utenzi

Yesterday Kim and I went out and did some shopping. The goal? To find her a birthday present. She veered towards the practical and decided on a new phone system for her house so we went to Best Buy to see what they had. Kim's current phones are kinda old and the batteries only last around 20 minutes so they really do need replacing. The phone we really wanted to get was out of stock. It had a feature that would allow it to ring when your cell phone was called. Pretty handy since often your cell phone is on the other side of the house and you can't hear it ring. But since it wasn't available, the phone we did end up getting was very pretty and had 2 satellite phones and an answering machine. We also picked up 2 blouses at Old Navy---and they were real bargains. Now I'm not going to tell you Kim's age since that would be impolite but AARP is after her now. After that we went to a mall and had lunch at California Pizza Kitchen . We shared a pizza and it was the most f...

On Sunday I roasted a 15 pound turkey. It'd been in my freezer for a year, ever since the great Thanksgiving sales of last year. So, when the sales started this year and I wanted to buy another two turkeys---I had to make room for them by tossing the old one in the 'fridge. I couldn't eat Mr Turkey right away since I was going to Kim's that weekend, and then I was going to my parents in SC for a few days before we all went to Georgia to spend Thanksgiving with my brother's family. And, come to think of it, I had turkey at all 3 places... And as soon as I got home from my parent's place early on Sunday I had to take out that turkey and start roasting it. It'd been in the refrigerator for over a week and since it was a year old to start with... but another turkey???!! As you can see in the pic above, I cooked the bird until it's tender thighs were nearly 185f. Yum-yum. And I've had dinner every night this week, Sunday through Thursday, using the breast...

Julie's coming over tonight and we're making dinner together. She's going to lend me her experience and show me the right way to make risotto. We're planning on using a recipe for risotto from Epicurious as a template. I'm used to being the font of trivia and odd information in a relationship but that isn't the case here. Julie has mentioned so many things that I'd never heard of before in the two brief weeks that we've been dating that I'm starting to believe that she just makes things up! A case in point happened last night while talking on the phone. Julie said that in the past certain people, referred to as mellified men , had diets composed of only honey so that after they die, other people could eat them. Ewwww! Here's a little bit of the Wiki article on it: ...it says in Arabia there are men 70 to 80 years old who are willing to give their bodies to save others. The subject does not eat food, he only bathes and partakes of honey. After ...

This weight loss ad campaign has been on the web for a while now. Every time I see it I cringe. The picture on the right looks horrible to me. Skeletal and emaciated. What do y'all think? Is she better looking before or after the weight loss?

Mood often drives what I eat. Lately I've been grumpy and when that is so, I generally am too lazy to do any cooking. As a result I've had little other than potato chips and Pepsi this past week and a half. And my belly has rejoiced. My body, and more directly--my intestines, really handle candy, soda and naughty things like that quite well. Unfortunately today I decided to cook my first "real food" in the past 12 days. Those burgers over there to the left. Big mistake. HUGE! (I think I lifted that from the shopping scene in Pretty Woman) Tomorrow I go back to salty snacks and soda. At least the burgers tasted really good. :-)

Every so often I eliminate some food from my diet for a period of time. It's partially in the name of losing weight, partially good health, but mostly just me being obstinate towards myself instead of others (for a change). My method every time I do this is to not buy the food items in question--using the reasoning that if I don't buy it I can't eat it. And it's a lot easier for me to not buy something so that when I get those nasty cravings, I'm too lazy to go out special to get said items. It works for me 'cause I hate making special trips like that. This time around I'm eliminating soda, kid cereals, and salty snacks. I ran out of chips 2 weeks ago, soda on Saturday, and kid cereal about 5 days ago. Tonight is the first bad night--soda is the thing that is hardest for me to do without--but I suspect the next 4 weeks will see me lusting after soda a lot worse than tonight. The damn stuff is so cheap and wonderful. I can't quite remember why I even eli...

Here's an excerpt from a science journal that is kinda interesting. Apparently just having extra fat around your middle is enough to make you hungrier--which of course triggers eating and more fat. Fat wants company? It would appear to be so. Weird. Can your belly fat be making you hungrier? According to a recent issue of The FASEB Journal , the extra fat we carry around our middle could be making us hungrier, so we eat more, which in turn leads to even more belly fat. Dr. Yaiping Yang and his colleagues at the Lawson Health Research Institute, which is affiliated with The University of Western Ontario, found that abdominal fat tissue can produce a hormone that stimulates fat cell production. Yang calls the hormone Neuropeptide Y or NPY. Discovring that this hormone is produced by abdominal fat tissue was a surprise since previously NPY was believed to be produced only by the brain. Yang believes this novel finding may lead to new therapeutic targets for combating obesity. The trad...

Food, that is. Most of us love to eat--and it shows. In my case, of late, Extra Cheese Tombstone frozen pizza is my version of "too much." I often eat a whole one when I get home from work. Since my IBS is a little touchy at times, I usually don't eat anything until I get home from work and a little 25 ounce pizza is just the thing to ease those hunger pangs. LOL I'm lucky I'm not as big as a house! There's almost 1,500 Kcals in that pizza I use as a big after-work snack. The same issue of the British Medical Journal that contained the back study that I mentioned yesterday also had a discussion of obesity and how the public health community might --or might not --be intentionlly misinterpreting how much obesity exists and how much impact that extra weight has on our collective health. *whew* That was one long sentence! I doubt anyone questions the intentions of the public officials in question. Their motivation in encouraging people to lose weight is no doub...

I'm on a diet right now that most would find... let's say "unconventional". Yes, let's describe it that way. Basically all I do is eat Smarties. No finesse to it. Just eat Smarties day and night. I bought over 20 pounds of them on post Halloween clearance so I won't run out of them until early December. Scary but I've already gone through over 12 pounds of the things in 4 weeks. And weirdly enough I've lost 8 pounds during that same time period--mostly off my belly. I think I might be torturing my pancreas to death--and not doing my liver any good either. Well, time for me to go eat my lunch. You can see it up there clinging to the keyboard of my laptop. Mmmmmm. Smarties!

The subject of one of Wired's little sidebars in the November issue is caffeine and soda. That's not surprising when you consider how many programmers and other geek-oriented folk like to stay up all night. Caffeine definitely helps in that quest. The sidebar starts with the disclaimer that no soda comes close to coffee, the gold standard, with on average over 120 mg per 12 ounces. However Vault Zero does approach that with 74 mg--quite a bit for soda--and after that the pack trails quite a bit. In the 50's are Pepsi One (57.1), Diet Mountain Dew (55.2) and Mountain Dew (54.8). I wonder why the diet version has more caffeine? Of those the only one I drink is Mountain Dew though I've switched to Sierra Mist of late--and that has no caffeine in it. Still, my favorite sodas are Dr Pepper, which clocks in at 42.6 mg, and Pepsi which has 38.9 mg of caffeine. The soda lowest on the list is Barq's Root Beer at 22.4 mg. I like Root Beer but rarely drink it. I guess that...

I'm sick as a dog today. My body is amplifying viruses like nobody's business and I place all the blame at the foot of a Chipolte pepper that I was nibbling on a few days ago. Who knew that a little spicy repast like that could bite me in the foot (actually my throat is sore, not my foot, and there's some fever too) this way? It makes a person wonder if all that capsaicin eating just isn't worth the pain and suffering. I might have to go back to my normal diet. It might be bland, but at least it doesn't threaten my health and well being. What do you think? Spicy and dangerous or bland and safe?

I saw an interesting article today on ScienceDaily . The article relates how increased soy consumption seems to have the effect of decreasing weight. The dateline was yesterday (6 May 2007) and the story originated from a University of Illinois press release. The first thought that comes to my head is that anyone who's eating a lot of soy is going to lose weight because it tastes awful and you tend to eat less. Or maybe you just lose your survival impulse. LOL However, according to Dr. Elvira de Mejia, a University of Illinois assistant professor of food science and human nutrition, "Weight loss is a complex physiological event. It's not always as simple as 'Eat less or exercise more,' losing weight is a cascade of many steps, beginning with the production of certain hormones and continuing with their action in the brain". Who knew? Dr de Mejia and Vaughn, a graduate student, noticed a significant weight loss in the group of animals that had received one of t...

As of 6:35pm today I am off that no-animal diet that I'd been doing the past 3 weeks. I ended the diet with two roast beef sandwiches. Mmmm. Toasted oat bread with two slices of provolone cheese and 4 slices of roast beef in each sandwich with just a little horseradish in there too. And then toasted a bit so the cheese was just starting to melt. It was a religious experience! Maybe tomorrow I'll start back on milk chocolate... I bought a pound of both the beef and the cheese so I'll be doing this several more times. Cows are so special.

After Ren left to go back home I watched 60 Minutes and The Amazing Race: All Stars . TAR was the first episode in the new All Star season. It's really kinda ridiculous but I love that show. I didn't think I'd like this new format--but I was wrong. I just eat this show up. There's only one team that I don't like though two of the other teams have one member annoys me. The team I don't like is the cousins and they managed to squeak by elimination tonight. Darn. My favorites are Rob and Amber , of course. He's so competitive he pisses a lot of people off but I enjoy the humor he displays when he's trying to get ahead. The guys in Team Guido strike me the same way. In the first season they were rather mean spirited but I suspect the past 5 years have mellowed them a bit. I won't give anything away about the episode since I know a lot of people haven't seen it yet. Here's a link where host Phil Keoghan talks about the new show a bit. Mary and I...

Okay. As of 45 minutes ago I became a temporary vegetarian. I'm already mourning the loss of cheese and butter. I suspect missing eggs will follow soon. The meat I can go without pretty easily for a month but denying myself cheese and butter will be tough. As Roxanne reminded me the other day, there's lots of tasty edibles like muffins that contain these banned substances. In the case of muffins it's eggs. That'll go for cake also. Sure there's mixes that only need water but that's because they already have egg solids within them. So I can't have them either. On the other hand, I get to eat as much rice, beans, and pasta as I want. Potatoes and bread too. Just no butter on that bread or potatoes. And no meat sauce on the pasta, and no franks or bacon in the beans. It's going to be a long month--but fortunately it's the shortest month of the year! For anyone just seeing this blog for the first time, I've got a bunch of food sensitivities and so I...

In February I'm going to go on a one month regimen of not eating animal products. I've not had any meat in two weeks so in a way I've already started. I have, on the other hand, been eating a lot of eggs. They've all been in the form of muffins. Each batch of 5 or 6 muffins requires one egg and I've made 8 batches in the past 4 days. 10 muffins a day I've been eating. And that's about all I've eaten in that time span. By the way, to the left is my muffin maker--it does 3 at a time and takes about 6 minutes per batch-- along with the mix I used, an egg and some milk (actually half and half). I can't explain these little food craze things I go through but it's been true all my life. One week it'll be mac & cheese casserole or maybe lasagna and that's all I'll eat...until my next interest comes through and that could be pancakes, pork chops, cheese and crackers or anything else. It's very unpredictable. I know a lot of people nee...

I should never make decisions on a day when I wasn't able to get any sleep the night before. They tend to be hasty and not well thought out. But here goes... I think I'm going to switch to the "dark side" for a month using February First as the kickoff date. That it's the shortest month of the year is just good luck. Ha! The darkside in this decision is going without meat. Vegetarian. Eeek. God I need to get more sleep--I'm already regretting this. And since this has nothing to do with politics or being sensitive to the needs of other animals but rather is a test to see how sensitive my IBS ridden innards are to animal proteins--I'll probably jettison eggs as well and definitely cheese. God I need to sleep more. This is a hasty decision. The best aspect of this is that maybe I'll lose some weight. I'm 219 as of this morning and that's a good 40 pounds over what I should be. There's no way I'll drop back under 200 but going to 210 would ...