Have you ever considered becoming a vegetarian? I have at times. My husband really loves his meat though. But after seeing this video (and having a toddler myself) I'm really serious about giving it a go for myself (sometime soon maybe).
In this video you see some agile tigers who hunt down a young buffalo. Then a crocodile tries to get their catch away from them. The fascinating part is when the buffalo herd comes back in full force to try to save their young one. This was the #1 most buzzed about YouTube video of last year. I felt a terrible revulsion at watching this, though I realize this is nature and the most natural thing these animals can do in nature. But it would be something if humanity could rise above this.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Goodbye to Chips, Cookies and Candy
Sean has lost 60 pounds. He's 6 feet tall and now weighs 280 and has much more muscle mass than when he weighed 340 eight months ago. He says eating chips, cookies and candy were 90% of his problem. At the age of 27 he was already feeling bad each morning when getting out of bed. His feet would be sore and tight. He's given up the junk food and is exercising regularly (with the help of a SWAT personal trainer) and feels great. See his success story and photo here.
The photo shown here is another success story featured on the SWAT Personal Training website.
The photo shown here is another success story featured on the SWAT Personal Training website.
Looking forward
Yesterdays food was ok...
I had a pot of instant couscous and roasted veg... 220 cals
I also had 2 banana's and some chocolate whilst I was at work, and then home made curry when I got home. I was glad I froze it because after 9 lessons I would have ordered takeout for sure!
Yesterday went well. I was a little worried about going back to work after having such a lot of time off, but everyone was really cool. All 9 kids had been practicing and it was great to know that I they would be ready for their exams in March.
Today I have 4 new pupils. WOW! The first is a lady who had a knee op who wants to use her time off to the maximum advantage. The next 2 are a couple of boys who have had lessons before but must have moved to the area and need to resume their studies, then I have a regular that has changed from Saturdays, then I have an old pupil coming back into the fold. She took her grade 6 with me and also some preparation for her A level music performance and then stopped in the summer to concentrate on her studies. Now she has been given a place at uni, but she needs grade 7, so we are going to get that cracked now!
So At the moment DS is doing his Maths lesson and I am kind of getting my head ready for work. I have to remember to take new notebooks for the new pupils and a selection of graded material to give them something to do to ease them into my regime and a little bit of preparation on a personal study I have.
I am at present sitting in the classroom with DS and between us is his half finished breakfast in a bowl. It is some kind of chocolate pillow style cereal we got from France. I am not joking, but it smells EXACTLY the same as baby poo. That yogurty new born baby poo made of pure milk.
I was sitting here getting wafts from the past when I realised what it was. I had forgotten that smell, but isn't it funny that the minute you smell it (even after 9 years) you start to look around for the wipes and a new nappy!
I haven't had anything to eat today, and frankly the baby poo cereal has kind of put me off to be honest. I am going to make something to go in the oven for dinner when I get home so that I don't order take away again as I might be tempted if there is nothing ready to eat when I get home. I am going to make a lasagne. YEAH! Easy peasy and nice to eat with my band.
Right, have fun chaps!
I had a pot of instant couscous and roasted veg... 220 cals
I also had 2 banana's and some chocolate whilst I was at work, and then home made curry when I got home. I was glad I froze it because after 9 lessons I would have ordered takeout for sure!
Yesterday went well. I was a little worried about going back to work after having such a lot of time off, but everyone was really cool. All 9 kids had been practicing and it was great to know that I they would be ready for their exams in March.
Today I have 4 new pupils. WOW! The first is a lady who had a knee op who wants to use her time off to the maximum advantage. The next 2 are a couple of boys who have had lessons before but must have moved to the area and need to resume their studies, then I have a regular that has changed from Saturdays, then I have an old pupil coming back into the fold. She took her grade 6 with me and also some preparation for her A level music performance and then stopped in the summer to concentrate on her studies. Now she has been given a place at uni, but she needs grade 7, so we are going to get that cracked now!
So At the moment DS is doing his Maths lesson and I am kind of getting my head ready for work. I have to remember to take new notebooks for the new pupils and a selection of graded material to give them something to do to ease them into my regime and a little bit of preparation on a personal study I have.
I am at present sitting in the classroom with DS and between us is his half finished breakfast in a bowl. It is some kind of chocolate pillow style cereal we got from France. I am not joking, but it smells EXACTLY the same as baby poo. That yogurty new born baby poo made of pure milk.
I was sitting here getting wafts from the past when I realised what it was. I had forgotten that smell, but isn't it funny that the minute you smell it (even after 9 years) you start to look around for the wipes and a new nappy!
I haven't had anything to eat today, and frankly the baby poo cereal has kind of put me off to be honest. I am going to make something to go in the oven for dinner when I get home so that I don't order take away again as I might be tempted if there is nothing ready to eat when I get home. I am going to make a lasagne. YEAH! Easy peasy and nice to eat with my band.
Right, have fun chaps!
Monday, January 7, 2008
A Virtual Weight Loss Gadget
Hi everyone. My name is Adriana and I developed the virtual weight loss gadget you see on the right sidebar. Isadora has kindly let me spout off about it here.Although we've had this free virtual model for people to put on their website sidebars for a while now, just two weeks ago we got accepted as a gadget in iGoogle.
So now anyone who wants to try it on their own private iGoogle page can do so.
We are hoping to get some comments from people about the gadget. It's meant to be a fun tool for weight loss inspiration in that it shows what you might look like at your heaviest weight, current weight and goal weight.
One reader recently complained that the gadget makes a 100 pound woman look good in a red dress. This is something we need to fix very soon, as currently the images only go down to a BMI of 18, and everything below that looks the same. We definitely don't want to encourage thin people to try to get even thinner and are very aware of the serious illness of anorexia. (Update February 2008: We've made this change now.)
We realize this virtual model is simplistic and there's little people can add on it to make it look more like themselves. But our mega maniacal hope is that if enough people like it and use it, that we might qualify for Google's gadget seed investment program. At that point we would receive the funding to develop this model into something much more versatile and exciting!
There is one other virtual model that we are aware of and this is much more sophisticated than ours. It's called the My Virtual Model and it was developed by a very successful company that employs over 100 people. (See my overview of My Virtual Model on Squidoo for more info). One day we'd like to compete with My Virtual Model ! ;-)
I hope you have fun trying this gadget out and would appreciate any feedback.
Celebrity Diet Secrets
The Daily Mail has an entertaining article today about celebrity diet secrets. These celebrity diet tips are taken from the The Black Book of Hollywood Diet Secrets
. They list the tips alphabetically. Here's a couple of examples;A IS FOR ASPARAGUS: Celebrities live on it. It's a natural diuretic, it diminishes bloating and is on every Hollywood insider's must-eat list. Actor Owen Wilson never misses his daily double dose of asparagus and parsley.
B IS FOR BLUE PLATES: Why? Blue is the least appetizing color for human beings and studies show when you eat from a blue plate you eat less.
E IS FOR EPSOM SALTS: By bathing in these, you can actually-soak away the pounds
But despite all these entertaining tips, the main secret lies at the bottom of the article where the author says "These women don't skip the gym - ever. If they have to get up at 5am to start filming, they will get up at 3am to work out."
Check out their article about celebrity diet secrets here.
Back to the grind
Hello all. Back from France and in a pretty cheery mood.
Have not weighed myself or bothered with what I have been eating AT ALL in any dieting sense but have gained just 2lbs since 12th December. That is really good news and a boost for my confidence in the band.
I have not been sick for the last 5 days as I finally (DOH!) realised that I do in fact need to chew everything to a paste before I swallow. At times this has even found me hawking up an errant piece of food out of my throat before the reflex swallowing happens just in case, which I am proud about.
So I have been to Russia and France and eaten out every day and drunk wine every day too and only put on 2 pounds in nearly a month.
Now I am back to England and back to normal food hopefully I will start to see that shift downwards.
I have sworn of the booze because its just pointless wen you are trying to lose weight. I have also sworn off takeaway meals too. They are loaded with fats even though it looks like they are not. So I am gonna make a lot of meals on a Sunday to freeze for eating when I get home from work in the evenings and am too tired to cook.
Financially I am totally back to normal and we even managed to get DS one of those Nintendo Wii things. I couldn't believe it when we were looking around before Russia and they said they were sold out! Whats that about? Anyway, we got one in France! HA HA. So although we were prepared to go Wii hunting and DS was on a serious mission to find one, we didn't have to look further than Cite Europe as they had one there. Also it was only £200 so saved a load on the UK price too. So if you want one, go to France!
So DS is happily being a maniac in the front room waving white controllers about with his Dad. He had already bought 3 games for it before we went to Russia so he was so excited about finally getting it back to blighty yesterday that we had to set it up the moment we walked through the door and let him have a go or 12!
We also got loads of bargains in France in the clothes department. Seems they now cater for larger lasses and I bought myself a nice pair of sweat pants. I have taken to wearing them around the house and, I never though I would say this, but its really comfy doing that! Also DH got a couple of new pairs of track suit bottoms which were actually the correct leg length! He always wears his trousers out at the heel because they are always too long. But obviously French men must be shorter than your average UK bloke, so he was chuffed.
DS spotted some really nice jumpers too and there was so much more selection in the boys department that there is in the UK. Seems that French kids like to look smart sometimes (or rather their parents don't just accept them looking like scruff budgets) and they had a great selection of smart casual stuff.
Next time we go I will be more prepared. I could only fit in about 20 packets of coffee pods, but they were only 80p per packet of 36!!! I LOVE coffee and I use maybe a packet of coffee pads in my machine every couple of days. Not senseo, or anything like that, just standard coffee pads. How can they charge £3 in the UK? Its sickening. I usually buy them on the Internet from Belgium, and I thought that was a good deal at £120 a pack of 18. Next time, its actually worth me popping over to France to get them!
So anyway, back to band land... I have NO PAIN, NONE! I am totally fine in every way. I have been swimming and down water slides and walked miles and even done things like *shock horror* scrubbed floors and fed the cats without getting a sore gut!
Its amazing to be pain free.
In fact its hard to imagine the pain I was in now and how tired it made me.
In light of this, I have taken on 5 more pupils and am now working 5 days a week - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I am pleased that my pupil taking her Grade 7 Piano exam at the end of last year passed because I was so worried that without the regular lessons I had ruined her chances, but she passed really well! I am so proud of them all.
Now I can start to get on with my life and start feeling better about myself and hopefully get on with losing weight the way I should have been last year.
So onwards and upwards!
Shout out to D over in Aus - Have fun and hope you had a good journey hun! Will miss you!
Have not weighed myself or bothered with what I have been eating AT ALL in any dieting sense but have gained just 2lbs since 12th December. That is really good news and a boost for my confidence in the band.
I have not been sick for the last 5 days as I finally (DOH!) realised that I do in fact need to chew everything to a paste before I swallow. At times this has even found me hawking up an errant piece of food out of my throat before the reflex swallowing happens just in case, which I am proud about.
So I have been to Russia and France and eaten out every day and drunk wine every day too and only put on 2 pounds in nearly a month.
Now I am back to England and back to normal food hopefully I will start to see that shift downwards.
I have sworn of the booze because its just pointless wen you are trying to lose weight. I have also sworn off takeaway meals too. They are loaded with fats even though it looks like they are not. So I am gonna make a lot of meals on a Sunday to freeze for eating when I get home from work in the evenings and am too tired to cook.
Financially I am totally back to normal and we even managed to get DS one of those Nintendo Wii things. I couldn't believe it when we were looking around before Russia and they said they were sold out! Whats that about? Anyway, we got one in France! HA HA. So although we were prepared to go Wii hunting and DS was on a serious mission to find one, we didn't have to look further than Cite Europe as they had one there. Also it was only £200 so saved a load on the UK price too. So if you want one, go to France!
So DS is happily being a maniac in the front room waving white controllers about with his Dad. He had already bought 3 games for it before we went to Russia so he was so excited about finally getting it back to blighty yesterday that we had to set it up the moment we walked through the door and let him have a go or 12!
We also got loads of bargains in France in the clothes department. Seems they now cater for larger lasses and I bought myself a nice pair of sweat pants. I have taken to wearing them around the house and, I never though I would say this, but its really comfy doing that! Also DH got a couple of new pairs of track suit bottoms which were actually the correct leg length! He always wears his trousers out at the heel because they are always too long. But obviously French men must be shorter than your average UK bloke, so he was chuffed.
DS spotted some really nice jumpers too and there was so much more selection in the boys department that there is in the UK. Seems that French kids like to look smart sometimes (or rather their parents don't just accept them looking like scruff budgets) and they had a great selection of smart casual stuff.
Next time we go I will be more prepared. I could only fit in about 20 packets of coffee pods, but they were only 80p per packet of 36!!! I LOVE coffee and I use maybe a packet of coffee pads in my machine every couple of days. Not senseo, or anything like that, just standard coffee pads. How can they charge £3 in the UK? Its sickening. I usually buy them on the Internet from Belgium, and I thought that was a good deal at £120 a pack of 18. Next time, its actually worth me popping over to France to get them!
So anyway, back to band land... I have NO PAIN, NONE! I am totally fine in every way. I have been swimming and down water slides and walked miles and even done things like *shock horror* scrubbed floors and fed the cats without getting a sore gut!
Its amazing to be pain free.
In fact its hard to imagine the pain I was in now and how tired it made me.
In light of this, I have taken on 5 more pupils and am now working 5 days a week - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I am pleased that my pupil taking her Grade 7 Piano exam at the end of last year passed because I was so worried that without the regular lessons I had ruined her chances, but she passed really well! I am so proud of them all.
Now I can start to get on with my life and start feeling better about myself and hopefully get on with losing weight the way I should have been last year.
So onwards and upwards!
Shout out to D over in Aus - Have fun and hope you had a good journey hun! Will miss you!
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