Saturday Weigh-In: September 27, 2008

Weight: 371 lbs

Total Weight Lost: 20.8 lbs in 20 weeks (1.04 lbs per week)

Not sure what to make of today's weigh-in. I'm hard pressed to believe that I gained 6 pounds this week though I have been eating rather poorly.

Hurricane Ike continues to make itself felt. For several days after I returned home and restocked my fridge, I found myself feeling ravenous all the time. I'm assuming it was a side effect of my "starvation" diet during the previous week. I wasn't overly hungry when food wasn't available but once food became relatively plentiful again, my body wanted to replenish itself. At least that's my theory but not I'm not a physician or nutritionist or anything like that so I don't really know.

It also didn't help that stores tended to be short on a lot of perishable goods, such as fish and chicken, because loss of power for an extended period of time meant having to throw those things out. So instead of being able to buy the sort of foods I normally get I wound up eating a lot of peanut butter and other such foods. That didn't help.

Finally, since my parents had no power until this Thursday, I went over to their house every day this week and wound up eating lunch with them. Unfortunately not every place they wanted to eat at was conducive to eating in a healthy manner and this was aggravated by the fact that a fair number of places still aren't open, limiting our choices as to where to eat. It also didn't help that they tend to combine lunch and dinner into one meal eaten around 3:00 pm which usually meant I was really hungry by the time we ate and consequently tended to load up the wrong kinds of foods.

Things should get better this week. The freezer is finally restocked with fish, chicken, and frozen vegetables and my parents have their power back so I won't be going over there every day which means I should be able to finally get back on track.

Teaching Kids to Roleplay

Wired has an interesting article on teaching your kids to play roleplaying games.

I discovered AD&D in high school and branched out into other games as I got older. As a strong introvert, such games helped me break out of my shell to develop social skills. In college I pretty much talked to no one but my roommate for the first couple of quarters. Then I connected with some other roleplayers and the number of friends I had blossomed. Even today I'd say most of my friends are people I met through gaming.

At the same time, the roleplaying aspect of games like AD&D has helped me deal with some personal issues. Not surprising given that some psychologists use roleplay, though in a different form, to treat their patients. It's a way of distancing yourself from issues while you work through them. Even today I notice certain similarities between the characters I play and myself that I've unconciously built into them.

Since RPGs have been a relatively positive influence on my life, I would certainly want to pass them on to my kids so this is a pretty handy article.

Saturday Weigh-In: September 20, 2008

Weight: 364.8 lbs

Total Weight Lost: 27 lbs in 19 weeks (1.42 lbs/week)

No weigh-in last week because I spent the day at my parents' house, away from my scale, listening to the radio while Hurricane Ike passed through the Houston area. To say I've been off my healthy eating plan since then would be an understatement.

Friday, the day before the storm, I went to my parents' house and we had lunch at a Chinese restaurant, one of the few places that we could find that stayed open past noon as people headed to their homes to wait out the storm. On our way home we stopped at Antonio's Flying Pizza to pick up a pizza for dinner. Oddly enough, that looks like it may become a tradition for us since we did the same thing when we were expecting Hurricane Rita when we had dinner (pasta) at Antonio's and then took a pizza home for later.

Anyway, after Ike passed we were without power so for the next few days my diet consisted of two slices of pizza a day. We had other food available, such as cereal and cans of soup, but I couldn't stop thinking that any food I ate was food that wasn't available to my parents if they needed it and I've inclined to think I'm better prepared to go without food for a few days than they are. Once businesses started to reopen we started going out to eat at whatever place we could find open without driving around and wasting gas. Since it would be our meal of the day, I'd deliberately choose food that was high in calories.

I'm at home now and have power again. One of the benefits of living in an apartment complex where the power company could get a bunch of people back online with relatively little effort. My parents are still without power so I'll be spending a lot of time at their house and still eating with them though now I'll start choosing healthier foods.

I want to call people's attention to the fact that even though my caloric intake this past week has been the lowest it's been since I started trying to lose weight, the rate at which I'm losing weight actually dropped this past week. That's because when your body doesn't get enough food, and two slices of pizza a day is not enough food, it starts to shut down in order to preserve energy. It will even burn muscle instead of fat in order to slow the metabolism and lower the number of calories you burn in a day. The slowing of my rate of weight loss is a pretty graphic demonstration that starving yourself is not a good way to lose weight.

Boot to the Head

Here's a little Monday morning silliness...

Perspective

Many who watched Gov. Palin's speech at the RNC found themselves smiling when they saw this:



Not the media though. According to the New York Times:

In the press galleries at the convention, journalists wrinkled their noses in disgust when Piper, Ms. Palin’s youngest daughter, was filmed kitty-licking her baby brother’s hair into place.

And just so you don't think that attitude was limited to the NYT, here is CNN's "unbiased" take on it:



How sad that their hatred of Gov. Palin is such that they would even belittle her 7-year-old daughter.

Sarah Palin and Creationism

Another smear circulating about Sarah Palin is that she wants Creationism to be taught in school. What she actually said was that it didn't have to be part of the curriculum but that there shouldn't be a prohibition against discussing it if it comes up in class.

In an interview Thursday, Palin said she meant only to say that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms:

"I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

She added that, if elected, she would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state's required curriculum.

Gee, how horrible. A politician that thinks that school kids' religious beliefs should be treated with respect instead of their teacher telling them to just shut up.

Sarah Palin and Sex Ed

To comment further on the attacks on Sarah Palin based on her supposedly wanting to restrict sex ed classes to an "Abstinence-only" curriculum, here's what Gov. Palin actually said about sex ed:

"No, I'm pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues. So I am not anti-contraception. But, yeah, abstinence is another alternative that should be discussed with kids. I don't have a problem with that. That doesn't scare me, so it's something I would support also."

Bill Maher Fails Biology

One of the first lies about Sarah Palin to pop up on the Internet was the claim that Trig Palin was actually her grandson and she had claimed him as her own to cover up the fact that he was actually her daughter Bristol's child. This was debunked on Monday when it was announced that Bristol was 5 months pregnant, which would make it kind of hard for her to have given birth to Trig 4 months ago. Unless, of course, she was the first woman in the history of the world to get pregnant with one child while 8 months pregnant with another.

Incredibly Bill Maher, obviously an intellectual giant, continues to push the claim that Trig is actually Bristol's son. So apparently she's some weird mutant who can get pregnant while pregnant and not miscarry the new fetus while delivering the first child. Perhaps someone should explain the female reproductive organs to Bill because apparently he's not familiar with them.

In any case I thought this was a pretty stupid attack on Gov. Palin from the very beginning. Even if it were true, who cares? Are we really expected to think poorly of Gov. Palin because she adopted her daughter's special needs baby and is raising it as her own? To a lot of people that would make her a saint. Maybe it's supposed to be an indictment of Palin for promoting abstinence-only education but the public school Bristol attends teaches about contraceptives in sex ed so she didn't have an abstinence-only education and thus her pregnancy wasn't proof that abstinence-only education doesn't work. Maybe it's supposed to be proof that Sarah is a bad mother because Bristol isn't a mindless robot that does everything her parents tell her to do. Of course anyone who's ever raised a teenager know that they're not always obedient so this would make every parent in the world a bad parent.

It has absolutely nothing to do with her political positions or her ability to perform her duties. It's just a stupid lie that doesn't even make her look bad.

Liberal Lies

I really don't want this to be a political blog but some of the lies coming out of the Left are too disgusting to ignore. It seems one particularly diseased mind has vomited forth a story claiming that Sarah Palin is a racist. The author describes himself as a Democrat and an activist so you can guess just how unbiased he is.

An independent, he has accomplished what the Associated Press, Reuters, MSNBC, CNN, etc. could not. He's gotten someone to spill the beans about Sarah Palin. Someone who is, conveniently, impossible to identify and even if you could track his source down she wouldn't talk to you because you don't have his friend, also conveniently unidentified, to vouch for you. According to his story, Palin was spouting racist comments at a lunch with 5 or 6 other people who are also conveniently unidentified.

Basically what you've got here is a completely unverifiable claim by a self-professed activist that Gov. Palin is an over-the-top racist who not only hates blacks by Alaskan aboriginals as well. If she hates Eskimos as much as she does, it's kind of strange that she married someone who is part Yup'ik. Which would make her children part Yup'ik as well.

It's possible that Sarah Palin is a racist. It's also possible that Barack Obama likes to dress up in his wife's lingerie and stand in front of a mirror singing, "I'm a pretty, pretty princess." I won't believe either claim until a see a more credible report than this tripe.

That's Gotta Hurt

Apparently people have had just about enough of the media trying to smear Gov. Palin with random rumors from the Internet.

Another Day, Another Lie About Sarah Palin

Apparently one of the benefits of picking someone as inexperienced as Sarah Palin is that since she doesn't have much of a political record, there's not much that can be found to smear her with so Obama's supporters are reduced to making up all kinds of things in an attempt to find something that will stick to her.

The latest that I've heard is that she supposedly tried to have a bunch of books banned when she was mayor of Wasilla. The funny thing is, the list of books she alledgedly tried to ban includes a number of books that weren't published until several years after she tried to ban them. Apparently Sarah Palin can see the future which, to my way of thinking, would be a very useful talent for someone running the country to have.

I've run across a web site that is keeping track of all the claims being made about Gov. Palin. It makes for some rather interesting reading.

Saturday Weigh-In: September 6, 2008

Weight: 366.6 lbs

Total Weight Lost: 25.2 lbs in 17 weeks (1.48 lbs per week)

Perhaps not my best week but certainly nothing to complain about. I still need to do something about getting some exercise but at least my healthy eating plan is going well and I'm not having too much trouble sticking to it.

The Smell of Fear

You can tell the left is getting desperate. Now they're attacking Sarah Palin's hair.

Sarahcuda

For those who missed it, here is Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention last night:

ABC News has the transcript.

I have reservations about Palin's lack of experience but, let's face it, both the Republicans and Democrats are running inexperienced politicians this year and at least with the Republican's the inexperience is at the bottom of the ticket unlike the Democrats where the inexperience is at the top.

For the past week, Palin and her family have had to endure all manner of outrageous claims that were about as substantial as those that Obama has a gerbil fetish just because he likes to dress gerbils up in lederhosen. Even the mainstream media has given up all pretense of being unbiased in order to spread lies about Palin. And if you think for one minute that the media doesn't know they're spreading lies watch this clip of Fox's Megyn Kelly speaking to the editor of a hit piece from Us Weekly magazine:

Those who have been smearing Palin have been patting themselves on the back, confident that they were on the verge of forcing her to withdraw from the race. Well, as they found at last night, you mess with the hockey mom, you get the stick. She delivered a great speech to a conservative base that has been energized by her addition to the ticket. They clearly love Palin and the vicious, sexist attacks against her have only served to make them rally in her defense.

The best response to Palin's speech that the Democrats have been able to come up with so far is that someone wrote it for her. It's a stupid response when you consider that Obama, Biden, and McCain all have their own speech writers and apparently Palin was actively involved in the writing of her speech. That's probably why she was able to deliver it so well after her teleprompter malfunctioned forcing her to "wing" it.

For the first time I'm actually feeling kind of excited about this election. While I do disagree with Palin on some issues, overall I find that I really like her. Is that enough to get me to vote Republican this year? Probably not but I do find myself thinking that a McCain presidency might not be such a bad thing and maybe in a few years we'll see a more experienced Sarah Palin running on the top of the ticket with someone like Bobby Jindal as her VP. Now that could very well be something to get excited about.