Behind the cut below you’re going to find a whole slew of pictures (and lots and lots of my flesh). I’m pasting in all the progress pictures I’ve taken over the last few years.
If you don’t want to see me without my shirt on don’t click the link. Can’t say I’d blame you, really.
Here goes nothing…
Image courtesy of stu_spivack
While there are some great resources out there for this question (Dotti’s Weight Loss Zone, Weight Watchers, Daily Burn, etc) , none of them have a clear answer on one of my favorites: Pho (Vietnamese noodle soup). While I am elevating ShrinkGeek to the level of the oracle on Delphi, do any of you guys know? Or – how about just a Boolean: Is it healthy, or not? BTW: I’m talking about restaurant Pho, not the crap in the ramen noodle aisle.
I tried to take the easy way out of this question and defer the answer to Jaden Hair, Tampa Bay area food celebrity and author of The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook. I follow her on Twitter and am constantly assaulted by posts about the amazing Asian recipes she talks about so I figured if anyone would know it was her. Sure enough, she has a recipe for Pho on her site that sounds absolutely amazing. Unfortunately for me when I asked her if she had ever figured out the nutrition information for the recipe she replied that she had not, and that we should all follow the advice of her Mother who so wisely said “Just eat! It good for you!”
Which, I suppose, answers the second part of the question. So much for this being an easy assignment.
Image courtesy of bryangeek
One of the biggest challenges that we face in the modern era when it comes to having a balanced diet is that cheap, unhealthy food is considerably easier to get than the healthier alternatives. Low-calorie, low-fat, and nutritious food is frustratingly expensive when compared to the dollar menu at your local fast food chain, and if you’re dieting on a budget those pennies can add up quickly. What’s worse is that when you are really hungry it sure seems like it’s a heck of a lot easier to run for the border than actually go through the effort of cooking something that is good for you.
Well, it turns out that perception may not be too terribly far from reality in America. Unless, that is, you literally live in the middle of nowhere.
I remember when the internet was still new and shiny. Back then if you were one of the folks who actually had a computer and, on top of that, the “luxury” of an internet connection you could pick a handle to be known by and spout off whatever you wanted to online without fear of the people in your “real life” finding what you said. Oh, sure…it happened on occasion. I’ll bet most of us who were around back in those days had at least one uncomfortable moment where we were confronted with the person who we had slagged up one side and down the other on Live Journal. There’s nothing quite like that sinking, horrible feeling you get in the pit of your stomach the first time someone says “I read something about me on your blog” when you didn’t know the person in question even could even figure out how to turn a computer ON. On the whole, though, the internet was a vast anonymous playground in those days. The people who knew you in meat space were likely in your social circle and could generally be counted on to be trusted confidants. You could talk about anything you wanted to, and we did. Oh did we. We talked about our sexual conquests. We talked about how insane our families made us. We talked about our jobs, and what we really thought about them. We talked about our secret dreams. We talked about recreational drug use.
We swore a lot, too.
Those days are over.
There’s a guy who hangs out in Ybor City on the weekends that stands in the middle of crowded night clubs preaching about Jesus. At least, there used to be. I really haven’t been clubbing in a long time so I couldn’t say whether or not he’s still doing it, but to be honest I kind of hope he is. You see, I kind of admire this guy. I think he’s a little crazy, of course, and I know he’s made some friends of mine uncomfortable on more than one occasion, but really…you have to kind of give it up for a man who willingly puts himself into what is almost certainly going to be an uncomfortable situation because he believes that doing so will help him save someone’s immortal soul.
There’s another reason why I like this guy, though.
A few years ago several World of Warcraft players with way too much time on their hands decided that it would be a good idea to rig their computers to a treadmill so they could virtually “run” across Azeroth. Unfortunately the video and the page that originally linked to it have vanished into the virtual ether, but suffice it to say that the heroes of the story soon learned that they were not, in fact, nearly as fit as their digital selves.
It seems as though these days you can’t have a conversation about Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games without someone asking which one is going to be the World of Warcraft killer. Personally? I happen to agree with my buddy Kevin Stallard who boldly stated that there would never be a WoW killer. Regardless of our opinion, though, people still speculate who is going to have the power to dethrone the 800 pound gorilla that Blizzard created, and many folks are wondering if the Asian inspired Aion from NCSoft has what it takes to become King of the Hill.
So what, you may be wondering, does dominance in the MMO industry have to do with a Health and Fitness blog?
There are four of us on my insurance policy. It’s a good insurance policy, by all accounts. It’s certainly much better than not having insurance. Most of the time, anyway.
This whole H1N1 scare, though? If you’re following all of the CDC best practice guidelines if you think you’re exposed you should go immediately to a clinic and be tested and start on Tamiflu.
The Urgent Care clinic co-pay on our plan is $50.
You know, it’s not very often that I get the opportunity to post a picture of a rather attractive and scantily clad woman here on ShrinkGeek and still have the right to claim that my doing so is in the realm of “legitimate” reporting. Today just happens to be one of those days.
Fitness model and former World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Trish Stratus announced on Thursday that she is partnering up with Frima Studios to produce Stratusphere, an exergame that will focus on using Yoga as a “real workout.” The game will use the Wii Balance Board along with other peripherals and include video segments of Stratus encouraging the players on.
So I’ve made another shift on the old blog here. I have moved away from WordPress.com and set up a hosting account with HostGator. WordPress.com is a great value, but the limited amount of stuff that you can do with your site there really got on my nerves. HostGator is, quite frankly, a stunningly good deal. $9.95 a month gets me unlimited disk space, bandwidth, databases, and domains. I could theoretically move all of my domains to the one account and give them completely different sites with the same monthly fee. It’s kinda crazy. I’m probably going to end up moving ShrinkGeek here, too. I just need to figure out what to do with the ColdFusion application we’re using on the back end.
For those of you following my RSS feeds, this now means that I can start using the <More> tag again and my epic length posts won’t clog up your feeds.
You’re welcome!
There was a lot of buzz on the floor of E3 this year after Microsoft unveiled Project Natal, and rightly so. The potential to have a game system that can track your movements so precisely that it can actually recognize who you are when you walk into the room is pretty amazing (and, admittedly, pretty creepy at the same time). While attaching a camera to a console to use in a video game is nothing new, the level of interactivity that Project Natal is promising is going to be a huge leap forward if it ever actually makes it out of development. Needless to say, this kind of tool could totally revolutionize the fitness gaming industry.
Ubisoft, however, isn’t waiting around for Microsoft to finish development of Project Natal. This Christmas they are bringing the hands-free fitness gaming concept to the Nintendo Wii.