance gain of 35% in just 4 sessions spread out over about 8 weeks! If I can find a way to burn fat that fast, I'll be unstoppable. Seeing these results gives me far more substantial hope for the future than I've had in a long time, and if I'm going to be around 200 years from now, I may as well be able to enjoy it, you know? I'll see you when we get there, okay?
One final note: I noticed some sort of browser hijacking going on recently, but I was under the impression that it was the wifi connections I was using. After all, this site is run off of a major internet company, and the chances of them getting hacked are infinitesimal. But that seems to be what has happened. The interesting little plug-ins I had - the interesting things to ponder and the pick-up lines you should never use - seem to have been hijacked, and that was what was screwing up the site. Man, I'm so sick of those hacker/spammer bastards ruining the internet for everyone. If they'd put 1% of the energy they consume into trying to make the world a better place instead of trying to destroy it, we'd probably all be rich by now.
I want to thank that guy I know from one of those Swedish countries for helping me figure out what was going on. When he said the site was trying to send him a trojan horse virus, I knew something wasn't adding up. Thanks, T-bone!
Oh, and hey, could someone please buy something from Amazon through one of these links for me? Please?
Monday, March 1, 2010
Got Lobstah?
.
I feel like I'm pretty well traveled, having just recently upped the number of states I've been to to 45. For a long time, I had been waiting to get into South Dakota, and a few months back, I finally did it. There was a time a couple years ago when I was in Minnesota and I had to go to Montana, and I had to choose between North Dakota or South Dakota as the way to get there. I figured with all the driving I was doing, it would be harder to get to North Dakota a second time, so I went that way. I had no idea it would take about 3 more years before I got into South Dakota! I only nicked the corner of it, though, and only because I went a little out of my way to do it.
Then a few weeks ago, I finally got to go somewhere else new. I love seeing new places, and I haven't been in hog heaven like this for a long time. First, they sent me up through the Adirondacks to Lake Champlain. I've never been in that part of upstate New York before, and I figured that, since I'd never been closer to the northeast corner of the USA than Boston, looking at Vermont from across the lake was all the closer I was going to get to it.
Wrong!
Next thing I knew, they wanted me to go to Maine! Woo hoo!!
So I continued up to the Canadian border until I got to within a mile of it. There's a bridge across the lake there, and you can see Quebec from it. Then I headed down through Vermont, then across New Hampshire and the White Mountains, until finally I reached Maine. Just in the Adam's apple part of it, not the face or the head.
Unfortunately, lobster was out of season when I went through, drat the luck! But at least I got to miss out on the snow storms that raged on to the south.
For a good 48 hours, I was in Terra Incognita, and it was awesome! Knocked out 3 new states in one fell swoop. Now I just need to get the northwest corner and my collection of continental states will be complete.
Haven't gotten around to updating my list of places I've been yet, but I'll get to it in a while. I've been pretty busy lately. For the most part, they've been keeping me busy, which is good. Surprising that it's been somewhat good; apparently the economy is recovering.
All right, that's all I've got for you for now. Tune in later as I continue with my serieses.
.
I feel like I'm pretty well traveled, having just recently upped the number of states I've been to to 45. For a long time, I had been waiting to get into South Dakota, and a few months back, I finally did it. There was a time a couple years ago when I was in Minnesota and I had to go to Montana, and I had to choose between North Dakota or South Dakota as the way to get there. I figured with all the driving I was doing, it would be harder to get to North Dakota a second time, so I went that way. I had no idea it would take about 3 more years before I got into South Dakota! I only nicked the corner of it, though, and only because I went a little out of my way to do it.
Then a few weeks ago, I finally got to go somewhere else new. I love seeing new places, and I haven't been in hog heaven like this for a long time. First, they sent me up through the Adirondacks to Lake Champlain. I've never been in that part of upstate New York before, and I figured that, since I'd never been closer to the northeast corner of the USA than Boston, looking at Vermont from across the lake was all the closer I was going to get to it.
Wrong!
Next thing I knew, they wanted me to go to Maine! Woo hoo!!
So I continued up to the Canadian border until I got to within a mile of it. There's a bridge across the lake there, and you can see Quebec from it. Then I headed down through Vermont, then across New Hampshire and the White Mountains, until finally I reached Maine. Just in the Adam's apple part of it, not the face or the head.
Unfortunately, lobster was out of season when I went through, drat the luck! But at least I got to miss out on the snow storms that raged on to the south.
For a good 48 hours, I was in Terra Incognita, and it was awesome! Knocked out 3 new states in one fell swoop. Now I just need to get the northwest corner and my collection of continental states will be complete.
Haven't gotten around to updating my list of places I've been yet, but I'll get to it in a while. I've been pretty busy lately. For the most part, they've been keeping me busy, which is good. Surprising that it's been somewhat good; apparently the economy is recovering.
All right, that's all I've got for you for now. Tune in later as I continue with my serieses.
.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Solar System - Asteroids
Labels:
good links,
space science,
you might not know
.
Things you don't know about the Solar System
I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.
Today's topic: Asteroids! No, not the video game, not the movies, but real asteroids.
Howdy, pardner! Welcome to the wild world of asteroid belting! We'll be mining those big chunks of rock and making money hand over fist in no time!
I'll bet you thought our next stop after the red planet would be the big planet, Jupiter, but you're wrong, buddy boy. Our next step away from the Sun is to the asteroid belt, where valuable minerals are just sitting there, waiting for us to grab them and use them.
The popular picture of the asteroid belt is that it's a huge collection of rocks just floating around, waiting to smash a passing spacecraft. This image comes from the movies, most notably The Empire Strikes Back
, where the Millennium Falcon has to dodge through these crazily hurting masses and TIE fighters get smashed up for not being better pilots.
The reality is much more pedestrian. Much more like the asteroid encounter scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey
. Sure, there's a lot of rocks, and sure, they do collide with each other, but that's over the course of millions of years, not on a minute-by-minute basis. And what's more, we've sent about a dozen spacecraft through it and, except when we intentionally crashed on one, never came within a million miles of one.
One other persistent myth is that there's enough mass out there to make a good-sized planet, which has been named Phaeton. The reality is that all the asteroids in the belt wouldn't add up to something the size of Pluto, which isn't even considered a planet any more.
But that doesn't mean the asteroids aren't valuable. As tiny planet-like objects, some of them will have a lot of useful minerals, like iron and titanium. Some will have oxygen or water. Most will be almost worthless piles of dirt and dust, but there's a good chance of finding a few that will pay for the trouble of going up there.
Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, is now considered to be a dwarf planet, just like Pluto now is. There are quite a few of these dwarf planets in our solar system, and Ceres isn't the largest, but it's the closest to us, and it's likely to be the most important object in that area. Because it's so big, it's very likely to have a lot of good minerals to recover.
As a dwarf planet, Ceres is so large that it has enough gravity to be roughly spherical in shape, but not enough to clear out its orbit of most other debris, and so form Phaeton.
One more thing about asteroids: there are a lot more of them than the ones in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They're all over the Solar system, and many of them orbit near Earth. In fact, many of them cross Earth's orbit every year, and one of them might crash into us in a few years. Many are discovered right after passing close by - some closer than the moon is to us. Should one of these impact the Earth, it would be a very bad day, and no one would see it coming.
I don't know about you, but I'd like it if someone started actively scanning the heavens for all the asteroids that could impact the Earth. Despite what some of the movies would have you believe, there is no such effort, and a bad day can happen with zero warning right now. If you think this is important, start bugging your congress-critter to do something useful instead of trying to destroy the country with health care "reform".
Until next time!
_______
Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Sun
To Your Health - Part 4
Solar System - Mars
.
Things you don't know about the Solar SystemI've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.
Today's topic: Asteroids! No, not the video game, not the movies, but real asteroids.
Howdy, pardner! Welcome to the wild world of asteroid belting! We'll be mining those big chunks of rock and making money hand over fist in no time!
I'll bet you thought our next stop after the red planet would be the big planet, Jupiter, but you're wrong, buddy boy. Our next step away from the Sun is to the asteroid belt, where valuable minerals are just sitting there, waiting for us to grab them and use them.
The popular picture of the asteroid belt is that it's a huge collection of rocks just floating around, waiting to smash a passing spacecraft. This image comes from the movies, most notably The Empire Strikes Back
, where the Millennium Falcon has to dodge through these crazily hurting masses and TIE fighters get smashed up for not being better pilots.The reality is much more pedestrian. Much more like the asteroid encounter scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey
. Sure, there's a lot of rocks, and sure, they do collide with each other, but that's over the course of millions of years, not on a minute-by-minute basis. And what's more, we've sent about a dozen spacecraft through it and, except when we intentionally crashed on one, never came within a million miles of one.One other persistent myth is that there's enough mass out there to make a good-sized planet, which has been named Phaeton. The reality is that all the asteroids in the belt wouldn't add up to something the size of Pluto, which isn't even considered a planet any more.
But that doesn't mean the asteroids aren't valuable. As tiny planet-like objects, some of them will have a lot of useful minerals, like iron and titanium. Some will have oxygen or water. Most will be almost worthless piles of dirt and dust, but there's a good chance of finding a few that will pay for the trouble of going up there.
As a dwarf planet, Ceres is so large that it has enough gravity to be roughly spherical in shape, but not enough to clear out its orbit of most other debris, and so form Phaeton.
One more thing about asteroids: there are a lot more of them than the ones in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They're all over the Solar system, and many of them orbit near Earth. In fact, many of them cross Earth's orbit every year, and one of them might crash into us in a few years. Many are discovered right after passing close by - some closer than the moon is to us. Should one of these impact the Earth, it would be a very bad day, and no one would see it coming.
I don't know about you, but I'd like it if someone started actively scanning the heavens for all the asteroids that could impact the Earth. Despite what some of the movies would have you believe, there is no such effort, and a bad day can happen with zero warning right now. If you think this is important, start bugging your congress-critter to do something useful instead of trying to destroy the country with health care "reform".
Until next time!
_______
Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Sun
To Your Health - Part 4
Solar System - Mars
.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
To Your Health - Part 2
Labels:
advice,
good links,
health
.
Would you like to get your weight at the right level, have more energy, look and feel better, and live longer, without radically changing your lifestyle or going on weird diets and boring exercise routines? Then I've got good news for you: I lost 50 pounds of fat in 1 year without really trying, and I'm going to tell you how I did it so you can try it too! But since I'm not a doctor and not in any way responsible for your actions, reading any part of this article constitutes your agreement not to hold me responsible in any way for anything.
In Part 1, I revealed to you a miraculous, cheap chemical that, if you add more of it to your life, you'll feel a lot better. By itself, this one chemical can boost your energy, improve your health, soften your skin, keep your weight under control, and it even tastes great! And if you started drinking more of this amazing stuff called water - drinking it during meals and replacing some of your sugary drinks with it, then you probably started feeling the difference almost immediately - like in just a few days. But you want more than one secret to better health the easy way, don't you? Well that's why I'm here again.
Replacing the majority of what I drink with water was a no-brainer, and it made a huge difference. That, combined with a moderate increase in my daily activity, and the near-elimination of pure-junk food led to a loss of about 30 pounds in only 4 months. To lose the next 20 took a little more time and effort, but not much more.
Getting rid of pure-junk food is a huge way to right-size your weight. Most people are worried about losing weight, but there are some people who need to gain it (and some people who THINK they need to lose weight when they really need to gain it - consult a BMI calculator or better yet, a doctor). Right-sizing your weight will go a long way toward improving the quality of your life. So first I'm going to tell you what some of thee incredibly bad foods are and then I'm going to give you an easy way to get rid of them.
First and worst is, you guessed it, sugar. Sugar is in almost everything we eat because it makes things taste better. However, sugar is what's called "cheap energy". It gives you a rush of energy for a very short time and then it's gone and you feel a crash. I've heard people are giving their kids sugar right before bed so that when the crash comes, the kid feels very tired and goes to sleep quickly. What a great way to ruin your child's life! As any diabetic will tell you, too much sugar isn't good for you at all, and giving these kids sugar rushes before bed teaches their body to crave it, plus it gives them a ton of calories with nowhere to go but fat cells.
Take a look at the ingredients list of the things you eat, and sugar is almost always one of the first 3 ingredients. If you are eating food like that, put it down and pick up something else. Breakfast cereals are especially bad about this. Even some of the "healthy" cereals, like Honey Nut Cheerios and Honey Bunches of Oats are loaded with almost as much sugar as Super Sugar Crisp and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Recently I discovered a cereal called Kashi which is a whole lot better for you simply by virtue of having no added sugar. There are two varieties of it I like, which I now eat almost every morning.
The next really bad food is called MonoSodium Glutamate, or MSG. Near as I can tell, the only use for MSG is to make you feel hungry. It's like nicotine for corn chips. Take a look at the Doritos and other flavored chips you eat, and you'll find they have MSG. Now you know why when you open a bag of Doritos you can't stop until you've eaten half the bag. But look, don't be like smokers and alcoholics and blame a chemical for your addiction, because you can manufacture your own chemical that will counteract that. I'll tell you more about that later.
Instead of picking up chips and candy with MSG and sugar, pick up chips and crackers without them. Pick up fruits like dried apricots and raisins, or try sesame oat bran sticks and cocktail peanuts. There are a lot of great alternatives out there that are much better for you than the junk you eat now, and it's not a radical lifestyle change.
The third bad food to avoid is bleach. Yuck, who eats bleach? White bread has been bleached. It doesn't matter if it's whole grain white, it's still white, and that means it's been bleached. And that includes most hotdog and hamburger buns too. Avoiding bleach is pretty easy, just choose bread that isn't white. I like whole grain honey wheat bread myself, and when I'm at the burger joint, well, they don't give me the option to have healthier bread, so I don't go there that much. But if you're making your own burgers, the store does stock non-bleached buns nowadays, so get these instead. Also, a lot of crackers and pretzels are bleached. And if you're thinking of going on the subway diet, don't get your sub on white bread; they've got a lot of good non-white breads.
The fourth thing you should avoid is artificial sweeteners. These are worse than sugar! That's right, those diet colas and no-sugar health foods that use artificial sweeteners instead of sugar are actually worse for you. And let's face it, they don't taste that good anyway. Many artificial sweeteners break down into things like formaldehyde, which they use to preserve dead creatures against decay, and that's the least of the problems they cause. Sure, they might not spike your blood sugar as bad if you're diabetic, but that doesn't mean they're good for you.
The fifth and final thing that's really bad for you is fried foods. I know, I know, they're so delicious, how can you avoid them? But you should try to eat less of them. Most seafood menus nowadays have an option to have your order broiled, which is better than frying, and you don't have to fry your chicken. Frying foods obliterates any health value they may have had, so don't pat yourself on the back for eating fried chicken strips or fried okra.
Completely eliminating all these bad types of food is almost impossible, but by making better choices and substituting good foods for bad ones, you'll find that you can eat less of the bad foods, and if you want, you can still have them once in a while without having to feel guilty.
Don't reach for a candy bar, reach for raisins, dried apricots, a banana, an apple, a granola bar (not the sugary kind!), sunflower seeds, an onion, a stick of gum, some watermelon, or any of a number of other things that are, if not good for you, at least not as bad. You can have as many green vegetables as you want; try to find ones you'll like. Try eating cucumber halves as a replacement for a candy bar. Or onions. Or broccoli. Broccoli has a lot of good stuff in it. Just be sure you eat these vegetables raw; cooking them ruins their health value.
I understand that you're not going to succeed at this every single time. It's okay, you don't have to. I'm HARDLY the picture of strict dieting. I still eat pizza, candy bars, ice cream, Doritos, and drink pop, but I don't eat them every day. Sometimes I don't even eat them every week. Sometimes not even every month! I'm at the point now where I don't feel like I HAVE TO eat that stuff. I have so many more opportunities to eat interesting things that I simply don't get around to eating the bad stuff so much.
If you can make a deal with yourself to pick something good instead of something bad every other time you have a craving, that's a good start right there. Small steps, not big ones. Remember Secret #1.
Have you, or would you, pay $100 for a diet that was sure to work? If so, then why not spend a lot less than that trying out some new foods to see how you like them? Many people pay thousands of dollars dieting, and it usually doesn't work, but this has worked for a lot of people, and more importantly, it's worked for me. I've found some new foods to eat instead of the junk I used to always eat, and I'm a lot better for it.
If you heard there was a food ingredient that was a poison that was GUARANTEED to kill you, would you start checking your food ingredients to make sure that wasn't in there? So start checking your food labels for the kinds of ingredients I've mentioned, because these things ARE poisons, they DO increase your chances of getting cancer, and the less of them you eat, the better you're going to feel.
So take the small step of buying some new foods that are better for you, and every time you have a craving for something, flip a coin. Heads, you try the new food, tails, you can eat the junk food.
And be sure to drink plenty of water with it.
Until next time,
Be your best!
- Jaycee
Hey, if you feel I've done you a favor with my site, do me a favor in return and take a look at some of these products from Amazon, maybe even buy some of them. Every purchase you make through one of my links goes to support this site, even if it's not exactly what I linked up, and keeping this site running will benefit many more people. Thank you for giving back!
_______
More articles of interest or amusement:
To Your Health - Part 1
Christy Brinkley, Terry Bradshaw, and many more - 1999
To Your Health - Part 3
.
In Part 1, I revealed to you a miraculous, cheap chemical that, if you add more of it to your life, you'll feel a lot better. By itself, this one chemical can boost your energy, improve your health, soften your skin, keep your weight under control, and it even tastes great! And if you started drinking more of this amazing stuff called water - drinking it during meals and replacing some of your sugary drinks with it, then you probably started feeling the difference almost immediately - like in just a few days. But you want more than one secret to better health the easy way, don't you? Well that's why I'm here again.
Replacing the majority of what I drink with water was a no-brainer, and it made a huge difference. That, combined with a moderate increase in my daily activity, and the near-elimination of pure-junk food led to a loss of about 30 pounds in only 4 months. To lose the next 20 took a little more time and effort, but not much more.
Getting rid of pure-junk food is a huge way to right-size your weight. Most people are worried about losing weight, but there are some people who need to gain it (and some people who THINK they need to lose weight when they really need to gain it - consult a BMI calculator or better yet, a doctor). Right-sizing your weight will go a long way toward improving the quality of your life. So first I'm going to tell you what some of thee incredibly bad foods are and then I'm going to give you an easy way to get rid of them.
First and worst is, you guessed it, sugar. Sugar is in almost everything we eat because it makes things taste better. However, sugar is what's called "cheap energy". It gives you a rush of energy for a very short time and then it's gone and you feel a crash. I've heard people are giving their kids sugar right before bed so that when the crash comes, the kid feels very tired and goes to sleep quickly. What a great way to ruin your child's life! As any diabetic will tell you, too much sugar isn't good for you at all, and giving these kids sugar rushes before bed teaches their body to crave it, plus it gives them a ton of calories with nowhere to go but fat cells.
Take a look at the ingredients list of the things you eat, and sugar is almost always one of the first 3 ingredients. If you are eating food like that, put it down and pick up something else. Breakfast cereals are especially bad about this. Even some of the "healthy" cereals, like Honey Nut Cheerios and Honey Bunches of Oats are loaded with almost as much sugar as Super Sugar Crisp and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Recently I discovered a cereal called Kashi which is a whole lot better for you simply by virtue of having no added sugar. There are two varieties of it I like, which I now eat almost every morning.
The next really bad food is called MonoSodium Glutamate, or MSG. Near as I can tell, the only use for MSG is to make you feel hungry. It's like nicotine for corn chips. Take a look at the Doritos and other flavored chips you eat, and you'll find they have MSG. Now you know why when you open a bag of Doritos you can't stop until you've eaten half the bag. But look, don't be like smokers and alcoholics and blame a chemical for your addiction, because you can manufacture your own chemical that will counteract that. I'll tell you more about that later.
Instead of picking up chips and candy with MSG and sugar, pick up chips and crackers without them. Pick up fruits like dried apricots and raisins, or try sesame oat bran sticks and cocktail peanuts. There are a lot of great alternatives out there that are much better for you than the junk you eat now, and it's not a radical lifestyle change.
The third bad food to avoid is bleach. Yuck, who eats bleach? White bread has been bleached. It doesn't matter if it's whole grain white, it's still white, and that means it's been bleached. And that includes most hotdog and hamburger buns too. Avoiding bleach is pretty easy, just choose bread that isn't white. I like whole grain honey wheat bread myself, and when I'm at the burger joint, well, they don't give me the option to have healthier bread, so I don't go there that much. But if you're making your own burgers, the store does stock non-bleached buns nowadays, so get these instead. Also, a lot of crackers and pretzels are bleached. And if you're thinking of going on the subway diet, don't get your sub on white bread; they've got a lot of good non-white breads.
The fourth thing you should avoid is artificial sweeteners. These are worse than sugar! That's right, those diet colas and no-sugar health foods that use artificial sweeteners instead of sugar are actually worse for you. And let's face it, they don't taste that good anyway. Many artificial sweeteners break down into things like formaldehyde, which they use to preserve dead creatures against decay, and that's the least of the problems they cause. Sure, they might not spike your blood sugar as bad if you're diabetic, but that doesn't mean they're good for you.
The fifth and final thing that's really bad for you is fried foods. I know, I know, they're so delicious, how can you avoid them? But you should try to eat less of them. Most seafood menus nowadays have an option to have your order broiled, which is better than frying, and you don't have to fry your chicken. Frying foods obliterates any health value they may have had, so don't pat yourself on the back for eating fried chicken strips or fried okra.
Completely eliminating all these bad types of food is almost impossible, but by making better choices and substituting good foods for bad ones, you'll find that you can eat less of the bad foods, and if you want, you can still have them once in a while without having to feel guilty.
Don't reach for a candy bar, reach for raisins, dried apricots, a banana, an apple, a granola bar (not the sugary kind!), sunflower seeds, an onion, a stick of gum, some watermelon, or any of a number of other things that are, if not good for you, at least not as bad. You can have as many green vegetables as you want; try to find ones you'll like. Try eating cucumber halves as a replacement for a candy bar. Or onions. Or broccoli. Broccoli has a lot of good stuff in it. Just be sure you eat these vegetables raw; cooking them ruins their health value.
I understand that you're not going to succeed at this every single time. It's okay, you don't have to. I'm HARDLY the picture of strict dieting. I still eat pizza, candy bars, ice cream, Doritos, and drink pop, but I don't eat them every day. Sometimes I don't even eat them every week. Sometimes not even every month! I'm at the point now where I don't feel like I HAVE TO eat that stuff. I have so many more opportunities to eat interesting things that I simply don't get around to eating the bad stuff so much.
If you can make a deal with yourself to pick something good instead of something bad every other time you have a craving, that's a good start right there. Small steps, not big ones. Remember Secret #1.
Have you, or would you, pay $100 for a diet that was sure to work? If so, then why not spend a lot less than that trying out some new foods to see how you like them? Many people pay thousands of dollars dieting, and it usually doesn't work, but this has worked for a lot of people, and more importantly, it's worked for me. I've found some new foods to eat instead of the junk I used to always eat, and I'm a lot better for it.
If you heard there was a food ingredient that was a poison that was GUARANTEED to kill you, would you start checking your food ingredients to make sure that wasn't in there? So start checking your food labels for the kinds of ingredients I've mentioned, because these things ARE poisons, they DO increase your chances of getting cancer, and the less of them you eat, the better you're going to feel.
So take the small step of buying some new foods that are better for you, and every time you have a craving for something, flip a coin. Heads, you try the new food, tails, you can eat the junk food.
And be sure to drink plenty of water with it.
Until next time,
Be your best!
- Jaycee
Hey, if you feel I've done you a favor with my site, do me a favor in return and take a look at some of these products from Amazon, maybe even buy some of them. Every purchase you make through one of my links goes to support this site, even if it's not exactly what I linked up, and keeping this site running will benefit many more people. Thank you for giving back!
_______
More articles of interest or amusement:
To Your Health - Part 1
Christy Brinkley, Terry Bradshaw, and many more - 1999
To Your Health - Part 3
.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Happy 21st birthday Tiffany!
Labels:
famous,
good links,
my jobs,
status,
travel
.
Today, my favorite niece turns 21. She's probably going to spend part of it the way most kids do, but she's got some really interesting things in mind too. Wish I could be there to help her celebrate, but I gotta work. She'll be staying at the Hilton, so if you're there and you witness any young girls acting all drunk, that might be her. But it might not be. But just in case it is, be nice to her and say, "Uncle Jimmy says hi". You don't get to call me that, but she does.
In the past couple days I got to do a lot of exciting things. First, I got to direct traffic in a jammed truckstop. Seems that when the snow starts coming down, truckers forget how to drive and get clogged up in small roadways. I went out there and helped get it cleared up. Now I know how rewarding the job of traffic cop is.
Next, I got to go several places I've never been before. I spent a good two days in unknown territory and loved every moment of it! Well, okay, not the part about being thrown around by crappy roads, and not the part about paying tolls, but other than that, it was great!
First, they sent me to upstate New York. I've never been there before the other day ago. On the way up, I skirted through the eastern side of the Adirondacks until I got to a little town on Lake Champlain. I figured looking at Vermont was the closest I was going to get, since in 4 years I haven't been this way. I took a few pics of the lake - which was frozen, but not nearly enough to walk out on - and counted myself lucky for what I'd gotten: the better part of the day in places I'd never been.
But then they wanted me to go to.... Dun dun DUUUUHH!!
Maine.
Yes, that one.
Overjoyed, even at the prospect of being cheated out of over a hundred miles on this trip (I'm usually cheated out of only about 50), I made my way north until I got to the bridge that goes across the lake. That bridge is within a mile of Quebec, a province I haven't been in, but I have it on film. Digital film, I mean. Microchip. Anyway, next thing I knew, I was in Vermont! Woo hoo! And holy cow, was I happy to discover that Vermont has free wifi in its rest areas! Too bad I couldn't spend the night, as I had to get to Maine by morning.
So I headed cross-country on some bad roads. I was in Vermont about 3 hours, including a couple times I stopped for pictures and potty breaks. And then, before I could go crazy having to drive so slow on these back roads that still had some snow on them, I was in New Hampshire! Woo hoo!
But the roads there were even crummier there, and I was only in the state about an hour or so. I almost forgot to stop and walk on the ground; I remembered just before I got out of the state. I didn't get to drive on more than 5 miles of interstate, so I have no idea what their rest areas are like.
As the sun was getting close to the ground, I crossed in to Maine, that unique state. It's the only state in the Union that borders only 1 other state, AND it's the only one whose name is but one syllable. And the roads were worse still! But at least I found a place to stop that had free wifi. (I update my list of free wifi locations now and then.)
Oops, I forgot. Maine! Woo hoo!
Okay, so here I am, hoping I can find some place that sells cheap lobster. Turns out, I'm a couple months early. You gotta go in late March. Most of the seafood places were closed. But I did manage to find a place to eat. But it didn't look like they ever sold lobster for cheap. But I definitely had fun. I got to drive along the coast and take some really nice pictures. Maine's got some nice beaches, except for all that ice on them.
So I got me a tee-shirt to prove I've been there, and found a coconut for one of my little cousins, and then proceeded down to Massachusetts, until I got to Connecticut, to one of the first places I ever drove my truck, and also the first place anyone ever tried to destroy my truck. But that's a story for another day.
I'll update my travel post when I get the chance.
The third thing I've got for you is a minor update to the site. When I originally wrote the article that you can find at stonehouse.mopjockey.com I wrote it for a less-mature audience at a different site (totally unlike the audience I've got here). Well, that audience has been served, and so now that I have a different (and much better) audience, I revamped the article so it reflects my level of professionalism slightly more accurately. Go ahead and check it out and tell me what you think of it. And if you go see Crissy, tell her where you read about her. I'll be updating other parts of the site here and there, and let you know when I do.
Lastly, I've been extra busy of late. I'm really surprised my trucking company has been keeping me so busy. Usually the first few months of the year are slow, and this company I drive for is rather notorious for making me sit even during the good months, but so far I've been doing a lot of driving, and what little free time I have, I've been using it to work on articles for the site and trying to get other personal business taken care of. But I haven't forgotten, oh no, not by a long shot. In the coming months, I plan to unveil a new business, which I expect to allow me to break the chains of wage-slavery once and for all! Not immediately, but within a few months after I launch it.
Wish me some good luck, and be your best!
(And, as always, buy something from Amazon using one of these links to help keep this site afloat. Thanks!)
Today, my favorite niece turns 21. She's probably going to spend part of it the way most kids do, but she's got some really interesting things in mind too. Wish I could be there to help her celebrate, but I gotta work. She'll be staying at the Hilton, so if you're there and you witness any young girls acting all drunk, that might be her. But it might not be. But just in case it is, be nice to her and say, "Uncle Jimmy says hi". You don't get to call me that, but she does.In the past couple days I got to do a lot of exciting things. First, I got to direct traffic in a jammed truckstop. Seems that when the snow starts coming down, truckers forget how to drive and get clogged up in small roadways. I went out there and helped get it cleared up. Now I know how rewarding the job of traffic cop is.
Next, I got to go several places I've never been before. I spent a good two days in unknown territory and loved every moment of it! Well, okay, not the part about being thrown around by crappy roads, and not the part about paying tolls, but other than that, it was great!
First, they sent me to upstate New York. I've never been there before the other day ago. On the way up, I skirted through the eastern side of the Adirondacks until I got to a little town on Lake Champlain. I figured looking at Vermont was the closest I was going to get, since in 4 years I haven't been this way. I took a few pics of the lake - which was frozen, but not nearly enough to walk out on - and counted myself lucky for what I'd gotten: the better part of the day in places I'd never been.
But then they wanted me to go to.... Dun dun DUUUUHH!!
Maine.
Yes, that one.
Overjoyed, even at the prospect of being cheated out of over a hundred miles on this trip (I'm usually cheated out of only about 50), I made my way north until I got to the bridge that goes across the lake. That bridge is within a mile of Quebec, a province I haven't been in, but I have it on film. Digital film, I mean. Microchip. Anyway, next thing I knew, I was in Vermont! Woo hoo! And holy cow, was I happy to discover that Vermont has free wifi in its rest areas! Too bad I couldn't spend the night, as I had to get to Maine by morning.
So I headed cross-country on some bad roads. I was in Vermont about 3 hours, including a couple times I stopped for pictures and potty breaks. And then, before I could go crazy having to drive so slow on these back roads that still had some snow on them, I was in New Hampshire! Woo hoo!
But the roads there were even crummier there, and I was only in the state about an hour or so. I almost forgot to stop and walk on the ground; I remembered just before I got out of the state. I didn't get to drive on more than 5 miles of interstate, so I have no idea what their rest areas are like.
As the sun was getting close to the ground, I crossed in to Maine, that unique state. It's the only state in the Union that borders only 1 other state, AND it's the only one whose name is but one syllable. And the roads were worse still! But at least I found a place to stop that had free wifi. (I update my list of free wifi locations now and then.)
Oops, I forgot. Maine! Woo hoo!
Okay, so here I am, hoping I can find some place that sells cheap lobster. Turns out, I'm a couple months early. You gotta go in late March. Most of the seafood places were closed. But I did manage to find a place to eat. But it didn't look like they ever sold lobster for cheap. But I definitely had fun. I got to drive along the coast and take some really nice pictures. Maine's got some nice beaches, except for all that ice on them.
So I got me a tee-shirt to prove I've been there, and found a coconut for one of my little cousins, and then proceeded down to Massachusetts, until I got to Connecticut, to one of the first places I ever drove my truck, and also the first place anyone ever tried to destroy my truck. But that's a story for another day.
I'll update my travel post when I get the chance.
The third thing I've got for you is a minor update to the site. When I originally wrote the article that you can find at stonehouse.mopjockey.com I wrote it for a less-mature audience at a different site (totally unlike the audience I've got here). Well, that audience has been served, and so now that I have a different (and much better) audience, I revamped the article so it reflects my level of professionalism slightly more accurately. Go ahead and check it out and tell me what you think of it. And if you go see Crissy, tell her where you read about her. I'll be updating other parts of the site here and there, and let you know when I do.
Lastly, I've been extra busy of late. I'm really surprised my trucking company has been keeping me so busy. Usually the first few months of the year are slow, and this company I drive for is rather notorious for making me sit even during the good months, but so far I've been doing a lot of driving, and what little free time I have, I've been using it to work on articles for the site and trying to get other personal business taken care of. But I haven't forgotten, oh no, not by a long shot. In the coming months, I plan to unveil a new business, which I expect to allow me to break the chains of wage-slavery once and for all! Not immediately, but within a few months after I launch it.
Wish me some good luck, and be your best!
(And, as always, buy something from Amazon using one of these links to help keep this site afloat. Thanks!)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)