Coping: With Rain, Flooding

You talk about wet!

That feller off to the right is one of the pair of hawks that live on the property and regularly come by for Panama’s handouts of raw bits of chicken when game is scarce for them in the winter.

Looks kind of cold and miserable, but that’s what happens to animals when it’s raining Persians and Poodles in East Texas.

We have just under 4” of rain in the gauge this morning.

Local media are full of exciting adventures cause by the heavy precip, too.

Worse, we are in “take care with the septic system, too, since when the ground is saturated, the septic system tends to get a little cranky.

Tomorrow, Ol’ John from the local septic cleaners will be out for his every-other-year visit.  After a drop in the water table and that, we’ll be back to feeling our usual selves when writing repeated bad puns…

Flushed.

Slowing Down the Diet

Meantime, Mr. Gluten-free Paleo (or, at least mostly so) has continued to drop pounds faster than ever imagined.  And I continue to credit the apple cider vinegar pill daily as helping with the results.  Also, two meals a day and within 8-hours of each other. 

The idea is that Paleo is good, ACV is good, off the fatty foods is good, but also helping is the exercise and eating all meals within 8-hours which (theory says) should give the body a chance to burn through sugars and get on to fat burning.

11-days of serious calorie restriction along with heavy exercise and such, and I’ve dropped 13.5 pounds.

So, yes, it can be done but I will likely declare a “free day” or two in order to give the organs that work hardest when dieting (liver and kidneys from what I’ve read) a chance to catch up with the changes.  This morning will see me wolfing down my  cottage cheese pancakes and that will involve the first use of butter (other than a tiny bit for use in pans) in 10-days.

Dropping a pound a day is NOT a good thing to do.  2-3 pounds in a week is plenty.  But (for whatever reason) being a male, I come from the factory pre-wired to think “If a bit is good, more is better, and the most is best.”

Speaking of which…here’s a dandy success story from a reader out in SF:

George,

I too lost about 40  lbs. about 2 1/2 years ago by changing my diet, exercising every day and moving my routine outdoors for extra Vitamin D benefits and mood enhancing.

My diet is a hybrid of the Paleo diet…No wheat products…although I have a cheat day with a local organic Pizza joint I crave…A lot of fish, chicken and Bison or a lean, grass fed, organic beef. I can’t get enough vegetables and I start each day with a smoothie that is a powerhouse of nutrition by itself.

The smoothie really powers my day..It consists of frozen blueberries, Vibrant Green powder, turmeric, cinnamon, ground flax seed, Apple cider vinegar, Chlorophyll, beets, ginger, taro root, kale/spinach mix and Odwalla blueberry juice.

I munch on almonds throughout the day and have a small piece of chicken. For dinner, I have a meat/fish dish, Organic greens salad and Quinoa/vegetable dish. 

I drink a glass of red wine a few times a week and the one hard liquor the diet does allow is Tequila (agave not grain based like most alcohol). 

But the one thing that is the key to weight loss is exercising…And I don’t mean lollygagging on an elliptical. I mean hard, drenched in sweat work outs that are measurable in increased performance milestones. I run at least 4 miles every day…but I measure my performance not in distance, but by the speed that I run. 

When I first started out, I was running 10:30 minute miles. Today, I run 7:30 minute miles..which is a comfortable pace for me and my 57 year old body. I supplement that with a weight circuit three days a week and a 5 day a week core and ab circuit.

But what really motivates me is the fact that I get to do most of my exercise outdoors in our beautiful weather here in the Bay Area. There really is no excuse to not want to be outside here…and while outside, why not get a work-out? 

I make a point of getting up and stepping outside on our deck outside of our bedroom, taking a deep breath of  that fresh Bay Area morning air and that is all the motivation I need to strap on my running shoes and get more of that outdoor high.

That’s my mindset…and it works for me…I feel as if I am in the best shape of my life. And, as a former athlete, in a family full of former collegiate athletes, that is saying a lot.

Ah, the runner… fine pursuit.

I have been noticing something on the treadmill that’s akin to “runner’s buzz.” 

If you’ve shied away from low contact exercise, like walking briskly or running, where only your feet have contact with something, you might give it a try when you’re in an “empty head” (Zen) moment.

What I find is that after as little as 12-minutes on the treadmill, my brain kicks loose with endorphins and when I get off and walk across my office there’s an almost “gliding” sense to it which is cool.

The truth of the matter is that endorphins are released by the brain to provide freedom from tiredness, they kill pain to some extent, and people have told me (can’t vouch, though) that they are very similar to the effects of opiates.  When someone tells you they are ‘addicted to running’ it’s  one of the healthier addictions in life.

Speaking of which, don’t know if I even mentioned it before, but there’s a book by John Marshall from the late 1970’s called Find Your Perfect High which is pretty good.

There’s a certain way of looking at people (like in the TV detective Backstrom), that holds they are mostly bad, pleasure-seeking, and somewhat lazy.  (Exceptions exist, of course.)  But when you see people deciding to change something, it’s often not a one-item list.   There’s often an accompanying change in many parts of one’s life.

In Marshall’s book, for example, people naturally seek better ways to coordinate the two halves of their brain.  There’s a bunch of different wants to mash-sides upstairs, but some of the more common ones are chemically (alcohol and a long, long list of drugs, and we’d have to include endorphins on the list; marijuana works too, but life all drugs there’s risk/likelihood of passing the MED – minimum effective dose – and screwing things up badly). 

Put another way, it’s the dose, not the overdose.

Thus, once our serious reader/runner discovered his “runner’s addiction” it likely improved his left-right brain coordination such that I’d expect some other areas of his life showed marked improvement as well.  Hard to overdose on running, at least up to marathon ranges.  Maybe his personal relationships improved, he started making more (and better) business deals, and so forth.

At the end of my sailing days, I spent a fair amount of time contemplating this and resolved to constantly be changing my circumstances in order to be constantly presenting both sides of my brain with more grist. 

I know there are some people who detest music, but if you plug math/programming problems into one side of your brain to feed that, and music, poetry, Zen koans or whatever, into the right side, you can develop both sides of your thinking processes.

All that’s left to marry them up into a harmonious whole is to improve the internal connection.  Some people find alcohol, others music, real opiates, or the much safer and better for you running.

I’ll let you know if your reader volunteers the major shifts since he lost 40 and got addicted to running because I bet there’s all kinds of happy outcome to it…because that’;s what Life as a perfect high is all about.  My expectation is there have been many.

Come back often and write when you break-even or can share useful recipes of life of interest.

George  george@ure.net

4 thoughts on “Coping: With Rain, Flooding”

  1. Hi George,

    Can you tell us why use ACV pills rather than the vinegar itself? It would seem more effective to just drench whatever you’re eating with vinegar, or even drink a bit of it. ACV is a staple in every food store.

  2. Please let us know in 7 or 8 years how the runners knees are doing. Mine didnt do well after 8 years same for most of my friends. One M.D. friend got hooked on running and ran his hip into replacement mode. Worked the emergency room in a wheel chair for over a year

  3. George, I’ve been Paleo for a year. Was 193lbs after years of organic Mediterranean diet. However good I ate I couldn’t loose weight (Worked down from 213lbs over about 25 years). Did I mention I was diabetic?, 2 1000mg Metformin, and 32 units of Insulin every day… and still no real control. On top of everything I got the flu. So after that died down, leaving me weak I finally decided to try Palio. I eat no more meat than I did, just more varied. No Grains, No Beans, and No Legumes. Boy! Did I have a hard time looking at my empty survival cache after giving all the grains away.
    On the other side I started getting dizzy after about 3 weeks, and the doc said “What now”, he did tests and then looked worried…never good. He said I was over medicating but was reluctant to change any dosages. I did anyway cutting the insulin to half, and cut out one pill (1000mg) per day. So far so good then about 4 weeks along the dizziness started up again. This time around the doc just said, I give up, if this is going around I’ll be out of business, despite his advice I stopped all medications (over medicating again) No pills no shots… not even the small pill for the heart. So, what about weight? Dropped to 161lbs in about 2 months.
    You see this is healthy, the body wants to be well, but we’re feeding a bit of Poison each day not necessarily the Glutin, but the lectins and other poisons that the Plants use to survive millions of years of preditation from animals. The poisons irritate our insides because we don’t have the enzimes, ferments, or multiple stomaches to process them. Irritation (inflamation) is how the seeds survived the processing, and re-seeded the plant. Cows adapted… we didn’t…we eat the cows and if they are healthy, we are too. As to “lean”. Grass fed is good… the process of feeding cows grain to fatten them & in the process make them sick is what we want to avoid. Grass fed, Grass finished healthy cows make us healthy. The fat is NOT a problem in a healthy cow. Lard, Tallow, Coconut oil, Olive oil can all be consumed without any bad results assuming they ALL are produced from healthy unsprayed sources. Fat burning is just that. I tend to snack on a teaspoon or two of Coconut oil when I get hungry. I also have been known to drink Olive oil & organic Balsamic vinegar shots. Why take a pill when you can sit talking with friends having a “drink” or three? I even have a few converts who tried it and like it. By the way the fat is what you are craving… after all it’s FOOD.
    As for that empty pantry… it’s now being filled with no refrigeration vegetables using fermentation methods (Kraut, Kim-Chi,etc.) Also, much better than the ACV (apple cider vinegar) is Kombucha… I also make continuously rather than batches. Yes most Kombucha cultures use sugar along with the brewed tea… you could use Rapadura dried cain juice sugar. However there is another drink that I like even better…JUN. JUN is a Kombucha culture from Tibet… supposedly 1000 years old, which has been developed to use just green Tea (organic in my case) and Honey (my own bees)the result is a tart, bubbly drink that gets consumed direct from the process container, and mixed with bubbly water for quite a bit of the water we drink. A hint, this stuff is powerful.. go slowly as the war with your biome will commence. The culture will replace the bad bacteria & yeast with it’s own probiotic culture… and encourage others to grow. Resulting in virtually perfect digestion… and immunity to diseases like the flu that goes around.
    Bottom line for Preppers… best to start now gaining true health, and along the way acquire th skills our great…..great ancestors knew. Better now, then After. But you know that…
    Tim

  4. Hi George, greetings from Africa.
    Endorphin means “endogenous morphine” , where endogenous means manufactured inside the body – so it’s an opiate alright!

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