Portland, the Half Blood Prince, and quick notes

Got back from Portland on Tuesday night, celebrating my girlfriend’s dirty 30, which went off well.  I pretty much went off diet the entire trip; Saturday I had some shitty crosamich at the airport, some crazy breakfast at Gravy, some pizza from a food cart pod, a cornucopia of bar food at the Jolly Rodger including more pizza, chicken wings, a burger, tots, and several beers. also consumed were several foods from the food pod including fois gras french fries and one of the best gyros i’ve ever eaten. I also plopped down a few donuts from voodoo donuts, half of a lox and bagel, more beer, and more samich from someplace down near the river who’s name escapes me. Overall i ate like shit and gained about 4 lbs back. this morning i weighed in at 244.6 lbs, almost an exact gain of 4 over my last weigh in on Friday of 240.5 lbs. (update, as of Friday morn I’m already down to 242.8)

One thing is for certain; the weight i’ve lost over the last three weeks is mostly body fat and not exactly water as I was afraid of. By not exactly, I mean that when fat is burned by the body, its transformed into waste products which are atp, water, co2, and heat. Not too different than the exhaust from a car but with a lot less co.  I didn’t know this till i was listening to the physiology of exersize class I’m taking from UCSD, I was expecting that fat was just gonna be pooed out or something.

The net result is that i feel strangely empowered now. My entire life has been ruled by this desperate undertone of dealing with food, and for the first time i feel like i have the ability to easily control both my weight and, further, what I can do with myself physically. Exercise was helping me maintain but the level of output in relation to the results was rather high.  Ive found it much, much easier to reduce the intake of certain foods and increase the levels of others.

What i’ve learned for certain about this entire experience is  that what we were taught about what is ok to eat as we grow up is entirely wrong. I constantly am finding life to be a lot like Harry Potter and the Half Blood prince, meaning, that I’m constantly finding the rules in the book i’ve been given to be wrong, and its kind of up to me to figure out where and how its been changed.  USDA guidelines are straight up bullshit. Common folk wisdom tends to be right some of the time, then way off base the rest of the time.  Really, it comes down to depending on “The Field” as I’m coming to call it- the network of people who are interested enough in a subject to talk and give away information and experiences for free. While the field can come up with incorrect solutions, more and more I’m finding that it tends to find the correct solutions and broadcasts them even when it contradicts what is commonly acceptable.  Part of dealing with the Field is navigating the morass of well funded, super hyped/marketed bullshit.  This is often the hardest part, as the bullshit has deep pockets and tends to be in the easiest of places to have access to- mcdonalds and walmart come to mind first as the biggest peddlers of crap that i can think of.

a few quick notes;

1. China fever  has taken hold with the president of communist china visiting and President Obama giving this hard working man of the proletariat a crazy lobster/steak/300$ bottle dinner and reception. What is just sad is to see how fucking week obama comes off . These are the people who have, more or less, destroyed our middle class by underpricing labor. Quasi slaves tend to do that. The fucked thing is that no one here seems to get it, especially my generation and younger. Basically we have cheep labor from Mexico, no decent middle class jobs now or in the foreseeable future, and an upper class that can only get there through extreme education and nicheation. I think that this reception with china will mark Obama’s presidency as the point when America really began to loose the plot. I’m just hoping my fellow gen x’ers will get the cahones to take the reigns of power from our more or less incompetent parents as quickly as possible. President Hintao did a sad, sad, stupid job of claiming technical difficulties when he was asked about human rights in China. This should concern everyone, as China’s leadership doesn’t give a shit about its own people- 75 million have died at the hands of the communist government since the 40’s-  we should expect it to care even less about us.

I feel like it’s time that I do my best to stop buying goods made in china, but I know this will prove difficult. I’ve already stopped eating anything grown in Mexico, I don’t trust the shit and I don’t find any of it to taste right anyways.

2. Starting to do trades again, albiet slowly. Got rid of the few shares of labcorp stock i have from last year, and as soon as I can im going to start looking at buying into the basket i’ve been tracking for the last six months, netflix, apple, and ge are the leaders. wish i had the money to trade in google, but its just way too out of reach at 600 a share.

3.I’m about a third of the way through my text book on management(its 800 pages), finished my sociobiology text book, (about 600 pages)  and finished reading the 24 hour body,(about another 500 pages) which is where i got the diet and vitamin stack recommendations from. Hopefully i’ll be able to test out of sociology and management soon, especially as my mom is pestering the fuck out of me doing it.

4. I feel kind of stuck with festival a go go. finding relevant products just isn’t coming to me quickly enough, however, the list is growing and my weekly hits is more than 1000, so at least i’m gathering steam.  Getting a income stream from this going is vital. I’ve learned enough in the last few months to be confident enough to go ahead with another niche webstie, only this time I think i’m going to do a lot more thought into relevant product sourcing with it before I go ahead. The basic premise is easy enough to get into but implementing it, especially getting ranking in google, is taking a lot of time, as is article writing.

Diet hacking 2

Just a few updates since the last “diet hacking” entry;

-I started using google calendar to track any measurements I take. Ive gone down from 256lbs to 242 lbs in the last 3 weeks, and for the last week have been averaging a pound a day in loss. This has been interrupted by going on trips and the holiday season, but snaps straight back into line as soon as I stop eating refined wheat products and sugary shit. I was able to maintain my initial 6 lbs loss over my 6 day trip to california but just barley.

-this has all been through diet and supplement changes.

-If i can keep my diet at least steady while in Portland, i should be at my 220 target weight by the end of February, at which time i will change my diet again because i want to start adding muscle to my upper body.

-For anyone who’s interested in doing what I’m doing, here’s the rules I’m going by;

-all organic. all free range meat. no veggies from Mexico.

-I’ve ditched the government food guidelines all together. they’re stupid, not realistic, and i believe are wrong, especially for my body type

-I’ve stopped eating bread, potatoes, coffee, anything sporting refined sugar, or containing artificial sweeteners. That means no cokes, diet coke, energy drinks, or anything like it

-all of my basic meals look like this; 40-50% veggies, 30-40% beans or lentils, and the rest is a protein of either beef, fish, or chicken, and sometimes bacon in the morning.

-Saturday is my cheat day and i go out of my way to eat crap. this has had two side effects; 1, anything processed immediately stands out as bad to eat. last weekend i tried to eat a grip of toll house bake at home cookies and a di giorno pizza and got sick from it, and the chemical taste stood out to the point where i never want to eat either again. This coming weekend I’ll be in Portland so I’ll probably go wild on breads and potatoes.

-I eat as soon as i get up. actually, i’ve been eating more i think now then i ever have, mostly because bread is not in my diet, and bread really fills one up. Its important to eat as soon as possible to get the glucose in your body working properly. If i cant cook a full meal I’ll mix one scoop of non denatured whey protein in with a half cup of coconut milk and half cup of water along with a few (like 5-10) frozen organic blueberry/blackberry mix. I usually chug down my vitamins at the same time

-my supplement stack goes like this; 4 times a day before meals i have garlic extract, green tea extract, and alpha lipolic acid. at night i add polysacinol.  This is called the PAGG stack and it helps the body get rid of fat. along with that in the morning i  have a fish oil, multivitamin, b complex vitamin, Choline, and Piracetam along with 1 200mg caffeine pill.   i take the piracetam 2-3 times per day as a cognitive supplement.

That’s. I’ve been steadily loosing a pound per day doing this. I’ll update again when i have more to share.

Ex Post Cali, USD classes, and testing

January is finally upon us and its time to put my nose to the grind stone. I’ve got three tests I’m planing on taking this month (intro to sociology, Marketing, and Management) so I’ve got a lot of reading to do; I’ve already studied quite a bit for the sociology class (clep study guide,wikibooks intro to sociology guide, sociology txt book and using instacert flash cards to round it out) I also took the video podcast of the class (itunes U has it, i think it was from a community college in Virgina, and I found the class to be severely lacking.)  I’m choosing this first class to test out of as a kind of test bed for the other 14 Cleps I’m taking. Things I’ve learned so far is-

• 1. clep study guides kind of suck. The one i read seemed like the professor had pirated a bunch of student papers that were horribly slanted and bigoted, and, did not cover the material effectively
• 2. a combination of randomized questions from the instacert, text book, and wikibook entries helped me cover the pertinent information quickly.
• 3. it’s hard for me to respect sociology as a science at all- so much of it is so damn subjective because its based on human social interaction, which can vary widely by whatever culture it’s playing out in.
• 4. i think its fucking ridiculous that Marx is taught so heavily over the other sociologists available, especially since so much of what he had to say was biased or just out right wrong.  It was, however, cool to be exposed to a lot of the other ideas from all the other sociologists like mills, Comte, Weber, ect.

Last month i started taking Piracetam along with a daily dose of vitamins to help me control my weight better and think clearer. Piracetam has been effective in helping my memory and my cognition. Its not some kind of uber wonderdrug, but it is like turning on a switch to making things feel more “anchored” in the here and now. I have noticed that there is a minimum effective dose for me and if i don’t take enough (somewhere around 1.5grams) I don’t notice an effect. If i do take too much (somewhere over 2.5 grams) i get a bit spacey. Once i get ahold of a good scale and experiment with measuring doses I’ll report back my findings. I’ve also been taking Choline supplements with it.  I’m glad i took that intro to pharmacology class a while back, its helped me understand how its been absorbed, processed, and released in my body. Along with the piracetam I’ve been taking a 4 supplement stack to help with my weight loss along with a really different diet. Its been pretty effective, but I gained a bit back while on the road for new years. Its gonna take me probably another 2 months before I start to really get around where I want to be before I stop with weight loss and start focusing on muscle gains. Its kind of exciting knowing that what I’m doing is finally working. after I’m done with the weight loss i figure it will be easier to stop what I’m doing and retooling my diet for upper body muscle gains. fun stuff.

USD is back with a rather huge list of classes this semester. Im looking forward to taking the Exercise Physiology class and getting the first 8 or so classes that weren’t available for the Cellular Neurology class offered last semester, which was the first class to make me say, woah, kinda hard.  Or at least super complex in the number of interactions going on at the neurotransmitter level.

I’m almost finished with a book on Caesars 10th Legion. It goes into detail about the different Legions underneath Caesar (Julius) how they were formed, how they performed during the Roman Civil war between Caesar and Pompeii, and what happened to them afterwards under the civil war fought with Mark Antony, and then about their history being stationed in Syria later on. The 10th was formed with Spanish troops and was Caesars favorite, so it was interesting hearing about how he used them, controlled them, and wielded them effectively in all his campaigns against the brits, french, romans, egyptians, tunisians, and romans too.

Anyways, thats all. got to go to the Bay Area this New Years and had a blast. Met some new friends (angela and ann jennete, much thanks for hosting us on new years!) got to see a lot of new places (the golden gate finally, salsaludio, capitola, and santa barbara along with stretches of the 101  and 5 that i haven’t seen before). Missed my homies who were partying like rock stars in vegas but im glad i took the time to have a new experience and meet new people. I’m starting to feel ok with anchoring myself out of California instead of New Mexico.  I’m gonna try to get the degree done with and out of the way asap and get started on making money, cause right now that’s the only way I’m gonna get what i want out of the future.