Mediterranean Afternoon

I would so love to be there right now!

Little did I know

when I wrote the post before this one that it would be over a year before I got back.  I had finished the integration project and started my last class when an annual checkup with my cardiologist sent me through a round of stress tests, a catheterization and finally quadruple coronary artery heart by-pass surgery.

It has taken me months to recover and regain some of my former energy and even surpass some of my prior VO2Max scores which had steadily been decreasing prior to the surgery.  I was down to 18 before the surgery and now I’ve built myself back up to 26.  26 is still poor but 18 was horrible.  For my age,  <25 is very poor, 25-28 is poor and 32-35 is the average.

Rough Couple of Months

It’s been a rough couple of months trying to finish up my Integration Project and I didn’t have a lot of time for blogging.

I hope to move off the WordPress server and pick up a hosted account of my own RSN!

Goals, Affirmations, and Success Oh My!

Yah Know?  It’s hard coming up with snazzy titles.  I wonder if the journalists have a piece of software that generates snazzy caption’s for their news articles.  Maybe it’s a table or a series of tables (i.e. baseball table) with 3 columns or so.  You fill in the blank with the subject and then there are several columns for adverbs, adjectives and verbs.  You draw one or two from each column and arrange them into semi coherent sentences.  Well again, I digress.

 

As I said yesterday, I’ve been thinking about goals a lot lately and I’m trying to decide if the lack of clearly defined goals is what is holding me back.  I’m not experiencing the success part.

The only way to tell if that is the problem is to clearly define some SMART goals and then measure.

Smart goals in this case are

• Simple
• Measurable
• Actionable (Describe an Action)
• Realistic
• Time – bound

GOAL! GOAL! GOAL!

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about goals and the practice of goal visualization.

A few years ago, a friend of mine purchased Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle eBook and I read it when she wasn’t looking.  In reality, she never got around to doing the whole diet and exercise thing and I inherited the eBook.

The very first chapter in that book was How to Set Powerful, Compelling Goals That Will Propel You Forward and Charge You Up With Unstoppable Motivation.  I’ll admit it, I blew that chapter off the first time.  Not completely, I half-assed it.  I did write goals but they weren’t very good and I never completed the process of reviewing my goals daily, visualizing them or anything else.  I wasn’t successful in what I wanted to do either. Doh!

The strangest secret in the world is that you become what you think about.” – Earl Nightingale

Have you read the book or seen the movie “The Secret”?  Even Paris Hilton is reading it. /:)

“If you can conceive of a goal, and believe in that goal, you will achieve that goal.” – Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich

None of this stuff is a secret.  People have been writing about our sub-conscience, our mental computer, our incredibly literal dumb auto-pilot for years. 

“If you have a strong enough why you can bear almost any how.” – Fredrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900

Tom references Psycho Cybernetics, a book that was written quite a few years ago (1960) by Dr. Maxwell Maltz – he was 61 at the time.  In that book, Dr. Maltz described the human brain and nervous system as a “perfect goal-striving servo-mechanism.”

“For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.” – Maxwell Maltz 

“Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.” – Maxwell Maltz

Whatever you think, that’s what your goal-striving mechanism goes for.  If you don’t provide positive goals and continue to think about them, your sub-conscious will direct you to whatever you thought about last or revert to habits, good or bad.  It will chase even negative goals.

• I’m fat and will never be fit
• I haven’t worked hard enough for a raise
• Nothing good ever happens to me
• I’ll never make $100,000 a year
• I hate running on the treadmill
• I can’t …..

Watermelon Sorbetto Popsicles

Kim O’Donnel really likes David Lebovitz’s book “The Perfect Scoop”, in her July 26th blog entry, she mentions using one of the recipes from his book to create some popsicles.  I’ve been looking for a better sorbet recipe and decided I’d use it with the white peaches I bought at the farmer’s market this past weekend.  I have them in a brown paper bag ripening a little more in the garage as I type!

I have to admit, I like what I’ve seen so far of David’s recipes and will probably pick up a copy of his book as well.

 

So, since my ice cream machine will ”churn” about 3 cups at a time, I’ll substitute peaches directly for the watermelon below and  I’ll probably use a lemon instead of a lime.  Just because I have lemons.  I only have Cyclone tequila flavored rum or moonshine for the alcohol so I’ll probably just leave it virgin.  I’ll also pass on the chocolate chip “seeds”.

I wonder how mixing in Splenda for 1/2 the sugar would work out.

 

Watermelon Sorbetto Popsicles
From “The Perfect Scoop,” by David Lebovitz

Ingredients
3 cups watermelon juice — from about a 3-pound chunk of melon, rind and seeds removed and pureed in a blender or food processor
1/2 cup granulated sugar
pinch salt
1 tablespoon juice of a lime
1-2 tablespoons vodka (optional)
1-2 tablespoons mini semisweet chocolate chips

Method
In a small nonreactive saucepan, heat about 1/2 cup of the watermelon juice with the sugar and salt, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and stir sugared syrup into remaining 2 1/2 cups of watermelon juice in a medium bowl. Mix in lime juice and vodka (if using).

Chill mixture thoroughly, for at least four hours, then pour mixture into plastic popsicle molds and freeze until firm, at least 6 hours.

For sorbetto out of the mod: Freeze chilled mixture in ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. During last minute of churning, add chocolate chips.

Cobbler Debates

Kim O’Donnel, a Washington Post Food Journalist (not sure if she would prefer Journalist before or after the Food or doesn’t care), added a couple recipes to her blog for a cobbler topping. 

Little did she know that I’ve been trying to AVOID eating things with sugar and refined flours.  Unfortunately, The recipes looked damn good and the follow-on comments started up the saliva pumps in high gear.   I’ve been going to the farmer’s market regularly and picking up not only vegetables but some tasty peaches and berries.

The last time I came across recipes like this, I ended up making two batches of peach sorbet.

Of course, I immediately started thinking about how I could replace part of the refined flours with whole wheat and possibly cut down on the sugar and fat while retaining some of that flavor. 

All this so I can fool myself somewhat that I’m eating healthy. 

But it’s FRESH Fruit!  It only has a Little sugar!  I used Whole Grain Flour!  I used Butter instead of nasty refined - I don’t know what’s in them and couldn’t pronounce it anyway - oils!  Splenda!

I will admit that Kim tried to make it a little healthier with a few judicial substitutions while trying to stay true to the originals.  I’m thinking of more radical changes…..

buah ha ha

Cuba Gooding Jr. in an advertisement.

Hey, Fatty. Yeah, You.

T-Nation posted a new article Velocity Diet Lite: Two Shakes a Day to a Leaner, Harder Body by Chris Shugart.  As I was reading, I almost snorted coffee out my nose.

What’s that? You’re just in a mass phase? Listen, buddy, if you haven’t been able to see your penis in three years because of your big gut, the “bulking stage” is over, okay?

I’ve been in a mass phase for mumble years!  Thankfully, I was blessed at birth! Hah.

Chris is reiterating that the reason that roughly 66% of the American population is overweight or just flat out obese is because of their diet.

It’s your diet, stupid!

Chris also mentions two specific reasons.

1. Late in the Day/Evening Binging
2. Skipping Breakfast

Item 2 can cause item 1.  You skip breakfast and then try to make up for it later in the day.  Most often by binging.

Chris proposes that you drink a full nutrient shake with fiber in the morning and a low carb shake in the evening.   I didn’t need to write PROTEIN in there did I?Oh and STOP Binging at night. 

Of course, Metabolic Drive Complete is recommended for the morning shake since it has the full nutrient profile plus more fiber than in a bowl of oatmeal and Metabolic Drive Complete Low Carb for the evening.

I eat breakfast of some form every morning.  Lately, I’ve been eating some combination of the below.

• 8oz of 2% cottage cheese for 22g of Protein
• fruit
• granola bar
• weight control oatmeal 7g protein, 6g fiber, and 29g carbohydrate
• regular 1 – minute oatmeal 5g protein, 4g fiber and 27g carbohydrate

Item 1 is my biggest problem.  Since I stopped smoking, I eat often (see Surfeit).  I eat a full meal and then start snacking and many times until I am overfull.  I recognize the problem, I see myself doing it.  I have 15 additional pounds to show for it.  How do you stop it?  Neural Linguistic Programming! That’s the ticket!!!

Windows Live Writer Second Coming

Ok, NOW, I have Beta 2 installed.  I would help if the developers identified the release version number (i.e. Beta 2 = x.y.z).

Beta 2 of Version 1 has this splash screen.