The Further Reduction of Ikce.

I am continuing to lose weight, averaging about 1 pound per day. I was about a week and a half into the diet before I found a scale that could record my weight and the first weigh in I was 396. Today I am 384 and I have enough data to estimate my total weight loss since starting the diet. I have lost at least 22 pounds. The number of pounds is an exact measurement but what does that mean in real life.

 

1. My clothes fit better and I am able to wear some clothes I have not been able to wear for a few months
2. I move better
3. I am already not getting as winded going up and down the stairs and other activities.
4. My shoes are lose, I may need to start wearing extra pairs of socks
5. I am just about ready to punch a new hole into my belt.

The diet has not been all that bad. I have been eating flavorful home cooked meals 4oz of meat with vegetables and two fruits or bowls of berries for snacks. I have determined that my favorite berry is the blackberry, followed by blueberries. I am mostly eating grilled chicken, homemade taco meat, and grilled flank steak. I grill them up and then portion them out for the week. Fruits are apples and oranges. I am drinking lots of water and Crystal Light, all good stuff. The goal is 500 calories per day, I may be getting a bit more than that but I am still losing weight. I am also taking an herbal HCG supplement, and will continue to do so for another couple weeks. I was going to go off the HCG next week but decided to continue on a 40 day and not a 30 day schedule.

After I am done with phase 2 I go into phase 3. I can increase my calorie intake to 1500 per day and stay away from sugar, and carbs. That means no sweets, potatoes, bread, I can choose to start eating limited dairy but I am thinking I will not do that, other than butter to sauté things and some occasional cheese. I do this for 3 weeks.

Here is the cool part. I just described phase 2, where I currently am and phase 3. There is a phase 1 that lasts 2 days. It sounds crazy but it is recommended that a person spends the first phase of this diet eating all the fat and sugar they can manage. My two phase 1 days will fall on March 22^nd and 23^rd. Those are Powwow days! Epic win for Ikce! I will get to eat fry bread and everything else but only for two days, and then it is back to phase 2.

I am looking at going through 3 cycles of this diet. If I am losing 30 to 40 pounds per phase 2 I should be down 120 pounds + by June. I will also be losing weight in phase 3 but no as dramatically. My goal by then is to be less than 300 pounds. I may do a 4^th run but I will see. My final target weight is between 200 and 250.

I am looking forward to my new life. I am already seeing glimpses of it. I am making a list of things I want to do.

1. I want to dance again.
2. Learn to scuba
3. Learn to surf
4. Learn a martial art of some kind OOO! HAH! OOO!
5. Travel more, can’t learn to surf in Colorado
6. Hiking and photographing
7. Too many more to list

I am getting my life back and once I do I will not lose it again through inaction and poor choices on my part.

How I look on Feb 14^th 2012

I think that there is a big difference. I still cannot fit in a 2X tanka shirt comfortably but I am getting there. My final weight goal is 250 pounds or so.

Ikce Reduction Update

Ok it has been a week since I started all this. Wednesday and Thursday were loading “gluttony days” not sure how that works but the diet requires it. On Friday of last week the restricted diet started.

Up until Yesterday my life has been hell. I would stare at the cats and think “I wonder if they taste like chicken” I also kept searching for Moo Goo Guy Kittey recipes online. I was pretty miserable. Yesterday was an ok day, today is about the same.

Am I hungry? Yea I could eat but I am no longer searching Amazon.com for “101 Ways to Wok Your Cat” ever 15 minutes. I guess my body is settling into the 500 calories per day.

Jonette has reported a weight loss of 7 and ½ pounds already. I have probably lost the same or more. Belly measurements are down about an inch or so. I cannot be sure due to the inexact nature of holding a sewing tape measure above my belly button and having Jonette walk around me.

No real change yet, I am still too heavy for our scales. I think I can handle it for 30 days. I was told that I would need to continue on the restricted diet for 3 more days to flush out the supplement after I stop taking it. That was a shock to hear while imagining Yoshi kitten turn into a turkey leg.

Things are looking good. The cats are safe, and this will not be as bad as I thought it would be 48 hours ago. I am drinking lots of water, and sticking with the plan. Today lunch is a salad with 4oz of homemade taco meat, homemade salsa and some extra red pepper and tomato. It really helps that we make good flavorful food to eat.

This weekend I will be grilling up some flank steak to portion out for the week.

All I good, looking forward to less of me and wearing a Tanka Bar shirt.

The cats say Meow…. Except Mins she just hisses. Old grumpy thing that she is.

Ikce Reduction Experiment

Ok time to come clean. I am fat. Not just fat, Orca fat. My 40 years and continued eating habits of a 20 year old stoner have caught up with me. My metabolism can no longer keep up with my calorie intake and lack of exorcise. Because of my weight I have sleep apnea and I am experiencing other health issues. It is time that I clean up my act. It is time that everyone sees less of me, in a sense.

Here are the gory details:

Height = 6’2″

Weight = No clue, last time I was weighed I was 360 and that was 4 years ago.

Waistline = 56″

Shirt size = 3X

I have two major problems that I need to overcome. I love food; to make matters worse I love potatoes, rice, bread, cheese, ice cream, cookies, brownies, cakes, pie and chips. All the worst things are the things that I love. The other problem is that I eat when I am bored. I nibble constantly.

My dear wife Jonette has a coworker that has used the HCG diet with great success. The HCG diet is a modified paleo diet that includes a supplement that suppresses apatite. I have my doubts but starting today I am giving it a shot.

The diet works like this. I start taking the HCG supplement twice a day; one dose before lunch and another dose before dinner. I have just taken my first 1ml of HCG. It is supposed to taste like chocolate. Yea right it is freak’n nasty. For the first 3 days I load up and eat whatever the hell I want to eat. If declaring war on 2 dozen chocolate chip cookies and a quart of Ben and Jerrys floats my boat for breakfast, I can go right ahead and begin my campaign of shock and awe. I have only 3 days to complete my assault and then the UN takes over on Friday.

For the next 27 days I am restricted to 2 4 oz servings of lean beef or chicken, some salad and two servings of fruit. I cannot have beef twice on the same day, same with chicken. If lunch is chicken then dinner is beef. Apples and oranges make the best fruit servings. The fruit can be eaten with my meal or as snacks but only two a day. After 30 days I must no longer take the HCG supplement. I can go back on the supplement after 30 days if I choose.

I am not sure if the reports are true but people are losing a pound or more per day. Most scales only weigh up to 350 pounds so even at max effectiveness I will not be able to gauge my weight for at least 10 days, till after the 3 binge days, so that would be Friday. I am not expecting to lose a pound a day but it sure would be nice.

Starting on Friday I have committed myself to 27 days of food hell, afterwards I will go on a paleo diet to maintain and continue to lose weight. I hope all goes well. I have some favorite shirts that no longer fit and I would love to wear a Tanka Bar shirt, but the biggest they come is in 2X. It has been years since I was able to wear a 2X shirt so that would be nice. Tanka Bar shirts are yellow, one of my favorite colors so BONUS!

So that is my goal, wear a Tanka Bar shirt and start powwow dancing again and other things.

I plan on providing weekly updates as to my progress.

Wish me luck.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 40 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The Vegetarian Jungle.

I am not a vegetarian and I probably never can be. Do not get me wrong I love vegetables, minus a few exceptions like peas, cauliflower, and celery. I had to go to school to learn that kids hated spinach. I was ok with that just meant more for me. I love vegetables, I like them raw, I like them roasted, I like them grilled, I like them sautéed, I am not a fan of boiled vegetables and that is where I think most people go wrong. Boiled vegetables are horrible, sorry there is just no other way to put it.

 

So other than boiled vegetables I am a vegetable fan, so much so that I will eat the broccoli first before it gets cold kind of person. So it would be safe to assume that I would dig vegetarian food. Sadly that is just not the case. I am sitting here at work picking at a dish of poblano peppers filled with quinoa grain. It smelled good, it even looks pretty good. The dish has poblano peppers in it so it must have some flavor.

Nope, seriously how much mad skillz does it take for a chef to take a delicious poblano pepper and render it tasteless? Yes there is a hint of heat from the decidedly mild peppers but I have eaten a chicken stuffed poblano that tasted fantastic. The pepper itself was just bursting with flavor. This all tasted like boiled vegetables. It not only tasted like eating a shadow but the act of eating it created a mouth feel that was mushy and grainy.

That is one side of the vegetarian spectrum I have tried, the other was long ago on a trip to Chicago. We stopped in at a local authentic vegetarian Indian establishment. I had a feeling that I was punked. The place was a large dirty buffet type restaurant with trays of unidentifiable food. There were no explanations of what the dishes were so I just played a game of food Russian roulette. The immediate results were not enjoyable. Every dish I sampled was nose wateringly over spiced. The later results were even worse when I crash redecorated the hotel bathroom that night. I now have an unhealthy fear of Indian food that will probably never go away.

I have also experienced home cooked vegetarian food. Jonette and I were invited over to a friend’s house to enjoy a feast of vegetarian lasagna. The lasagna came out of the oven and it looked like paste, there was no color just white and beige. I took a plate full of the half liquid mass and took a bite. Once when I was a kid someone dared me to lick a salt lick. Salt licks are big blocks of salt that ranchers use for their cattle. I had one in the back yard to attract deer. Deer like salt licks as well. I think that there was more salt in that lasagna than in the salt lick in my back yard. I forced myself to eat the rest and refused any second helping. To top it all off she served a desert of flourless chocolate cake that could have had a spectacular career as a puck in an NHL playoff game. Good thing there was a Burger King on the way home and a 7-11 where I could get a gallon of water to counteract the salt.

I will admit that I have not had good vegetarian food; maybe good vegetarian food is worth eating. Sadly I have yet to experience vegetarian or vegan food that is worth trying a second time. I am actually sad that my experience today just racks up another point in the bad column. I will go on eating vegetables and meat. I like them both and will keep my options open. Maybe someday I will find vegetarian food that is worth eating.

Until then “Stay hungry my friends!”

How I Passed High School Physics

I just completed a test on my scientific literacy. The test was 50 questions from Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Meteorology, Paleontology, and Physics. I got 37 out of 50. I am not happy with that result; I am weak in Chemistry and Physics, two courses I struggled with in high school. I know the reason. I struggle with math. I cannot keep numbers straight in my head. Numbers scramble, they twist and turn. I can do a set of mathematical problems at home or in class but come test time I can’t retain the processes of untangling equations. Physics and Chemistry are very much math based sciences.

Physics and the numbers problem.

Physics was an absolute nightmare for me. I can visualize the experiments, the concepts make complete sense. I can see how things are supposed to work but once numbers are assigned I am lost. It is not even a memory thing; all the equations were posted around the room near the ceiling. They could have been written in Greek for all the good it did me at test time.

There was another student in my class. His name was Andrew he was very bright and a wizard when it came to numbers. Andrew could work those equations in ways I never thought imaginable. On the other hand he could no more visualize the experiments or set them up any more than I could manipulate the numbers. The two of us made a whole person, and we always teamed up as lab partners.

Unfortunately even with Andrew in the class I was still doomed. There were no partners for the tests. I would sit down and look at the test watching the equations and numbers slither around the page. I was hopeless and racked up fail after fail after fail. There was a massive crash and burn in my future and there was nothing I could do to avoid it.

What’s in the box!!!!!

Physics was my last class of the day and I was a bus student and had a ridiculously short amount of time to dash to my bus at the end of classes. Getting left behind was a disaster that had to be avoided at all costs. In order to reduce the time needed between end of class and catching the bus, I would take everything I needed to bring home with me to my physics class. One day I needed to bring home a feather fan that I had brought in for another class. I had the feather fan in a basic cardboard box that I tucked under my arm as I entered the classroom.

I was not the most popular kid in school, oh who am I kidding I was the least liked kid in the history of the school. I had a speech impediment that I was struggling with and succeeding in suppressing. Unfortunately I lived in a small town with a small population of students so I was immediately labeled a retard. Combined with the fact that I was devastatingly shy I was also labeled a homosexual. This opened me up to constant badgering every day. The day I had a box with me in class gave the other students a new opportunity to harass me something my fellow students never passed up. “What’s in the box? What’s in the box?” Followed by several highly sexual suggestions of what I could possibly have in it. For some reason I was not going to tell them what I had in the box, it was no business of theirs anyway. I finally had enough so I turned around and said. “It’s a letter bomb now leave me alone!”

Did I just say that out loud?

Yea I did just say it out loud; the furious activity of my classmates regarding the possible contents of my box came to a screeching halt.

I am 40 years old so I graduated high school long before Columbine or any other school massacres but it was still the absolute worst thing to say. The instructor responded “David would you please come up here.” This is it I thought, next will be counseling at best, detention again, or suspension, a swat, maybe the police at worst. I walked slowly up to his desk. “You are a smart kid David, but you are failing my class. I bet you are smart enough to actually build a letter bomb. If you can diagram one on the board and explain how it works for the class I will pass you.” A fog of confusion and relief surrounded me. This is not the end? All I have to do is draw a diagram of an IED on the black board and explain how it would work and I pass physics. “Yea ok” I said. He handed me a piece of chalk. “Students we have a special class today!” the instructor announced and sat down at his desk. I went to work.

I will not go into detail about what I drew on the board or my explanations of how it would work and where to get materials. I would like to report that even after instructing a class and impressing my classmates with my knowledge that their opinion of me was changed, sadly that is not the case. Years of stuttering and shyness will not be overcome by 40 minutes of impressing or scaring the hell out of my classmates. In fact the event probably just added the label scary psychopath to the list of perceived character and mental flaws they had all tacked onto me. However I did receive a D in physics that year, a passing grade just as the instructor promised.

 

I would not in any way suggest that anyone try this approach to pass physics or any other class. I was damn lucky to get out of it without being prosecuted even before the current hysteria that has gripped our nation over school shooters and terrorists.

 

Hi Mom! I am not sure you know about this one. J

 

 

Good Cat, Bad Cat, Kitten

Sorry that I have not been around much recently. Holidays get crazy and Happy Holidays to my entire handful of readers. This holiday season the wife and I added a new family member.

Meet Yoshi! She is a 3 or 4 month old kitten. We adopted her from the Denver Dumb Friends League earlier this month. She is a real cutie as you can see. In this picture she is completely knackered after a long play session and a bath. She is so busy playing that she does not clean herself so we have to do it for her. Jonette and I needed some happiness this winter and a kitten fit the bill. Catzilla also has been wanting for a companion. His trying to play with Cinnamon has not been received well due to the fact that Cinnamon is old and grumpy.

It was not long before Yoshi and Catzilla became fast friends. They are nearly inseparable. It took only a week. I came in from the garage refrigerator carrying some food items and found Catzilla flat on his back in the middle of the living room floor with Yoshi bouncing around his head biting his neck. After 3 weeks they play constantly.

Yoshi seems to be pretty smart; we have a cat toy that is a piece of plastic fringy stuff on the end of a wire. I put the handle in between the arm and cushion of the couch so that Yoshi can play with it solo. Yoshi spent a couple days jumping and batting at the plastic fringy stuff and then realized that a wire was attached to it. She now plays with it by jumping up on the couch and manipulating the wire to make the toy bounce around. This occupies her for hours at a time.

Just recently she got the fringy part stuck in the door of the fireplace. I was going to let Yoshi worry over getting it loose for a bit and then free it for her. Catzilla was watching the activity and, before I decided to help out, ran over to the fireplace and attempted to free the toy for Yoshi. Catzilla was unsuccessful so I intervened and all was happy with the world. I am amazed that Catzilla was so quick to see the problem and then try to help out. Good Cat.

Unfortunately Cinnamon, I have already mentioned is old and grumpy, wants nothing to do with Yoshi other than make her disappear.

We have 5 cat nests, and 3 cats. Catzilla refuses to use any of the cat nests. He prefers boxes. So we have 5 cat nests and only 2 cats using them. Yoshi took a liking to a small white donut shaped one and yesterday Cinnamon decided to pee in it. Not just a little pee, she hosed it down. Cinnamon must have saved over a day’s worth and just let fly right before we got home. We came into the house and poor Yoshi was trying to bury it in the living room. I found a long stick and managed to get the soaked thing in the washing machine. Yoshi will have her nest back tonight. Cinnamon will just have to cope with having only 4 nests and 3 chairs to sleep on. Bad Cat!

I cannot be to mad at Cinnamon, she is 18 years old and is losing her teeth and her kidneys are bad. We have to give her antibiotics for her teeth and liquid for her kidneys. And she sleeps all day or is eating or begging for food. I just wish she would leave Yoshi alone, Yoshi spends all her time chewing on Catzilla and he could not be a happier cat for it.

More pictures of Yoshi.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/114828832787645499040/albums/5685824511724566673

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/114828832787645499040/albums/5689814004617135201

Pictures of Yoshi and Catzilla

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/114828832787645499040/albums/5686771171130217569

Denver Dumb Friends League.

http://www.ddfl.org/

Video of Yoshi and Catzilla playing King of the Box. A favorite game.