Bastard

224.2lbs. Yes, an increase yet again. By now the pattern is a common one. Lower, lower, lower, lower, higher, high, lower, lower lower lower. It's just how this stuff works and I am happy with it so far.

Saw a few friends over the weekend and I tell you it just seems harder to get together these days. So much crap seems to pass from one week to the next. You get so lost between your job and friends you tend to forget that so much can happen within a day or week. It's incredibly important to have time with your friends. Good friends are your sounding boards, your bellwethers, your best critics; they never hold back and will tell you exactly what you think.

Now I have a friend named Tammy who is wonderfully cynical about certain things and will call "shenanigans!" when something does not seem to ring true. Now Saturday I proceeded to launch poetic, evangelical style, on how wonderful this health regimen I am on truly is and how body hacking was fun and interesting. I hate when I do this, I truly do. When I find something exciting or interesting, I get loud, very loud. I annoy myself. I could have had a wonderful career in selling Sham-Wows if highly absorbent cloths made me squirm with delight. As I talked wildly (perhaps my lingering cold and the glass of bourbon enhanced the effect) for 15 minutes on GLUT-4 , what a scam the HCG diet is, how vitamin D is excellent for testosterone production in men, fruit is bad for you - specifically juice and eating like a pig everyday can make you lose weight if you only eat the bad stuff once a week, I heard Tammy's questioning voice - rightfully so. All the links to info in this paragraph are just for her when she reads this and you too, if you want more information.

Tammy always has great questions. All of my friends are fantastically intelligent, I do not say this to shine their apples. I always, always take their opinions with the highest regard. My wife is my best friend and I always take what she says as gospel as well. The key to looking halfway intelligent is to always have friends smarter than you. Tammy's first statement made me pause, "Hell, I don't need extra vitamin D, I live in Arizona where there is sun year round!" Well, of course she is right. But it is the form of vitamin D that is important and what is bio available on any given day. It's odd but we need more as we get older and though UV light will trigger production, it takes quite a bit of exposure to get to levels that might prevent loss of bone density and increase testosterone production. It has some cancer preventing elements but can also cause problems when levels are extremely high. There is a trade off here in Arizona for vitamin D through natural light and an increase of skin cancer from other factors. It made me think that if UV was enough to trigger the levels of vitamin D in men's body to produce more testosterone, the men here should be studly sex demons with ripped bodies. Taking a visual survey, I can tell that this is not true. At the time I had no answer but Tammy made me do my research. I love my friends for that.

Tammy also questioned fruit being evil. I totally get this as well. Fruit is incredibly vitamin rich. Fruit has better sugars than your run of the mill sucrose (regular old sugar). I have had this notion of fruit being vital parts of pyramids, quadrangles and tetrahedrons produced by the Federal Government over the last 4 or 5 decades. Fruit! It's all natural! It comes from the earth! Well, so does anthrax and asbestos. I like fruit, don't get me wrong. It's the way it is metabolized in the blood stream which is the issue. Fruit is particularly good for women looking to increase estrogen and iron.

Fruit, generally, increases iron absorption in the blood stream. This can be beneficial to women but catastrophic for men. We, as men, have no mechanism to clean out excess iron in our blood stream. I have another friend who really has a problem clearing iron in his body, fruit is a huge no-no and he has to donate blood on a regular basis so he won't die. As women become menopausal they lose this mechanism, as well. Excess iron leads to heart attacks and strokes. As for fructose being better, yes it is, but if you do not metabolize it all (it's hard to do when you drink more than a 8 ounce glass of it) within a certain time period it will turn into fat just like any other sugar. A majority of the fruit juice on the market even has sugar added. Even the American Diabetes Association suggest you be very careful about your fruit intake. A lot of the same vitamins and minerals in fruit can be found in vegetables and meats and other sources without the high sugar content. Sugar and starches are the only things that will cause fat storage on the body. I have learned far more about human physiology over the past four weeks than I ever cared to know. It's all about balance but not the crazy balance the media and government push at us through outdated research.

Now there was no way I was going to torture Tammy with the last two paragraphs of information on a casual night. It goes back to the preaching thing that I was doing. As I got farther along I couldn't stand myself any longer. I had already pulled out The Tim Ferriss book (the boys at the party marveled over the 15 minute female orgasm and how to increase your vertical leap) while we were talking. I just felt bad about it all. The book has far more information than I could convey and it wasn't really all about the book anyway. As an aside, I do plan on doing more stuff from the book as we go along. I have just played with the dietary stuff and there is far more to it. I kind of like the idea of body hacking and if the next 5 weeks work as well as the previous three then it will be nice to to see what else I can do. The whole idea of the book is decidedly not about being the new Atkins but how to get the greatest effects out of doing the least possible. I like that because when it comes to stuff like this I am naturally very lazy. I also loathe diets, I honestly think they are stupid and ineffective.

Before I forget, my friend Lee asked a pertinent question that night as well, "Have you quit drinking diet drinks?" Lee has always had his suspicions about diet drinks and man did I love them. I drank gallons of them on certain days and would eat or drink little else. So why wasn't I losing weight? Diet drinks aren't. They have an opposite effect on your body than the one desired. They make you store fat because they kill the healthy flora in your digestive system that helps you to break down food into vital nutrients. Drink enough and you are starving yourself of the vitamins that you would normally get by eating. I do sometimes have a can of diet coke but I also make sure I have a forkful of sauerkraut or Greek yogurt to replenish what the diet soda has killed off. Weird but true. Everything has its price.

See why I love my friends?!? They ask such pertinent questions and they also endure my craziness even when I play unflattering songs about Bruce Springsteen at 1am. For the record, I love Bruce and Tammy is right about another thing, to have no Eagles on vinyl is shameful.

So now I am 44 years old and I have set so many goals for myself this year. One goal I need to start working diligently towards is getting published. I have one book 2/3rds finished and another one that comes in bits and pieces. If I spent half the time on that writing instead of this blog, I'd be finished by now. If anyone wants to read the work in progress, just drop me a line. Christy has read most of the first one and I really owe her to get cracking on it. I left the main character in a rather perilous position and she has been waiting two years to see what happens next.

'The more you know you know you don't know shit, 'The Whiz Man' will never fit you like 'The Whiz Kid' did"