My Plate

The new food pyramid came out. Well, it doesn’t really look like a food pyramid anymore. They’ve successfully weaned us completely off the building block design I grew up with, eliminating sweets, fats and sugars from what I’m supposed to eat at all. But who are we kidding? It’s some of the cheapest energy available and has kept Americans kicking butt since we used them for soldiers in the World Wars. Even today they try to ship chocolate to the soldiers in the Middle East, but temperature has been a bit of a limiting factor and I’ve heard the chocolate that can survive that is not really worth eating.

The link I gave you above to the food pyramid comes from a friend’s blog. She gave some interesting input on it and I found it more helpful than the still currently limited information on the USDA blog. I have this sinking feeling that I blogged just last year on a new food pyramid and they probably just finished creating that website, so we’re in for a bit of a wait as they tell us over again how to eat and how to not get as fat as we are. But as time goes on, I’m seeing more that it’s not just how much we eat, it’s how much we do. And I found it ironic that they decided to suggest drinking fat free milk even though the fat provided in milk is much better for people than other fat they could intake. Milk is so great for you, there’s no reason why 1% or 2% milk isn’t just fine. Just remember to limit your fat intake somewhere else.
I didn’t gain weight when I ate a lot, I gained weight when I ate more than I was burning in daily exercise and work. I lose weight when I do physical labor and play sports, regardless of how much I eat or drink during that time. Sure, how much I eat or drink might limit how much weight I lose, but I lose weight. Amanda and I are in the process of tracking our weight change versus how much we walk and I can tell you that already the graphs are pretty interesting for me. I’ve learned a lot about my exercise levels and how much I really do or don’t walk on a given day and I’ll give you 2 fun facts I picked up the past couple weeks. First, stairs at work instead of the elevator isn’t gonna do it unless you work at the Sears Tower. Second, I need to ditch the desk work. Unfortunately neither of these are helpful in my situation so I’ll keep walking as much as I can and limiting unnecessary food intake.

And that’s what really important out of all this. We don’t all have a ton of time to go exercise and be super athletes. I hate lifting, my wife hates running, and our dog can’t go swimming with us. But all of us can find ways to be active, and we can avoid intaking large quantities of food. If you want a health food diet just eat healthy quantities for starters. People who pack themselves full of fiber material such as lettuce just to limit their intake or who starve themselves to limit calories are most likely not enjoying their weight loss strategies for various reasons. And our bodies are designed to be efficient. If your intake balance shifts, your body will find a way to capture as much as possible from what you provide it – that’s just a fact of life and something those of us who work with food animals are acutely aware of. Just like humans, animals adjust to different energy sources or quantities and their bodies naturally do what is efficient. Our problem is that we’re smart enough to provide ourselves more food than we need and then our body is too efficient. We eat too much and then our body stores too much and we get fatter. And we don’t exercise.

The food pyramid provides a great guideline for balancing your meals, but we need to limit how much balanced food we eat. And then we need to get outside and be active.

Nap by the "lake"

I'm sitting waiting for stats class and just saw an old woman shove cash down her shirt. Um... Awkward, so I thought I'd blog briefly.

Taking a nap by Mirror Lake reminded me of a funny story. I woke up with a start to the realization that people were wandering around me and I had no idea where I was or what time it was. It was strangely similar to a time in the Netherlands after one of my crazy nights when I didn't know where I was or where any of my belongings were so I just wandered into town and to the grocery store. In desperate need of some adequate nutrition, I figured on the sure bet and bought a liter jug of milk which I then took down to the canal and watched the ducks with, slowly drinking down the jug. About halfway through it, I fell asleep there in the sun for about 2 hours. I woke up suddenly to realize that this young Moroccan man wearing all black was standing in front of me staring at me. He sort of jumped when I sat up and exclaimed loudly in Dutch at me. Surprised by my lack of response, he inquired twice as to what I was doing there before I responded to him, "I don't speak Dutch". With increasing surprise and now frustration on his face, he responded to me, "All of the people think you are dead. We've been worried about you". My only answer, "No... no, I'm not dead. Thanks though." At which point, I proceeded to open my milk gallon and stare at the ducks again as this guy stormed off.

Anyhow, just a funny story to uplift your day. I've been trying to document more of my stories but I'm starting with some of the simpler and more appropriate ones in my blog. Unbelievable things happen to me and I like to tell stories that people will actually believe.

315 Closed at Ackerman, etc.

Flavored milk - unhealthy? So says Florida schools who are removing strawberry from the school menu already this year along with soda pop in an effort to fight obesity among children. I'll agree that's a problem we should be concerned with, but is removing milk the answer?


Also, Hogweed and Poison Hemlock are spreading through C. Ohio. I have inserted a picture of the burn that Hogweed causes as well as the appearance the Poison Hemlock plant. Please read both of these articles and learn to distinguish the difference. Eliminate both plants as quickly as possible.

Driving down today to campus was my first day with the 315 route closed because yesterday I was over at the Hippology Contest all day. (Congratulations to the Delaware County Team for their 2nd Place!). So today I headed down and realized just before I got on the highway that I'd forgotten my parking pass. Great. So I turned around and headed back to get the pass. Now, when I say my pass, I really should say Amanda's pass, because she is being gracious enough to share it with me so that we can save money, which especially works well when I don't forget it. Once I had gotten the pass I had to turn around and head back south. 71 S was running pretty smooth for 8 am, but when I tried to get off Weber there was a train. Well, that's just great. Train leaves and suddenly out of nowhere there's a service truck on the tracks. Not so great. So I drive down Silver to get to Hudson cause I'm not going to keep waiting on this. And then, there is this truck trying to back into a place on Silver. Well, if you know that road at all, you know he's go no chance in getting in there easy. So we sat while he tried to back in. Eventually he got in, after holding up everyone, trying 3-4 times and taking the fence in front of him off its posts. Then I still had to get all the way to campus. All told, my trip to OSU today took me 50 minutes. Pathetic.


Facebook continues to be goofy. I can't read any of my messages and my facebook isn't updating at all. I don't know why they haven't fixed it yet, but's been 4 days and this is not cool. I'm currently watching the World Cup on Fifa's Matchcast. It's nice to have it, but it's nothing like ESPN's 360.

No news yet from Tom Izzo, except that there is no news. I'm becoming numb to it all. For better or worse, I want him to make up his mind so that we can figure out where we stand for next year's season.

Got Milk?

I do. One of my favorites brought me some today from her home and I have to say that it is absolutely fantastic to have real milk. I can understand why people have this vision of organic greatness in the taste of good milk. Now, I'm pretty sure these cows weren't organic (and if you do finally read my blog again, you can correct me), but still the milk tastes so great and I feel like I can taste the cow in it. Now of course, with Michael Pollan's big quantity points last night, this milk is exactly what he wants. No offense, random cows... while your milk might taste better than Meijer's, you still won't get all of my business.

I need to be able to get milk when I need it and at a price I can afford. This is my personal reason for all of the foods I buy. Sure, local is great, but if I can't afford it, or if local isn't available when I'm finally out of work after a busy day, I'm still going to buy the milk that I can get.

In other news, Trent Loos facebook friended me today. This is pretty special, even if he does have 2100 friends, if only for the fact that he friended me without my searching him out. Heck, I didn't even know he was on facebook, and I was really excited to receive that news this evening.

Also, we played 2-3 hours of basketball today on the feedmill "court". I love playing basketball, and really enjoyed the exercise and the competition. I felt like it was a great, friendly set of matches and I had both my good games and my bad ones. Yet, I always seem to play better on a bad hoop, even if I've never played on it before for previous experience.

And can I just say that it frustrates me when people like Farm Sanctuary do such great things such as save injured animals. That's great, really. But then Gene Baur and his crew turn around and complain about Factory Farms. Find a new term already, because this one still doesn't have a clear definition, only a misguided set of followers.