Have you ever had one of those weeks where you feel like you are one step behind in everything you’re doing?

That was my week last week. Actually, maybe the entire month of July.

My biggest immediate challenge is to get my business plan in order – and believe it or not, fitness is part of it. I’ve been more or less in vacation mode this month, trying to adjust to my new situation pursuing writing and blogging projects fulltime, and the looseness of my schedule has been a detriment to getting things done. Fortunately I had nearly a month of vacation time built up before I left my job, so I’ve been floating on that income. That is about to change however, since the month is ending and as expected, there is no paycheck coming from the old steady corporate source. Looks like I’m winging it from here on out. I had better get my act together. Read the rest of this entry »

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- Or, “Forgive me blogger, for I have sinned”

On the exercise front, last week was honestly a wash. I ran exactly once at the beginning of the week, and the rest of the week really did slip by. My knees have been giving me a little trouble, but not enough to justify my lack of exercise. The real problem has been my sleep schedule – I’ve been staying up too late, and getting up too late, mostly because I don’t have a set work schedule in place.

For me, my most natural, comfortable schedule is sleeping from 2AM until 10AM – I was able to do this when we were working solely as artists and had no kids or significant responsibilities. We set our own schedule, and it was bliss – and both the art and software engineering worlds in my experience are rarely driven by a 9 to 5 workday. However, with kids that rise at 7AM – going to bed at 2AM does not work very well for more than a few nights in a row. I’m much better off getting up early. Read the rest of this entry »

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Our recent trip to Southern Oregon confirmed firsthand one of the laws of domestic road trips: it is almost always tough to find real food in unfamiliar places. When you are highway traveling, you find that gas stations, corner stores, and fast food are the most common options, and with two kids who seem to get hungry every once in a while for no apparent reason, your decision process sometimes leaves something to be desired.

However, If you can spend a little time in smaller highway towns, once you ask a few locals and learn the schedules of the mom and pop outfits (hours in small restaurants and food retailers are often odd), you can generally find what you’re looking for, or better yet, discover an unexpected culinary surprise.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Ed. Note: This is a reprint (with a few changes) of an article I wrote a while back as a guest post for the guys at GetFitSlowly – Mac and J.D. are some of my principle inspirations for writing about this process, and their site is highly recommended. I’ve had several requests to repost the article here, so I am doing so today. If you enjoy it, please give it a vote via your social networking tool of choice, such as Digg or StumbleUpon. Thanks. Oh, and if you’re new here, welcome to Almost Fit. Please leave a comment and introduce yourself.

When it comes to food, exercise, and our obsession with obesity, the French appear to break all of the rules of Western thought. By and large those who live a traditional French lifestyle eat for pleasure and satisfaction, they often smoke (arguably a stereotype), and they drink regularly. Despite a diet proportionally high in things like saturated fats, the French have remarkably low rates of heart disease and obesity. Welcome to the French Paradox. Read the rest of this entry »

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Ed. Note: This is a personal entry on my recent trip to the mountains of Southern Oregon. If you enjoy Almost Fit, please leave a comment or consider having Almost Fit delivered to your inbox. Thanks.

As the title of this post indicates, despite my best efforts to the contrary, my camping trip at Umpqua’s Last Resort was a dietary success.

After 7 days of camping in the mountains of Southern Oregon and then 3 days at an incredible ocean view rental on the Oregon coast, I have returned unscathed by the scale.

In hindsight it would have been interesting to write down what I ate and drank during our excursion, but I was too busy playing and hiding from the sun. However, here is what I remember: Read the rest of this entry »

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This post is Thursday’s Real Food Resource, which is a weekly spotlight on books, sites, and relevant media that helps you to identify what real food is. If you enjoy this article, please consider receiving Almost Fit in your inbox. Thanks.

“Vegetarian? Carnivorous? Onmivorous? Low-Fat? High-Fat? Are you confused about how to eat for optimal health?”

So reads the back panel on this week’s Real Food resource: The Garden of Eating: A Produce-Dominated Diet and Cookbook, by Rachel Albert-Matesz and Don Matesz. Through a mutual friend, (Thanks K.!), I was recently put in touch with Chef Rachel by email to find out more about how she is addressing these questions on health. She was gracious enough to send her book to see what we think.

Put simply, this book should be required reading.

The Garden of Eating is an extensive volume of well-documented research (rooted in the essential work of Weston A. Price), reasonable and compelling conclusions, ultra-practical suggestions, and phenomenal recipes, all presented in a writing style that is both inviting and accessible.

Many of the book’s ideas feel like the next logical steps for some of the fundamentally important resources that I already have. In other words, where books like Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon are quintessential in understanding the human diet and our impact on the world around us, The Garden of Eating demonstrates a mastery of these concepts while taking each one to a completely new and practical level. The Garden of Eating is filled with direct answers to the questions that most of us have when we start to really think about our diet, lists in the margin that simplify shopping intelligently, and simple but powerful suggestions on how to eat well without going bankrupt.

How to shop for just about everything

One of my favorite features of this book is the method the authors use to break down food choices. Where some of my other top-shelf reads include useful conceptual information, The Garden of Eating connects the dots on how to immediately put that information into action. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is part three of the series, “How I quit eating fast food”. If you enjoy this post, please consider receiving AlmostFit articles in your inbox. Thanks.

In parts one and two of this series, I described how I’ve quit eating fast food using 3 basic steps: Educating myself, Deciding to quit, and Acting on my convictions. In this final part of the series I’m describing the actions I’ve used to successfully break the fast food habit.

20 tactics to kill the fast food habit

1. Start out with a ridiculously simple goal – So simple that you can’t fail. Leo Babauta’s book, Zen To Done, (an excellent book by the way), highlights this concept. If you start out excessively simple, you can build on that success to reach your goals over time. Here’s an example: I first realized that soda, regular or otherwise, is bad for me for one specific reason: in the end, even diet soda simply perpetuated my desire for the stuff. I realized that I could easily give up soda if I wanted to – it never tastes the same at a fast food place anyway, and I always drink too much of it. It was simple and attainable. And the more I did it, the more “power” to change that I felt.

2. Treat the decision to quit fast food as a habit, not a lifelong commitment. The idea is to make it your habit to seek out real food, at the expense of spending time and money on fast food. It doesn’t need to be a lifelong political position. You want healthful choices to become second nature. That way when you do give into that impulse desire, which you likely will at some point in the future, you will not have “failed”. Take it slow, and be proud of your many small accomplishments that will lead to a bigger success of building a healthy habit of eating.

3. Make yourself as publicly accountable as possible. Blog about it. Tell your friends that you are doing it. Use that concept of peer pressure to your advantage by putting pressure on yourself to stick to it. Everyone you know should be shocked if they see you walking out with a weighted paper sack with an ever-expanding grease spot on the bottom where the fries are trying to dig their way to freedom.

4. Don’t buy into the “healthy alternatives” concept that fast food is trying to sell to you. This is basic marketing 101, and is one of the greatest “dupes” since the famous Roman campaign for the healthfulness of lead cups (OK I made that up – but it sounds plausible). The basic idea is to find any way possible to get customers into the store. That is the hardest part. Once customers are in, add-ons are the name of the game. Want that salad? Bundle it with a cheaply sweetened fruit cup and a large diet soda.

“And ya know, since it’s better for you, well, it is going to cost a little more. But that is the price you’ll have to pay for a “healthy” choice. . .”

Sound Fishy? It should. It is malarkey.

Let me put it to you this way: Using basic common sense – If Add-ons and upselling didn’t work, no one would bother to do it.The truth is, IT WORKS. The answer? Don’t enter in the first place.

5. Don’t enter in the first place. This deserves repeating (See the previous tip to understand why). This is hard to do, without question. It may take a while before you can make that a habit, but think of it this way: If you suffered from an addiction to alcohol, does common sense say it’s your best move to buy your groceries at the liquor store? It is common sense, no matter how we try to rationalize it. Believe me – I’ve tried.

6. Reduce your exposure to fast food advertising. This is going to sound crazy, but if you watch less commercial TV, you will be less inclined to eat fast food. Why? Again, common sense. Big Industry pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year trying to find ways of convincing you in a 30-second spot that eating their new sandwich will change your life for good, forever. And their tactics simply work. If you are exposed less, you will be influenced less. Exposed to more – influenced more.

That said, does that mean I have to give up watching Top Chef? I don’t think so. If you want to see who gets voted off the island this week, go for it – but DVR it if you have the option, and then skip the commercials. Of course, if you want to go hardcore, just give up TV altogether. It’s almost guaranteed you will be less influenced if you reduce your exposure.

Want scientific proof? It’s simple: Corporations are all out for one thing: MONEY. If gigantic ad campaigns, which mean repeated exposure, didn’t actually work, do you think they would spend their money on it? Trust THEIR money-making science – they truly do know exactly what they’re doing.

7. Be a cheapskate. Don’t confuse quantity with value, throwing your money away because it is sold to you as a “good deal”. Fast food depends on the idea that you will be foolish enough to believe that a big pile of garbage has more value than a little pile of quality food. Stick with the quality food. Learn to cook. Make enough for leftovers. Lather, rinse, repeat.

One other thing on being cheap as a method of motivation: Remember that when you eat a pile of junk food for $5.00, the one thing you are NOT getting is decent nutrition. Nutritional deficit may be the single greatest cause of all classically Western diseases. So in the end, you’re going to pay for it anyway. And in the mean time, the fast food CEO will be using his $18,000,000 dollar salary to eat excessively well at your expense. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is the second part in the series, “How I quit eating fast food”. If you think it might help others, please consider sharing it via Digg, StumbleUpon, or your favorite social media tools. Thanks. And don’t forget to check out part 3, “20 tactics to kill the fast food habit“.

“Just because it’s toxic doesn’t mean it’s not tasty.” – MastersInTheMaking.com

As I made clear in part 1, I think it’s fair to say that I have an issue or two with my lifelong personified compadre, Fast Food. That’s not to say that it’s my ONLY issue (oh and by the way, speaking of issues, a big “thanks” to the coiners of that ubiquitous ’80s phrase, “global thermonuclear war” for ruining my trust in humanity – Nice work), but in my opinion the fast food hang-up really does have the possibility of killing me in a hurried, greasy fashion.

And if I have one rule in life, it is that when I go, I do not want my mournful passing to be in any way associated with Grease. And thus why I am neither an auto mechanic nor John Travolta.

Further, to prevent a future experience that includes balloon-like medical devices being inserted near my nether-regions in an emergency effort to clear out my brittle arteries, I have quit frequenting fast food restaurants since the beginning of the year.

How am I doing it, considering I seem to get the hankerin’ for Kentucky Fried Chicken every few months as if there is some sort of time-release chicken nugget flavored tablet wedged somewhere in my right parietal cortex?

If you read nothing else, read this

In my opinion, there are very few things in life that you can give up permanently. Does fast food in all of it’s forms fit that category for me for all Eternity? I can’t say – I don’t wear that cologne. But for right now, I have decided to exclude it from my diet altogether (both fast food AND cologne) to allow myself to create the HABIT of eating better.

For me, the only way that I can do this is to say no to fast food completely. Who knows; at some point fast food may become “real food”…But from my vantage point today, I highly doubt it. For now, I’ve decided it doesn’t fit the current picture of my life.

In other words, giving up fast food is a reasonable goal for me, today. Where you draw your own line is, well, your own business.

How to quit eating fast food

There are three parts to this process for me: Educate, Decide, and Act. Read the rest of this entry »

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This post is Thursday’s Real Food Resource, which is a weekly spotlight on books, sites, and relevant media that helps you to identify what real food is. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to Almost Fit. Thanks.

Every once in a while I stumble across an entirely new, personally unexplored pocket of the Internet that really inspires me. I don’t know why I’m surprised by the discovery, but each time I find an unexplored corner of the Web, I feel like I’ve landed in a new self-contained community filled with thousands of original and interesting perspectives that no one from my tribe has ever seen. Yes, its geeky, but it’s not unlike what I might imagine exploring new galaxies would be like, if I were, you know, to geek out (assuming of course, that we are not…..Alone…..[cue the doom music]…..).

Not that I ever have that mental picture of myself, in a space suit, or anything.

I will admit, however, that in my mind I visualize myself exploring tide pools filled with strange and interesting things.

When I started Almost Fit my inspiration began with a combination of physically local blogs (which I still read) and a handful of widely scattered favorites. The Portland locals included Get Fit Slowly, Portland Food and Drink, and Kevin Allman’s blog for just plain great writing (although Kevin has since moved from Portland to his hometown on the Gulf Coast). My wider net of favorites at the time included Orangette, ZenHabits, and the Sartorialist, among many others, most of which I still read voraciously. Over time, that list has of course grown beyond all rational and reasonable levels of control and safety.

So why stop now?

Thursday’s Real Food Resource

For this week’s Real Food Resource, I’m highlighting a thriving hub of the Internet that I literally had not stumbled across until last night:

http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/

Eating locally is one of the core tenets of eating Real Food in Moderation, although I don’t insist on making a virtual “religion” out of it. I tend to lean away from the extremes in diet and fitness, as I think for the most part, unless you have a medical mandate to do so, they are short-term solutions at best and sometimes unhealthy practices in the long run. And even the medical mandates should be questioned.

I think that is why I was so excited to find this site – their suggestion is to take your food selection seriously, do your best, but be reasonable. It is not a Cardinal sin to eat a tomato in January – but you should consider including locally grown, seasonal options.

What is their focus? Here is how the writers describe themselves:

EatLocalChallenge.com is a group blog written by authors who are interested in the benefits of eating food grown and produced in their local foodshed.

Spanning the United States, the group is committed to challenging themselves to eat mainly local food during a specific period of time during the year.

In this article, “A few tips for the May 2006 Eat Local Challenge“, the Locavore pledge is cited with the last line as a humorous addendum, which I felt really boils things down on the question of how to shop for food:

If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.
If not ORGANIC, then Family farm.
If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business.
If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.
If all else fails, at least don’t eat at McDonald’s!

I also really appreciate the site’s candor, with articles like, “About four days ago, I decided to quit the Eat Local Challenge” – not something I expected to see on a site that is dedicated to the polar opposite of the article’s title.

For me however, the greatest benefit of this site is all of the incredibly useful links to other sites that touch on the subject of eating Real Food. In a quick glance through their list, I only recognize one or two – the rest are completely new to me – and there are literally dozens of them. In the few I’ve explored so far, I am already engrossed in a wide array of completely different perspectives that are both new and intuitively familiar.

If you have some time for exploring, be sure to check out http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/. It’s well worth the stasis period during interstellar travel. But there I go again with the geek thing. To which I say:

Live Long, Eat Local, and Prosper.

(Wow. That was dorky even by my own standards.)

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This article is the second part of, “Should you bother with organic fruits and vegetables?“. If you enjoy these posts, please consider sharing them through Digg, StumbleUpon, or the social media of your choice. Thanks.

In part 1 (“Should you bother with organic fruits and vegetables?“) I suggested that when it comes to the debate over organic vs. conventionally grown produce, if you are relying strictly on the moving target that is statistical evidence you are likely to be confused at best, and disillusioned at worst.

With so many loud opinions on the subject, deciphering which pieces are truthful and accurate is nearly impossible. But for me, ultimately the statistics are not making my decision. My wallet has something to do with it of course; but really it comes down to one of those Life questions. (Ughh…not one of those…)

For me, it’s a question of Risk

To state the obvious, life involves a degree of risk. You choose to accept the risk of driving a car at 70 miles an hour on the freeway. You accept the risk that the guy who is hooking up your bungee cord KNOWS that everyone lies about their weight, so he’ll shorten the rubber band for that extra 15lbs that you forgot to mention. You accept the risk that watching The Soup may actually ruin your Dancing with the Stars viewing pleasure.

We all have to choose what we’re willing to risk in our lives. So how does risk play into organic vs. conventional produce? Read the rest of this entry »

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