I'm Stopping The Food Insanity

As you can see, today will not be much different than yesterday as far as outdoor activity for the hounds. The first two photos were from yesterday afternoon. Both hounds had relieved themselves first thing in the morning, in the dark around 6:38am but the day of rain really put a wrench in their plans afterwards.

Heidi eventually 'hid' under the overhang to do what she had to do and Stella held out as long as she could. She stood in front of me around 1am as I was watching the 9th inning of the Reds game to let me know she wanted to go outside, no matter if it was still raining or not.

This morning was the same. It will be more of the same tomorrow. At least with all the rain all the grass, the fields, the trees and plants are recovering from the winter and growing fast and really getting green.

I told Stella we were needing some new photos for this blog post this morning. She literally stood right here, not wanting to cross the path of water nor did she try to walk around it ... she wasn't interested in going anywhere near the driveway under a light sprinkle of rain.

This always grows back nice after being dormant a month earlier.

With a look like this, Stella convinced me to get back inside. With a high of 47° possible, I changed from cargo shorts back to fleece lined jeans. I don't care that we are well into April. Where's those wool socks I tucked away in my drawer?

It was almost a year ago when my food insanity started. I was feeling like crap, feeling heavier than normal last May 2018. I stepped on the scales to see I had gained back all the weight I had lost the previous year and decided to do something about it ... like get serious. That is when all the spreadsheet tracking started and the food app where I logged in everything I ate or drank. Scanning a bar code on the food with the phone camera made it quite easy to do.

About a month or so ago when I was again seeing disappointing results I thought to myself "it is what it is, you're older and it's just what happens in life" ... thinking I'd go back to no apps, no spreadsheets, and then eat what I want when I want. After all, eight to ten months of trying to control calories, and the food I ate really was not showing that much improvement.

Certainly not enough to make it feel like it was worth my time.

That same feeling hit me a few weeks ago when I had regain the pounds I had lost the week before. Yet, compared to last year I was still under 8-10 pounds and from 2014 I was down 20 pounds give or take a couple. With all the logging of food and seeing how much fat, carbs and protein I was getting plus seeing that I basically inhaled 1200-1750 calories per day ... I didn't feel I needed to continue to log my food.

I knew what foods I could not eat due to ingestion. I also knew what foods I could not eat due to weight gain. More important, I knew it really was dependent on portion size, more than anything else. I know what food makes me feel good and what makes me feel sick.

I did not need a food app nor a couple of simple spreadsheets to tell me that.

So by dinner time last night, around 6pm I had decided that today would start my new path ... eat what I like, eat healthy food, NO logging of food, NO spreadsheet data entry and no more monitoring weight, inches or millimeters of fat using those skin calipers.

It would not make a difference !!!

While I was waiting for my 10:10pm Reds game start time I was doing a little channel surfing on tv when I stopped to check out the tv show about the last days or hours of famous people who had died. In this case it was about Michael Clarke Duncan, the star in the movie The Green Mile with Tom Hanks. He died in 2012 of a heart attack, eating a strict vegetarian diet and was a workout addict.

It was just what I had talked about here a couple of times the past few weeks.

Long story short ... he had gone to a vegetarian diet about four years before he died because of some fainting spells and finding out he had a cardiac disease, where I cannot remember the name of it and am too lazy to look it up. The doctor on the tv show said his disease most likely started in his early 20's, leading up to a heart attack 35 years later.

That tv show was a few hours after I heard the notification on my iPhone that I had received an email telling me that Greg had made a comment on my blog post from Tuesday. You can read his comment here after you scroll to the bottom of the post. It's something to think about and I agree with.

He was basically taking the words right out of my brain, words that I had thought about an hour or two before his comment, a few weeks ago and the same thoughts a few months ago. It was good to read that maybe just saying 'screw it' was not insane after all. What I was doing with the food app, spreadsheets and a somewhat strict eating plan WAS insane.

It was like beating my head against a wall ... doing the same thing over and over again and getting the same results. You know, they say THAT is the definition of insanity and that is what I've been doing the past year.

So today is kinda a big day for me.

Habits will be broken. My thought process will catch the changes. My eating will not change much but those times I have urges for pizza or a cheeseburger will not be shoved to the side like I've been doing. Plus that "all you can eat" Chinese Buffet downtown will be back on my places to go list. The battered deep fried fish at Long John Silver's ... goes back on the list too.

The fact is I want to remain healthy, which I am based on my blood pressure and heart rate, no shortness of breath at anytime. I also know I will never be or get into the athletic shape I was in when I was younger but I have been healthy my whole live and never had any kind of health issues 66 years later.

I am not even sure that I enjoy riding a bicycle after all the thousands of miles I have ridden in my life. Those miles started when I was growing up, riding the 2 miles to town on my one speed Schwinn. Then riding further and doing some bicycle racing in my 20's along with the summer cross country trip to California and then up the coast to Seattle when I was 24 years old. I wasn't bad in my 40's when I was at home and not on deployments on aircraft carriers.

I could ride 25-40 miles daily after work and a 100 miler on Saturdays. If I was in town I would ride the Seattle - Portland ride every spring, 202 miles between 10 - 11 hours of riding. Yet in my 60's I lost that urge to ride. It might have been a lack of motivation as I got older or my sore knees as I tried to get in shape. Or it might be fear ... yes fear.

I see too many cars and trucks in front of my house going 55-70mph, running off the side of the highway onto the shoulder. Plus I see too many people when I am driving that like to text while they drive. I have a slight fear of ending up a statistic if I ride my bike in this area. A couple of local riders have.

I know and have always known that when my time is due it will happen. Very little in between now and then will be much of a factor. It's life, not a big deal. I would like to outlive my hounds, no doubt I will but I hate the thought of dying while they are still living ... sad to think of that option.

So ... I am going back to really enjoying life and not putting everything I do into a damn spreadsheet or a food app on my phone !!!!!

Things are good here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Stella's A Diet Assistant

While Heidi got plenty of rest this morning for a possible walk this afternoon, Stella and I duplicated the start of the morning only she decided this morning I deserved an extra hour of sleep and didn't start her whining to wake me until 6am. She seems to forget at times that I am retired and do not need to get up before the crack of dawn.

It was cold again, below 30°, but really nice this morning as we walked in the field. We had a pretty steady walk, with few stops in between as the photos will show. So, what's the post title about? Well it happened again last night around 9:30pm. I was not the first time it has happened but good old Stella prevented me of making a quick drive to the Dollar Store for some candy, cookies and anything else I could get my hands on. I had a HUGE CRAVING for junk food.

With her on again off again, never knowing when she will have a separation anxiety attack when I leave, I have been keeping her and Heidi in the bedroom as always BUT I continue to use the baby gate outside of the closed door. That door is always tied in a way that she cannot open it.

It takes probably less than two minutes to set up "the wall" but the effort to do that while waking her up from a deep sleep is a huge roadblock for my junk food runs late at night. I really don't like waking her up on the couch just to move her into her 'jail cell' while I am only gone 5-7 minutes, 10 at the most.

Doesn't seem like a lot of time does it? Besides I just told you she is in a deep sleep on the couch. Based on past experiences when I trusted her and was sure I could make it back before she woke up ... NOT ONE TIME did that work out as planned.

She must wake up as she hears my car drive away. Then she will counter surf for any possible food, fruit in bowls, maybe some left over pasta sauce stains on a plate that is waiting to be washed. She has even tried opening the refrigerator. The hanging bloodhound drool on the handle was a dead giveaway last summer.

So ... 7-10 minutes is too long for Stella to stay out of trouble. With it being too much of a hassel to set up "the wall", she slept on the couch and I changed my mind about going. I killed my junk food urge with a raw banana.

You may have noticed I did change the blog design. This was quick and easy since I did not have to do hardly any cusomization after I implemented the change. It still has a sidebar but it has the posts listed one by one instead of a grid. I was getting tired of the grid look on the home page. I did change the font and for the blog posts title, that change automatically reduced the size enough to make all the post titles just one line.

I know I've said it at least four times before but "I like this design"

When Stella heard the word "go" she stopped in her tracks and looked at me is if she would be making the trip when we returned home. All I said was "I have to go to the store" as I was trying to get her to work more and sniff less

I usually don't like shooting directly into the sun but I kind of liked this photo the more I looked at it.

Starting Thursday night I will be back to living on the couch watching "March Madness" through the weekend. Combine that with the start of the MLB season, there will be a lot of games going on at the same time. The split screen will definitely be used. It's a feature I did NOT have with DirecTV but do with DishNetwork. Unless my internet service changes from satellite to through my phone service I don't see many options on how I get my tv signal.

I have 11 months left on my contract with DishNetwork and at the rate things are changing I am sure my options will increase from now until February 2020. Being a sports addict and my locaction most of all, makes it hard for me to become a "Cord Cutter".

One of the problems of getting up at 6am, is that Heidi and Stella now want to have lunch at 10am. They have both given up their barking and howling knowing that I will not feed them until at least 11am, maybe a little later.

Since the release of the Mueller Investigation Report and the announcement by the Attorney General, tv news has been very very interesting. If it wasn't so sad it would be hilarious. I do glance at those channels that are far left and it is just amazing the amount of DENIAL that is going on by current and past members of Congress, the FBI and the CIA.

Just like the Democrats loved Comey in the summer of 2016, they hated him by October 2016. They (the far left media and pundits) have pulled that same whining feature with Mueller. They were positive that Trump would be nailed to the cross by that investigation and when he wasn't Meuller was the bad guy. Some think they can get the truth easier than it took Mueller. Clowns.

Needless to say any comments I make about the political scene from now on will be based on what I read online. I'm done with TV news ... again.

I reset my targets or limits for calories, carbs, protein and fat on the Cronometer app to what the Mediterranean Diet suggested. Calories 1,527 - Carbs 190g - Protein 110g - Fat 30g.

I am back to following "My Diet" which is a little bit from all the top diets. My emphasis is tyring to stay away from fast food, junk food, processed food and sugar. Some of those that I am focused on, I have stayed away from most of the time the past four years. So I am really trying to eliminate those late night junk food runs I have had in the past and combatting against those fast food urges I have.

When I have fallen off the whole food wagon, I have fallen hard and make up for all the ice cream, pizza, cheeseburgers that I have missed. Although the last time I had a Pepsi (months ago) it did not taste good.

I am slowly breaking my sugar habit by cutting the quantities in half. That means only 1tsp per cup of coffee or cup of oatmeal. It has seemed to have worked the past two mornings.

Why is it every time I take a photo where my house is in the background or as we end our walk, that I always have to edit it and level the top of the roof to where it is straight???? Anywhere from an angle of 2°-4°. It's the same way whether I use the smaller Canon G9 or the larger Nikon D3200. I am positive I am holding the camera level when I take the photo.

Is my house sinking 2°-4° on the north end of the house?   (that's a joke ... I think)

The camera didn't catch her but Stella ran a couple of times today. Once she was so fast that she ran into the back of me as I was about to turn take her picture. Oh, one thing I do not want her to find out about, is the "dietitian assistant" job, because she will expect more kibble with each meal.

No matter what the temperatures are, it is always nice when the sun is out and it's not raining.

Stella getting in a little hamstring stretching.

With the library books returned I am back to reading the small font, 600 page book about Steve Jobs. It's a very very slow read. It's not him that I want to read about it's about Apple that I want read about. His partner was the computer whiz, Steve was the salesman. In the few pages I have read they made quite a pair. They are just starting their first computer as a company, when I put the book down and went to bed last night. They combined what money they had and started Apple with $1,300.

My car is a year older but the great state of Indiana let me know I needed to pay more than last year for license plates. They also hit me for a little more income taxes to pay this year. I still see a lot of bridges that need repaired, highways that need repaired ... so where does the money go? This state use to have a huge surplus of funds just a few years ago.

Well I need to go. The hounds are trying a different strategy to get me to serve lunch earlier than normal. No sounds but they are both sitting next to my desk chair staring at me with just a little bloodhound drool on the left jowl of Stella.

It's another beautiful day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.