Month: August 2013

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Weight Loss Exercise

Bill Clinton the Vegan?

I had no idea but just read an article about Bill Clinton and how he switched to a vegan lifestyle.

http://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-08-2013/bill-clinton-vegan.html

bill-clintonI am not sure how much you have noticed or if it is just the people and blogs and facebook people I see but it seems like being a vegan is not nearly as crazy as it used to seem.

I remember as a kid people would be vegetarians, mainly just not eating meat or fish, and I used to think of it as unhealthy and very fringe lifestyle. But now, veganism abounds. We have a vegan cookbook at home and the foods, although a little strange, seem to be really good.

Not sure if I am ready to go vegan anytime soon but the whole idea of eating a cleaner diet is very tempting. I still have a lot of room to move in my diet right now. I take in a bit too much fat, I eat some processed foods every single day, I drink coffee, and I have a bit of a sweet tooth.

I really believe that people that are eating a vegan meal plan are on the right track as far as getting healthy goes. There are a lot of problems with North American cattle and chicken farming and the unhealthy additives, steroids, and unclean conditions of having so many animals in a cramped area to bring down fast food prices.

On the other hand I do still have a lot of problem with giving up chicken burgers, steaks, and hamburgers.

I guess just trying a few vegan dishes and cleaning up my diet is the best bet for me right now.

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Ride the Divide Movie

Late on Friday and Saturday nights I will lie in bed and watch a movie on my iPad on Netflix. It is a nice quiet time for me and I tend to watch stuff that no one else in the house would care about. Last night I watched the documentary Ride the Divide.

Ride the Divide is just about an hour and a half long and it follows closely three people out of 16 people in total that do a bicycle race from Banff Canada to the US-Mexico border. The ride is purely individual although everyone is tracking each other and supporting each other as much as they can. There are no teams, or team support like you see in the Tour De France.

I won’t spoil the result but the winner takes about three weeks and the last take about five weeks to complete this race. Not only is the distance absolutely ridiculous but since the race goes down the continental divide they have to deal with mountains, snow, rain, and crazy elevation changes all the time while trying to ride as far as they can every day. Oh, and lots of wildlife as lots of the riding is not on highways but trails instead.

The riders ride as long as they want everyday and they tend to stop where they can in hotel or tent and eat from gas stations, restaurants, or grocery stores. Early on you would see four or five people riding together and stopping at a gas station to get some snacks to get them going, there was a vegan that was struggling to find food but all the riders are very concious of how many calories and type of food they need to keep themselves going.

As the race goes on the riders definitely get spread out and there are all kinds of emotions going through the ride the divide riders, loneliness, fear,  boredom, exhaustion.

And how about the physical toll that these guys go through? One of the riders, Mary Metcalf-Collier goes from strong, to swollen knees and ankles, to better, to worse and back again. I could feel for her everyday of the race as she kept persevering. Another racer Mike Dion left his family for a few weeks to race and had terrible knee problems as well that went away and then came back, while the third racer being followed seemed to have no physical problems at all.

The music in Ride the Divide is great. The scenery is spectacular and the music used compliments it perfectly. for a late night movie Ride the Divide was a fantastic way to spend and hour and a half to see a crazy race with real people competing against themselves and the elements. I know that the maker of the movie has a follow up movie and am looking forward to seeing that one as well.

 


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How Fast Food Marketing is Affecting Our Kids Health

I saw this great video on from TedX on how fast food marketing to kids works. We all have seen commercials for kids food with characters from movies and TV shows but the Anna Lappe goes even farther in explaining how big business can really market hard to kids and how important brand loyalty is.

What I really took away from this is the fact that businesses in their pursuit of profits will market hard like we would expect and some of it is really underhanded and really not ethical. Secondly, as we all know most kids don’t care about nutrition and these big conglomerates are really taking advantage of using the kids to pester parents to buy products that are deadly over time.


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