2-Potato Week 1

January 5th, 2009
I swear I’m going to die thin. OK maybe not thin, but not obese. Ever since that false rumor that Mama Cass Elliot choked to death on a sandwich I have sworn that wasn’t going to be me. It took me a long time to get serious about that, some huge life changes and near loss of health care after becoming diabetic being the main ‘Fear Factors”. I don’t think anyone loses weight for anyone else. They have to want it for themselves. They have to want it more than they want to eat that next potato chip or that piece of pie. They have to want it every freakin minute of the day. I’m not saying that it’s all you think about, but it has to be up there. Yes yes, there’s 2 percent of the population who can just change their lifestyle and to quote some ignorant assholes, “do what you’re supposed to do and stop eating and exercise”. Why do I call them ignorant? Because if it was all that easy everyone would die thin. And 98% or more of diets wouldn’t fail. Yes, you have to make lifestyle changes, this is true. But they don’t have to be earth shattering. The simple formula is: calories in minus calories out equals fat reserves. But IMHO, there are some differences between calories that make all the difference in whether you stick to your new life or not. Here I’m going to discuss some of mine. Feel free to comment, agree or disagree. I’m not likely to bother arguing with you although I may comment back. I’m just going to live it and we’ll see how it turns out.

In 2007 I lost 100 lbs. in nine months without ever feeling hungry. Last year, I regained 30 lbs. (mostly because I had to eat out every meal for two months straight). This year, I’m going to loose at least 60 lbs. I expect I’ll regain some at some point. I don’t consider that failure, I consider that life. As I said, my goal is to die not obese.

Tomorrow I will begin with the first step. Weighing in (HEP HEP I’m SCARED). Everyone should track their weight consistently if you have a weight problem. I really like scales that measure to at least .2 lbs. Why? Even though your weight does bounce around a lot from time of day differences, variation in body hydration, how much bulk waste you are carrying etc., you can generally follow the downward trend day to day and it encourages you. Yes, that’s right, day to day. If you wait two weeks to see how you’re doing ..that’s a lot of lost time if you’ve been fooling yourself. Time you could have used to get it right. I weigh in daily. I also like measuring myself every week or two. It helps a lot in those times where you put on muscle mass and keeps you from being too disappointed. My scale gives a rough guess at percent water and percent fat..again, very useful for keeping you on target and hopeful. I do not really care if I gain weight because I had something salty and retained too much water one day. I do care if I gained fat. Here’s a site with a bunch of scales you can compare and pick from. Mine is a Health o Meter and it’s done a good job, I like that it keeps track of up to four people. I am the only human dieting in my house so I use all four settings. One is for Monday weigh ins. One for Friday Mornings and One I use once a month and one I use daily. That way, even if I’m lax about my database (yeah, I used a database when I lost the small human’s worth of fat, might or might not this time we’ll see) I can see right away how I’m doing over time. But I’m not trying to sell this brand. I sometimes have to step on the scale a few times to get a consistent fat reading. Whatever scale you choose, make sure you’re on a firm flat floor. That bathroom carpet giving you a lesser weight reading is NOT your friend.

More tomorrow!

January 6th, 2009

Worse than I thought, I’m up to 233.4 lbs. 44.7% fat and 40.4% water. I hate being more fat than water! At my weight, 4.3% difference means I need to lose 10 lbs of fat to become tied. Since I like being more water than fat, I’m going to set my first mini-goal at 18 lbs. It could take as long as 2 months to lose that much weight at a reasonable pace and that’s a long enough time to work towards a goal. It might come off quicker though since 15 of those pounds were put on in the last month. I ate a lot of processed foods and I find they stick to the linings of your body a long, long, long time. One of the many negatives of highly processed foods. Since I’ll be replacing those HPC’s (Highly Processed Carbohydrates) with minimally processed carbs I hope to lose some of that baggage quickly. By the way, when I reach a mini-goal I reward myself. But NEVER with food. Rewarding yourself with gorging or eating something you’ve decided isn’t healthy for you just imprints on your brain that you are punishing yourself by eating your new way. Why would you want to feel that badly about yourself? Heck no. Every day you eat things that are good for you you’ll feel a little better. Your knees and hips and back and most of all your FEET will hurt a little less, you will feel proud of yourself for your accomplishments.

Let me start out with why I think people like me are fat. I like to eat and I hate exercising. That deserves emphasis:

I like to eat and I hate exercising!

Seriously, any diet that has me eating something smaller than the palm of my hand and doing jumping jacks is going to fail. 98% do fail, guess why. People like to eat and we don’t want to exercise. It’s genetic. The desire to eat very little and run in place for 2 hours is abnormal. Seriously. The availability of large quantities of unhealthy food and the freedom to lounge around is very new. We don’t have genes that are adapted to that. So we need to figure out ways to work with our innate desires rather than fight them. I do that by eating large volumes of very low calorie foods and two potatoes a day. That’s right, two whole potatoes a day. One sweet potato and one baked Idaho tater along with a large assortment of veggies/salads, some fruits and fluids. Good carbs. Lightly processed.

I don’t have time to put everything up here in one day and this is probably not going to be laid out in the manner you (or I) would like. But I feel I have to tell you at this point that the first thing you have to do is figure out how many calories you should be eating a day to not gain weight. There are 3500 calories in a lb of fat. To lose 2-3 lbs per week you have to eat 7-10 thousand calories less than you burn. How many do you burn? Well here’s your first guesstimate at your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) I did the calculations using my information:
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English BMR Formula
Women:
655 + (4.35 x weight in lbs.) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)
Men:
66 + ( 6.23 x weight in lbs.) + ( 2.7 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in year )

Age 53
Height 66
Weight 233
Harris Benedict Formula
Daily Calorie Needs

BMR

	BMR	Sedentary	Light Activity	Moderate Activity
Women	1740	2088	2392	2696
Men	1995	2394	2744	3093

Be Honest! It will show up when you do not lose weight otherwise.
Sedentary very little or no exercise
Light activity light exercise 3 days a week
Moderate moderate exercise 5 days a week

Activity Multiplier Used above

Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no activity, desk job)
Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light activity/sports 1-3 days/wk)
Mod. active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate activity/sports 3-5 days/wk)
Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard activity/sports 6-7 days/wk)
Extr. active = BMR X 1.9 (hard daily activity/sports & physical job or 2X day training, i.e marathon, contest etc.)

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So we can see from the above that at my age and weight I need 2392 calories a day to stay right where I am (more or less) assuming I’m lightly active. I know, I’m asking you to do math. And worse yet, over time you’ll need to do that math again. Why? Because as you lose weight, your caloric needs go down. Doesn’t THAT suck.. sighs.. well it’s reality. You can make up for it somewhat if you put weights on yourself all day long, I don’t think that’s the way to go. After all, the biggest benefit of losing weight is not having as much pressure on your joints and those poor little feet! I highly recommend putting the formula into excel or one of the free spreadsheet programs. Set it up so it uses the age and weight cells and not so it’s just a formula that way as your age goes up (sorry, although I hope you feel younger I haven’t figured out how to reverse the fourth dimension) and your weight goes down you can just stick the new numbers in and see what your goal calorie figure is. Also, your activity level might increase… when your feet feel better you just feel like walking or dancing more. Let me stress that this is just an estimate of your caloric needs. I found it was consistently slightly low for myself, maybe I was more active than I thought.

OK so now I have a number 2392 calories a day, times 7 is 16744 calories a week. To lose 2 lbs a week I would have to eat 7000 calories a week less which is 1000 calories a day meaning 1392 calorie a day diet. But because I take Fridays off the diet (we’ll discuss why later) that 7000 has to be divided by 6 instead of 7 bringing it to 1166 calories a day less which gives me 1225 calories a day of food I can eat and lose 2 lbs. a week. To lose 3 lbs. a week I’d have to reduce my consumption to 1041 calories a day OR increase my activity level by which I do not mean exercise.

One more thing for today then I’ll stop. For lunch today I had a baked potato with a cup of salsa and a cup of broccoli. For dinner I’m planning a giant salad with a few nuts and a small amount of cheese. I also plan to eat a yellow sweet pepper, an apple, and maybe some carrots. If I’m still hungry I’m going to have 3-400 grams of sweet potato with salt, pepper, cinnamon and a touch of vanilla.

Tomorrow I want to talk about another useful too, the kitchen scale, measure my starting stats and talk about how not to exercise and lose weight.

January 7th, 2009

So, first official day on the diet and when I weighed in first thing this morning it was 230.4 lbs, 46.6% fat and 38.8% water. Yesterday as you’ll remember it was 233.4 lbs. 44.7% fat and 40.4% water. So did I really lose anything?
Let’s chart it:

Weighing In

	Weight	Fat	Water	Other
Tuesday Afternoon	233.4	104.3	94.3	34.8
Wednesday Morning	230.4	107.4	89.4	33.6
Change	-3.0	+3.0	-4.9	-1.1

It looks like I lost a LOT of weight for one day, gained fat (EEEK!) and lost water and other.. not what I wanted at all except for the lots of weight part, which, if this were true would be almost meaningless since it’s primarily water loss and I gained fat! Better for my clothes and feet but not a good first day. Do I really think I gained over 3 lbs of fat in one day? Heck no! Does this make all this weighing meaningless? No. Yesterday when I weighed in I’d been up a few hours and done my reading (while walking), ensuring that I drank when I was thirsty. This morning, I popped out of bed and ran over to weigh. I did this to demonstrate how important it is to weigh yourself with some consistency. Weighing yourself when you first get up is great! Just be consistent. I weighed myself a second time about the same time of day as yesterday and the results are now Weight: 229.4, Fat 44.0% (100.9 lbs) and water: 40.8% (93.6 lbs) which leaves other at 34.9. Let’s look at the table:

Time of Day Matters

	Weight	Fat	Water	Other
Tuesday Afternoon	233.4	104.3	94.3	34.8
Wednesday Afternoon	229.4	100.9	93.6	34.9
Change	-4.0	-3.4	-.7	+0.1

Does this make lots more sense? Yes! So we’re agreed, consistency matters.

I promised to talk about food scales today. I have one of these Salter Scale and love it. You can measure in grams or oz or lots of different ways and it even does some calorie calculations for you. It turns out, that it’s a bit overkill in the long run because you learn how much of something is about right. Also because everyone should download THIS, the USDA National Nutrient Database. It’s FREE, it’s your tax dollars at work for you. It’s easy to use and kinda fun! Type in the raw ingredient you’re looking for, figure out which category would narrow down what you’re looking for best (or just look at everything), highlight what you are interested in, click nutrients, decide what units you’re using, like cup or gram, change the amount to how much you’re using and look at the nutrient list. It’s not perfect but it has a LOT of stuff in there, indeed too much information is probably the problem. What you are most interested in is right at the top though: Total Lipid (aka FAT), Energy in kcals (aka Calories), Carbohydrate and Protein. Of course, I went further to break it down to the kinds of fat and I also was tracking my fiber. Let’s look at carrots (click on the image twice to see it a bit bigger):

WOW what a lot of information! Far more than I’ll ever need but don’t let it intimidate you. If you want to look at different kinds of fats you can page down and look for the words Fatty acids. There are 3-4 of them, total saturated, total unsaturated, and total mono unsaturated and especially total trans (BAD BAD BAD! I have a whole blogs worth of stuff to say about this awful gunk!). It also shows the cholesterol if you bother with that. I don’t.

I can hear you now. “This is WAY too complex can’t you just tell me how to eat?” I can tell you how I shop and eat. I shop around the outside of the grocery store diving into the aisles quickly for specific items and getting out to the edges again fast and I go through the checkout line reading a magazine, filing my nails or doing anything but looking at the junk food by the register. I have a message to all grocery stores, PUT IN A HEALTHY CHECKOUT LANE with no candy or snacks, I will be a customer for life. I buy very little processed food. There are like ten different reasons why processed foods aren’t good for you, a discussion for another day. I spend very, very little time in the meat section, a little time in the cheese and dairy section (I drink raw milk and make my own butter so I don’t need much there). I dive into the danger zone to get things like teas, canned fish, beans, wild rice, vinegars, oils, herbs, and cocoa powder. I spend the bulk of my time in the fresh fruits and veggies aisle and always buy sweet onions, sweet potatoes and Idaho potatoes in bulk (I eat one a day of each).

OK that’s a lot for one day. One thing I want to emphasize before going is that you should not avoid all fats. We’re going to talk in depth about fats one day but today I’m just going to say that a rough goal should be to get 0% of your calories from Trans Fats, <10% from Saturated fats and 10-20% from Unsaturated Fats. That's roughly 1/3 of your calories from fats. Tomorrow we'll talk about water and at long last, potatoes!

January 8th, 2009

OK I took a sneak peak and I am certain that I’ve lost some weight today but thankfully not as much as yesterday. That was, I’m fairly sure, mostly getting rid of the processed gunk that had been stuck to my innards!

Instead of telling you what I’m going to eat, starting today we’ll look backwards at what I actually ate. I probably will not break it down like this from now on but I wanted to give you an idea of what exactly everything adds up to.

Daily Consumption Breakdown Goal 1225

	Yel Swt Pep	Salsa	Onion	Potato	Broccoli	Banana	Salad	Shrimp	Sweet Potato	Olive Oil
Unit	100g	1 Cup	100g	299g	100g	lg	1 Cup	4 Med	100g	1 Tbsp
Eaten	2	1	3	1	3	1	5	2	3	1
Cal	112	99	102.4	286.4	123.5	132.8	81.8	162	276.5	119.4
Protein	8	6.1	9.6	30.0	33.8	5.9	18	144	24	0
Fat Sat	.54	14.6	0	0.9	1.9	1.4	0.8	5.4	4.1	18
Fat Uns	3.2	44.8	2.2	2.7	8.1	1.3	3.6	12.6	0	101.4
Carbs	50.6	33.5	90.6	252.8	79.7	124.2	59.4	0	248.4	0
Fiber	1.8	1.7	0.9	6.6	7.8	3.5	6	0	9.9	0

So what does that total up to?

Summary 1-7-09

	Total	% of Total	Goal	Goal Met?
Calories	1496		<1225	Over by 271
Protein	135	10.6	10-35%	Good
Fat Saturated	42.2	3.3	<10%	Good
Fat Unsaturated	167	13	10 go 25%	Good
Carbs	939	73	40 go 65%	Sl High
Fiber	40		21g	Great

I missed my calorie goal.. but I’m not overly concerned as long as I’m losing weight. I did walk a lot yesterday. The good news is that I didn’t have to calculate anything as I went. I just had a feel for what I should eat when I was hungry. I won’t try to cut back on that unless I don’t lose fast enough, as I pointed out those calculations are just a first guesstimate.

Water. Water is important. Everyone should be drinking it. Your body SHOULD be around 60% water. Caffeinated beverages don’t count. Alcoholic beverages don’t count. Sorry, but both these things make you pee a LOT and that reduces the amount of water available for the chemical processes in your body overall. I avoid sugary beverages as well, that’s sodas and fruit juices and by the way veggie juices. For some reason the body doesn’t take into consideration calories when you drink them to determine if you’re hungry or not. It sure counts them when it’s building it’s fat content though!

Women in the US need about 11.5 (92 oz) cups of water a day, and men need about 15.5(124 oz) cups of water a day. That’s a LOT of water! And of course that amount varies a lot depending on the temperature and humidity, how active you are, bigger people need more water etc. etc. But should you be drinking that much? NO! what that doesn’t take into account is how much water you get from your food. Water makes up approximately 75-95% of the foods you eat. A cup of water weighs about 237g. I probably eat around 2300 grams of food a day. I eat a lot of fruits and veggies which are higher percent water.. So I’m going to use 85% as my estimated amount of water from my food, which means I ate about 8 cups of water. (I went back to the USDA database and actually calculated it, I consumed 7.9 cups of water in my food, pretty darn close!) That means I only need to drink 3 cups, since I’m a little more active lately I’ll say 4 cups. I drink more than that each day but I do not try to drink 11 cups. That’s just crazy and I don’t think it’s good for me (a reminder, I’m not a doctor, I’m just a biologist but this guy is). It dilutes my cations too much making it hard for my nervous system including my brain to function, it overworks my kidneys, it causes edema, it increases my blood pressure. By all means if I’m thirsty, I drink. If I think I’m hungry, I try a sip of water first to see if I’m incorrectly interpreting my body’s signals. I just don’t think the ‘water diet’ is sensible although water IS important and can help, when used in moderation, to lose weight. We use water to metabolize our fat, keep our blood from getting too thick and prevents kidney stones. In fact, the cure for edema caused by eating too much salt is to drink a bit more water! In the end, I probably drink 6-8 cups a day. I don’t carry a water bottle with me wherever I go (and if I do, it’s stainless steel and reusable!). I drink responsibly.

And finally today.. Potatoes!
I love them, they love me. OK, truth is it appears I’m Irish but I didn’t know that when I fell in love with potatoes. Let’s look at the data from USDA:

Potato, baked, flesh and skin, without salt
Water 223.92 g
Energy 278 kcal
Protein 7.47 g
Total lipid (fat) .39 g
Carbs 63.24 g
Fiber 6.6 g

WOW! Look at that protein! Third highest source of protein I had all day. Shrimp of course was the main source but the biggest source of protein was that lovely yellow pepper I ate raw, just like an apple–YUM! In fact, if I hadn’t eaten that shrimp at all my protein levels would have been just fine. Check out the table above and see for yourself!

Minerals in a large potato:

Where spuds really shine in minerals is in the potassium giving me half my daily needed dosage but this guy also contributed 1/5th my daily needed magnesium and phosphorous.

When it comes to vitamins taters provide a third of my daily requirement of Vitamin C, one fifth of my daily dose of folate and niacin, and a splattering of other needed vitamins. I still take a Flintstones vitamin daily and a chewable calcium suppliment. Can’t be too careful when cutting calories!

I can hear you worrying now.. isn’t a potato full of bad for me starch? Oh no, it’s full of good for you starch! Starch that fills you up and slowly digests to keep you full longer. IMHO, those Adkins folks are idiots. The whole concept of eating like a caveman.. well, I have an anthropology degree and I’m going to tell you cave men didn’t mostly eat meat. They called them ‘Hunter Gatherers” for a reason. Why did they put the hunter part first? Because anthropologists were mostly men and it’s mostly men that are the hunters so of course they put that first. But the truth is that on a daily basis man has primarily eaten gathered materials such as fruits, veggies, roots, and nuts througout history. Americans eat far too much meat and fat and processed foods (which are the bad carbs you should avoid!). I was a type II diabetic when I started this lifestyle, I no longer am. Never once on the way down from 300 lbs did my blood sugar get out of control and I ate 2 potatoes every day. I’m not advocating not checking your blood sugar while you diet, I’m just saying what worked for me. Notice I say I was diabetic. I no longer have high blood sugar and have been off medication for 2 years. Am I still insulin resistant? Will I become diabetic again if I gain more weight? Probably. Best reason in the world for keeping my weight down.

Interestingly, I tried all this before the hubub about resistant starches. Never heard of them? This is from Wikipedia:

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Resistant starch (RS) is starch that escapes digestion in the small intestine of healthy individuals.[1] Resistant starch is considered the third type of dietary fiber, as it can deliver some of the benefits of insoluble fiber and some of the benefits of soluble fiber.

Some carbohydrates, such as sugars and most starch, are rapidly digested and absorbed as glucose into the body through the small intestine and subsequently used for short-term energy needs or stored. Resistant starch, on the other hand, resists digestion and passes through to the large intestine where it acts like dietary fiber.

Resistant starch has been categorized into four types:

* RS1 Physically inaccessible or digestible resistant starch, such as that found in seeds or legumes and unprocessed whole grains

* RS2 Resistant starch that occurs in its natural granular form, such as uncooked potato, green banana flour and high amylose corn

* RS3 Resistant starch that is formed when starch-containing foods are cooked and cooled such as in bread, cornflakes and cooked-and-chilled potatoes or retrograded high amylose corn

* RS4 Starches that have been chemically modified to resist digestion. This type of resistant starches can have a wide variety of structures and are not found in nature.

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Notice that they are saying a cooked potato does not have RS. But it depends on your treatment of the tater. There’s research still underway seeing how microwaving compares to oven baking but I don’t overcook my spuds. In fact, if I microwave them (in a glass bowl of course!) the centers are still very slightly crunchy. And usually, I bake seven potatoes on a Saturday in the oven, stick six of them in the fridge and when I reheat them I only cook them for a few minutes so the Spud is warm. Heating and cooling starches increases their resistant properties. Also, I philosophically disagree with some researchers about the temperature that a spud needs to be at when you eat it for it to have more RS. Anything you eat will be at body temperature (about 98.6 degrees F) when you digest it. It’s history, heating and cooling, no doubt matters, not eating it so hot that your tummy is hotter than normal during digestion might matter (but surely it’s cooled by the time it gets to your intestine!).

Also note this from that Wikipedia page:
“Lipid oxidation: Resistant starch helps burn fat and may lead to lower fat accumulation. A recent clinical trial with high amylose corn resistant starch showed that it increased fat oxidation after a meal. It also changed the sequence in which the body burns food – with fat burning being placed at the top of the list relative to carbohydrates and protein. These findings suggest a possible metabolic effect of resistant starch that may impact body weight.”

So burn that fat! Eat a hot (or rather warm) potato tonight!

Be sure to eat the skins though that’s where the good stuff is and cook it without adding a bunch of fatty toppings, baked, microwaved, even boiled is OK. Mashed is fine but count that milk if you add it! Deep fried anything is going to make a healthy food go bad. I moisten my taters with lemon juice instead of butter (although I’m not advocating to avoid good, wholesome butter especially if you’ve made it at home, hopefully from your raw milk! Just remember to count the calories.) I also put a cup of salsa on it along with an onion and broccoli. I’ll take a picture of tonights dinner and show you how great it looks tomorrow. Well that’s enough for today. Tomorrow I’ll talk about sweet potatoes and taking Friday’s off.

Oh and my weigh in today was: 227.4 lbs 44.4% fat and 40.4% water. Did I really not lose any fat? Nah, truth is I am sure I didn’t lose 3 lbs of fat yesterday. The way the scales work is that they determine how much water is in your body based on resistance of a tiny electrical currant then calculate the fat percent based on a formula that is tuned for fit people (how goofy is that?). This is affected by almost everything in the universe, the temperature, humidity, how much salt in my body, the phase of the moon, what the static charge in the air is, how much I weigh… on and on. I want to keep a close eye on it but not over react to small variations. Here’s what my fat percent chart looked like last time:

Lots of ups and downs! But in a one years time I went from 57% fat to 35% fat. This time I’m aiming for 30% fat for the long term. What’s your goal?

January 9th, 2009

We’ll look at my daily weigh in to begin today. I’m at 227.0 lbs, down 0.4 lbs from yesterday, I lost 0.2 lbs fat, gained 0.1 lbs water and lost 0.3 other. For a total for five days of 6.4 lbs down, Woot! Just 11.6 more lbs to go to my mini-goal which I should reach within a month. I expect that this will be a typical ‘great’ day from now on with an average day losing 0.2 lbs. And tomorrow, I expect to gain 1-2 lbs. Why? Because everyone should take a break from controlling what they eat one day a week. Now, I’m not saying I should eat a gallon of ice cream or 20 snickers bars, I don’t want to over-eat to the point you can’t take it off next week. But if I’ve been craving something all week but couldn’t fit it into my calorie count, today’s the day. I will have probably have 2 pieces of bread tonight when I eat out at dinner and order whatever I feel like. Although I really am not having any ‘cravings’ at this time. If I get there and want pasta, I’ll have it (although I probably will not have the bread then, I really hate the way I feel all gunked up from processed foods). If I have energy I’ll probably get fajita’s (having to make your own food WHILE going out can be exhausting! LOL). So for the next few days, because I won’t have enough fiber today, I’ll be carrying some of that processed food around with me, PLUS some extra calorie fat gain.

Why do I break over weekly? For one, because if I’m absolutely craving something it’s rarely on a Saturday or Sunday because I just ate whatever I wanted on Friday so likely if I want something I only have to wait 3-4 days to have it. I can usually talk myself into waiting that long.

Another reason is your body doesn’t get the feeling it’s starving. “Look, it says, there IS still food in the world, we don’t have to go into hoarding mode. All is well. We can keep building muscle and bone and burning fat because there is more food left in the world.”

And finally because everyone should have one day eating out a week just for the social value and to not have to eat your own cooking. It’s great, you get reinforcement from friends on your weight loss, consolation from them if you had a bad week and you can do the same for them for whatever their goals are in life. It’s good for you. And it’s almost impossible to eat out and eat reasonably. Even if all you get is a salad what they put on the salad makes it a vehicle for way too many of the wrong fats and overall calories.

So pick a day and relax. Don’t go crazy but if your aunt Margaret sent over a piece of red velvet cake and it’s been taunting you all week, now’s the time!

I’ve decided to cut these posts down in size for many reasons. One, turns out I’m spending too much time talking about my life and not living it. I thought I’d be able to post faster than I am but it’s not the case. Secondly, I don’t want to run out of subjects too fast. I’m sure we’re going to have days where I have nothing to say and no time to say it. But not too soon, nor too fast! And lastly, when looking over the posts they were just too long, the paragraphs were too long, even I got bored trying to get through them. LOL OK Everyone do something fun today!