Year 2 Week 2 Day 1

The mantra is "one week, one pound."

Alright from last Monday's 317.0 to today's 316.8 and that is a 0.2 pound drop on a week that had no excuses so I am feeling pretty crappy about that. I did eat pizza for dinner three nights last week and that was pretty bad. Also had a few delicious sandwiches this week too and we all know the evils of carbs.

The exercise routine, barely qualifies as that, suffered a bit with the really cold temperatures and the really warm bed. No, I did not want to get up and go to work much less crank through 7-10 minutes of calisthenics and free weight lifting. I am developing real shoulders though and that's kind of nice.

Now I have to focus on the after work exercise program of stationary bike for as long as I can up to 30 minutes. If I get up to that I might even get a real bicycle again. Or that LED TV I was talking about that week. Yeah, you're right, it'll be the LED.

I got nothing else to say really. So here's the final week to week goal. The 0.8 missed this week gets rolled into next week and that means 315.0 is the goal and no cheats in the Monday – Friday routine. Minnesota Vikings on at 1PM might require some sort of treat, but we'll wait and see if I get the afternoon thing lined up.

Later.

Blog Block

OMFG!

I really have been posting to the ether. I have been posting weekly since Week 1 I swear it. I started using Word and then posting from inside Word to get it to this bokg and I just checked now and I don't see any of the blogs that were supposedly sent this way.

I am pissed. I will get to the bottom of this. I am betting the new filters are blog-blocking me from work.

So the measurements are done. BTW weight this morning was 313.2 and the BP was 139/87 but I'll get the historical details up from home this weekend.

Later.

Week 26 Day 1

The mantra is "one week, one pound."

Last week was 321.2 and this Monday morning was 322.4 pounds. That's a 1.2 pound increase and that is not so awesome! Next week's goal in the ever present one week, one pound is 313.2 so we'll see if I can catch up in time to enjoy a mostly worry-free Christmas. That's looking as likely as an Atlanta Falcons play-off run now, but keep hope alive.

I am hitting an interesting series of problems. I am sure everyone else is familiar with the highs and lows of extreme dieting. I am betting if I'd stick with the all liquid thing it would go one way and if I went back to a more balanced eating schedule it would go the other way but I am suffering from both. I have really disgustingly loose and oily stools that make farting way too dangerous. In fact even a good urine stream could result in some slippage so I am squatting to pee most of the time. So I am looking at a fiber supplement this week.

My weekend eating is bad mostly because with the weather and my lacking social calendar means I sit at home and eat even if I'm not hungry. That and I nap a lot which burns a lot less calories than any other kind of exercise. Bad choices dining out are entirely personal and predicated on the idea that why would I pay to eat something that I don't think I want to eat. If I am paying twenty five bucks I want the tasty cheese sticks and the greasy Reuben sandwich with fries not a grilled chicken salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing and a glass of water.

And while I get into the groove of exercising on a Monday-Friday basis I find my physical activity level decreases dramatically on Saturday and Sunday. That 's bad for two reasons at least. One I have a fairly low activity level in general and two I am eating more on those two days so that's really taking the calorie intake versus calories burned in the wrong direction.

So things are progressing, this week through regression, and it's easy to lose focus. This is the half way point (looking at a full year as a complete point) and this is a big change from where I started on Week 1 Day 1.

New measurements this week so await with bated breath.

Later.

Week 21 Day 1

Seven weeks down and life to go.

The mantra is "one week, one pound."

Last week was 323.0 and Monday morning's was 321.4, that is -1.6 if I did the math right. So next week's minimum is 319.2.

So I missed the goal for the second time and it still sucks. I am still tracking as if I lost the one pound for two weeks hence the minimum of 319.2 instead of 320.4.

Obviously I have no one to blame but myself. Maybe that is why people get married, so they have someone else to blame when they get fatter. What sucks is that while I still enjoyed a nice dinner on Friday night and Saturday night I didn't eat a lot of food during the day. The burger and chili cheese fries at the Mac on Sunday night might have been a tipping point. Really the issue is the lack of aerobic activity and the portion sizes of my meals. Low calorie and high volume is great, but especially when eating out I have trouble getting the low calorie part while still desiring high volume. So my brother is right I have to wean down my meals to shrink down the capacity of the old stomach. It probably helps him that he has undiagnosed stomach cancer or a tapeworm or something.

So now this week is hell, again, because the penalty clause remains and I took the Healthe Trim this morning. That means NO caffeine this week and drinking water all morning and waiting three hours before breakfast. If I miss again next week, I think the clause is removal of a limb, but I'll just be back to tracking calories and taking food pictures again. Good times. (edit) I think the second week penalty will be walking to and from the mail box at home and/or sitting on the exercise bike for 15 minutes. We'll see how it goes.

The second goal? The second goal is getting better.

I did my seven minute morning perk up five times last week. It's not bad and I am still trying out different exercises. Still looking to add an evening seven minute workout before going to bed or a bit earlier. Now that the weather went from way too hot to way too cold I am still dubious about walking outside. Plus the whole swine flu thing has me leery of people and the outdoors in general.

Took the clothes to Goodwill and now I am cleaning up the stacks of bills to be filed and generally getting the office in shape again. I got a wireless printer/scanner/copier so I could move some furniture around and remove the old scanner. Now I really can launch a space shuttle with 2 Desktops and a Laptop running at the same time. After getting the bills and my checkbook for 2009 straightened out I have to work on cleaning out the office closet. Probably time to dump the old comic books. Anyone want 20,000 or so comics? Cheap. Plus I have assorted collectable, that term is used loosely, cards.

Still have way too many books filled with way too much crap too. CDs, DVDs, cassette tapes, action figures and the like are also taking up too much space in my place. I'll be happy if I don't have to move all that stuff in the next transition.

'til then I will keep on keeping on.

Later.

Week 14 Day 1

Alright back from vacation and back to the regularly scheduled life.

Meals are back on track and things and settling down.

The holiday weekend wasn't bad eating wise despite my better efforts and I look forward to making good food choices this week.

Let's go back and reset the numbers. When this whole thing started fourteen short weeks ago I was at three hundred and fifty pounds. Now that is nowhere near my all time scale tipping of a verified three hundred and seventy, but it was pretty bad. I did not feel well and my body was giving clear indications that what I was doing to it was not making it happy in other ways.

My lowest weight so far has been three hundred twenty one and a decimal or two and this morning was at three hundred thirty one and a half. My specific goal is one pound a week and that resets every week. Read a different way on week 66 day 1 I will be no less than 52 pounds lighter than I am today and that fits nicely with a two year goal of being around 220 pounds, but that's week 118 and who can plan that far in advance. A key to goal setting is to come up with big goals, but create small action steps that get you through each day.

On that front my action steps are no longer picture taking of food because I eat pretty much the same thing every day and it gets boring. I also won't be detailing the calorie counts anymore as I am getting well versed in the counts of each item of food I eat regularly and I cannot find counts on some irregular items. But we'll have the numbers here.

Action step one: daily exercise.

I have dumbbells and an exercise bike. I have a relatively safe walking area for a middle aged white dude. My body is stable and healthy enough for sustained movements. Now I have to get my mind in shape to do this starting today. I think the health wackos are trying to get people up to 30 minutes a day and like seven days a week. Right now I hope to get up to 30 minutes a week and move up from there.

Action step two: lower blood pressure.

I can track my BP at home so we'll follow this progress as the weight goes down and the exercise time goes up. I also will be avoiding salt even though I never use table salt already. I eyeball most food sodium content and stay away from 20% per servings or more items. Yes, I haven't had hamburger helper in months and I mostly avoid fast food and French fries both are loaded in salt. The trick is catching the low calorie, low fat foods that make up taste in salt content and I am getting better at catching those too, mostly frozen prepared meals where the sodium content isn't advertised.

Action step three: clean up my life.

To the extent that eating is emotional and comforting I will endeavor to make my life less emotionally tumultuous and more stable. I already started on this with an easy step of cleaning out my closet of old clothes and some junk. Next is cleaning out old books, then comic books and finally old furniture and crap I just don't throw away. I am also in the process of cleaning up my credit which for many reasons, none of them smart or logical, is terrible. I will put up a running total of debt as I already track this. The reward once I straighten that all out is either a house or a car. The time line matches up too as I figure this to take two years to put right.

So that is it for the serious portion of this run.

How about those Miss State Bulldogs? Forget that it was Jackson State University and School for the Blind. "We" won 45-7. When was the last time MSU put that number on any opponent? Not once under former head coach Croomer, not once. Even better the scoring happened in the second half, which indicates actual coaching is going on and schemes can be adjusted during halftime. At Auburn this Saturday night and they are a team in turn around too. We did well there two years ago and lost at home last year, but both teams have first year head coaches and more questions than answers and maybe we'll see a great game.

And fall television starts this week, technically. CW and FOX are rolling out some shows about a week ahead of everyone else, so catch the top rated, for one week, all new "Melrose Place". I'll be watching it for Katie Cassidy.

Later.

Week 12 Day 2

Monday was a mellow day. Late morning, some coffee and then we visited Uncle George and Aunt Audrey. I also got a lotto ticket so maybe 45 million reasons to come back soon.

Food wise wasn't too crazy, went to Alcapulco for Mexican food. I had the enchilada and a taco, both beef, along with rice and beans. Also a bit of cheese dip and salsa and chips. All very nice. Then for dessert we went to an awesome pie place called Betty's Pies where I had banana cream pie and strawberry-rhubarb pie, also had a bit of 5 layer chocolate pie and a taste of lemony heaven pie or some such name.

Dinner was a great grilled steak, microwave mashed potato stuff, and a really fantastic salad. I made the salad. Dessert was the last of the chocolate ice cream and the last of the vanilla ice cream.

I barely fit into the same shorts I wore on the way to Minnesota last week. I think they were shrunk in the wash.

I am debating a weigh in tomorrow morning versus the weigh in on Monday next week when I am back in the swing of things.

I got errands to run when I get back tomorrow. Oil change, emissions tests, hair cut, groceries and the like will fill up my Wednesday before returning for two long days of work before the holiday.

Should be able to post this tonight and I doubt I can ignore my scale in the morning so I've post them numbers in the am.

Later taters.

Week 12 Day 1

In Minnesota there are two food choices, bad and worse. You don't just eat cheese, you eat cheese after it's battered and fried and then dipped in a ranch dressing or some other sauce/condiment. It's always fun food and the Minnesota State Fair ups the fun level by making mini-foods and foods on sticks. Mini-donuts, trout on a stick and the like are staples of the fair days. I did have a fresh roasted ear of corn that was slathered with butter and salt and that was close to the healthiest thing I've eaten so far.

Well, I have had a few salads with balsamic vinaigrette dressings. Before going on to eat massive lasagnas and pizzas with extra cheese, that is.

So starting Wednesday with the vacation I had one bloody Mary and three rum and cokes along with a bag of TGI Fridays cheese and sour cream chips on the plane. Then in MN, we went to the Ho Ho Gourmet for Kung Po Chicken. Dinner was Mama's Pizza with a few deep fried onion rings, mostocholli with cheese and pizza with sausage, mushroom, onion and extra cheese.

Thursday was Fair day, the first day of the fair and we started with Pronto Pups, then a peach scone, then a Dole Whip, then a part of a crème puff, then cookies, then an ear of corn, then mini-donuts and somewhere in there a cherry cordial and a gooey turtle. That was breakfast and maybe lunch. Went to see G.I. Joe, not great but not the worst movie of the summer thanks to Transformers 2 and there I had a large soda pop (it is MN) and a small dish of ice cream. Dinner was grilled steaks with whipped potatoes, salad and grilled peppers.

Friday was a nice day. Went to Dunn Bros. for a coffee and a blueberry muffin and free Wi-Fi. Lunch was Donatelli's for a salad, a lasagna and a taste of Hot Fudge Cake, Strawberry cake and Tiramisu. And dinner was grilled hamburgers with medium cheddar cheese slices and a special chili-mustard spread, grilling beans and pasta salad and watermelon.

Interspersed were more cookies and a bunch of soda and a little bit of ice cream.

And that is where we stand three days in. I am guessing I am still at -20, which considering I was at -28.4 on Weds. morning isn't super-fantastic. I am also estimating my calorie count to be around 12,000 so far this trip…and counting.

Saturday's meals were simple. I had a version of Eggs Benedict and a loaf of banana bread at Woodbury Café, then a large fruit punch at the movies and then dinner with Grandma. At dinner we ate cucumber salad, beer can chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, a lovely pinot grigio and for dessert a bit of ice cream and a lot of Grandma's chocolate cherry bars. Then a little later I had some left over pizza while watching football.

Sunday I had some chocolate nirvana drink at Dunn Bros. with a Bavarian crème doughnut, I had a medium root beer and pack of M&Ms at the movie, then we went to Granite City Bar and Grill for lunch and I had Mountain Dew, 7 layer dip, spinach and artichoke dip, a huge peppercorn crusted bleu cheese burger and a apple caramel crumble. Finally, dinner was mom's spaghetti with a salad and two meatballs and a sausage. Dessert was chocolate ice cream with banana.

So make it 20,000 calories and a clearly delightful food time in the great North. Also two consecutive nights of near record lows and I swear I saw snowflakes in a light rain we had on Saturday.

Week 11 Day 1

Holy smoke. Can smoke be holy? Seventy days and 25 pounds ago I started a journey of a single step. If you've been following my exercise routines then you know not many steps came after that.

I tried no dairy and that was crazy, but some of that soy milk and cheese was pretty good.

The best days were ones with simple, fast and pre-made foods. Cereal bars, 100 calorie snack packs, 60 calorie puddings, Lean Cuisines and the like made it really easy to control and track what I ate. A little bit of research makes it clear that fast food meals and the devil, just like my doctor said 7 years ago.

I am taking two weeks off of the stringent picture diary that wasn't very stringent towards the end and taking at least the 2 weeks of the Healthe Trim. All the kudos in the world for helping me set a focus on the start-up but I'd like to see how it goes without pills for a bit.

Big trip to MN on Wednesday and a photo diary of that will be replacing the food diary for the duration. Still at the same general vicinity on Flickr though, so come on by to see how the mid-western, practically Canadian folks on the Twin Cities eat.

Also< I'll try to get a handle on this whole Brett Favre situation and the attitudes of the real Vikings fans. I still can't believe the signs with all the Brett love I saw on the TV picture.

I'll still be posting a before trip and after trip measurement too, so that should be ummm whatever.

Final number on the Healthe Trim was 68 days and -24.6 pounds. Slow and steady should be okay for now and the key will be sustaining it. We'll see if I can build in some exercise while I am off on vacation.

Week 10 Day 4

How do YouTube people make money? How do they spend so much time recording their boring yet oddly entertaining lives?

When I win the lottery I am going to have a crew record everything for a YouTube channel.

Still thinking about that breakfast yesterday and it makes me sick. That was a regular Friday meal a few months ago. Add a regular Wendy's lunch at 1,382, an early dinner at around 1,000 then a late dinner at Applebee's for around 1,600 calories and a regular Friday was about 5,700 calories. One day. Now that is about three days.

Still working out my plans for next week and I think I am taking a break from the Trim for two weeks starting Monday August 24th and ending on Labor Day. Still going to follow my menus, but maybe add back some coffees and energy drinks that I have been trying to avoid while on the pills.

Wonder if there will be an appreciable difference in appetite. I may pack more nibbling snacks like carrot sticks and celery and low cal chips and cookies just in case.

I am also blaming my new eating habits for my extreme lack of focus while playing poker. That's my story and I am sticking to it.

How about a YouTube channel with videos of me eating meals? It might not help me, but other people could watch it and be put off from eating for hours after seeing me jam food in my grill.

Hey! Did I invite you to my BBQ? Then why you all up in my grill?

Thanks, I'll be here all my life.

Later.

Week 10 Day 3

So the pattern is what it is ten weeks into the new life. Very controlled and measured meals on Monday-Friday lunch with wild, wild west like meals on Saturday and Sunday. Very measurable weight loss Tuesday-Friday with wild, wild fluctuations Saturday-Monday. As of this morning we are back to -24.5 and held strong below -20 through the weekend and get back to the new standard of -25. By Minnesota -30 will be the standard I hope to be at when I leave and when I get back.

That said, it is a vacation with the temptations of vacation eating out, snacking and travel foods almost all of which are bad. Also, the measures meals that are generating loss now will be absent on vacation. Finally, no Healthe’ Trim on this trip either, so I can finally enjoy some coffee in the morning without the fear that I will pee napalm soon after. Very exciting.

Something I always imagined but never believed. Calorie counts are deceptively different than I think they should be. Burger King breakfast: four crappy Cini Minis are 490 calories, one dry, nearly flavorless chicken biscuit is 400 calories and the awesomely wonderful Ham, Egg and Cheese Croissan’wich is only 330 calories. So a pretty good breakfast is a yogurt, fruit and the HEC Cois. Like any time I order at a fast food place I got too much food and I ate it all.

So I am skipping lunch today. I hate doing it, but with some raisins and a weight watchers mint cookie crisp mini bar as a snack and an abusive to my urinary tract amount of water I don’t feel too hungry at 3pm. I bet dinner will be dangerous though. I want pizza bad. I will hold out for Mama’s Pizza, that’s a restaurant as my mother’s pizza isn’t that good. Salad and veggies with a frozen dinner and I should get through this day by the skin of my teeth.

Now that I am clearly rambling, possibly from starvation. I hear that sets in after not eating in over 6 hours. I got to get my itinerary together for next week. Getting in on Weds and flying out the next Tuesday so only one weekend to do weekend stuff, but some good days for catching a few movies in there too.

Mmmm…food…

Maybe I should get that lasagna pizza for dinner, that pie is awesome.

Later.

Week 10 Day 1

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crobin11/

Just a reminder that the photos that mostly track my food intake are found through the above link.

It gets crazy next week as there will hopefully be a super special "Foods of Minnesota" collection on my photostream.

Yes, you too can see the mythical Mama's Pizza. The SMOX is a long time family favorite, that's Sausage, Mushroom, Onion, with eXtra cheese if ya don't know. And on a flat bread crust is comes out gooey and delicious – just like my…

I think the weigh-ins for Mondays should be banned. They are not particularly accurate given the horrible eating schedule I have on Saturday and Sunday. If I say I am at -22 this morning and then tomorrow is -28, that is more a factor of food processing times than of any wild dietary excess.

That said, I ate like a madman this weekend. The cookies at Subway are about as low class as Chips Ahoy cookies, but I love the crap out of them. So the foot long Subway Club with Cookies and fruit wasn't the best meal choice, but mmm good. Also managed to eat three dinners on Friday. I had lunch at Mexican place for breakfast, then ate my breakfast for dinner at about 5:40 pm. Then ate ½ of a Moo Goo Gai Pan for middle dinner at 8 and then had ½ a California Shrimp salad at Applebees around midnight. Yes, it was awesome.

Today is back to normal and I can feel the food of the weekend making its way through the forty miles of intestines, it is 40 right?, as my body resets. In a way it was kind of a fun challenge. I didn't know I was having Chinese food at 8, so the controlled ordering and controlled eating which would generally be out of character for me (I am not known as a taker of leftovers when it comes to eating out). Ordering the ½ size of the Salad was different too. Still an Applebee's salad is like 900 calories in the half sizes so no real calorie savings even ignoring that it was my third meal out in 12 hours.

I seem to be doing a little better with the ordering for one. To be fair I am trying to stay away from fast food as I usually think the say number five at mcdonalds with the super fries and a coke might not be enough food and I order a chicken sandwich add on. Still, could have been very happy with one Subway cookie and a 6 inch sub over the 12 incher. God, knows 6 inches is more than enough, right ladies? Ladies?

So, more exercising this week. Now the crunch is on! Going to the MN next Wednesday and I do not want to be the weak link in the Fair walkers when the other two links are 60 or over. That was sad two years ago and I don't want a repeat of me sitting and gasping (despite clearly photoshopped pictures I did not cry) while my mother is dragging me to the cream puff stand way, way, way toward the back of the fair grounds. What I really need is a "Quest Finder" ala WoW that lays out the best path with the minimal effort to help me level up on fair food. That's for the one person who might get that.

Later Taters.

Give ya a numbers update this week too. Sometime. Maybe.

Week 9 Night 3

So here are the latest measures. I'll do another full set before I leave on vacation on the 26^th and a comparison set on the day I get back. During the vacation I won't be weighing or counting calories, but I will try to keep the food diary up and running.

 

As of today:

Ankle:    -1.000

Thigh:    -3.500

Hips:    -2.500

Middle:    -3.250

Chest:    -1.750

Bicep:    -1.500

Wrist:    -0.500

Neck:    -0.750

Weight:-20.60

B/P:    166/110

Pulse:    77

Now the BP is blood pressure in case you didn't know and the goal there is closer to 130/70 or something crazy like that.

The pulse I include mostly because it's part of the BP machine's readings.

This is the U.S. of A. so all measurements are in inches and pounds.

Also, for the record I weighed in this evening for the weight number used and that was after a full dinner and dessert.

Just saying. 66 Days and running.

Week 9 Day 3

Signs that your day is not going well.

1. You pulled a muscle sleeping. That's almost as bad as getting winded answering the phone.
   
2. Your glasses have broken for the 5^th time in a month and now you are out of crazy glue.
   
3. Your eye appointment is scheduled for today and now you'll have to listen to the eye doctor chastise you for waiting so long to come when he sees the "Revenge of the Nerds" tape job you have on your broken glasses.
   
4. You didn't win the lottery last night.
   
5. You really had planned on winning that lottery and now those glasses are going to cost you groceries for the month.
   
6. Despite your love of what you do, your company is on financially shaky ground making every drive in seem like torture.
   
7. Non-stop and seemingly unending road construction makes the drive actual torture.
   
8. You're pretty sure the kick-backs politicians received from the shoddy road crews not working on that construction did not go back into the economy, well maybe the Argentinean economy.
   
9. You're done for the day mentally, physically and emotionally and it's only 9am.
   
10. Since you didn't win the lottery you are back to your 2^nd retirement plan, dying at your desk
    

Other than that the week is going fantastic so far.

Despite the back pain, I have been sleeping very well. Damn it if eight hours a night isn't better than four.

I even did a bit of weight lifting this morning. Dumbbell work and some leg routines. I am looking to make 6-6:30 my workout time in the morning and the evening. Yesterday I spent the half hour walking around Kroger getting bananas and vegetables and bread, so I counted that.

Exercise time is the time you invest in yourself. If I am willing to spend 3 hours a night trying to level up a character in WoW, I should be able to get a half hour in the morning and a half in the evening to build my actual self up a little.

Also, starting this week I am trying to wean myself off of "Big" meals. Up to now I have been using large servings of veggies and salads to compensate for much smaller meat and cheese and noodle and bread servings. I used to eat a huge plate of pasta and then I'd eat a small pasta and a huge salad, that kind of thing. Used to eat 4 sandwiches for dinner, now it's two and I am going down to one. Generally, I think the idea of feeling full is fueling some of my worse choices of meals when I am eating out. This notion that I won't feel like I am bursting at the seams messes with my head a lot.

We'll see how that goes.

I missed measuring and the weight is sitting at -23.4 as of this morning so nothing too exciting there. I ran down my BP measurements and will post those too.

Later.

Week Eight Day Five

Oh am I in a mood today.

OMI? Ohio Medical Institute?

Anyways. Let's get the number since yesterday -.8 for a running total of -23.4 I think.

Enough of that, now on to the more pertinent questions.

 

Was Jesus gay? Right, seems likely doesn't it? I mean the man hung out with dudes all the times, including a pair of brothers which I think is equivalent to bagging sisters for a straight guy. He had his own fag hag in Mary Magdalene, although now that I think about 'fag hag' might be politically incorrect. He hung out with religious old guys when he was twelve, generally a chance for pedophilia in that situation. Finally, he always appears very well groomed with his long hair and full beard even in a time when impeccable grooming had to be a pain in the ass. Also, the temptations of Christ never mention sex, just food, drink, property and outside assistance from angels. Just strange that a guy who clearly had a way with people never had a list of conquests longer than his outstretched arms. It's not like the bible shied away from mentioning sex, often and sometimes in detail, yet Jesus is said to stay away from contact with women. Of course at some point much, much later the Catholic church interprets this behavior to mean that priests need to be celibate "like Jesus" in order to minister to the faithful. Wow, so they go from covering up one man's behavior to creating generations of criminals who pretend to be celibate while carrying on affairs with men and women and unfortunately with boys and girls too.

 

Why don't we cure diseases anymore? We have a ton of treatments these days, but when was the last cure for a disease discovered and given to people? Polio? 1952 for Salk and 1962 for Sabin. I am from one of the last years children were given the small pox vaccine because that disease had been all but eradicated. Now cancer has been around for a long time and trillions of dollars have been spent on research, TRILLIONS. No cure. HIV and AIDS have been around for probably forty years and no cure. We've advanced medical science to the point where liposuction and child birth are out-patient procedures now and we have pills to make even the most flaccid of men truly hard chargers. We can treat cancer and we can treat HIV. Really expensive and generally lifelong treatments. Saw it coming with the Herpes. Used to be a venereal disease could be cured with a quick shot of the penicillin and a note to use a condom when you don't know where it's been before you. Now, it's for life and we can treat it. Can't cure it, sorry, no profits in that, but those treatments are making a fortune for us.

 

And why are people allergic to peanuts all of the sudden? Was George Washington Carver killing folks left and right hundreds of years ago and medicine was so backward they just wrote off those deaths as consumption before going back to their delicious PB&J sandwiches? No one I grew up with didn't eat peanut butter in some way; cookies, on crackers, the freaks had it on celery stalks or in a delightful PB, Banana and Marshmallow Fluff sandwich. Now if you invite friends over you need a list of dietary requirements and an adrenaline shot.

 

Finally, what would you do if you won the lottery? I ask myself this every time the number gets over $100 million mostly because that is the number I think you need to be set for life. At 100, you get about 35 in a onetime payment and even if you don't invest a penny and accrue no interest that's 1 million a year for 35 years and much longer than I expect to be alive at this point. So after I clear all my debts and make sure my name is clean in all 50 states and a few foreign countries where I may or may not be persona non grata right now I'd help out my Mom anyway she saw fit and I'd help out my brother as I saw fit. Then I'd probably disappear and really that just means no more full time work, no more schedules of 'have tos' and 'need tos' as all my time would go to 'want tos' and 'why nots'. If you called me, I might be cheering on the bulls in Pamplona or pissing off the top of the Eiffel Tower. More likely I'd be in a nicely set-up house playing a video game on a computer system that cost as much as the house while watching a movie on some sort of concept 3-D projection system. I'd also love to do a documentary on the first year after winning the lottery and follow the events as they unfold from a 3^rd party perspective. Then go to Cannes and bang coked out celebrities while winning the Palme d'Or and thanking my Mom and random luck.

 

What? Too much caffeine this morning? So what!

Week Eight Day Four

I have been having a great week.

Pizza, the new flavors of boneless chicken wings from that fast food place with the red headed hussy as the mascot, the…how's the weight you ask?

Down.

As of this morning the eight and a half week run has rung up -22.6 pounds thus far.

Still no exercise, still kind of watching what I eat but eating things I want, still going off the deep end Friday night to Sunday night.

-22.6, wow.

I need an app or an add-on so that all the walking and running and skinning and such that I do in "World in Warcraft" translates into actual calories burned in the real world. Then I'd be down at least 100 pounds for far. Being a Level 17 Night Elf Hunter ain't all about the loot. And I am fairly certain that the skinning/leatherworking professions in WoW are a good barometer of future serial killers (or current ones with good internet connections) in America.

Anyways, it's been a mediocre week of watching what I eat for the most part. Still doing the mega-water run in the morning and the late breakfast, but I am getting tired by early afternoon and getting hungry as a mo-fo by the time I get home at night. This is leading me to doubts that the fancy Healthe Trim is performing as advertised.

We'll find out in three weeks as I drop off the Trim, awkwardly phrased there, and try out a vacation week or two at the end of August and beginning of September.

Today's afternoon energy isn't bad though. Could be that I skipped the afternoon Trim, I had some Crystal Light Metabolism – Peach Tea water flavor add, or the chicken nuggets in Honey BBQ and Buffalo sauce that is making the difference.

We'll see which way I go for dinnertime tonight. Could eat the kind of healthy frozen dinner, the yogurt smoothie, or more pizza. Though the pizza nearly killed me last night, not a good sign. Felt like I ate a bunch of razor blades about ten minutes after chowing down on 3 slices of the Works from Papa Johns on a thin crust and 3 slices of Pineapple, or dessert pizza, also on thin. Would not be cool if one of the effects of the Trim is wicked stomach pains from eating pizza, but that seems like a very specific and therefore unlikely explanation.

Hmmm, now I might need to eat pizza just to test my tolerance for pizza. How's that for logic over common sense?

Later.

Week Eight Day One

Okay, so it's been a week and a hey since last I updated.

I won't lie. I kind of hit a wall and it was both depressing and uplifting.

It was depressing because while staying more or less on target with eating the weight stopped falling off. Now this generally happens when you start eating more, taking more days of eating crap, or you stop exercising regularly. Now I never started exercising so I thought maybe I was just at the end of the Healthe Trim's ability to help me shed weight via calorie control alone. Forgetting the fact that it takes a negative 3,500 calories to lose one pound. In theory, in order to maintain my current weight I need to take in 3,500 calories a day (holy crap, if I just don't eat for 100 days I can lose 100 pounds – not really, but it sounds good). So I try to take in between 2,200 and 2,500 a day and that means for four days a week I have a negative 4,000 calories and maybe one pound a week lost. The other three days I am closer to 3,000 calories and we'll say lucky to break even.

Now, I have no idea exactly what Healthe Trim does. Vaguely it suggests that it might work as a appetite suppressant and vaguely suggests it works as a metabolism lifter, at least with its warning about caffeine and energy drinks suggests a metabolic effect but I am pretty sure this stuff doesn't get FDA approval on its effects. Now I will continue through the doses I have left and then see how the appetite is affected and that should be more indicative of the product's claims.

And the uplifting is that the weight hasn't gone up over the last 10 days and as of this morning continues to show signs of going down again. I take a long term view and the short-term results are still positive, plus the urges aren't all that strong to 'cheat' on this plan. And by plan I mean I look at what I eat and I count the calories. If I am under for the day I can have a treat after dinner and if I am looking over I cut out the treat and plan to scale down a bit on the next day.

The plan is really straight forward too. In the morning I drink a ton of water (at least 64 oz.) and they have a breakfast bar, a juice, a fruit and a yogurt with an emphasis on protein in the bar and a banana for no reason other than I like bananas. Breakfast I try to keep under 500 calories, mostly because I have it around 10 am and lunch is around 1 pm Monday-Friday.

Lunch is either a healthy soup or a healthy lunch, a salad, a chip of some sort, a Gatorade, a jell-o pudding, and rice cakes and it's around 700 calories.

So that's 1,200 and leaves room for up to 1,300 for dinner which is sandwiches and chips and vegetables, then an ice cream bar of some type or maybe a smoothie with yogurt and frozen fruits.

And that is the framework of the 21 pounds lost so far. And it's so easy, in the sense that if you do go out for a dinner or a lunch you and figure out where to cut or just to trim it down for the next day, that if it takes two years because I still refuse to exercise then I can do this for two years or forever if need be.

God knows that on a Friday night I might go way off with cheese sticks or a cookie sundae or both, but then the next Monday its back to tossing in 500 calories for breakfast and 700 for lunch. Then another secret to fast weight loss is to go to sleep at 10 pm (after having dinner at 6pm) and waking up at 6am. It cuts on snacking and the sleeping helps with general good health.

In case you need this, none of the statements I make are reviewed nor approved by doctors. Any decisions you make about your life are your responsibility and not those of the person who writes these statements.

What else? I did measurements at some point last week, but I'll redo those and get the numbers on here along with the frightening stats on my blood pressure. And no I do not take BP medication, and I never will. Refer to the above paragraph if you wonder.

Later.

Week Six Day Three

So that's 48 days of taking pictures of what I eat and tracking calories and as of this morning the results are a -20 pounds with the caveat that there is little to no exercise and I take most Friday, Saturday and Sunday meals off from the 2,200 calories or less plan that Monday – Thursday are set up for.

I find that having prepared meal items make planning for breakfast and lunch easier and helps me avoid over-indulging. Counting each item as 100 calories and planning 1,500 calories for breakfast and lunch I know I can pull 15 of the prepared items together and have it ready to go in less than 5 minutes in the morning. The most work is dumping the salad mix into the cool whip container and tossing grape tomatoes on top, everything else is pre-measured like the cheetos or the teddy grahams, or container limited like the juice and V8 in the 10 oz bottles. I might save more money buying in bulk, but then I have more chances of over-measuring and just skipping because I don't have time to measure out fifteen baggies of food in the morning.

Yes, I am that lazy. I am not giving up any sweet sleeping time to go and plan out a breakfast and lunch menu.

As for motivation, this week I am focusing on the idea that it might be physically possible to be orally pleasured while driving my vehicle. You see the steering wheel to stomach gap was and continues to be very narrow. I can no longer steer with my belly but that wasn't out of the realm of possibility a few months ago. And putting the seat back further is out of the question as I already drive with my feet barely reaching the pedals, so losing weight makes the idea of an automotive rendezvous at least physically possible. How many people put that on the list of reasons to lose weight?

Otherwise, I'll run the measurements again tonight or tomorrow and I am also tracking my blood pressure again. I am not saying that the BP machine I am using is inaccurate, but according to my theoretically medically trained brother based on the last few measurements I should be dead already. I am racing with Jack Donaghy from "30 Rock" to see who can get to 300/200 first. That said, I am seeing small improvements over the last few days. Maybe that is a better motivation than the auto-erotic bj?

Whatever.

See the pictures at:

Mmm...Food

Facebook me and see nothing really.

Where I rank behind Hitler and Stalin in Lovability Rankings...

If you really want to be disturbed read my twitter nonsense.

Rambling Id

Have a good day and get back to work.

Week 5 Day 2

This is day one after the death of my father and while it is minimally affective on my daily life it leaves a big hole in the entirety of my life. Who can I call now to give me misinformation on the Twins and Vikings?

More proof that not eating helps you lose weight, I had about 1,300 calories yesterday including a smoothie of yogurt and soy milk for dinner. This morning's weight is -17 lbs from starting point. Monday was -12.5 so that is a one day drop of 4.5 without any significant exercise.

Eating is pretty boring these days. Funny how looking at calories makes your eyes bug out. A small box of raisins is 130 calories. Dried fruit that vaguely tastes like eating ants (don't ask how I know) and that's 1/15 of about what I can eat to lose weight and it seems like a rip off. You can get the no sugar added peaches for 25 calories and they are much more enjoyable. The sugar free Jell-o tastes like slightly watery regular Jell-o pudding, but it's between 60-120 calories less a serving. I don't mind slightly watery if it gets me to an occasional plate of spaghetti.

It's not so much about sacrifice and reward for me. I don't need the "if I lose this many pounds I'll reward myself with cheesecake" plan. For me it's all about the education. Like when I learned that crappy faux ice cream has more calories and less taste then real ice cream with 'less fat' or the fro-yo options. The vegetarian diet isn't built around less calories, in fact with the absence of meat there seems to be more calories to make up for protein deficiencies. Not eating meat takes more work than I am willing to add to my already full plate.

I got no plan and I got no idea of where or how. I am sticking with the healthe trim for another two months and after that I will continue to educate myself and plan ahead for eating. When I go out to dinner I do a little research and plan my meal out in advance, tricky, as some slow service restaurants are reluctant to share nutritional information. Other than that I am still in search of my motivation to add exercise as more than an occasional activity.

Keep on, keeping on.

Week 5 Day 1

A New Beginning…

I took last weekend off and am feeling the effects of a food related hang over this morning. My head aches and my stomach is queasy to say the least. Apparently a huge platter of nachos with extra jalapenos is not the best way to end a weekend off the wagon.

I feel terrible, literally on the verge of puking, and I couldn't be happier.

You see the proof is in the pudding, the sugar-free and only 60 calories a serving pudding. I have lived with the notion that eating what I want makes me happy. Well brother I can tell you that a weekend of eating what I want has made me miserable and I don't want to go back to that anymore.

It is clear that eating well is a choice and a lifestyle and that choosing to eat better foods isn't a burden. That those choices actually make every part of my day a little better, a little more energizes, a little less nauseous. Sure I still think about the "bad" food – it's impossible not to when the commercials run nonstop on TV – but the minutes of eating DQ ice cream or bacon infused tacos just aren't worth the costs of the rest of the day.

So I am going to spend the rest of today downing aspirins and eating celery sticks not because I have to, but I am doing it because I want to, I want to feel better physically.

All that said, soy ice cream sucks ass. I will go to low-carb, low-fat frozen yogurt and ice cream. Just saying.

Starting the week slightly worse for wear after the weekend of debauchery at -12.5 from start or +2.5 from where I was Friday morning.

Everything that goes in my mouth in full color.

You can also follow my random thoughts that on occasion touch on what I am eating and disturbingly when I am not making my regular trips to the restroom on Twitter.

My Twitter

Let's be careful out there.

Week 4 Day 4 Update

Just writing in with the new measurements. I hadn't realized that it was so long ago (6/30) when I did this before. Here are the changes from the last taping.

L-Ankle -0.25"
L-Thigh -0.75"
Hips -1.00"
Middle -0.25"
Chest +0.50"
L-Bicep -0.75"
L-Wrist -0.25
Neck -0.75"

What is up with that chest measurement? Maybe I am menstruating and my breasts are swollen? I did these measurements less than a half hour after dinner, maybe like swimming I needed to wait longer before diving in?

Week 4 Day 4

I reordered the Healthe Trim this morning so I shouldn't have a disruption in the go-go pills next week. Thanks to missed days here and there I have a few extra days on the full vitamin regimen until I switch over to a regular multivitamin.

Yesterday wasn't bad, wasn't great but it was not a bad day. Still holding at -15 lbs as of this morning and giving the calorie count under 2,000 yesterday and plans to keep it there for today I expect to move slightly below that tomorrow.

The Lean Cuisine frozen meals are a life-saver and a time-saver. Low calorie counts for main course dishes that easily allow for salads or steamed veggie add-ons. Still no great substitutes for ice cream or candy bars, damn it, but fruit cups, sugar free jell-o and gum are helping fight the junk food urges most of the time.

Listening to a radio show this morning where they mention that it takes 90 days for a new routine to become a habit. 90 days, and I am on 25 days so far with a long way to go. I haven't hit a rut yet, no feeling like I am sacrificing too much or giving up anything to eat. I know I have given up something when I see the Taco Bell commercial about some bacon on bacon burrito that I don't even want to imagine. Just typing about it is making me drool. Luckily, bringing my lunch in with me helps me avoid the temptations of driving around looking for lunch.

Dinner is easier and trickier too. I am enjoying the smaller meals earlier in the evening, but I am also keenly aware of all the food in the house and how quickly I could plow through 6 bags of 100 calorie cookies. Going to bed earlier tricks me out of being hungry past 9pm.

Feeling good and looking a little better. Only 65 more days until this becomes an old habit.

Week 4 Day 3

We are plowing through the days now. I can barely keep track of them as they fly by.

I can however keep track of the calories and the total poundage. Based on yesterday's 3100 plus calories I wasn't surprised to see a small tick back up on the scale this morning. I am making adjustments to today's meals accordingly.

That's the good side of weighing in every day and really tracking calories every day. You can relate the cause and effect more directly than you might with a once a week measuring system.

So the experiment with a vegetable based spaghetti dinner was a mixed bag. The shredded zucchini and squash was a good base. I over steamed it, just like I overcook noodles, and they were squishier than I would have liked. Still the taste wasn't all that different and given the calorie count difference it was really worthwhile.

The Veggie Mozzarella cheese slices were however very disappointing. They kind of taste like you think they should, but they did not melt at all like they advertised they would. The sauce was a mere 90 calories a half cup and the fresh veggies I added only enhanced the taste. I added sausage and a sort of meatball to the sauce that increased the calories about 100 per serving. If I used turkey-based meatballs it might have worked out slightly lower, but I can't get to eggplant. Those things look like the pods from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Then I realized at some point the whole dish ends up being a tomato-based stew with lots of shredded veggies and some chunks of meat.

It was fun though I'll probably go back to the wheat noodles tonight.

Also, frozen yogurt was good on calories but I still feel bloated up the next morning which I am associating with lactose related issues and not the fact that I was eating it at way past 9pm.

Good times.

Week 4 Day 2

Getting to this a little late. Ran some errands this afternoon and so I am writing at the old computer.

Passed the 15 pound mark today. Very awesome.

Trying the zucchini and squash as pasta experiment tonight. Forgot I didn't have pasta sauce yesterday so I had to push it back a day. I am skeptical but 5 cups of this veggie pasta substitute has 100 calories. And a half a cup of wheat pasta has 420 calories...do I need to do the math.

There is also something called spaghetti squash that actually is supposed to look like spaghetti. I might try that too.

Other than my kitchen laboratory everything else is slowly coming together. The benefits of Healthe Trim seem to be undeniable and I will be buying more for the next cycle. In fact, I will probably buy the three back which gives me two a day each morning and one each afternoon for 60 days. Will be able to see if that helps with my energy levels when I am home later in the day and need to exercise.

Repeat those three words...NEED...TO...EXERCISE.

Week 4 Day 1

Staying strong. Usually by week four I would have given up and quit dieting. Well, this time two things are different. I spent a ridiculous amount of money on a month's worth of vitamins and unlike certain fat blocking pills that also help you lose weight mostly by giving you explosive diarrhea the Healthe Trim side effects so far are nothing except seemingly decreased appetite and a rising energy level. Also, this time I am not really dieting. I am choosing more carefully what I eat and tracking the calorie "cost" of those decisions. It just doesn't feel like a diet when you are eating prime rib and eating a Snickers with Almonds.

As of this morning the total down since W1D1 is 14.6 lbs. Still looking for close to 50 by W11D5, which is still possible, especially if I get that exercise in at least 4 days a week. I know the numbers are good, even better is grabbing that belt I haven't been wearing for a few years and being able to wear it comfortably for the last couple of days. It is funny the things that really matter. Now I am glad I didn't give away all the not really skinny but not big enough clothes I almost gave up.

Not to get too far ahead of myself though. I'll do measurements again tomorrow or Wednesday. I did clean the bathroom yesterday and that is a workout, kinda. I installed the shower cleaning system too, based on a recommendation, so I will see if that works better at keeping the ever present mold and mildew from growing out of control. Today, I will get the vacuum out and push that around for a while. See, if I can clean for twenty minutes at least four times a week I'll have both a neat and clean living space and fulfill my needed exercise requirements. That is what my business professor would refer to as win-win.

Groceries were a little expensive this week. The shower system and a bottle of wine were unusual expenses, but I am also hoping the lunch savings of $10-$12 a day helps off-set that cost. There isn't as much savings in fresh fruit and vegetables as I hoped and there is the added pressure of eating the stuff before it goes bad that doesn't exist for frozen foods. Tonight is the night for Super Pasta Primavera with lots of veggies in the sauce and the veggie pasta experiment.

Results to be posted tomorrow.

Week 3 Day 7

I am not going to jinks myself by saying that so far this has been the most awesomest experience I have ever had in attempting to eat in a more conscious manner.

The pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/crobin11/ and the counting of calories has been more like a game then an intentional attempt to self improve myself, as opposed to self improving someone else. Figuring out foods and looking at calorie counts, not to mention the taking of pictures.

I find myself thinking, this photo needs better balance, warmer tones, softer lighting. I reference to them with words like composition, clarity and consistence. I am looking into getting an NEA grant to support the photostream.

"It's not about eating what you like, It's about liking what you eat."

That's the mantra. I find it easy to eat just about anything. No qualms about trying salads, soy foods, rice foods and looking into trying new ways to make my favorite pasta dishes without pasta. I will be trying that tomorrow. I bought zucchini and squash to shred up and steam for a base for tomato sauce and a little bit of sausage and meatballs. I even have soy mozzarella cheese to put on top.

I am also disappointed by the lie that is soy. When you read the fine print on the vegetarian diet plan, they warn you that they are not a weight lose plan. No crap! The soy ice cream is 840 calories. I can get the low-fat fro-yo from Ben and Jerry's for 480 calories. I may have to abandon the non-dairy, or less dairy portion of this eating plan and live with being phlegmy and other lactose related symptoms.

Actually lost a little again today, but I wll wait until tomorrow to give you the total lost since W1D1. I am beginning to turn around on Healthe Trim and may have to buy more next week. Definitely not getting the vitamins though.

Hope everyone had a wonderful 4th and you're psyched to get back to work tomorrow!

Week 3 Day 6

So I really enjoyed my day off from work.

Ate about 3155 of deliciousness and some not so deliciousness, but still enjoyed the whole day.

I probably don't notice this as much during the week because my meals fall right into schedule, but on days off I really am aware of how hungry I get between 3-6 pm. I had a good breakfast yesterday, it was late around 11:30, and I was really hungry by 3pm. Ate poorly for a skippable lunch of a pint of faux ice cream. Still felt hungry for a while.

So I play World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game, and it distracts me from the hunger. By 6:30 I am not hungry at all and if not going out for a late dinner I could have skipped and gone straight to bed. I really think the idea that people sit around all day playing video games is making them fat is not true.

Seriously, other than water runs and the inevitable bathroom breaks I don't like to eat and mess around with WoW or other games. Whether I'm so focused on my play or I just don't want to break away I just don't like to stop and make a meal while playing. Of course it can lead to doing a quickie meal of a pint of ice cream, but it also leads to a few nights of going to bed without even thinking of eating dinner.

Nope, playing video games does not make you fat. Eating a box of cookies while playing video games and guzzling sodas will make you fat. Don't hate the game, hate the player.

Late meal + huge meal = bad morning weigh in. I'll let you know when I go below the latest low point. We are heading into lows not seen in the last 5 years though. With luck (and the damnable exercise) we might get to lows not seen since 2000, then we can party like it's 1999!

Week 3 Day 5

Typing directly to the blog today. I usually type these in Word then upload them so I get instant spellcheck. Just warning you in advance.

Not a bad day yesterday, down about half a pound and had dinner around 10pm so that was really good.

Not much else to say about that. I have today off so the whole day at home today. I'm going to do some cleaning and shopping. Seems when you eat more fresh foods you have to go the store more often and purchase less so you can eat without worrying about it going bad. Just saying, I never have to worry about a Milky Way bar going bad.

Otherwise, the challenge of eating on my own during the lesser eating holiday of July 4th shouldn't be too bad. I don't have any plans for BBQ anyways. Just going out to the same restaurants as last week. Well, maybe not IHOP but Applebees, and I know what I am getting into there.

So enjoy your holiday and stay safe. Remember the opposable thumb is all that separates us from the animals so don't blow them off.

Week 3 Day 4

What a great week so far. This being the first week of really trying to eat less, both quantity and calorie wise, it's been easier than I thought.

Now it might have been cheating a little, but I have the smoothie for dinner last night and have a dramatic 1.6 lb drop when I weighed this morning. Not that it confirms my suspicions that one reason people see dramatic weight loss early on in a diet plan is simply because they have less total food weight processing through their body, but there is just not a lot of bulk in the meal I ate so there is less bulk on the scale the next morning.

Also explains how people on those crazy cabbage soup diets lose ten pounds in a week. It's all weight from having the colon emptied out.

Feeling very energized in the morning, but still dragging by the time I get home at night. Trying to add more movement to my regular daily activities just to add any exercise I can.

The food diary is still going strong, I occasionally forget to picture meals when eating at restaurants but that is only because I am so excited to be eating something besides pasta I made or sandwiches.

Exploring more of the vegetarian foods with the veggie cheese slices and the rice dream and soy ice cream. I like those and even though the calorie differences aren't dramatic I do feel better after eating a pint of soy ice cream then I do after regular ice cream.

And I think I am going to go ahead and order another month of the Healthe Trim thermo-energy pills. I don't think the multi-vitamins are necessary and it's a ton of pill swallowing, so I'll peel those down and replace them with the mega-man multi-vitamin from GNC.

Other than that I still need to get the exercise on track and maybe this weekend with the holiday I can work in more work-outs.

Week 3 Day 3

Seventeen days of tracking and following and marking and the results? Down eleven pounds so far and feeling pretty good.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090701/ap_on_he_me/us_med_obesity_rankings

Just read the above story and that writer is a genius. No idea how well researched but the opening paragraph with "ominous tide is rolling toward…Alabama" is awesome.

And now that smoking is all but completely illegal across the country I fully expect the drums to start beating for the attack on fatties. This article whines about the rising medical costs related to the care of obese people. Though it fails to mention that fat people die younger and so spend much less time draining Medicare and Social Security than those granola eating old people.

Even though the research regarding health problems and obesity seem more realistic than the dangers of second hand smoke from cigarettes, it still sounds more like propaganda than real research. They probably got the 'global warming' nerds in to draw baseless conclusions from a shallow fact pool.

Georgia ranks 3^rd in obese children. Third? Come on parents! Just start feeding them straight lard mixed with sugar. My own informal research does agree that kids are much fatter today than they were thirty years ago. Maybe parents hope by making their kids morbidly obese they will be less likely to be targeted by child molesters? Hook up the TV or video game's power supply to the exercise bike or the treadmill! At the very least they can get fat while reading books then.

Most depressing is that Colorado is the least obese state. No idea why, it just is depressing.

http://www.naafaonline.com/dev2/

For the other side of the debate is the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Maybe the saddest name for an organization ever and the acronym sounds like a fat person trying to get up out of a chair. They have a book advertised "Healthy At Every Size" and it is written by Linda Bacon…BACON? Ouch.

They are on myspace and while they don't really have marches per se, they do occasionally have sit-ins. And when NAAFA sits in they REALLY fill up a space.

I am definitely having more fun this week than last. Probably more to do with our Friday holiday for Independence Day. I even enjoy getting up a little earlier to make breakfast and lunch for work. The calorie counting has become a game of doing math in my head and the frozen dinner with add-ons at night is making the evenings less stressful.

Refer to http://crobin11.blogspot.com/2009/06/finishing-week-one.html to see the uncanny self-portrait used for measurements.

I got a new and improved measuring tape so these should be more accurate going forward but here are the supposed changes a week and a half later:

Left Ankle: -0.5"

Left Thigh: -1.0"

Hips: -0.5"

Middle: -2.0"

Chest: -2.0"

Neck: -0.5"

Left Bicep: -0.25" (done in a curl flex position)

Left Wrist: 0"

It makes sense that the most change would happen where I am carrying the most weight, but between first measure and this is only 3.4 pounds difference so I am dubious about the total accuracy. That and the loss of thigh makes me a little worried that muscle atrophy is playing a part in total lost weight so far too.

We'll see how the rest of the week goes. I'll be using part of the vacation to clean my apartment for the first time in a year and a half. No, not that it hasn't been cleaned, I just paid someone else to do it for a long time. Housework does count as exercise, right?

W3 D2

I skipped a few days. Blame it on depression, blame it on crazy eating over the last week or whatever, but today when I weighed in I was at the same weight I was at last time I was happy and was that almost a week ago.

W2 was marked with disappointing weigh-ins and generally lackluster eating. Also, mark the complete lack of exercise and you have a recipe for depression. No binge eating though and I powered through the whole thing by Sunday night.

I went shopping pretty much for the first time since starting with the food diary so you'll be seeing more home prepped meals at work and more low cal frozen dinners augmented with salads and fruit and the like at home for dinner. This should result in a bulking up of the wallet that hopefully coincides with a slimming of everything else.

I am still reluctant to release myself from breads and cheeses entirely. I did however invest in some G2, essentially vitamin fortified water from Gatorade, to get myself off the sodas. Supposedly any soda, diet or regular and caffeinated or not, is bad on the Healthe Trim. Either way, regular soda was between 120 and 140 calories per pop and two or three of those a day replaces an honest to goodness meal. I can still remember as a kid getting to drink Coke once or twice a week was a special occasion and now it will become so again.

I didn't think I was eating significantly less than I usually do, but that bubble was convincing burst. Maybe the claims from this diet pill about needing to eat less and feeling full are true. Anyways, making and bringing lunch should also help with another problem I have with lunch.

Every time I go out to eat I have a fear that whatever I get won't be enough food. So I get the spicy chicken sandwich and the fries and the root beer. Then I think I might still be hungry after all that so I add on the double stack (just in case) and if I am really feeling iffy I might LARGE size the whole thing to be more sure I don't starve in the 5 hours between lunch and dinner. Then I am lucky if I eat half the fries and even if I feel full after the chicken I can't let the double stack go to waste, right? And I always finish the soda and maybe get another from the vending machine downstairs. When I ate that lunch it was 1640 calories and 60 grams of fat (16 saturated). The good news I still have about 1000 calories for breakfast and dinner combined that day and 5 grams of fat. The bad news is that I can almost hear my arteries screaming for mercy.

So the grocery shopping focused on some veggie cheese substitute that I tried before and liked, bananas and salad which are meal staples and the low sugar Gatorade to help with non-soda drinking. I also got the Lean Cuisine dinners, some yogurt and some fruit cups. I should get more whole fruits and veggies but they are tricky and require slightly better meal planning than I have gotten to so far. I also didn't get any squash or zucchini so the veggie instead of noodle pasta dinner will be a few days delayed. That should be an experience.

I am hoping to add meal planning for next week and that means writing out a menu and shopping to the menu so I can make what I plan to eat and only eat what's on the meal plan. Got to talk to someone at work about a website they use for meal, menu and shopping. I think it's emealz or something like that.

Also need to focus on exercise, more the Nike tag JUST DO IT. Maybe force myself to sit on the exercise bike for 10 minutes and build it up. And if I'm already sitting there I might as well pedal it a little. It is hard to tricky myself into the whole thing.

W2 D5

No truth to the rumors that they took Michael Jackson to a children's hospital in hopes of reviving him.

Ate well yesterday and got back on track. Today starts out with a traffic accident (AGAIN) on I-85 on the southside. Let me tell you starting the day drinking 64 oz of water and getting stuck in a 2 hour traffic delay do NOT mix.

Still no exercise, I have no energy after fighting traffic home and no motivation other than not wanted to die slowly. Hopefully with the high blood pressure I'll go out like John Ritter and not drag it out like Dick Clark. Go to sleep Dick, just go to sleep. Your work on this planet is done.

Alright, two morbid celebrity death jokes in one post are enough, so like David Carradine I am out of here.

W2 D4

That sounds like a bad droid from a Star Wars movie.

Yesterday was a much better calorie intake day, but I ate dinner at about 10pm so the results are not visible on the scale.

I wonder if I ate soup and or other only liquid foods for dinner if the weigh in the next morning would be really impressive. I might need to keep that in the back pocket for W3 D1 weigh in.

The good news is that even though I had issues making dinner last night, the cheap rice cooker I bought at Kroger is a piece of shite and is now in the trash, I didn't experience any desire to just mow down food. Even after such a long wait I found myself getting full and stopping at about have way through. That also means move leftovers tonight, but no delay in eating so maybe I can go to bed before 1am.

Need to bust my ass a lot as I am falling behind in my daily goals and that could endanger the weekly goal only two weeks into this whole new lifestyle.

We'll see as I missed breakfast this morning due to late wake-up and the three hours delay so I will have a "big" lunch this afternoon and eat the leftovers early tonight. If the loss number is small or gods forbid a step backwards, then there might be some emotional gorging on whatever ice cream is on sale.

Week 2 Day 2

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crobin11/

Go see my not so secret shame. Yesterday was terrible for me. I was going to get Chick-Fil-A for breakfast and I did knowing that the cheese and the fried chicken would be a big calorie bounce. Still it was the morning and should be the more forgiving meal especially for a protein leaning meal.

Then came lunch. I was going to go to Applebee's and get a salad, however there were panhandlers at the red light so I turned in order to avoid them. Stupid car's AC isn't working so my windows are down and I'd have to talk to these seedy looking guys otherwise. So now I am going the wrong way and decide to get Chinese food. I'd done the research and figured on chicken with mixed vegetables and steamed rice for a safer meal. I got the right main course, but the rice wasn't steamed nor white. It was fried and with chicken in it. I should have just thrown it out, but I ate it and about half of the chicken with vegetables. The other major problem with this meal was the amount of sodium used in making it and in the soy sauce, so none of this meal was good for me in the end.

An easy snack later that afternoon was Jell-o pudding. I needed the snack because lunch was Chinese food and it's true, I was hungry an hour later.

Then it was dinner with the brother at La Parilla. They have really no healthy menu. Their vegetarian selections are still loaded with cheese and sour cream and guacamole. So I ordered the La Parilla dip with chunks of steak, chicken and shrimp in it for an appetizer, I ordered the big nachos for my dinner and I ordered a 32 oz. Budweiser to make it all feel better. I was disgusted with myself and I really, for the first time I can recall, did not even care that we left food on the table. It plays with my head the idea of eating everything you order and I ignored it last night. I did finish that beer though.

Finally, I had some Ben and Jerry's Fro-Yo Half Baked. The pint is supposed to be four servings. It was barely one. And so ends the worst day of eating for me in the last week and a half.

Almost 6,000 calories and I weighed 1.4 pounds more this morning than I did the day before.

I think I was lucky it was only that much. Today will be a payback day, with both food and exercise.

Week 2 Day 2

Holy smokes down a total of 9.6 pounds thus far and that is keeping me ahead of the one pound a day goal. It's really 50 in 60 days, but fractions are a nuisance.

No real issues with hunger pains or cravings. I am still pretty much eating what I want to eat (See the Mtn Dew WoW and the multiple candy bars) and my exercising is still pretty much limited to parking farther away and walking and doing some stretching and free weights. The exercise bike is getting less attention than my love life and that ain't getting any attention at all.

I wonder if the diet pills that suggest drinking 64 ounces of water or more in three hours have worked out some scheme where all that processing of water equals burning just enough calories and keeps you from eating too much too early to all but guarantee some loss.

Also another comment about why you should (or at least why I did) measure yourself at various locations on your person.

I know there is some psychology to weight gain and body image just like for anorexia but maybe reversed. I see myself today in the mirror and think "not bad" even though Chris from 1997 would puke at the same image. I also think if my chest is x inches and my waist is x – y inches than I still look, I think I'll use this word, proportional. So even though I don't know without measures that I am proportional I still see myself that way when I look in the mirror. And if I put on a t-shirt I can pretend to myself that I look fantastic.

However, once I measured the areas mentioned on Sunday of week one I could no longer pretend that what I see and reality were the same thing. While my chest was X and my hips were barely an x – y number, the "Middle" number was x + z. Easily seen, even by me, in a profile view but I was still "not sure" this was true until then. That made me crap myself a little bit. So in the measurements department I need to lose not only y, but also z to see the kind of improvements I am hoping for and get my actual body to match what I think my body should be.

For all you math guys, no cheating as all variables are real numbers with no negatives (so y can't be a -3 making is x - -3, ya know?).

I picked Chris from 1997 because that was my best year weight and image-wise, ah to be 27 and under 250 lbs again.

Slowly dropping my calories per day too, not because I am intentional skipping food, but mostly from a lack of snacking and just choosing different, healthier options. It's not easy, but so far it's been easier than I thought it would be.

Start of Week 2

The great news is I end week one down 8.5 pounds. The bad news is that the first week is always the easiest for dropping water weigh and just shifting down to smaller meals.

Sunday was terrible in theory. I didn't get up until nearly 1pm and didn't eat solid food until 8:30 pm. Went to the Taco Mac in Newnan which is a great place if you can stand the musical selections. No Braves game and they decided to show the Angels/Dodgers game with no audio. I had soup, wrap and ice cream and still managed my lowest calorie day of the week. I think I figured out the secret to losing weight. Sleep 20 hours a day.

Then I went to a movie and avoided the concession area. And that was how week one ended. Today I am back on the full pill input with the morning, noon and nighttime Healthe Trim pills.

I did the free weights yesterday and not the bike. The plan on the weights is increasing reps and sets, not on increasing the amount of weight lifted. That is at least partially due to the fact that I only have one set of dumbbells and they are of a fixed weight and partially due to the fact that I really don't need Hulk-like biceps to feel like a man. I would like to be able to lift a telephone receiver without getting winded though.

I also have to say I got more support than I was expecting when I went out to eat this weekend. Sometimes you don't remember who your friends are until they remind to take a picture of your food.

Finishing Week One

So far so good.

Without making any major changes in what I eat weighing in today I was down 7.8 pounds from Monday.

Weekends suck for breakfast which is weird since I have all the time in the world to make anything I want. Mostly, I just want to sleep in. Add that desire to the Healthe Trim no food for three hours rule and breakfast goes right out the door on Saturday and Sunday. In fact, today I didn't get up until 1pm so my first meal won't come around before 4pm.

That's all on me.

Otherwise, the exercise is coming along now. The walk yesterday wasn't too unpleasant and my heart seemed to pound slightly less in my chest for thirty minutes afterward.

So OJ, sandwiches and a nice dinner at Ruby Tuesday made for a casual Saturday of dining.

I also will incorporate measurements on a weekly basis with the same rules as the weight, no starting numbers just the change from week to week.

Those measurements will be in the following areas (please refer to the image at the top – not entirely to scale)

So the numbers will look like this

Left Ankle: 0

Left Thigh: 0

Hips: 0

Middle: 0

Chest: o

Neck: 0

Left Bicep: 0 (done in a curl flex position)

Left Wrist: 0

Besides the walking and the exercise bike which I will try to get in some time on today, I am doing very light dumbbell workouts with 6.6lb weights. I will be doing curls, presses, wrist rolls, inverse curls and lifts. If I called something by the wrong name there I apologize. Maybe I'll do a video to demonstrate them at some point. I also do calf raises and squats about every other day but I don't seem to have much of a plan. I will look at creating a spreadsheet to track the reps and sets for these exercises too. The idea isn't to add muscle but more to create tone and some sort of endurance by increasing reps and sets along the way.

Mainly, I'll want to see – numbers about except maybe bicep and thigh numbers which would hopefully stay about the same or go up slightly. I really don't expect a big change in ankle or wrist but my in depth research does indicate that weight loss can come from the farthest parts going in, so you might not see a big shrinking in the hips, but your ankles or wrists could be showing a faster improvement. I have no idea and will go with the idea that more information is better than less for now.

We'll see how it goes when week two starts tomorrow.

Daily Food diary Day 6

So yesterday was Friday and the first of the three regular going out nights of the week. It wasn't too bad. Drinking Diet Coke isn't my favorite option, but it's okay to get caffeine that late when I am planning to stay up until at least 3am.

In case you didn't know it Applebees is almost literally the worst place on Earth to eat. They refuse, actually refuse, to release nutritional information unless required by law to do so. You might have to sue the corporation to find out what you are eating. What information you can gleam from other sources leads you to believe they have good reasons to hide the truly deadly combinations of calories and fats that they perpetrate as a menu. I will say they do have a Weight Watchers points guides for some items, but that is it. The place is just terrible for someone on a diet. That said, their effing food can taste pretty damn good and you can minimize the damage if you are willing to work it. I didn't but I stayed away from fried foods and added a salad that had bacon, cheese and croutons on it. I removed the croutons myself. I got the Margherita chicken that included steamed vegetables (good) and mashed potatoes that had some kind of ham or bacon on top of it (bad). The chicken was topped with mozzarella cheese and parmesan cheese and some tomatoes.

Going backwards, I polished off the pasta from Tuesday with some high caffeine Voltage. I needed the bridge from lunch at noon to the dinner at 11pm. I did skip the bread and the sugary dessert at least.

Lunch was also terrible, the so called Fresco menu at Taco Bell didn't work out for me as I wasn't familiar that they were the exact same as items already on the menu and you had to say the secret password "Fresco" to get the slightly lower calorie option. Secondly, my other big problem at lunch. I order way more food than I need, but never more than I can eat. To be fair I rarely run into the pile of food I cannot finish so the onus is on me to control my eating by under ordering. So that was just me being a poor steward to my own best interests.

Breakfast was a breeze, but now I am done with the old breakfast bars and will be looking for other and more varied food options for my morning meals.

It was a bad day in reality and I was late getting up this morning and I walked and drank some OJ before the big weigh in. I was down .2 pounds! Down! After the ridiculously huge amount of food I ate on Friday I could not have been more happy with these results.

I left the afternoon Healthe Trim pills at work. They were just the multi-vitamins and not the key thermo-energy pills that should boost metabolism so I will be alright.

Taking pictures of my food in front people was a little strange, luckily they were very supportive.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Day Five and still Alive!

Here's the link to the visual food diary.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crobin11/sets/72157619773592202/

This first week is really still more of a base line of what I eat on the regular. Next week I'll really start experimenting with newer, healthier foods and be bringing my lunch in with me more often as a cost saving measure too. Though those five dollar foot long subs are a good bargain in my book.

I can't explain my ability to eat almost anything at any time, I just can. The same dinner three nights in a row, meh. I would do really well in prison where you eat bologna sandwiches 7 days a week. Don't get me wrong, I love variety and am more than willing to try new foods and new restaurants, but give me a plate of lasagna and I am a happy camper.

Breakfast still proves to be the biggest challenge. No motivation for getting up early and making anything fancy and no desire to plan out meals. I still think it's important to load up on protein early in the day, but most quick and easy breakfasts are not protein heavy. Can you eat a workout bar for breakfast and not workout? Is the calorie count worth the lack of taste and possible lack of satisfying fullness? Definitely looking for better options at the Kroger this weekend.

Lunch is too easy. Many fast food (fat food?) options in Forest Park, and as proven they do have healthy menu items. I still don't like rocking the boat in the drive thru, so I have avoided that because I don't really like French fries and yet will eat them but I also won't try to order a side salad instead of fries in the drive thru. I really hate people who try to get complicated in the drive thru orders with special requests or multiple orders. You get one number choice and an add on and that is it. "I'll have the 6, Large size with a Coke and a double stack." Boom, done. I went thru only one drive thru so far at the BK and just got the salad (no dressing) and it was quick and easy. Anyway lunch should be easier next week when I bring in my own.

Dinner has been the best of all. Cook up a heap of pasta. Usually that is two meals but I broke it out first into four containers and thereby saved myself from trying to judge on the plate. I also cut down the bread with dinner from 4 to 2 to 0 slices by the Thursday repast. I little bit of sugar as I ate a Milky Way last night, more calories than the Snicker with Almonds (I knew that was the healthy candy bar).

Not feeling too hungry or any odd cravings and I think a big key is eating early, between 6:30-7:30pm, and not snacking afterwards. As I run out of the sodas I will replace them with non-sodas and see how I feel about that. Water, fruit juices, teas and I wonder what else? Maybe, Gatorade.

I also finally sucked it up and walked to the mailbox and back last night. It only took about ten minutes even though it felt like an hour, so I'll need to add more distance to the trip around the apartment complex. As soon as I can make it once without crying like Sally Fields at the Oscars. Only more with pain than with joy.

Lost a bit more between Thursday's weigh in and Friday, about 1.6 pounds. Still not that impressed, but when I get down 16 from where I started on Monday I will be whistling a happy tune.

Day 4 of the Food Diary…

Wow, well if I need to eat 2200 or less a day in order to lose weight it is easy to see why I am not losing any based on the first three days of this week.

Monday – 3,060 calories

Tuesday – 2,748 calories

Wednesday – 2,940 calories

Not surprising then that after the Sunday to Monday drop I have only lost one pound.

The Healthy Trim pill regimen isn't tough. I was doing the GNC heart healthy at one time and I am somewhat over the idea of taking daily vitamin supplements under the heading of "Don't know if they really help."

Yesterday's food included two servings of free office pizza that also had a ton of cheese which keeps my dairy number up higher than I want. I am also thinking of ways to eat Italian without the pasta and am wondering how gross it might be to try shredded zucchini or squash instead of pasta noodles with the sauce. That might be a Sunday experiment.

My main problem is still the exercise, always the exercise. I am too exhausted at night and I hate the idea of waking up in general so waking up earlier to exercise feels terrible. In a mind over matter battle I cannot get my mind to matter. This is definitely where having an exercise buddy would help. I wonder if there is a place to find that on the internet?

I am still eating what I want or at least not forcing myself to eat foods I don't want. Looks like breads and pastas are still not good and clearly pizza isn't an ideal food. If I don't start exercising soon, I will have to dramatically alter what I eat in order to lose any significant weight. Maybe that will be a good motivator.

Today should be fun, trying soy chocolate milk. Not as low on calories as you might want but has added vitamins. Also, going back to Subway to try a low-fat menu option hopefully with flavor. Dinner will probably be day three of the pasta.

Have a good one.

Day 3 Daily Check In

So I start today with a little bit of a disappointment. The weigh in this morning is the same number as yesterday. Now I just started taking the supposedly miraculous Healthy Trim yesterday, but I also feel as though I was eating a lot less food yesterday too so I was expecting a better result this morning.

The meals yesterday were a little better like I said. I had a bigger and more substantial breakfast. Those were the last pop tarts for me, but I like the breakfast drink in that it gives me some morning protein. I will continue to try to increase my morning protein intake and make it the high calorie meal of the day.

Lunch wasn't bad either. The Grilled Chicken salad from Burger King was a remarkable discovery. I am betting without croutons and cheese that the total calories are south of 200 on that meal. I like and am accustomed to ending meals with a dessert so the sugar free Jell-O pudding was a nice topper. It's also clear that the sodas with 120 calories a pop are a problem. I will look into more methods of flavoring water to vary my beverage choices.

Dinner was a huge surprise in that I was starving by the time I ate, but I was more than satisfied with the amount of food I had and I was glad I divided up the pasta before eating. The four pieces of Italian bread were only 90 calories a slice, but I have a strong feeling based on this morning's weigh in that I may have to be more concerned about carbohydrates than I really want to be. I love bread and pasta so cutting that out won't make me happy.

On the positive side with the Healthy Trim, their claim of cutting down on cravings for "bad foods" isn't necessarily inaccurate. Whether from the pills or the fact that I am posting everything I am eating on-line I haven't felt a strong craving for sugar and I haven't felt any hang over effects from cutting out coffee and caffeinated sodas.

The biggest negative is still the lack of exercise. This whole experience is for nothing if I don't get my lazy behind in the habit of more with a purpose for at least 30 minutes a day.

I was asleep again before 10pm and I am beginning to wonder if the evening pills don't have some kind of sleep agent in them. However, my energy levels throughout the day remained fairly consistent and a bit higher overall. No mid-afternoon doze off feelings and I wasn't as jittery as I thought I'd be either.

Plan Day Two

Day one recap.
Alright, I just want to say I had every intention of exercising yesterday. I got home around 6pm and made the lovely dinner you can see on my flickr page. Then around 7:30 I started to get very tired. I was in bed by 8:30 and didn’t wake up until this morning’s alarm at 6:20am. So no exercise, but I got a hella good night’s sleep which is also important for healthy living.

Meals were fine. I started out strong with a breakfast bar and coffee. Of course, this made me very hungry and I ran to lunch at 11:45 and got the meatball sub from Subway and wasn’t impressed with the tradeoff of flavors to calories on that meal. Dinner was simple with the PB&J sandwiches that were also loaded with calories.

I’d say my biggest challenges right now are all quantity related. I could have been fine with a 6” sub instead of the foot long. I also would have been fine eating a low-cal sub if I had even considered it. The three sandwiches for dinner could have easily been two. Still, without moderating my diet I did pretty well.

I also started Healthy Trim yesterday afternoon. So I took the two sets of pills with lunch and the one set with dinner, but I didn’t start the key thermogenic until this morning. So we’ll see how well this program works too. Plus, that crap is expensive. The full run of pills that I picked up ran me about $190 with shipping and taxes. It had a long way to go to prove that it is worth the cost.

So far I haven’t made any significant changes to my eating habits though by tracking them via pictures on the web I find myself considering what I am willing to eat based on what I want people to see me eating. It will be interesting to see how eating out will be affected later this week by this whole process.

Based on my starting weight Monday I am down 3 pounds this morning. Not putting much stock in that number because my starting weight was about 6 pounds higher than my average over the last month or so. I should get a better measure today and also get to factor in the use of the pills too.

I am also looking at Soy Milk and Soy Yougurts to replace the milk based ummm milk I use now.

New Day, New Plan

Starting today I am keeping a visual food diary of everything I eat that has any significant calorie count and will continue to do so for the next 60 days, or until I get sick of doing it.

I have in my head a plan to drop between thirty and fifty pounds by August 15 using at least the dual methods of diet and exercise. I know, I too think this is revolutionary.

I am going to run the photos to my flickr photostream. What? Where is that?

Here; http://www.flickr.com/photos/crobin11/

And I will blog about the eating and the exercising here on the regular blog.

http://crobin11.blogspot.com/

I won’t track a few items. No reason to track water or coffee drinking. I also chew a ton of Orbitz gum of any and all varieties. The calories in that gum are less than five calories per piece and the chewing probably offsets the calories.

I am also looking to reduce dairy consumption not for any particular political agenda, but just because I think I am slightly lactose intolerant.

The exercise will be mostly walking and exercise bike with some free weight and basic calisthenics to start. If I manage to not die or quit eventually I’d like to get through the basic Pilates workouts and then start going to the gym and meet with a trainer a few times a week to develop a solid foundation for healthy living.

Start simple, stay simple.

Gods help me.

Star Trek (2009)

Director: J.J. Abrams

Writers: Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman

Release Date: 8 May 2009

Cast:
Chris Pine ... James T. Kirk
Zachary Quinto ... Spock
Leonard Nimoy ... Spock Prime
Eric Bana ... Nero
Bruce Greenwood ... Capt. Christopher Pike
Karl Urban ... Dr. Leonard 'Bones' McCoy
Zoe Saldana ... Nyota Uhura
Simon Pegg ... Scotty
John Cho ... Hikaru Sulu
Anton Yelchin ... Pavel Chekov
Ben Cross ... Sarek
Winona Ryder ... Amanda Grayson
Chris Hemsworth ... George Kirk
Jennifer Morrison ... Winona Kirk
Rachel Nichols ... Gaila

MPAA: Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action and violence, and brief sexual content.

Runtime: 126 min

Filming Locations: Bakersfield, California, USA

Company: Bad Robot

AKA: Madea Goes to Starfleet Academy

Again, this is a review of the movie and contains all sorts of plot and character spoilers. Never read this blog before seeing the movie unless you don’t mind knowing what I know about it.

WTF is this shite???

Here’s what we know:
On Television-
Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) 1966-1969
Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) 1987-1994
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) 1993-1999
Star Trek: Voyager (VOY) 1995-2001
Star Trek: Enterprise (ENT) 2001-2005

At the Movies-
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (I) 1979
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (II) 1982
Star Trek: The Search for Spock (III) 1984
Star Trek: The Voyage Home (IV) 1986
Star Trek: The Final Frontier (V) 1989
Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (VI) 1991
Star Trek: Generations (VII) 1994
Star Trek: First Contact (VIII) 1996
Star Trek: Insurrection (IX) 1998
Star Trek: Nemesis (X) 2002

So this is the eleventh “Star Trek” movie and as such would fall under the even/odd mythology as a bad Star Trek movie. It kind of lives up to that billing.

First of all if you don’t know anything about the entirety of the Star Trek universe this movie does absolutely nothing to bring you into it. The backgrounds of the main characters, and the way this movie lays out there are only two characters, are told in a very snapshot-like manner. Not a ton of depth and no establishment of the universe for newbies, so you have to have a very open mind to sit through the rest of the story. In fact I can’t imagine a worse way to reboot, relaunch, reimagine or re-anything a franchise like Star Trek with its forty plus years of material then the makers of this movie managed to do.

If you are a Star Trek fan and a devotee of all things Trek, then you probably walked out of this movie feeling confused, violated and a little bit angry. It has been forever (almost five years since ENT left the airwaves) since we’ve had new Trek. This is new Trek. And by new I mean it has almost no resemblance to anything that has come before. You are watching a bad re-enactment of an old Star Trek episode where the characters have familiar names and there are a few familiar motifs but nothing else is quite right.

The story kills me. It is terrible at its core and that destroys the entire emotion that the movie attempts to establish at the very beginning. Here’s the nutshell: Romulus has been destroyed by a star that has gone supernova. Now that is a completely natural event, at least we’ll assume it is at this point. This causes a captain of a mining vessel, a MINING vessel, to go completely insane. He’s pissed because his wife and daughter died and Spock, who had promised to help with what I can only call the most retarded nonsense I have ever heard – he was going to create a singularity (a black hole) to collapse the exploding star before it reached Romulus, is the man he blames. The method involves red matter and Spock does create the black hole. But don’t you still end up with a black hole like right by Romulus? Also, there are a ton of warning signs regarding a star going Supernova and the Romulans have been a space-faring race for a long time. So why the hell are they still on Romulus? They could have and should have evacuated well ahead of any explosion.

Both Spock in his ultra-fancy Vulcan science vessel and crazy Capt. Nero in his less than state of the art mining vessel go through the black hole and back in time. Oh my god! Can there be a more contrived method for faking time travel? I submit to you that there cannot be. The Romulans arrive in a time and place where a single Federation vessel happens to be and this mining vessel is Romulan so I suppose that it is armed with missiles and disruptors isn’t all that surprising. The Romulan mining ship destroys a top of the line Federation vessel in a few minutes. None of this would matter except the First Officer on this ship happens to be James T. Kirk’s dad and he dies saving his wife and his just born son. This part is actually pretty awesome as a beginning scene for the movie, if you don’t know the why of Nero’s appearance.

Forward a few years and see young Spock and young Kirk being all rebellious. Not really sure of the aging process for Vulcans in that they are very long lived, but I am not sure if that means their childhoods are really long, normal – human, or abbreviated like Spock –reborn in III. Anyways, they flash forward to teen Kirk and Spock still being rebellious and yet managing to both find their ways to Starfleet. Flash forward three years and teacher Spock and (yes, still rebellious) student Kirk are far from friends when Kirk is before a disciplinary committee for cheating on Spock’s test (???). Then word comes that there is trouble on Vulcan.

Students are rushed to waiting ships because the main Federation fleet is in some other part of space doing something that they cannot break away from. Kirk isn’t supposed to go, but he’s - ya know – rebellious and Bones gets him on board Enterprise. Now it’s getting cool because we get to meet young Chekov and kind of young Sulu. We also get to see Uhura take her seat at the communications chair and Capt. Pike running the whole ship. The gang’s not quite all here and our backgrounds on Chekov, Sulu, Uhura, Bones and later Scotty left me a little bit disappointed. Still as a buddy picture (Spock and Kirk) we’ve got all the players together at about an hour in.

Kirk knows what’s what, gets made first officer when Pike leaves Spock in command while Pike negotiates with the Mad Nero (very ancient Rome for a space opera). Things go bad on Vulcan and bad on Nero’s ship. Kirk gets jettisoned from Enterprise (huh?) and lands on a planet that has not only old man Spock after Nero left him there to watch Vulcan turn into a black hole (where again I am confused about the astrophysics involving the gravity of a black hole and its effects on nearby planets), but also a certain engineer with a Scottish brogue and a few ideas about teleporting at warp speeds. Talk about your crazy coincidences.

Scotty and Kirk get back to Enterprise in time to make Spock angry, and when he’s angry he gets relieved of command. (Oh, that’s why Kirk calls him MISTER Spock?) The crew gets behind the regimen change and head to Earth to stop the psychotic Romulan from imploding the planet and creating about black hole just like Vulcan. That red matter is some dangerous crap.

Wham, Bam, thank you Ma’am. And then there is the not so happy but we still saved Earth ending. The universe is still mostly similar to the TOS universe except instead of six billion or more Vulcans running around we have closer to ten thousand. Not much if any of the future tech survived the singularity at the end, but we have Spock (Prime?) and we have Spock (Alpha?) meeting at the end and giving a quick wrap up. Kirk goes from disgraced cadet to savior of the Earth and the Federation. He ends up beating Spock’s no win scenario and taking over command of the Enterprise after Pike’s advancement to Admiral.

Like I said the details of the story are pure crap. And if you are going to see Star Trek for a rock solid science fiction story then you are going to be disappointed. This is the start of the summer movie releases, or so I’ve read and this movie does deliver a ton of action, dumb jokes, huge explosions AND implosions – you don’t get a lot of those, and some very pretty people in costumes.

The pretty people aren’t that bad either. In fact a big redeemer for this movie is the cast who I would pay to see in another Star Trek movie or two. After all this ends up being the odd numbered Trek movie, so you have to let them put in an even numbered one to get the truly spectacular one. Chris Pine as James T. Kirk is brash and bold. He might be smart, but he doesn’t let his brains get in the way of his fists. In all he’s a more than worthy portrayer of this Starfleet Captain. Zachary Quinto is eerily good as Spock. His Sylar on “Heroes” has served him well in carrying a ton of information in a glare. His relationship with Uhuru (again not really explained in the movie) carries more weight for the tortured looks Spock throws around under his demeanor of cool logic.

Damn it, Jim! We needed more Karl Urban as McCoy. He did what he could in his few scenes to dance between the conflicts of Spock and Kirk and in all established his place as best he could in the time Abrams allowed. Same with Uhuru. Zoe “MmmMmm Good” Saldana was efficient and competent as the communications officer, but there isn’t quite the tensions there would have been in the 60s of seeing a woman, much less a black woman, running a major part of what is essentially a warship. More of Zoe in the next installment. Scotty shows up around the halfway point and Simon Pegg delivers what has to be considered an understated performance. Not too overbearing in his role, but he’s still mostly an outsider by the end of the film. And did he have a Tribble on that ice planet?

The rest were nearly awesome and borderline awful at the same time. Poor Anton Yelchin as Chekov has the unenviable task of recreating one of the worst stereotyped characters in all of science fiction, the Russian who speaks really horrible English. And I almost bought it with his pronouncing V as a W (Victor becomes Whictor). Until the part where he says “away team” because then the bastard says- I swear to god- “avay team” making a perfect Vee sound. Somebody should have said something about that. John Cho is Sulu and he’s also doing comic relief in a bit where he forgets to release the parking brake before going to light speed. He’s a fighter (because he took fencing classes) and that’s about it for his character development. That’s it for the main crew and I know it’s tough in a two hour movie to delve into all the characters from birth to their appearances on the deck of Enterprise, but really could have used some help there. And final Nero was played by Eric Bana in more makeup then you can justify for such a handsome man. He’s wasted in the underdeveloped villain role and my god I almost forgot the James Bond villain moment. Hack effing writing as Nero has Kirk dead to rights and then walks away without finishing him. Insane or not, come on!

And that is the movie in a nutshell.

J.J. isn’t a great director. He does a ton of TV where he’s rarely behind the camera and it shows with the lens issues here. Maybe he’ll blame Dan Mindel the cinematographer. You might not notice those problems the first time you see the movie because it runs at a pretty fast pace to hide the holes in dialogue and plot, but it will make second and third viewings more painful. Maybe he can produce and let someone else handle the day to day?

These are the writers that brought you MI:3 and Transformers so you kind of have to expect a terribly shallow script. Your expectations are met. Again with so much time spent on Kirk and Spock back-stories, we could have used a few minutes to establish Nero somewhere. Or go with some better-known bad guys, which is where I hope the sequel goes. This is the time of conflict with the Klingons. At least if we skip the stuff from ENT it is. I mean wouldn’t this altered timeline be the perfect place for Koloth, Kang and Kor to meet up with Kirk and crew for some rocking good space fightin’? Doesn’t Koloth deserve his chance to face Kirk in the field of battle?

Anyway, like Eddie Murphy once opined, if a man is in the desert for weeks and is then offered a cracker, that cracker will be the best damn cracker he’s ever eaten. This movie ain’t no Ritz cracker, but for Star Trek fans left in the desert for the last four years it’s better than nothing.

See it and try to enjoy the whiz bang explosions, but remember these are the same guys who wrote last year’s “Transformers” and really can you expect cool effects and a good story?