Quick Update

For those of you who read my post on “Hypnosis and Weightloss” I received my CD’s from Dr. Hill. I can’t wait to get started! While I was over there looking thru his products, I ended up buying one on sales training also. I know he’s terrific because I’ve seen him in person, it’ll just be interesting to see how this goes. I’ll let you all know after I’ve been doing it for a few days.

Don’t forget to see my post below on “Cold Soups”.

Cold Soup

We still have a few hot days left before Fall moves in and takes over. In California, even fall can be a hot season. On days where the temperature rises to over 85 degrees, the last thing I want is to have to cook or eat a hot (usually heavy) meal. I don’t want to do anything in the oven that adds heat to the kitchen. The crockpot comes in handy, but there again it’s usually a pretty heavy meal of some sort and it’s always hot when it comes out.

I’ve done the “salad” thing with the taco salads and chicken pasta. I’ve made Tacos because while I still have to use the stove, it’s quick and easy, and still like a salad in a tortilla. LOL.

One thing I haven’t gotten used to the is the idea of cold soups. The only ones I’d ever heard of were Gazpacho and probably Cucumber with dill. It seems the people that eat them, swear by them, how refreshing and tasty they are. I don’t know if my mind can accept putting a spoon in my mouth with something my mind thinks should be hot, and yet it’s cold. I did get used to the idea of iced coffee tho, so maybe there’s hope.

Vichyssoise

As I was looking thru the ingredients and instructions, (links on the bottom of this post) most of these soups are incredibly easy and require, more often than not, a blender more than a stove. I don’t know what’s the matter with me since I’ve gotten older. I used to be willing to experiment with almost anything! I’ve had some odd dishes that I got from the original WeightWatchers book!

One of my problems is with most soups, a lot of these don’t seem like they would be substantial enough to be a meal that would keep you full for very long. Maybe that’s why Gazpacho is so popular. Made with stale bread, olive oil, garlic, ground almonds, vinegar, tomatoes and peppers, I can see where this may be pretty hardy. What do you serve with it? Today’s versions can be made with tropical fruits, avocados, corn and even watermelon. Strange, aye?

Nowadays they even have “cold fruit” soups. Berry and stone fruit soups are traditional in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Berry soups are often accented with a touch of wine and a splash of cream or sour cream. Fresh lemon juice is often used to brighten the flavors of the fruit. They usually garnish puréed soups with whole berries or sliced fruit and a dollop of crème fraiche or sour cream. These can either be a whole meal or a dessert. I’m afraid I’d have to add a touch of fatfree Cool Whip to mine. LOL.

Berry Soup

 If you’re interested in trying this idea for yourself, I have a few links here to what I think are some pretty neat recipe sites. Altho there are recipes for everything of course, these links go right to the “cold soup” pages.

• AllRecipes. com
• CooksRecipes.com

I usually take versions of recipes and do some substituting for lower fat versions, but for those of you who are interested in getting the low fat, or lower carb, etc.

• TasteofHome.com
• Hubpages.com

Last but not least, for my friend writinggb here is a recipe for Scandanavian Fruit soup using dried fruits (which really seems odd to me).

• BusyCooks.com 

Any feedback if you try any of these would be greatly appreciated. I’d also love to hear if you think the idea of “cold soup” is as odd as I do. LOL

Hypnosis and Weightloss…

is an old remedy to no willpower, but seems to be getting some new attention. I read two blogs this morning, both about how hypnosis retrains our mind, and about how statistically people who have used hypnosis for weightloss have kept the weight off through maintenance vs. those who didn’t use hypnosis. One of the blogs was a health blog, the other belongs to my favorite hypnotist in the whole world, Dr. Dave Hill. This guy is so great and does the funniest hypnosis comedy shows. If you’d like to see the stats on weightloss for yourself, just visit him through the link.

I personally have always loved hypnosis. I even studied for awhile to become a hypnotist. If you can allow yourself to be hypnotised I can see where this would be the easy answer everybody’s looking for when it comes to weightloss. I know just the subliminal tapes I listen to work really well in reprogramming my mind. There’s no drugs involved and it lasts a long time. No more fighting with willpower because you would be doing what your mind is telling you you want to do. I Love it!

If they can get smokers to quit smoking thru hypnosis, why couldn’t you lose weight? I bet you even stand a better chance, because in order for hypnosis to work you have to want to quit smoking, which a lot of smokers don’t they just know they should, but we all want to lose the excess baggage, right?

I just realized, maybe I could get Dr. Hill to

1. Help me lose weight
2. Help me love exercise (yuk)
3. Help me quit smoking

I’m so lucky. I have my favorite, world’s greatest hypnotist right in my own back yard! If you decide to proceed with this idea and you’re not close enough to use him (altho I understand he’s doing phone consultations now) make sure you get someone reputable. Like any other industry, there are the charlatans. Get referrences, etc.

Gee, with so much wrong with me I wonder if Dr. Dave will give me a discount?

A Poor Excuse Is Better Than No Excuse…

I finally got my sink fixed. It’s had my kitchen hostage for 3 days. I had turned on the disposal to clear it so I could run the (full) dishwasher, and the water in the sink never went away. The BF worked on it the first day. No luck. The BF worked on it all the second day. Can’t cook. Too late to call the plumber, don’t want to pay “after hours” charges. Can’t cook, no clean dishes to eat on or with. Answer. Fast food. Healthy fastfood? Never heard of any. Why waste a perfectly good excuse?

Day 3. BF worked on drain most of the day. Called plumber. Took them less than 30 min. start to finish. Cooked nice, healthy, well-balanced dinner last nite. Excuses all gone. Wish excuses were that easy for no exercise. LOL

Sorry

I didn’t realize my link to Crockpot 365 blog was wrong. I just tried it and about had a heart attack thinking it was no more. It’s fixed now. If anyone tried it before and got sent to the wrong spot I’m sorry.

Doing What You Know…

I went to a free sales training seminar  a couple of months ago. The trainer was absolutely terrific. Out of the two full days of training and tips, the one thing he kept throwing in, and I walked away with is “do what you know”, and he is right.

I probably have dozens of “how to” tapes and guides, etc. on sales training that I’ve bought and collected over the years. Some of what this trainer was teaching was new, but a lot of it was the same stuff I had studied years ago. He said “do what you know”.

The same is true with dieting and exercise. I think we all probably “know” how to lose weight and get in shape, especially if you’ve been around for awhile and dieted for any length of time. I know for me with all the stuff all over the internet about diet and nutrition, I rarely, if ever, come across a “tip” that is news to me.

I am learning new stuff about exercise, but the bottom line’s the same. If you don’t do anything, it doesn’t work. I’m just trying to learn new ways of what moves I make count or work better than some of the old traditional ways.

So, I know that journaling what you eat works. I have never counted calories in my life. I’ve counted carbs, fat grams, points, but never calories. It was always too big a pain in the neck. I am now using a nutrition tracker, similar to WeightWatchers, but it’s free on the web. You track glasses of water, fruits and veggies, and your meals. (It sounds like more of a pain than it is) I’ve found it to be pretty interesting. After you track your food intake, you get a report of cal, fat, carbs, fiber, protein, and a pie chart showing what you should be doing vs. what you are doing. You can set it up to track whatever you’re interested in tracking.

I’m also using the “fitness tracker” to log in my exercise. Do to the new type of fitness exercising I’m doing, my tracking doesn’t exactly fit the “norm”, but I can see progress, etc. anyhow and that’s the main thing. No actually the main thing is I move more so I have something to put on the “tracker”, sort of how a pedometer makes you want to walk more steps. LOL.

So for now I’m “doing what I know” works, and feeling pretty good about it. The free tools you find on line are terrific support and the communities for motivation and encouragement are fabulous. It’s amazing how you subconciously and conciously start making different choices when you can see in black and white what you are doing.

A Lot of Research

I knew I hadn’t been on here in awhile, but I hadn’t realized how long. Everytime I get involved with a new project it’s like I have tunnel-vision until I get it down. Unfortunately some projects take longer and more efforts than others. LOL.

It never ceases to amaze me how the medical community at just the drop of a hat, can turn everything you learned upside down. Of course everything we’ve learned is from the last time they turned things upside down! It’s sort of like nursing a baby. They have flip-flopped on that subject so many times, it’s no wonder new mothers don’t know which way to go.

The latest craze in exercise seems to be interval training. You can see how easily accepted it has been by just seeing how “Curves” took off. To me it makes a lot of sense, plus I’m into anything that purposes to work faster with less effort. Since coming across the “Couch to 5k” workout, I’ve been doing a little more research on some of this stuff. I’m reading an ebook right now from a doctor that came up with a workout that has the same basic idea. He says what the medical community is teaching about cardio is actually detrimental to our heart and lungs. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but a lot of doctors are proposing that we actually need 60 minutes now of cardio vs. 30 min. that it has advised for years. According to this doctor all that is doing is putting undo stress on our hearts and lungs. When he gives examples of people in perfectly good health keeling over after a long run, it makes his argument a little more plausible.

Another new finding is that our muscles actually need lactic acid. For so many years we were taught to work out under our “lactic threshold”. Now it turns out our muscles actually need to produce more lactic acid as we work out because our muscles use it for fuel. I don’t know how much of the Olympics you’ve been watching, but I like everyone else have been watching all the info coming out about Mark Phelps. One of the things I thought was interesting is they prick his earlobe to test for lactic acid after each one of his swims. They do that supposedly to tell how fatigued he is. What they’re having a hard time understanding is why his levels are lower than most athletes. It would make sense if his muscles are using the lactic acid in his muscle to fuel and energize him, that they would be depleted after a competition.

So, because it makes sense to me, because for me it seems to work fast, I will probably stick to this interval training for awhile. It also seems to provide for a longer “afterburn”. I know walking alone for me went rather slow and now that I’m heavier than I was before, I need to start out easy in whatever I do.

Nowhere Left To Hide When It Comes To Lack of Exercise…

Brain Fitness

Somehow, starting Saturday morning while I was working at my computer, I got stuck on PBS television. The woman who was presenting caught my attention because she was talking about menopause and life after. For as intelligent as I feel I am when it comes to health and wellness issues, this is one area I know hardly anything about. Oh I know the typical stuff that every woman knows (myths and all), but I really don’t know too much about the physiology of it all. Having gone through menopause, I knew what worked for me, but the information I put to use on my own body was more accidental than scientific. She gave a lot of helpful information, a lot of warm fuzzies regarding menopause, and what I thought to be a little “way out there” stuff. One of the things that especially caught my attention was what she had to say about weightloss and exercise. It was all stuff I had sort of figured out for myself the hard way, but it was encouraging to have an authority figure back what I generally thought.

Right after her was Dr. Roizen, Oprah Winfrey’s new guru of medicine. As definitely “geeky” as this guy seems to be, I do feel like he truly loves medicine and has a lot of cutting edge info. He also has a pretty good sense of humor which makes the dry subject of health a little more enjoyable. He is really good about suggesting a lot of things can be fixed by diet and exercise. Since I don’t trust doctors at all when it comes to pills, I am glad to see this.

Between these two, I had learned a couple of good effects exercise has on us that I didn’t realize, and then came the icing on the cake. A brain doctor who believes you can “change your brain and change your life”. Most of the stuff I had ever heard was that as we age our brain cell productivity is pretty much non-existent. The best we could hope for was to just keep what we have from dieing out. According to him and the latest findings with all the new technology we have, growing our brain cells and exercising our brain is a never ending process.

I thought all I had to do to protect myself from Alzheimer’s and Dementia was to keep learning new things. I never realized what a profound effect physical exercise (or the lack there of) had on our brain activity. It was phenomenal to see the examples he had. This was enough to make me sit up and take notice. I am one of those that is always going to start my exercise program “tomorrow”.

On top of that I went shopping that nite and there in the middle at the back of my grocery store was a self help blood pressure machine. For some reason I had been wondering about my blood pressure the last few days and was actually looking for my BF’s home monitor, but hadn’t found it yet. I sat down and let the machine do it’s thing. My blood pressure has risen soooo much between the weight I’ve gained and the sedentary lifestyle that I’ve been leading for the last year, I took it twice because I couldn’t believe the numbers! My blood pressure was always around 110/64 which is excellent for my age. Now I’m walking around like a stroke waiting to happen.

Needless to say “tomorrow” has arrived and given me a swift kick in the butt. I started my exercise program Sat. nite while cooking dinner, with weight training. Yesterday I did the “couch to 5K” training in the morning, and weight training last nite. I can already feel the difference in my body. If I get to the point of needing new motivation, I’ll be looking for reruns on PBS or YouTube. LOL.