MTheads

Exercise Update

Still lifting weights.  I've added in a bit of running just for fun.  But instead of running straight at some reasonable pace I mix it up with walking because my knees have never loved long distances.  I switch running and walking every song so I end up only running a bit more than half of the distance. I've done this for a half-marathon (here) and I beat my earlier conventional running time.  One of the nice things about run/walk is I can run quite a bit faster than if I was trying to keep some sort of pace. After all, I'll get a break in about 2 to 3 minutes.  Makes running more entertaining.

So, back to lifting.  Not much new to report except that I'm up to ten wider armed pull-ups, at a time! For me, that's great. I'd like to work up to sets of ten, maybe three times in a row.  Right now, I do a wide-arm set, then a narrower one, then a chin-up set.  Then repeat the trio.  Of course, I quickly get down to doing 5 and 3 rep sets, for a total of maybe 30 or 40. This is on leg day when there's less competition for my arm muscles.  I do fewer on upper body day. 

I'm a big advocate for pull-ups because they are so good for the upper body and the core.  And I'm of the opinion that most women of average weight could do them.  But perhaps I'm wrong, and I'm some sort of freak because so many women have sworn to me they just can't do them.  I don't know....I think pull-ups are like bike riding; once you figure out the trick or technique, it suddenly all clicks.

I try to get my daughters to do them.  I've offered a dollar a pull-up and so far I haven't lost any money.  One of them is getting close, but dangling and pathetically pulling up half way is not going to earn you any of my money.  I don't care how much you cry.... God forbid the day they figure out the mechanics!

LCHF Still Rules My Life

God, still doing the LCHF thing.  Not that I mind a diet of filet mignon and bacon, but it's a difficult diet to keep going.  I generally have to go shopping 3.5 times a day in order to keep all the fresh food needed to feed six people in the house. There can be no boxes or cans.  

And then, my children have gotten the idea from somewhere that home-cooked, fresh food is actually a sneaky substitute for the real food that comes out of boxes.  OK, we ate a lot of mac and cheese in the old days.  It's a challenge to keep them eating high quality food.  So that's something to keep me busy.

Years ago, Denis Leary had this hilarious riff about the morphing of modern man into some kind of soft sandal wearing, tofu eating, meat shunning, full contact football abhorring, sun avoiding, Oprah watching creature. I think about that while I'm clicking through my three thousand paleo/LCHF web sites everyday. I think about it because sometimes an image of Paleo man comes unbidden to my mind, an image of a man similarly struggling to live forever.

Paleo man wears finger shoes when not earthing, wears special colored lenses to help him maintain his circadian rhythm. Only sprints. Moves often and slow. Lifts heavy things. Checks his glucose and ketone levels obsessively. Eats spoonfuls of organic unrefined coconut oil. Eats exactly five brazil nuts a day. Intermittently fasts (the thinner the faster, the more the fasting). Drinks bone broth. Eats the perfect diet which only requires supplementing with Vitamin D3, fermented cod liver oil, magnesium, iodine, CoQ10, resistant starch, probiotics, and prebiotics.  

Now this sounds more like an eating disorder. Perfect control perfect life.  And the acolytes all want the primal/paleo gurus to tell them exactly what to do to get themselves fixed -- what to eat, what to take, how to sleep, walk, breath, and think. It's kind of worrying. But they're just people looking to feel better, live forever, cure something. Like us all.

Of course, there're plenty of sciencey LCHF blogs out there too -- less orthodoxy and more studies. I like best the blogs by actual doctors and scientists. I like the blogs which are helping to disseminate the studies debunking the low fat dogma and trans fat insanity.  And I still read all the others, just in case.

So, still in this for a penny in for a pound of pork.

 

Back On-line

I gots me a new net book!  Now I can relax on the couch while writing rather than sit in the torture chair in the kitchen.  The problem with net books is that they make a warm, snuggly platform for fat cats.  Whenever I open mine up, he runs over and hops on.  He even tries to knead the key board.  Or maybe he's trying to type something.  Hard to tell.  But I finally figured out how to use the camera, so expect a lot of close-ups.

And...

And...

Ok.  That's my son but the cat managed to get off my lap before I took the picture.  Something was going to be photographed.

Evolution, or Denial of Reality??

Here's the typical home remote.  Big enough to hold comfortably even after half a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.  Mmmm, so meaty.

Behold! The Apple TV remote.  So small we spend more time looking for the darn thing than using it.  It's the reason we're not watching Game of Thrones.  I hate you, tiny remote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The predictable end product of ever shrinking remotes: Thanks Apple for phones larger than a laptop and remotes smaller than a postage stamp.

Crazy Cat Pic Thursday!

LCHF Diet Extraordinaire Update

I'm still eating LCHF and eating any kind of diet with a catchy name means I have to write excruciatingly detailed and personal posts about my "journey" and personal transformation following this new doctrine, I mean, diet.  Luckily for you, I'll be skipping the bathroom details.  Let's just say all is A-OK and on the boring side. 

From reading other people's blogs and books and testimonials though, I have to ask, "Why am I so untroubled in the bathroom department??"  It's like a rite or something on any new diet to finally be regular, stop being regular, stop everything, never have a minute's peace, wonder what the hell that is, ask strangers on the internet if they've ever seen anything like what I've described, and maybe even take pics of it to bring to the doctors.  Instead, I'm just sailing through life without purpose.

So nothing tantalizing on that front.  What is different for me on this new way of eating?  Actually, not much.  I think I eat less because the fat fills me up.  I seem to be more likely to skip meals, but then, I did before.  I do notice less energy after hard weight workouts, but I'm also still making progress and getting stronger.  I'm thirsty more often, but that's probably the kidneys groaning under all the red meat I'm eating.  Suck it up, waste strainers!  We all have our little challenges.

I have not gained any weight.  I sleep the same.  I look the same.  I spend five times as much on food.  But, who knows, I have no proof that this diet has not made me resistant to all illnesses, and perhaps immortal.  That's something.  More updates later.  If you're lucky, I'll post pictures of my fat drenched meals. Instead, I'm posting this:

Low Carb High Fat tips I've learned from the internet

LCHF tip #1: If it's a floaty, you're eating fat mostly.

(sorry...)

Housewife News Digest

Weiner - Egads.  Who wants a text of your thingy?  You have a shallow conscience and you lack integrity.  You would be a detriment to NYC. 

Weiner's wife - WTH??  Leave the bastard.  Scared he'll become mayor and you'll have missed your chance to share the spotlight?  Ewww, prostrating yourself before your husband's career, how humiliating. 

NSA spying - Mixed feelings.  We have to protect ourselves from the losers with small brains who would like to hurt us.  But at the same time, it's good to know it's being done so when conservative leaning groups start to be harassed by liberal governmental agencies we can trace it back and maybe stop it.

IRS scandal - McCarthyism, but without the outrage since it's not being done to groups on the Left.  Oh, how lefty groups wish it could be them, instead. 

Zimmerman hatred - Perceived group dissing trumps bad schools and high murder rates in the Black community every time.

I Don't Mind the Stupid People, It's the Stupid Narcissists

I have two sons who both work in different fast food restaurants.  One works for the world's largest chain.  The other works for a more upscale chain.  Contrary to what many people seem to think, fast food chain employees actually have brains and are able to size up and judge their customers, too.  And some people are dicks. 

First, my son who works for the most successful fast food chain in the world has no complaints about his customers.  His customer base is made up of people living in subsidized housing, from the homeless shelter across the street, day laborers, construction workers, taxi drivers, and locals from the recently gentrified areas (dinks with dogs).  His customers behave normally and are friendly. 

My other son, however, has a more upscale clientele; business people, upper-middle income, tourists, and so forth.  Imagine a busy street in one of DC metro's more expensive, touristy areas.  He has the most rude, belligerent, cheap, lying, pathetic excuses for customers.   Well-dressed women mock the foreign worker for not being able to speak English well.  Well-dressed men try to finagle extra meat for no extra cost, even going so far as to threaten my son with being fired if he doesn't give them the extra food at no cost. 

Wow, threatening teenagers and recent immigrants while at the same time demanding more for less.  Just who do they think take minimum wage jobs?   You want more for less?  Stop yelling at the teenagers and immigrants willing to serve your ugly mug for low pay and hard work.  Morons.

My son has been yelled at, used as a ruse for free food, lied about, threatened, and cheated out of money by apparently well-off individuals.  He has stories about middle aged women, with every appearance of being solidly in the middle classes somewhere, screeching and demanding free food for things completely out of his control.  Something goes slightly wrong, we're not talking cancer here, and some people lash out at the weakest person in the vicinity.  It's disgusting.

Whatever happened to self control?  Or of empathy?  I think these oddly mean people with their shallow material wealth haven't ever had to really work.  They must have gone from coddled child to spoiled teen to privileged adult without ever having to see the world from the other side of the counter.

We live in a wealthy area in the DC metro area.  We saved to live here.  We worked minimum wage jobs to finally work our way up to a little wealth ourselves.  And I have never lived anywhere with people so shrieky and ready to take offense.  Just today I saw a woman in an expensive mini-van lean out her window and screech at a family of non-English speakers who walked against the light. 

Yes, a crime against humanity deserving the most hateful of condemnation.  But what this ugly woman didn't see was that this family was encouraged across the street by the lead car who thought he was doing a nice thing for this small group of tourists who took the waving forward as a request to walk.  So, some idiot with a life far too important to be patient with foreigners crossing against the light let the world know how it made her feel -- ugly and mean.  As if we don't have real problems to scream at.  Pathetic. 

She probably has a nice family, lives in a nice home, gets her nails done, but she has to publicly curse out a bunch of tourists who made her wait maybe 15 seconds.  It was a disgusting scene, and I pity her.  If she could have seen the rage on her face...over a trifle. 

I don't know.  My sons are getting an education far beyond anything they can learn in school.  They're learning about people and character.  People who break down because they're out of pulled pork are not the kind of people one wants to emulate.  I tell them to learn from the losers and copy the good ones.  Because there are good customers.   Sometimes, a restaraunt runs out of avocado.  Adjust.  It's not the end of the world. 

The End of the World is the end of the world.  We all soon enough run out of time.  Let's not think waiting an extra 15 seconds is that time and treat other people poorly.  It's bad character, embarrassing, immoral, and will never lead to anything other than your eventual humiliation in front of people who work harder than you.  Have some character and use that time to think of something nice to do for someone else.  You are not all that.  Ask the women who come in to clean your house.  Ask your server.  He's watching you, too. 

 

Hungry, Again.

There are several aspects of my new, experimental LCHF diet that I find difficult.  The most difficult is getting enough to eat.  You'd think it would be easy to eat all the bacon and steak one wanted.  It ain't.  For one thing, fresh meat and high quality bacon means constant grocery shopping.  And we're a family of six eaters.  Imagine the amount of bacon we have to buy to satisfy all of us.  For six, we need at least a pound and a half at a serving, and that leads to a few of us pining for just one more piece.  And to fights.

And because I truly believe in the importance of buying high quality meat -- as in grass-fed, free-range, home-schooled -- we spend a small fortune on meat.  Again, six eaters means two chickens, or eight breasts, or several pounds of ground beef for every dinner.  Of course, I give it my best newbie meat eater try with meatloaves and stew-type meals to help mitigate costs.  I know tenderloin for six is stupid planning.  I'm learning as fast as I can.

Another problem is I'm the only one in the family with a taste for the more "flavorful" end of the meat spectrum.  I eat all the cheap (and delicious) offal, I eat all the bone marrow.  I'm the only one excited to try the tripe soup.  My husband does bravely give anything I make a try.  But, God forbid my children taste something not sanitized out of all recognition of its origins.  While our girls won't even look at raw meat, running away in horror, they have no problems eating bland white meat with a breaded exterior.  Our boys play it more cool but still won't try much of anything that looks like the animal it is. 

My husband and I created these children, but I'm not sure how we did because we have never been your typical American eaters, having been tofu-eating vegetarians most of our adult lives.  Maybe it's a result of them growing up in America.  All we can do is keep making healthy food and hoping their tastes mature sometime.

Back to the problem of not enough to eat.  I do my best to make meals using fresh ingredients, but they run out quickly, as do leftovers, if we have them.  So I'm left trying to put together a LC meal from pantry ingredients and whatever is left in the fridge.  The kids and my husband still eat carbs so they can just make pasta or rice or pour a bowl of death carbs, I mean, cereal.  I'm stuck making myself eggs, again.  Or eating salami and cheese and olives, again.  Sometimes I just give up and don't eat.  

This problem of running out of food is due to my inexperience with dealing with fresh, whole meat products.  I have to figure out the balance between maintaining stock and not wasting food by not eating it in time.  Yes, I know, all you experienced cooks, especially all you working moms, that's what the freezer is for!  I'm learning.  Eventually I'll have it down.  But for now, I miss the convenience and long-term storage of high carb foods!

My little LCHF eating buddy.  He's got my back.

The IRS is a Bug Compared to the People of Oklahoma

Good thing all those people conducting search and rescue operations and helping each other in Oklahoma don't view their jobs or roles as vehicles for promoting their own personal political views.

I don't think those in the IRS see the rest of us as their neighbors and fellow citizens.  Oh, they'll let us equally pay for their salaries and benefits, but treat us equitably?  No.  Imagine if we all acted like those white-collared, college-educated, tax-paid losers who used their positions of responsibility to hurt those with whom they disagree politically.  We'd live in chaos, hate, and paranoia.

Government beneficence for some, suppression for others.  Good job, tools.