After first hearing about Soylent years ago, I finally bought a case from Amazon on a whim.
Soylent is a meal replacement drink that purportedly contains 20% of your nutritional needs in each bottle.
After first hearing about Soylent years ago, I finally bought a case from Amazon on a whim.
Soylent is a meal replacement drink that purportedly contains 20% of your nutritional needs in each bottle.
The only good thing to come out of last fall’s Samsung cellphone recall saga was that I received a free Samsung Gear Fit2 with my phone as a pre-order promotion.
I had to give back my Note 2 because of the recall, but Samsung never asked for the watch back. (Could you imagine?)
This was also around the time when my Fitbit died for the second time, so I was in the market for a new watch anyway.
After about six months with the Gear Fit2, I am still happy with it and do not miss my Fitbit at all.
Here’s what I’m talking about this morning.
1. “Fake news” trolling: There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the age-old problem of fake news. A relatively new phenomenon is that people are starting troll legitimate news sources by calling real stories fake.
We get that all of the time at the newspaper, and I’ve even started to see it on this blog.
I’ve found that most of the negative comments come from people who fall into one of four categories:
You can work with people in category #1, but #2-4 are lost causes.
Here’s what I’m talking about today.
1. That fall feeling: Christmas may be next week, but it really feels like fall in Dallas.
The leaves finally turned color, but it’s still warm enough to comfortably do long dog walks before and after work. Although that may change – we are going from a high of 75° on Saturday to a high of 32° on Sunday.
Looks like brunch won’t be on a patio.
2. Dropbox: They had an unfortunate Twitter incident yesterday. On the positive side, their annual “diversity in the workplace” report probably got way more views than last year’s.
There is no incidental exercise for me in Dallas.
I work from home. There’s a grocery and liquor store across the street. There are two dog parks in my complex, and 20 gay bars and restaurants within a few blocks of my apartment.
Long dog walks are also tricky.
It is routinely over 100 degrees in Dallas during the day, so I long walks have to happen at 5 a.m. or 10 p.m.
I know, I know. I watched Food Inc. a while ago and didn’t make the switch to organic meat. It turns out that rampant animal abuse wasn’t enough to get me to switch to organic meat, but salt was.
My grumblings about salt started a few weeks ago and culminated last night when I realized that our canned soup from Target had 111% of the daily recommended allowance of salt in it. I also realized that every processed thing in our house was bathed in sodium or high fructose corn syrup.
Even our 98% fat free turkey hot dogs are packed with sodium. One turkey hot dog link has 470mg of sodium or 20 percent of the daily recommended value. I was grossed out so I decided to switch to organic meat. Besides not having the hormones and animal abuse associated with it, organic meat also has considerably less sodium.
Buying organic meat at the local grocery store was difficult. I couldn’t find it at first until the butcher lady informed me that they only had “natural” chicken and small packets of organic ground beef hidden somewhere amongst the normal meat.
I eventually found it. What a miserable little package.
Despite the cosmetics of the package, it was delicious.
I then had the problem of a pantry full of canned food that I wasn’t not going to eat. I looked over the cans and realized that seven were already expired. Canned food takes a long-ass time to go bad, so I obviously don’t eat enough of it anyway. I gathered the good cans and brought them to the Aliveness Project, the local HIV/AIDS food shelf.
And yes, I realize the irony in donating unhealthy food to sick people, but I didn’t want to waste it and the food shelf doesn’t accept fresh food in anyway.
Also, to ease my guilt about donating the sodium-filled cans, I called the food shelf and offered to buy the kitchen fresh food. The cook thought it was a rather bizarre request and told me that he’s never had anyone offer to buy food for the kitchen before. He only requested lemons and cilantro, so my healthy contribution was rather meager. Maybe they’ll want something more substantial next time?
What a lovely two weeks. Fall was extended this year so Minneapolis still has temperatures in the 50’s and 60’s. The colors are amazing and the morning dog walks have become sprawling two-hour events because it is so nice outside.
I saw this at the Uptown Rainbow Foods grocery store today:
My first reaction was: “What a fugly box.”
The cafeteria cashiers at work are awesome.
Donna: “Only two bananas?”
Me: “Yep. I’m being healthy.”
Note: the “Best Week Ever” (BWE) posts are summaries of the prior week.
The past two weeks whizzed by. I don’t know what to say.
I sucked it in like Mariah Carey at school today. I wore a snug shirt as a motivation to go to the gym. This is an old Dr. Phil trick based on the theory that discomfort is an incentive for change.
Most of us buy bigger clothes when we gain weight. We hang out with less athletic friends, pick up passive activities (that involve butter and booze), and do everything possible to be comfortable in our obesity.
2 large pizzas for $20. It was a great deal.
At 2 slices per meal, that meant I was buying ten, easily microwavable $2 meals. Holler! …or not – I have never felt sicker in the past few days.
This week of unpleasantness started on Monday, when I bought a McFlurry. I have been drinking lactose free milk because it keeps longer, and I don’t know if one loses lactose tolerance or what is going on…but that McFlurry did not sit well.
So, fresh off my McFlurry queasiness, I decide to order these pizzas, and it was like going from Afghanistan to Iraq.
In addition to my minimal lactose intake, I also have a small wheat intake. I have not bought breads, chips, crackers, or cereal lately because I find that these turn me into a compulsive eater – where’d those Pringles go? So I don’t know if it’s the lack grease and wheat in my diet or just plain old nasty Pizza Hut…but the pizza is a disaster and needs to go.
That pizza has put me through such hell that I would burn it in the parking lot if there was any way to convince the cops that I wasn’t a law student who snapped. I am also not giving the pizza to Harley, because I guarantee I’ll have to clean up the aftermath in the kennel tomorrow.
So I am chucking the pizza, and officially avoiding lactose and wheat.
I was in high school when I watched Supersize Me. At the time, I ate at McDonalds twice a day, every day. The movie didn’t phase me, and my drive-thru habits continued. 1
After reading Jillian Michael’s “Master your Metabolism” my grocery list turned into that of a hippie yoga teacher, but drive-thrus were still the norm when I didn’t make time to stop at the grocery store.
My eating habits consisted of fruits, vegetables, and fresh meat mixed with fast food and vending machine “food.”
I realized that my eating habits reached the disgusting level last week during my summer school final exams. I felt queasy and sleep deprived, and my stack of bluebooks was surrounded by cups of vending machine coffee2, two bags of pretzels, a bag of generic vending machine salted trail mix, and a box of Mike & Ikes. Sure, I had healthy food at home, but this crap was somehow in front of me.
Sometime between my Professional Responsibility exam and my Wills & Trust exam I decided this had to stop.
That day I decided to ditch the vending machine food and the late night fast food trips.
On Saturday, Jill and I were pulling a marathon work day, and we decided to take a break and fetch lunch. I decided to shake up the new “healthy” diet with a strategically timed trip to Culver’s.3 I figured that a burger wouldn’t shake things up too much…
…and I was wrong.
We get back to work, I eat the burger, and twenty minutes later we hear a loud cranking and gurgling sound.
Jill: “Oh my god, is that your stomach!?”
I give her a pathetic, panicked look and flee to the restroom.
Culver’s was officially axed from the diet.
Today, I axed all the other fast food restaurants. I saw the movie “Food Inc.” and I think it finished the diet change that Jillian Michaels started.
Jillian described how disgusting most food is, but it is one thing to read about how gross food is, and it’s another thing to see it.
The reason why Supersize Me didn’t change my eating habits is because I lost weight on my straight-McDonald’s diet. Supersize Me didn’t disgust me because I knew that fast food was made from poorly treated, hormone pumped animals and chemically engineered potatoes. So what?
Food Inc. answered the “So what?” question.
