Tony's Losing It

Another great article from Carrie.

I’m an adventurous cook, but a lot of the time when I’m busy I don’t stop to smell the turnips. Something that helps me mix up my meal planning is just having a handy list of things other than cheese, chocolate, and carbs, to put in my dinners.

My husband and I just filled out a food preference sheet put together by Graham Kerr. He’s the former Galloping Gourmet from television, and now promotes a healthy lifestyle. The sheet lists about a hundred different food items– fruits, vegetables, meats, as well as flavors– sweet, sour, spicy.

The idea is to “profile” the variety of foods that you like, to try to vary your diet. It helps to give you a clear idea of what healthier items you like to help you to choose those items, and also include
them in meal planning. For example, my husband does not like sweet flavors in his main dishes, but I’m fine having, say, a honey sauce with my roast chicken.

The food preference sheet can be printed off from Kerr’s Web Site, as a pdf file, or you can register and use the interactive version. Both versions are free.

It’s definitely more of an organizational tool more than anything, but good to have on hand to inspire creativity. Here’s the liink:

http://www.grahamkerr.com/fps/index.php

What follows is a guest article that was sent to me last week. Carolyn is a recent listener and has offered to submit some of here thoughts and experiences to share with everyone here.

You can normally find her at www.serenityfirefly.com

Thanks, Carrie!

I have a very food-focused perspective when it comes to healthy eating and weight loss. I love to eat, but I’m not terribly willing to give up any food completely. I’ve noticed that when we have at least one vegetable side dish with the main “meat,” it helps us fill up and eat less of the higher calorie stuff.

However, veggies are not usually my first choice when I’m cooking and in a hurry. So one of my goals this summer is to eat my veggies.

One way that I’m doing that this summer is by joining a CSA. CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, is a way to buy “shares” in a local farm, and then they supply you with veggies, and sometimes fruits, on a weekly basis through the spring, summer, and fall.

I’m in my third week of participating in my local CSA. And it’s going great. I pick up my share weekly, in a spot centrally located in the city where I live. I get a nice supply of fresh vegetables weekly, and it’s pre paid. So I feel really guilty if I let them rot in my
crisper drawer.

It’s also helping me use more variety in my cooking and meal planning, without sacrificing flavor. I’ve already made some stir-fried baby bok choy and a lot of other side dishes from the veggies I’ve gotten so far.

For people who don’t want to commit to a CSA, a farmer’s market is also a good place to find fresh and exciting foods.

Here is a link where you can search for CSAs and Farmer’s markets across the US. http://www.localharvest.org/

A walk through my weekend. Talked about the Can’t Stop the Serenity screening that I attended Saturday night. Movie Theater Popcorn is one of my pitfalls. I know it is, I try to make sure that when I attend a movie that I am doing so on one of my guilt-free days.

Special thanks to Stu from Sofa Dogs. He came up with the awesome artwork you see on the last few episodes of TLI (I’m going to be retroactively adding it to some of the old episodes in the near future.

Thanks for listening!

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This one is a bit long, but considering the hour it’s amazing that I can speak in full sentences.

Thanks to all of my wonderful podcast friends who so graciously played the new promo. You guys are all metal \00/

Check back next week to read Carolyn’s articles for TLI. Content from you guys is thoroughly awesome for me. Less work.

Let me know what you think, or how you are doing on any goals you might have set.

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Now that the Boot Camp is over, I have been struggling with how I wanted to continue the exercise portion of my weight loss.

It’s amazing how much personal trainers or even the membership to a gym costs (especially when you figure in sign up fees and contracts lengths.)

My lovely wife, Julie, pointed me to an article from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website that gives you ten workouts that you can do in your home. Each workout lists a description of how to do the workout, what you’ll need, and what you won’t need (Have a step in your house, kiss a stair walking machine goodbye.)

Ready the full article here:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/lifestyle/stories.nsf/healthfitness/story/148A4B82ACE5C3BF862572FB0061BDDE?OpenDocument

I was always surprised by the amount of weight these folks would lose week after week. Hearing this really concerns me that some people may be wrecking themselves on this journey. The point is to get HEALTHIER. Destroying your body just to lose weight doesn’t make any sense. If it did, going in to get a leg amputated would be a great idea… I mean, just think how much weight you would lose.

Ok, that’s an extreme example. But if this change isn’t something sensible, it’s not going to be permanent, or worse, it could cause more harm than good.

I often thought that I would love to go on a show like this to dump weight. Now, I think I’ll stick with MY show. It’s working so far.

Thanks to my wife, Julie for sending this article to me.

Read the article here:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1627013,00.html

Ok, so my experiment didn’t work, and I am back on www.thedailyplate.com tracking my intake.

I need to schedule workouts into my life and schedule more than just the two hours a week I was doing during the boot camp.

This one is a bit shorter and stuffier.

So, how are you guys doing? Have a nice weekend? I did! Julie, Holden and the-baby-to-be-named-later got me a Nikon Coolpix L10 for Father’s Day. I wanted a compact (fits in my pocket) camera that took gook pictures. This isn’t the “GOOD” camera, Julie got a really nice Sony about 2 years ago, and that’s the good camera. This is the one that I get to take to cons and start collecting pictures of some of the cool people I’ve met and amazing costumes I’ve seen.

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Made it to 10 episodes!

Just finished boot camp and now I need to find a replacement workout program.

There is a MAJOR announcement at the end of this one.

Tchuss.

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Ok, so weight-loss drugs aren’t necessarily the best idea, but this is just COOL.

First, I want to give a special thanks to Michael R. Mennenga of Slice of SciFi, Wingin’ It, and all around cool guy. Michael pointed this cool toy out to me, and now I WANT ONE.

The Polar F55 is a fitness watch. This cool gadget can help you track your workouts, monitor you calories, manage your workouts, and much more. I won’t go into all of the details here, because you can look them up at Polar’s Website. But This is one of the higher end general fitness watches that they have. They also produce lines of Running and Cycling specific watches.

With Father’s Day around the corner, and me being a Dad, I would not be opposed to some wealthy listener sending me such a gift. Ok, back to reality… If I get donations through the site(look over to the right), I will use them to get two things. At least at the moment, I’m only looking at two things. First, I’ll get an activity watch like this. I think it’s a great tool, and it looks slick too. The other item is a Wii. I’ve heard that they are fun and a great workout.

Here is a link to check out the F55.

We have a problem. A couple of them actually. One of our problems is that we know what we are supposed to do. “Breakfast is important to a healthy diet.” But according to a new survey, over half of us don’t eat breakfast.
Another problem is that a lot of us don’t know the difference between the good and bad fats and which we should be eating.

These are just a couple of problems that need to be addressed in how disconnected we are between what we are doing and what we should be doing.

The survey of 1,000 US adults took place in March and was conducted by the International Food Information Council (IFIC). This was the foundation’s second annual Food & Health Survey.

Read the full text of the referenced article here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18944144/