So I decided to trash the notes because the pile was building and I was still finding no time to enter them All in on my blog, it's just ridiculous. It was getting impractical to be keeping notes if I wasn't going to post them soon afterwards. So the notes are gone and from now on I will not take notes on what I'm doing but rather just try and update you guys as regularly as I can and give you a general idea of what I've been up to.
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Hello internet. I know that I have not updated my progress in a long time. School is taking up a lot of my time but I can assure you that I'm still doing great. I got some 5-pound dumbells a while back and found some new exercises that work all different kinds of muscles. I've even upped the anti a little bit with how much weight I'm dealing with. I've discovered afterburn exercises and love the concept. They help your body to continue to burn calories even after you've stopped exercising and the exercises are great for strengthening your cardio. It's the secret weapon for weight loss. Even though I don't really need to lose weight (except for my famous food baby) but it helps your body get the fat out of the way that might be hiding muscle that you've been working hard to get. Six Pack Shortcuts is the youtube channel that has a lot of great stuff. Well, that's all I can say for now. I still have a lot of chores and homework to do. I really hope I can have a bit of a break tomorrow to fill you in on as much progress as I can tell you. Thanks for sticking with me.
[im layin it out for yas here...]
Yes, I'm going cold turkey on the Coffee, again. And let me clarify now that that also includes pretty much any other form of caffeine, like - soda / black tea / energy drinks / some chocolate / etc. You know what I mean. Instead of defaulting to caffeine for energy, or a high (both of which I am probably somewhat 'attached' to), I will default to other forms of NATURAL energy. Natural energy comes from so many different things including - good sleep habits (HUGE importance) / fruit- and vegetable-loaded diet (ESPECIALLY RAW fruits and veggies) / exercise (duh ;p) / Psyche and mental state (ex: Spirituality, if you want to get deep here) / etc. Again, you know what I mean. And thank you to John Johnson who cued me in on the tasty and awesome energy power of fresh pure baby coconut water! That just might be my 'cup of joe' from now on! Why: Round 3 of, lets say, caffeine "detox", is different than the previous two FAIL rounds. Besides the fact that, for someone with heart issues, caffeine is one of the dumbest things I could put in my body, I am now even further along and more matured with my health lifestyle changes. I am getting more disciplined with what I do and do not eat, and why. Instead of just thinking "well, doc says I should stop the coffee, I guess I'll try", this time I actually want to stop. Almost like I've got a personal vendetta against caffeine, there is a passion behind my motivation. I feel more like I "own" my individual decision to stop. I want to make sure my body is happy. I am eating all this good food everyday but what good does it do if I have 2 cups of coffee each day that are draining a total of 8 cups of fluid from my body as well as damaging my body from the acidity and toxicity. When attempting to purify and cleanse something what good is it to throw acid in the mix? And I always knew that caffeine was some type of drug, although obviously not as damaging or harmful as the many others. But hearing it actually be discussed in my Drugs And Behavior class was when my realization occurred - the final push off the "fence". If I call myself "straight edge" then I'd be in denial if I told myself that my cup of coffee was an exception. It is a drug. It is addictive. It does damage to the body. Recently I heard that two cups of coffee a day can increase heart health for women. Well they also tell you that a few glasses of wine every week can reduce heart issues too. If I'm rejecting alcohol and the supposed health benefits of that, then I reject caffeine and it's supposed health benefits as well. But remember, there are so many other alternatives that can give you the same health benefits. I'm not missing anything. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand that drugs are not the only addictive or damaging things you can do. Food itself can be addictive and damaging. In fact, the definition of a "drug" is pretty vague and you could apply it to a lot of stuff. But obviously we got to use our common sense, duh. And I know coffee is one of the least extreme sources of drugs in the universe and it might seem pretty silly for me to be talking about it like this. But the truth remains, what I've said above remains true for me. So here we go...*Third time's the charm!* (and hey, it's St.Patty's Day!) Anne G :) btw- speaking of coconut (which I absolutely love and find heavenly delicious), heres one tasty-lookin coconut smoothie from John Johnson's Raw food blog - http://www.johnjohnsonraw.com/recipe-blog/coconut-smoothie and here's a couple other links about coffee/caffeine: http://amazingdiscoveries.org/H-deception-health-coffee-drinking-caffeine-risk http://www.caffeineweb.com/ (thanks Carlos!) Yes, I know I'm still late with the exercise posts, but I figured I'd post this video that I made recently... At this point I have so many notes that I can't remember which of the older ones goes first so I'm just going to list them however.
This was probably from back in January when we were getting one snow storm after another (which kind of stretched into February a little too). So since I shoveled the back porch I felt like that counted as a sufficient amount of upper-body exercise and also a little bit of a cardio, cause I just kept going and concentrated on my breathing and I felt my heart going pretty good for a while. And they always warn people who have heart issues (like me) to not shovel the heavy snow, or not do too much shoveling in general, so that's why I knew it would be a good cardio endurance exercise. I did not forget about this blog. In fact, it has been at the front of my brain pretty much every day because I have a constantly growing pile of notes on my keyboard about all my exercising and fooding (that is now a word). So yes, I am still keeping up with everything very well. There were only a couple times that I went almost four days without exercise and only a few days when I was really slacking on the fruit and other healthy foods. But I'm back on track and I hope to have a little time at the end of the week to enter in all these notes I took. So thanks for hanging in there, to anyone who is reading my blog.
I will update you later about how my week went but I figured I would first post this video here on my blog. I should have posted it early because this was sort of the intro video to my blog on my youtube channel. It's sort of the beginning of everything and the moment of my decision to make this a lifestyle change and not just a temporary experiment. It's still a sort of experiment but it's definitely not temporary. I've gotten to a point where I have conditioned my body well enough to stick with a lot of my 'health-nut' foods, refuse fast-food- and junk-food-like items, and I've decided that exercising needs to be high up on my priorities list. Nothing else really matters if your not feeling good or treating your body well. You can do all the studying for school, earning money, and "apple-a-day" stuff but, until you make it a lifestyle choice - to kick out all those crap foods that the industry has brainwashed you into thinking are 'good enough' and decide to expel your energy in a productive way such as exercising - then you'll just be miserably crawling through a muddy life and sink-holes will bring you down for sure. Here's a good analogy - Its the same as how water affects you. If you are eating good food and taking vitamins, all that nutrients will not even be absorbed correctly if you're not drinking enough water! It's pointless without water! A human can survive longer with just water than they can with just food (Fact)! So how can you do life if your body isn't even up to par? Life isn't applicable if your body is not there. It just makes sense that your body's health comes before you can even begin to live life. It's like people who run smack into a health issue, they say that everything was going well until that moment and then their life just stopped, and they had to first focus on healing their body before being able to actually live their life again. Many of us might not even realize how poorly nourished our body really is because of all the industry's crappy food that we're subjecting ourselves to. You really have to start being more aware of the ingredients in things, what are you really putting into your body? Remember, we humans are amazing animals, our survival instincts and abilities are miraculous at times but we are also very fragile beings. So, anyways, I'm trying my best to keep my body happy in the right ways so that everything else 'absorbs' appropriately. ;) Hello internet people. So this is what I did yesterday (sunday):
My mom also found a new kind of food called quinoa (keen-wah) that has even more protein than tofu and is supposedly without the side affects that soy products can cause. And it's actually quite tasty! It's a great replacement for rice and other starchy items too, it's the seed of a plant and apparently isn't a starch. I've been trying to resist the Goldfish crackers but my mom just made a batch of a sweet chex mix, it's heavenly and can find loopholes in your diet. It's not good. But I'm trying to control my portions when I do have any of the mix. Some food I had over the weekend... Last night, while eating my could-taste-better bean-and-tofu-on-wheat-bread burrito and watching my father enjoy a delicious traditional bean and cheese burrito with white bread, I realized something. Something that helped me change the way I look at food and also made me wonder why we even have the ability to find certain tastes pleasurable and other not so pleasurable. Why this torture? I say torture because when we grow up in a certain culture where our taste buds are conditioned to crave the taste of foods that are actually toxic to our body it's a little discouraging and frustrating when we realize we are killing ourselves and that healthy food (the stuff we should be eating if we want to live past year 50) might not always taste as epic as we think those BigMacs do. And for many, the junky toxic food can be quite addicting. It's like the effect that Morgan Spurlock experienced after only so many days of eating McDonnalds every day (Super Size Me). He said that, when it came to meal time, he would be craving that tasty MickyD's and he felt horrible when he wasn't eating it but as soon as he was chowin down on a death-patty he felt amazing. He was experiencing similar reactions to those of an addict.
I know that not every American eats fast food every single day, but that just gives you an idea of how one can really get used to, and possibly addicted to, anything that they inflict on their bodies. But what if we switched it around? Instead of pushing bad things on ourselves, doesn't it just make sense to push good stuff? What if we started eating healthy food, food that we know will definitely try its hardest to help keep us around for our grandchild's first birthday? Regardless of the taste would you do it? Think about this for a moment - every sensation we receive into our brain is nothing but an electrical signal. NOTHING but electricity. Just how they explain in the Matrix movies (video) and just how Echo explains in her vlog about how she deals with daily excruciating pain. Taste, touch, sound, sight, and all that, are simply the way that our brain interprets the signals that our body sends to it in reaction to stimuli in our environment. In one viewpoint, we can see this as a very direct and accurate way to interpret our environment, therefore we might completely believe everything our brain tells us (but if we should trust everything that our brain tells us then why would a heroin addict, who is on his death bed, go for another hit?). Or, in the other viewpoint, this signal actually takes a very complicated, intricate, and somewhat long road to the brain's concluding interpretation. I'd have to say, don't trust everything your brain tells you. We've got school to condition our brains for math, science, reading and such, but we've got the world to thank for conditioning our taste-buds for premature death and free self-preservation (mmm, tasty preservatives in my food, I'd die for 'em). (Don't get me wrong, I know that taste can help us a lot. When we are trying to determine whether something is too salty or if something will be fatty enough to keep us alive if we're stuck on a desert island. But otherwise, in the world we live, there isn't very much reason to rely on our taste signals anymore. Until we retrain them, at least, which is what I'd love to try doing.) I realized all this as I was eating my somewhat modified burrito (It really wasn't all that bad but I knew it could have tasted better) and I mentioned a shorter version of this theory about taste to my parents there at the dinner table and they agreed. Then, watching them continue to eat their greasy cheese and bean burritos with satisfaction, I knew we could probably all agree that there are many things that are easier said than done. p.s. - cheese hates me anyways, so that helped me not feel so bad about the cheese missing from my burrito ;) I was so tired last night after exercising that I only had the energy to type out the list I had kept from all the things I did and ate today. I realized that keeping a list while I did things really helped and I'm sure it can help the reader of the blog as well. So the following is a list of the exercising I did last night:
After the crunches I had begun to start feeling really tired, not like out-of-breath tired, but as if someone drugged me and I was so lazy, my muscles didn't care to move very fast. I felt like I could have went to bed right then. But instead I went down to eat my burrito.
Following the food note, this is my list of food that I ate yesterday:
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Hello.These are the notes from your average couch-potato that is simply trying to fix it before it breaks! check it..
January 2015
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