The Neon Hippo

So far, so good!  My 30 day trial has been mostly successful.  I’ve been eating fresh foods and avoiding anything with ingredients that I can’t pronounce.  There have certainly been cravings, but it’s not as bad as I thought it might be.  I have eaten at a restaurant a couple of times and probably got some stuff that I didn’t really want, but I did order the healthiest stuff I could find on the menu – stuff like grilled tilapia and steam broccoli.

I bought a wok and am learning to cook relatively healthy and (usually) tasty food.  I’ve been using olive oil in the wok and experimenting with recipes from various books and online sources.  Sometimes it gets to be a drag having to deal with cooking every night instead of going to a restaurant or popping something in the microwave, but I think it’s worth it.

I have a short road trip coming up that is typically filled with junk food for the drive down and eating out the entire time I’m at my destination.  This trip happens just a couple days short of the end of my 30 day trial and a week before the results of the 8 week fitness challenge at the gym.  I’m going to do my best to eat healthier, but most likely I’ll be eating a lot of meals in restaurants for a few days.  That makes it very hard to know exactly what I’m eating, but I’ll hang out mostly at the salad bar and probably eat a lot of grilled seafood and chicken.

Oh yeah… I didn’t have to give up hot dogs either.  I can’t get them at the ball park, but  Oscar Meyer has an all natural hot dog – no added nitrites and a simple ingredient list.  You know… beef, salt, etc.  OK, so it’s still not necessarily healthy food, but it meets my criteria of not having ingredients that I can’t pronounce.  Just to be clear, I avoid stuff I can pronounce, too.  Things like high fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, etc.  I do miss Oreo cookies though!

Exercise has been going well, too.  Some days I’m definitely more motivated than others, but I’ve been meeting my goal of 15 minutes a day.  Some days I do much more than that – other days I struggle to do the 15 minutes.  Last Saturday all I wanted to do was exercise.  I now keep a set of 5 pound barbells on my desk and use them several times a day.  Yep – it’s becoming a habit and it’s OK.

I read an interesting blog post by Steve Pavlina called 30 Days to Success and found it rather inspiring.  He says there’s a lesson to be learned from the shareware model – try it out for 30 days, then either stop using the software or make the commitment and buy it.

He goes on to say that if you do something for 30 days and the changes are positive, you’re likely to keep the new habit.  It makes a lot of sense.

Personally, I think it takes less time for something to become habit.  I remember once reading that if you do something for as little as 14 days, it will become a habit.  I tested it and started putting my pants on left leg first – it was awkward at first and just felt abnormal, but now 10+ years later, I still put my pants on left leg first.  Weird, huh?

So I’ve decided to have my own little 30 trial.  I’m going to try out a healthier lifestyle for just a month and see what happens. Starting today I’m going to eat only natural healthy foods and exercise at least 15 minutes a day.  That means giving up hot dogs at the beginning of baseball season.  That means no Snickers bars or anything else with high fructose corn syrup for 30 days. No cheating on Sundays and slipping back into the old habits of eating unhealthy food, and most importantly no more excuses as to why I can’t exercise every day. Rain or shine, in sickness and in health – I can do this… it’s only 30 days.  Geez, I put up with the Army for 2 years, I can handle 30 days of healthy food and exercise!

It’s not a permanent change – I don’t have to be on a diet for the rest of my life and I don’t have to exercise every day for the rest of eternity… I’m just going to try out a healthier lifestyle for 30 days and see what happens.  At the end of the trial period, I can quit and go back to Oreos and potato chips as a regular part of my diet.  I can just sit at the computer all day without getting up moving around.  Or I might be willing to buy into the changes and make it a more or less permanent part of my life. Stranger things have happened.

Hooray!  What a beautiful spring day we’re having up here in the Chicago suburbs.  It’s in the 70’s, the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and it’s almost baseball season.  Tomorrow is Good Friday and many of my customers will be closing their businesses.  I just finished my morning appointment and with a little luck, I’ll have tomorrow off as well.

Who wouldn’t want to be me?   Happy April Fool’s Day!

From Rosie’s Blog – someone sent it to her and she asked that everyone pass this message along:

You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in  Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn’t get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.

You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.  Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans…oh hell no.

I found this quote in the comments of an article about this new health care bill that just passed:

No Democrat or Republican will ever get my vote again. This is about being “historic” and making Obama look good. Dennis Kucinich sold out Americans because he didn’t want the president to fail. What about US? And Republicans are to blame too. They made up this stuff about the bill being socialist medicine when it isn’t instead of actually trying to make arguments on the merits. This galvanized people who then decided they didn’t need to fight for real universal healthcare, because debate just stopped. It became about Congress and the president and the American people were just left out.

I have to agree.  We desperately need health care reform.  We have something, but I’m afraid the big winners in this “reform” are the insurance companies.  We finally have our “air tax”  a tax on being alive in the USA.  If you’re a citizen you MUST buy health insurance or you will be fined.  Yep, the great Health Insurance Bailout has begun…. as if they need bailing out.

On the other hand… it’s a start.  It’s better than we were yesterday.  Insurance companies can no longer drop you when you get sick and expensive.  They can no longer deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions.  They can no longer put a limit on how much health care you get in your lifetime.  It’s far from perfect.  It doesn’t address a lot of the issues, but it does give me hope that we now have something to build on and improve.

I don’t understand how people can say we can’t afford it.  We spend billions upon billions bailing out bankers, on foreign military installations and waging a war against whoever is the enemy of the month.  So much money is wasted, so much can be cut from the budget if they’d just use a little common sense.  We can certainly afford to help the U.S. citizens.  Without us, what is the purpose of government?  A government’s number one job is to protect its citizens.

The categories weren’t working on the old installation of this blog.  I tried fixing the problem, then decided it was taking too much time and the outcome was far from certain.  Rather than mess around with it anymore, I decided to reinstall WordPress and start fresh.  Sorry if this messes up your RSS feeds – if so I hope you’ll take the time to subscribe again.  I’ll go back and look at some of the old posts and may re-post a few of them.

I made a backup of the old wordpress installation and put it into a different location, but the database links still point to neonhippo.com and so I can’t get to it.  I suppose I could export from the database, but I’ll probably never take the time to do that, so it truly is a BRAND NEW WORLD.