finally feeling generally better, i wasn't too bad yesterday, but still pretty bad. I'm working from home today mostly because i'm getting a package delivered today.

This video is awesome. You should start watching it at 45 seconds in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mVpGmoES3w

i'm going to just do a re-start on the p90x next week. towards the end of this week, I'm going to do yoga x again, do stretch x, and on sunday night do kempo x. I've been working through changing the diet for phase 1 to meet the requirements, and I think I've come up with a good way to do it.

I've been doing some reading on eating, in general, and came across Mark Sisson's website (http://www.marksdailyapple.com/). He's got some interesting views on food and exercise and all that, and promotes a low-carb, non-processed food lifestyle he calls the 'Primal Diet'. It's kind of where I was heading anyways, trying to get rid of all processed foods, including breads, but still eating rice and a few others. Under his plan, I could still do rice once a day, but that'd be okay.

It's pretty amusing reading the various 'research' done into diets. This kind of research is really difficult to do because, as anyone who uses CK to track food knows, keeping track of food properly is a lot of work in and of itself. There was some new report on CNN.com the other night showing how this study compared people that ate a lot of red meat vs people that didn't, and red meat eaters had higher death rates. There's an accepted way to normalize what people report for food that they applied, but they only seemed to really concentrate on the food itself, not other aspects of the people's lives, like exercise.

There was also research done into the Maasai people in Africa. They consume very large amounts of red meat and very few carbohydrates. Guess what? They have a *very* low rate of heart attacks. But, they're also extremely active people who get a lot of exercise.

For whatever reason, in the US, they're really big on the high carb, low animal protein diets. Most research seems to resolve around this concept of eating being 'healthy.' I'm not really sure why. There are people that also state *any* animal protein is bad for you, but I'm never clear if these people have this view because of the ethical concerns over the treatment of animals or for actual health reasons. Humans have been eating meat for a *really* long time, so I don't know about some of the health reasons.

Another interesting thing I came across is that up to 70% (I've seen numbers between 50-70%) of people in the US with first-time heart attacks do *not* have high cholesterol. Current research is showing that high cholesterol medicine may actually be doing more harm than good. It's also important to understand what cholesterol is and what it does in your body, especially if you get diagnosed with 'high' cholesterol. Eggs are high in cholesterol in the yolk, because cholesterol is required for life to start. You *need* cholesterol to exist, and it's been thought that high cholesterol caused heart attacks, because there were large amounts in the heart tissue after a heart attack. However, cholesterol is also used by the body as a 'band aid' as a quick fix, so perhaps the large amount in the heart tissue wasn't directly related to the cause of the heart attack, it was just there.

So, where does that leave me. And you, perhaps. Well, first off, I think the importance of exercise is great. It doesn't have to be large amounts, just ~1 hour a day of quality exercise. Not a leisurely stroll in the park, but a reasonably aggressive walk. I'm not advocating large amounts of red meat. Good science or bad science, there is some science there to indicate that large amounts of red meat isn't the best for you. One thing I like about the 'Primal Diet' and the way Mark wrote about it isn't that it's a cure-all perfect diet that people should blindly follow, but it's something that *he* does and feels is beneficial for others to do as well. "And that's where the Primal Blueprint enters: it's about informed, not dictated choices. That French bread at an anniversary dinner, a sample of the pasta salad at your Uncle Billy's steak fry, the saffron rice your daughter cooks for you when you visit her first apartment ... they're thoughtful, purposeful compromises"

I think that Mark's statement above illustrates some important aspects of food in general. First off, no matter what, we're human. A big part of the human experience is the social aspect of it, and eating and social events go hand in hand. You know, the office birthday cake. Or your aunt's famous bbq ribs. Or...whatever. I think it's perfectly fine to eat these things occasionally. I think you're going to go nuts *not* eating them. While CK is anti-food reward, I can see benefits with it, as well. I use it, and it works for me, but I also have the discipline to make it work. My new 'reward' is eating some sort of new food once every 2-3 months and splurging on it. Is that going to cause me to plunge into the abyss of huge weight gain? Probably not. Will it cause my weight to go up for a few days? Probably. Can I deal with that? I think so.

'Informed, not dictated' choices is the difficult one. I love doing research and I'm pretty good at it. At my previous job, they were amazed that I could be given 80-100 page documents, read it in a few hours, and start working on a response to the various issues outlined in the document. Not everyone's this way. How do most people get 'informed'? I think it's a few things, doing research - just trying to find some other research that has the same results. But, also listen to yourself, and what *seems* right. Does that celery-only diet sound like something you can live with? Probably not. Love red meat? Chances are, you're not going to be that happy without it in your diet. Can you limit your diet to red meat once a week? Probably, will this keep you happy? It might.

But...now I digress into random blabbing, so I shall stop.