Eggsparagus

 

Fresh, raw, chopped, thoroughly washed organic asparagus
Braised to warm in olive oil
Toss in 3 eggs and scramble them all around the asparagus
Sprinkle on grated cheese of choice (here finely grated mozzarella)
Sprinkle on Thyme
Serve Eggsparagus

…another version of eggsparagus:

http://thesproutdiaries.wordpress.com/tag/asparagus/

Enjoy with a Kale-Mango smoothie? Water? Enjoy and pretend the gift of food makes it your birthday! Pictured are leftover napkins from a birthday some weeks ago!

Boost Raw Casserole

Washed, chopped, raw organic yellow squash, broccoli, orange pepper, & gala apple in juice of fresh lemon and lime…

Adaptive Strategies: Boost Your Immune System & Solving the Paradox of Success

The change of seasons puts the micro-bugs into overdrive. Are our immune systems ready?

For those who have undertaken the training life, this is an important, if confusing question.

It has to do with the Paradox of Success. When we feel fit and well, we become susceptible to undermining the behaviors we lived to get there: exercising, eating right, sleeping well, and feeding relationships (filling buckets).

Success invites a temporary sense of immortality mania. In this state, we tend to over-extend ourselves at the expense of sleep, rest, exercise, downtime, relationships, and soon, wellness. Then we get sick.

If we can early-detect our sense of mania after successes, this is our first sign of coming under a spell of over-extension. So it is with our successes.

Here are some WebMD pages on positive immune system boosting routines — followed by some counter-intuitive surveys of findings about immune boosting — as linked-to below:

Immune System Busters & Boosters

Super Foods for Optimal Health

How to Keep Your Immune System Healthy

Guide to Ginseng as Immunity Booster

Can Exercise Reduce Your Risk of Catching a Cold?

Ten Surprising Health Benefits of Sex

Exercise After Chemo Helps Patients Ward Off Future Cancer

Yet when you consider that inflammation and upper-respiratory mucous generation (mostly against nasal passage infecting viruses) are immune system responses, some survey reviews of a few years ago suggest that bolstering the immune system will only increase inflammatory, super-charged immune systems. Is that bad, or good? More research is needed, but consider the following perspectives:

How Not To Fight Colds

Why everything you thought about colds is wrong! Scientists have finally separated fact from fiction about those sniffles

Our Immune Systems Were Built for More Challenges Than They Get

Given the above contra-pieces, here is a summary of useful takeaways:

1. Let go of unnecessary stressors and poor stress response habits, then burn-off, let loose, and heal from inevitable stress with the following;

2. Bolstering human relationships;

3. Consistent exercise;

4. Healthy, nutritional, natural eating and drinking with little or no refined, processed sugars, MSG, etc.;

5. Put our children’s well being first. (for parents, and for those without children, someone else’s needs).

There is more to this topic than a blog post can touch. Researching and reading up on the latest using article alerts from trusted sources, and weighing, comparing, and testing them is sane way to continue navigating.

Sea Beans or Salicornia can lend diversity in your healthy kitchen

Hat tip to Hank Shaw at Hunter-Angler-Gardener-Cook for a nice essay on ‘Sea Beans,’ a coastal, marshy plant reminiscent of ice plants, and nutritious for sure. I emphasize their variety-nutrition value here, because they were expensive…

Here’s what I did with them several weeks back (Sea Beans at left in first photo). I photographed this because it was my first time enjoying sea beans:

Mixed in with the risotto, garlic, potato mix, Ghee, organic vegetable broth, and less cheese than the color suggests. The other ingredients were a mixture of diced greens and onions I had on hand.

The Story of an FEIAA Meeting and Book Signing

What a privilege to sit down and talk with Federal Executive Institute alumni and friends last night. These professionals brought up a host of great topics. We talked gluten freedom, how eating, drinking, and sleeping are self-trainable behaviors, and how intelligent attunement can benefit us in every dimension of physical action as well as perception. These civilian and military public servants, technical, and knowledge workers spoke in ways revealing their high accomplishment, and by their intelligence had found the many packaged fitness offerings in the marketplace unfulfilling or unsustainable. We also discussed the texture of real life: traumas, shadows, and challenges in daily life. Being with intelligent people can be a good time, but being with intelligent, feeling people is the best of times, and that is what last night’s gathering was like.

We talked nuts and bolts: Muscle, Mileage, Mobility, Midsection/Core, Mountains’ Meaning, and more. Everyone in attendance had been athletic in their lives whether they considered themselves so or not, and I made sure to point this out first of all. We must be clear about our identities, that we are among other wonderful truths, mind-body entities capable of athleticism in physical sport, art, and work. Yes, the basic adaptive physical training pathways can expand to intellectual and for some, spiritual athleticism.

On the sheer material side, a la Steve Martin in The Jerk, needing to hold onto some possessions on an anniversary date when I had once felt I’d lost everything, I brought some self-comforting props for my presentation. Rip’s Fire Engine 2 (TM) Plant Strong cereal (my strength), and Toblerone (TM) swiss chocolate (my weakness). They seemed like the props to bring at the time.

Along with a box of books and a gym bag with all I needed, I walked into Breckenridge Craft Colorado, home to craft beers and LoDo Denver venue-name dropping. You may remember our former mayor and now Governor Hickenlooper owned a restaurant in LoDo (Lower Downtown), where rough-hewn, red-brick mellow-looking pubs and brewers fill old warehouse buildings near lofts where nearly everyone walking around down there looks like they do Pilates during breakfast, Yoga during lunch, and feed intravenously through a liquid food bladder while running long distances through dinner.

Well, that may be an exaggeration but I’ll tell you what is not: most people living in downtown lofts are single, young, career starters enjoying urban life to the fullest, and throwing their pliable youthful bodies into one or two training modalities, sometimes not really bothering with long range thinking. They live close to their white collar work. They’re busy on various levels, but many don’t yet know the change that comes with rising in the ranks of responsibility, having a family, and having more and more people they are responsible for (at which time they often move out of the lofts). That doesn’t make them lesser or lazy, they just fill more of their time focusing on self-development than other-development because of their phase in life. Logic says juggling a one bean bag business is easier than juggling and adapting to three or more bean bags’ businesses…

Leading me to the course of our discussions last night: How do those with hairy schedules at work and home, extra-curriculars in the community, and little time to themselves make changes that temper for them a sound, powerful training life with consistency, excellence, and purpose? How do they overcome the crushing, conflicting, Hoi Polloi of Expectation-a-Legal living and not become unhealthy?

That is what Farm Your Training Day was written to begin answering. It contains many specific guidances on HOW, not just statements and restatements of a vague vision. I couldn’t convey all of it in one sitting and standing. What I could convey are some of the broad brush adaptive training principles and dimensions, and suggest that the fullness of these is in the book. This includes illustrations, guidances, sources, stories, and some visualizable details over 276 pages and 17 chapters without pictures.

All I can say is, after reading the book, which is not a Polly-Anna Manifesto by any stretch, and which takes a look at the mundane and dramatic obstacles to a consistent training life that would wear us down and make us unhealthy, I think people find not only bedrock to stand on within themselves, but a process of remolding their bedrock again and again from the interior life. Their training lives spring out of this aquifer of intelligent, planned and unplanned energy and movement within that connects with the world around them. The book maps forward, not ‘out.’ I say forward, because every reader is invited to be the pioneer who adds to this map, innovates, and improves the book by going into other principles and dimensions of adaptive training.

I know something of what there is and wrote a book about it, yet part of that is seeing that I do not know the limits of what is possible.

Understanding Obesity

Understanding Obesity.

via Understanding Obesity at A Handbook for Fitness & Wellness Professionals by Laura Kennett.

A strong, strong summary that helps create a pathway to healing and change through understanding, empathy, and seeing the hurting person. Wisdom helps us withdraw judgment and make pathways to connection and friendship for those suffering from the afflictions that are obesity.

To My CrossFit Friends: Try Adaptive Training for the Long Haul

Adaptive training is sustainable, body-wise, and freer compared to many manifestations of CrossFit. CrossFit has gems to offer, but I believe they were borrowed gems. Those gems were adopted from elsewhere and combined in a “Box,” or a “crucible.” The toughest gems came from elite forces training, that is, combat training. Do or die training. Still, part of military training, even elite military training, is readiness. And readiness involves recovery, and non-injury. If you’re injured, you’re not ready. If you don’t recover properly, injury risk spikes.

For some that may have temporary appeal, especially to younger people. Yet younger people lack experience, and seldom see conflicts of interest in business models that target them. Young people often appear non-conformist…all at the same time in the same way. It is a vulnerable time. And some people are lonely. Lonely as hell. The comradeship they lack they may seek in an intense, physical, shared experience. For that reason, they are less likely to see those conflicts of interest lurking.

Let’s think outside the Box a bit. What is a healthy versus unhealthy gift of individual power to a culture or authority for mind-body training? Some CrossFit groups may dial-in a healthy balance in their approach, especially after recent controversy. On the other hand, there are the other reports:

Getting Fit Even If It Kills You

CrossFit’s Dirty Little Secret

Idea Fit Discussion

Navy Times

How CrossFit Forges Elite Failure

And you can Google the rest of the negatives, of which there are many.

On the other hand, you will also find the positives and Google them too. Any CrossFit member or gym owner will be more than happy to tell you the positives. Yet others will say if you aren’t committed, they don’t want you. And I’d say you should be ready to respond with a laugh at that manipulation game. Just remember, not every useful wonder of chemistry is good to mix at the same time. You can get hurt or die from the ensuing explosion or gaseous poisoning. True it is also of training. Excesses are not consistent with durable endurance or sustainable fitness, and therefore excesses in training are not always consistent with readiness.

Military, sport, art, and work readiness is about fitness and conditioning, but training isn’t about getting injured, it is about proofing against it when the real thing trained for is going on. Studies in stress inoculation make it just as much about mindset, adaptive sleeping, recovery, and rewiring after traumatic experiences. The stresses are measured and periodized by time of exposure and response during training. Check out this summary of researched-supported points in the work of Lt. Col. David Grossman, specifically:

Section three describes the mental attitude necessary to be a warrior. The book goes into greater detail about stress inoculation and its importance to effective, realistic training. There are also some important training principles outlined.

Principle 1: Never “Kill” a Warrior in Training. Learners are expected to complete a scenario even if hit, stabbed or shot. As a trainer, tell them, “You’re not dead until I tell you you’re dead!” Don’t give up, always win.

Principle 2: Try to Never Send a Loser off Your Training Site. Have your participants go through a scenario as many times as necessary in order to have them succeed. Scenarios designed to make the trainee look foolish or fail just prove that the training designers are jerks.

Principle 3: As a Trainer, Never Talk Trash about Your Students. Don’t ridicule or try to tell funny stories about the last trainee who tried to complete your scenario. Your role as a trainer/leader is not only to pass along knowledge but also to inspire. You cannot do this when you are not respected. If criticism is to be given, give it in private. If praise is warranted, do so publicly.

I’m sure this could include: don’t give Rhapdo to your trainees. Don’t injure your troops in training so they are disabled for the real fight.

But are you training for combat? It is as much about mindset, and handling what your body does. Listen:

LTC David Grossman interview.

So to some extent CrossFit, run by those who are trained coaches, can achieve some of these training goals. Yet not everyone is training to be a warrior any more than every tool in a toolbox is a hammer. However, even military training leaves boot camp behind and graduates into a more sophisticated, measured, and periodized experience over time. It mixes individual control with leadership. Most individual civilians who are training for combat don’t have the rest of the training. They are not warriors per-se, but want to be ready for what this society teaches them to fear — which is about everything. Which begs the question: should training be motivated by fear? Or should training be inspired by the commitment to master fear?

For now, let’s discuss.

Fueling, Hydration, and Management of Forces Training Dimension: Follow-Up Post

Policy on Heat Injury: Prevention, Early Detection of precursors, Awareness, Quick Response. If it happens to you once, as it did to me 21 years ago, you will want to adopt another policy. No Repeats! Adaptive Training has 7 dimensions, and one of them is Forces Training. Forces Training is about intentionally encountering the natural forces, physics, energies, and elements of our training, sport, art, or work environments under controlled conditions for the purpose of acclimation, adaptation, increased capacity, and performance.

This post follows up on the last post, “When a Run Is Not a Run,” thanks to a question from Simone, whose blog is at http://meltdowntoironman.com/ and whose training targets the 2014 IMOZ or Iron Man Down Under. I was laughing as I wrote this because I’m betting Simone knows more about this than I do, but here is my expanded answer anyway. Anyone have wisdom to add? Please chime in.

There are excellent multi-sport resources for fueling and hydration. I’m posting those below. After that, I post my own suggested lessons-learned from the summer weight-bearing running and hiking perspective.

Professional Multi-Sport Fueling:

Master Race Day Nutrition:
http://www.ironman.com/triathlon-news/articles/2013/06/race-day-fueling.aspx#axzz2aAEqlXGN

How the Pros Hydrated At The Hawaii Iron Man:
http://triathlon.competitor.com/2011/10/nutrition/how-the-pros-hydrated-at-the-hawaii-ironman_41584

Fueling for Open Water Swimming (underlying science & practical detail included by USA Swimming):

Click to access Nutrition%20Strategies%20for%20Open%20Water.pdf

Our fellow WordPressers you may already know have lots of practical posts on the swim:
http://waterbloggedtriathlete.com/

http://owswimming.com/

My running hydration lessons learned:

1. Hydrate with electrolytes;
2. sipping not gulping;
3. steady sipping;
4. steady nutrition bearing in mind your temps, climbs, and humidity as they will impact your calorie burn rate (your thermostat and cooling system needs fuel to work efficiently);
5. seek cooling opportunities during runs, i.e. shade, cool presses, ice to rub on your head, whatever’s legal, efficient, and doesn’t overly distract you;
6. use an SPF rated, moisture wicking hat if allowed;
7. use proven moisture wicking training wear (in my book I cite research that such garments have a micro-wind tunnel effect surrounding the skin);
8. if thirsty, you’re already dehydrated, so sip at first sign your mouth feels dry, and boost frequency;
9. recognize climbs or changes in running surface resistance may boost your need for replacement fluid;
10. Have a plan and method for hydration, fueling, transition and practice / perfect them during training and races;
11. Occasionally train yourself for short intervals without adequate nutrition and hydration in arduous conditions to practice adapting to unexpected circumstances, practice distinguishing signs of trouble in yourself early, and to become a more perceptive self-trainer. KEEP THESE TRAINING SESSIONS SHORTER THAN THE NORMAL TRAINING SESSION — you don’t want “authentic battle damage” in training, BUT you do want to very gradually increase your capacity and tolerance for hardship; unexpected snafus, changes in conditions using intervals. Also practice your remedial counter-measures during these sessions, and gauge their effectiveness, try different salves, etc. WARNING: GET YOUR PHYSICIAN’S CLEARANCE TO TRY THIS, AND TO WHAT EXTENT.
12. If you show symptoms of dehydration (thirst, urine darker than a light yellow) boost your continual sipping of electrolyte fortified fluids, redouble your focus on efficient form in your sport; seek cooling opportunities (shade etc.); and be sure you’re breathing as efficiently as possible. Watch for symptoms of heat injury developing (cramps, exhaustion, or stroke), which may be found here:

http://www.outdoorlife.com/blogs/survivalist/2013/07/survival-medicine-signs-and-field-treatments-heat-illnesses
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/heat-stroke/DS01025/DSECTION=symptoms

There are myriad forces, elements, factors, and related circumstances you may encounter to modify your sport, art, work, race, event, expedition, or training day: heat, cold, wind, rain, humidity, pressure, altitude, lack of shade, UV rays, reflection, water, fire, disaster, weather, lightening, mud, bugs, animals, inclines, navigation errors, forgotten supplies, contaminated supplies, and more.

Adaptive Forces, Movement with Forces, and Management of Forces training intentionally encounters these elements and natural forces in controlled conditions as primary and secondary training factors to reduce their impact on the outcome of your effort, and if possible, to find ways that these can help you become better. A more detailed, long treatment of this customizable training dimension is an entire chapter in my book Farm Your Training Day: An American Dream of Sustainable Personal Fitness.

Working-In Instead of Working-Out

there are many time-spaces to train in…

One day I saw that I had been driving in reverse: I was looking for a slot in the day to “work-out” instead finding time-spaces to “work-in” and integrate my training life with my whole life.

The chief and subtle difference is that working-in assumes a lifelong, committed training life awaiting us in real time all of the time, while working-out is some kind of exceptional act we set-aside. It takes on a clunky, conditional bigness as we add conditions for the “workout” to be “right.”

Physical training and exercise, if we’re medically cleared for it, is inherently good. It is worthy of working-in at many time-space points in our day.

Working-in is adaptive training. Cheers!

Weight Shifting Is a Shooting and Spending War, Not a Matter of Health Care Alone (Revised)

Defining Terms to Get Results

“Weight-loss” or “weight-gain” are too abstract to help us perceive what is involved in the overweight casualties of the New Millennium.

Truer terms are “Weight-shifting” and “Mind-Body War.” For-profit, the Weight-Shifters strategically bomb us with ill-messaging about food, good-times, and ourselves. We are taught that we are significant because we are brand-supporters. Tactically, we are disarmed by bright lights, warm colors, and enticing photos of food and drink.

Crazily, the image of ourselves as fit can even make us indulge, thinking we can “take it” at the drive-through, or that “fit people eat here.” We are guerrilla stricken during commutes, when we are tired, rushed, feeling deprived, getting in late, and grappling with daily problems. We are “too tired to fix dinner.”

Yet there is hope. There are natural and organic grocers, and grocery sections. There are often free samples of healthy fare at the grocery stores to ease the urgency of hunger. Or just buy a small green juice first, and sip while shopping.

Our Appetites

Our appetites are the most vulnerable, non-critical, and primitive pressure points in this weight-shifting war. Each assault exploits the tensions of the busy-life schema that put us in urgently hungry states of the primitive brain.

Each attack, and each battle lost, takes a permanent toll. The hit-and-run nature of the anti-health raids impels us to hit-and-run ourselves with the false notion that it will only be “this time.”

Mind and Emotions

A sober, stoic war-footing toward these messaging phenomena would help galvanize and unify our minds and emotions against these false-comfort attacks. Think about who you want to be when attacked, not what you want right then.

False comfort is fizzy, melted, hot, salty, sweet, fatty, calming, and ultimately, a Dopamine-dumping chemical frenzy to ease our tension, cull our cognitive dissonance, and crush our health. It also drains our wallets.

True comfort is being truly free and under control of our life direction. Shopping and preparation burns calories, and deepens our relationship to fresher, purer food.

Body

When we eat the refined, processed, sodium-filled, grease-bombs that explode in our tummies and calm our nerves, we are descending into sickness. Thinking the situation through is not so easy.

Thinking outside of our bodily frenzies is the beginning of freedom. Detaching a part of our higher minds to float above our animal-drives can help us become self-aware of our total beings, not just our Pavlovian-Lowest Common Denominator. We can trump our immediate appetites.

Conclusion

Adaptive fitness assumes that eating, drinking, and sleeping are self-trainable behaviors every bit as much as exercise and sport are trainable. We can eat, drink, and sleep in accord with who and how we want to be.

Offering a Book Discount in Honor of my Fellow WordPressers

Feel free to check it out! Use the link below:

Now Available at Lulu.com: Farm Your Training Day: An American Dream of Sustainable Personal Fitness

It’s official. Click on the book cover icon at the upper right side of this screen, and you can go there. The E-book will be available in about one week. For now, it is print on demand, with some extra cost of production. I tried to set as reasonable a print price as possible considering all factors. You can also click here:

Farm Your Training Day: An American Dream of Sustainable Personal Fitness

Coming May 31st: Available in Lulu.com outlets including B&N, I-Books, and more

Ten principles and seven dimensions of adaptive training, conditioning, and mental training for sport, arts, and work.

Farm Your Training Day contains ten principles and seven dimensions of adaptive training, conditioning, and mental training for sport, physical arts, and work. Available through Lulu.com outlets by the end of May 2013. Please link your family, friends, acquaintances, networks, and anyone you believe may benefit from sustainable fitness principles and applications toward a fulfilling training life, for life.

May your Memorial Day weekend be peaceful as you reflect on our fallen who have kept the peace for so many generations.

 

What Is Adaptive Fitness Training?

Sticky note for the peak register at Mount Parnassus, CO. A favorite photo because someone dedicates the summit hike “to Kristen who has never hiked above tree line.”

Soon it will be time to release the title, cover, and the book on adaptive training principles and dimensions.

Once the book is released, please feel free to share the book with your friends, family, and anyone you believe may benefit.

Adaptive training principles and dimensions can help anyone create their own best foundations and pathways to new levels of training consistency and fitness.

Afraid to Change

This is a very important post. Here is a wonderful human being, a brother or sister, a son or daughter, a father or mother, a friend; standing at a lookout near the front after fighting a day’s battle. Good for the writer.

On fitness, health, and training, here is the truth: we will face the battle of the day whether we are fit or not. We will be subject to it whether we fight or not.

The proposition of lifelong training discipline is to adapt to the battle of the day so we improve and excel at meeting objectives that matter to us. That we would be more present and capable to serve loved ones, friends, neighbors, and more, because we are fitter.

It is harder when one is alone, without a purpose in mind, to find a reason to stand and participate in the battle engaging both body and mind. When someone we love becomes an important reason to train, exercise, and improve, we get traction and toughen-up. It seems paradoxical that something so soft as love toughens us to live well.

back up your people by training yourself

tiredofbeingoldandtired

I’m really–times 500–afraid of change. Why is change necessary? Here I am, tiredOfBeingOldAndTired, needing to lose  30–40 pounds or suffer and die, and I won’t change! I always say to myself: After this candy bar, I won’t eat candy bars anymore.  Uh humm. Right.

I read something last week, which totally applies here:

Pain is part of Change, Change is the price of Progress, and Progress is the Purpose of Life.

So today I made a few small changes: I only overate at dinner; I ate veggies and fruits on purpose; I drank loads of water; I exercised for 30 minutes. If I did that every day, over time my body would change?

View original post

You may ask yourself…about food choices

Where did a platypus learn to fight so good?

By adaptive training, no doubt. And most likely, eating most of his meals at home of high quality, healthy food choices from his supermarket where he likely appears as a mild mannered, everyday platypus. Still, if he must hurry out on a secret mission and needs to grab a quick bite out, you can bet he adapts to find the healthiest choices he can.

I can’t help but like Perry Platypus, his hat choice and the serious mind depicted underneath. He is a Platypus of few words who always does the right thing. He finds creative ways to get out of situations that may vex non-secret agents. What’s his secret? No one knows because he’s got character and keeps his cards close. Neither is Perry discouraged that his villainous opponent is not as ambitious as those of other action heroes, limiting his covetousness to his local tri-state area. Despite that, Perry is as serious as though the world was at risk even if few know about it. That’s dedication.

All of those attributes are captured well in the Subway campaign to give away Perry Platypus paraphernalia, including reusable bags that can be brought back to Subway to carry one’s sandwiches away instead of the usual plastic bag. See the photo close up above.

For environmental sense and because Subway does have a few lower calorie, lower sodium, zero trans fats, fast food choices on the healthier side (compared with most), I was glad to see them do something to interest kids; so I give the Perry bags a good review here.

Healthy as its PR sounds, there are plenty of fatty, sugary and salty ingredients and sauces at Subway. It remains for parents to guide their kids in making low sodium, low fat sandwich and side choices at Subway. Surely Jared the Subway guy did not major in Spicy Italians with chocolate chip cookies and cola during his career promoting Subway.

For the record, Subway’s website publishes guides to its menu items’ nutritional data. I like the six inch egg white on flat bread with cheese and a few veggies thrown in. As fast food goes, it is a positive, low fat, low cholesterol meal with good protein.

No doubt you may know of higher yield choices, so please comment about them. I know Subway’s a chain, and for some that’s lame, but then if it does something that heads in the right direction, that has impact. I hope to see organic choices popping up in “fast casual” chains, until it is the new normal and not an expensive fancy.

Done with Book awaiting Permissions for citations into February 2013

“The Independent Athlete” is complete. FYI: For strategic and tactical reasons, that is not its real title. It’s been fun coming up with titles, from boring and technical to rugged and simple, but it really wouldn’t be prudent to jump too far in front with the real deal.

I am still awaiting permissions on citations and attributions I have included in the book. This will delay publication into February 2013, however, since Microsoft Corporation can delay a product release, I guess I can delay a book release for the same month.

How’s that for rationalization and band-wagon-speak?

I’ve been absorbed and probably will be for another few weeks, however, look forward to the fluidity of interacting with your blogs and training topics as before. I’ve missed that.

May your training be so Pacific and nourishing as to elevate you every morning, and tuck you in for sound sleep every night.

Torreys

Updated: The Independent Athlete (with its very own independent moving deadline)

Book in Progress, BY OLD CALENDAR EASTERN ORTHODOX CHRISTMAS or BUST!

That’s JANUARY 7, 2013.

Discussions on Agent and Amazon on the business side before self-publishing.

Editing phase ongoing.

Citadel climbed in September 2006. Motivation to return after book finished. Like when will that be?

As you were…

keep moving through the holidays

Traditionally the winter season gives rise to binge and bust behaviors in which lots of eating and indoor gatherings make us feel cozy, well fed and mellow. We might even get a little sick. There’s too much sugar onboard for many, and things just don’t feel the same.

Soon, specials at gyms and fitness outlets will make their come ons for the bikini body preparation period. Diets follow. It’s become a seasonal game.

I think that if there was ever a time for staying the same from an exercise and eating standpoint, winter is it.

We can eat the good stuff, just in no greater amount than you would in July or February.

Be “as you were” even though holidays offer so many culinary and sedentary opportunities. This averts binges and busts. The extremes cause most of the unwanted weight gain for most Americans.

I would be willing to bet there is even a hibernation instinct wired into us somewhere that makes us want to stay in, eat and sleep a lot. Should living like that become absolutely necessary, I’m sure we’ll all have no problem adapting.

Otherwise, we can enjoy a very pleasant holiday season living in balance.

Science Daily: Older People Who Diet Without Exercising Lose Valuable Muscle Mass

Generations staying fit together…

This 2008 piece is relevant to people who are undertaking weight loss. At the link, you will find other very useful related pieces on exercise, attitudes toward exercise and aspects of weight loss. A hat tip to my AFPA newsletter for referencing this and other Science Daily pieces.

Dr. William Davis, author of “Wheat Belly” Claims Engineered Wheat Protein Drives Weight Gain

He focuses on a genetically designed wheat protein called gliadin in this CBS interview.