The second week of The 21-Day Fix has come and gone, and the success continues. I lost another 4.8 pounds, and Jenn lost another 3, bringing our totals to 11 and 9, respectively. This week, I did get in some exercise by taking Stella the dog for some walks around the neighborhood, and with a good three or four hours of yardwork on Saturday. Even with that, I didn’t know what to expect when I stepped back on the scale. You always hear those stories about any given diet, where the person in question loses a good amount of weight the first week, and even when that person continues to do everything “right”, the weight loss drops precipitously or comes to a screeching halt altogether. Continue reading
Diet
The 21-Day Fix: Week 1 Update
The first week of the 21-Day Fix has been interesting, to say the least. There are aspects of the diet plan that are not as bad as I thought they were going to be, but in other ways, it’s a trial of willpower that I’m not quite used to. I won’t be providing a daily journal here, as that would be tedious for me and likely boring for you, but I’ll give you an overall view of what I’ve gone through so far. There were some struggles (all of which were mental), some success, and some surprisingly good meals (some of which I’ll describe and provide pictures for). Perhaps the hardest part for me so far has been satisfying my raging sweet tooth, which I’ve had to do with fruit alone thus far. One of my favorite things in the world is gummies of all sorts, and up to this point, a bag of them came to work with me several times a week to get me through the day. Continue reading
The 21-Day Fix: Getting Started
As of yesterday, Jenn and I embarked on a diet plan called The 21-Day Fix, in conjunction with the well-known Shakeology program. Founded upon the concepts of clean eating and portion control, the three-week program includes flavored shakes that are packed with essential nutrients, an extensive cookbook full of seemingly delicious meals, and exercise DVDs. To make portion control easy, the subscription kit comes with a collection of color-coded containers for the rationing of your daily allowances of proteins, fruits, vegetables, starches, and healthy fats. Based on your starting weight, you’ll be assigned a daily calorie intake, which corresponds to a certain number of each type of container. All of the food you eat has to fit neatly within each container, and the recipes are specially designed to ensure this. Continue reading
On Fat Shaming
The Internet can be a brutal place. While I think that people who choose to have a presence on the Web typically have an unrealistic and unreasonable expectation of privacy and approval, there is still no other place where a person can feel so naked, so alone, and so unprepared to deal with a cruel and constant onslaught of insults from faceless strangers. The relatively recent phenomenon of “fat shaming” has taken root across social media and viral content websites alike, and has left many victims in tears, or worse, and has hoards of others crying foul. Fat shaming takes place when a woman (most of the time, as it has become clear in our society that men are not held up to the same scrutiny and standards when it comes to body type and overall physical appearance) who has more than 0% body fat posts a picture of herself revealing something other than the perfect vision of the female form that we have adopted. When and if said picture makes it somewhere beyond the eyes of friends, it becomes subject to a barrage of comments and insults that can leave the victim more or less defenseless. Now, what’s pleasing to the eye surely differs from person to person, as does everyone’s definition of “fat” when it comes to body mass. It takes a special kind of abandon to blindly insult a stranger from behind a keyboard. Maybe the perpetrator is just mean-spirited. Continue reading
The Soda Struggle
My torrid love affair with bubbly, sugary soft drinks started early on during my formative years. I don’t have an addictive personality- I never became a smoker, my days of getting carried away with alcohol were mostly left behind after I graduated from college, and I never got bit by the gambling bug. However, soda is one thing that has always had a strong and unreasoning psychological grip on me. My parents, bless their hearts, tried to keep it under control. Once my two younger brothers and I started resisting milk, our parents would allow us to have soda at dinner time, and they tried to limit it to that, particularly our weekly Friday night pizza dinners. Before you question their parenting abilities, remember that it wasn’t their fault. Back in the 60’s, it seemed like just about everyone smoked cigarettes. They surely knew that smoking wasn’t good for them, but they obviously didn’t know just how bad it really was. The same can be said for soda back in the early 90’s. Any adult knew it wasn’t the best thing for their kids, but they couldn’t possibly imagine it would turn out to be the silent killer that is has been recently revealed to be. Soft drinks were easy to come by when I was a kid. My mom would buy 2-liter bottles for just 69 cents. My brothers and I would easily polish off one of those bottles during dinner. Continue reading
The No Seatbelt Blog 