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No sooner do I make a couple of posts about my fitness routine and some healthy eating tips than I find myself going to the ER this morning because of chest pains. That, my friends, is the definition of irony.

Turns out I have Costochondritis, which means the cartilage that connects my ribs & sternum is inflamed. I felt a bit silly for going to the ER for heart pains (a 28-year-old shouldn’t be having a heart-attack) but after I read that “Costochondritis symptoms are similar to the chest pain associated with a heart attack,” I felt a bit better.

So now I have to take it easy and pop some pills to ease the pain & inflammation. Good news is that my heart was given a clean bill of health!

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I started writing a reply to a comment on my 9-month update, but it got to be too long. So here’s a brief summary of my fitness routine:

Fitness
I’ve been doing plyometrics twice a week and (lately) lifting 3 days / week. When the weather is nicer (not too hot, not too cold, not too dark) I run about 3.5 miles. Ideally, I’d do plyometrics twice a week, run twice a week and lift twice a week. Oh, and I try to bike to the gym, but I don’t like biking in the dark (almost got hit by a car one day).

Having someone to workout with is key. There’s a group of us that keep each other motivated, and harass one another if someone skips a workout. The trainer we work with pushes us hard, and I wouldn’t be where I am if it weren’t for him. I think his military background helps… I need someone calling me a cheese-puff when I want to quit.

The other key ingredient in getting fit is time. Stick with it. It took me 9 months to do what I did. The first day the weather passes 50 degrees, don’t decide to go to the gym to get fit by summer. If you want to be fit for next summer, you should’ve started last summer.

Dieting
As for dieting, I’m horrible at that. There’s a few reasons why… healthy food is more expensive than processed stuff, I have kids in the house, and my wife loves to bake.

That being said, I do have a few diet tips:

1. Drink lots of water
2. Eat every 3 hours
3. Eat with your left hand. It’ll slow you down. Take a bite, but down your fork, swallow, take a sip of water, repeat
4. Use the small plate. You’ll put less food on your plate, and it’ll look fuller
5. Right after dinner, brush, floss and rinse. If you’re like me and hate the flossing routine, you’ll be far less likely to eat at night

Any of those fad diets or pills or whatever all have fine print: “diet and exercise are recommended”. Save your money, skip the other stuff and just go with diet and exercise.

I’ve followed Weight Watchers before and learned a lot from it. In my opinion, it’s not a diet but rather an education on how to pick the right foods to eat. It also gets you in the habit of writing down everything you eat, which is key when you’re dieting. You don’t have to run out & join the program - look for Weight Watchers Starter Kits on eBay. It’s all you need.

My final tips are to stay off the scale! Get a trainer to measure your body fat and weigh you every 3 months or so. If I only used a scale, I would have been very depressed that I work out very hard, and have only a 1-pound difference to show. However, since I was getting my body fat measured, I now know I replaced 16 pounds of fat with muscle. If you need to, use photos. Since you see yourself in the mirror every day, you won’t notice the difference, but looking back 3 months at a time, you’ll be able to see it.

I once told Steve, “Money doesn’t come easy, or else everyone would be rich“. The same goes for fitness:

Getting in shape doesn’t come easy, or else everyone would have the body of their dreams.

Stick with it, and good luck!

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

It’s been 9 months since I started really training hard. I don’t know what I’m training for - I guess just a healthier lifestyle. I’m not the best at eating healthy, but I’d rather not be completely miserable, so I eat pretty much what I want. But I’m pretty strict about getting to the gym (not as much as some people, but better than most).

Well Monday was my 9-month check-up, and my body fat has dropped to 12.5%. Having started at 22%, I can’t believe how far I’ve come. I’ve now set a goal of 11% by March 15th, my 1-year anniversary. If I can drop half of my body fat in 1 year, that’d be fantastic.

During the past 9 months, my weight has gone from 170 to 171, which means I’ve added 16 pounds of muscle. I’ll need to replace 2.5 pounds of fat with muscle in 3 months to meet my goal - easily done, I hope.

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 9:06 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

While working on a site today, I noticed a cookie named “loverealone” was set on my machine. The cookie had a value of “real”. I know I didn’t set the cookie. A Google search yielded nothing (well, nothing in English).

Turns out, Google Analytics is setting this cookie! You can see in their code the following line:

var start=cookieString.indexOf(”loverealone=”)

Well, at least now I know it’s not spyware. Back to work…

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

It’s still snowing out there… started about 7:00 last night and is expected to keep snowing ’til Monday morning. I shoveled, but you can’t tell. Especially not after the plow goes by. Going to have to dig out if we’re going to get out of the house today. There’s a thin layer of ice on the car (less than 1/4″) which will have to be chipped off first.

I’m watching the Bills / Browns game now - it’s just as bad there as it is here. Always funny when you can’t even see the yardlines on the field.

I finally got the house phones working again after switching to Vonage last week. So now I’m running both my business voice, business fax and home voice lines all through Vonage over one Time Warner cable connection. So far, so good. Luckily all the house phones are wireless, so we just had to move the base to a hardwired connection, and all the other phones work.

Well, time to go shovel again. It’s a battle I just can’t win.

This entry was posted by Eric on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

My Christmas lights this year are now “award-winning!” We won the Town of Tonawanda Paramedics Award for Best Classic Display for the 2007 Ken-Ton Energy Efficient Holiday Decorating Contest (try saying that in 1 breath)!

So what’s so energy efficient about my display?

• The lights flash on and off to the music. On average, less than 1/3 of my lights are on at a time (if I have everything on, it uses about 1.6 Kw of energy… when it’s running, it stays at about 550 watts)
• We only run the lights a few hours a night (3-4). Because of the speaker, I don’t want to disturb the neighbors too much. As I drive to the gym at 5:45 in the morning, I’m amazed at how many people just leave their lights on all night long.
• The spotlight on my sign is an LED spotlight. That baby uses 1.5 watts / hr; my average cost of electricity is $0.15 / Kwh, so running it for an hour costs me $0.000225. Or, I can run it for nearly 45 hours and it’ll cost me $0.01.
• All of the power in the house is provided by Green Mountain Energy Corporation. Currently, that’s 90% hydroelectric and 10% New Wind. (For comparison, the average mix of resources supplying New York includes: Natural Gas (22%), Nuclear (29%), Hydroelectric (18%), Coal (15%), Oil (14%), and Other (<3%)).

Mr. Parker: It’s a Major Award!
Swede: Shucks I wouldn’t know that. It looks like a lamp.
Mr. Parker: What is a lamp, you nincompoop? It’s a Major Award. I won it!
Swede: Damn, hell, you say won it?
Mr. Parker: Yeah, mind power, Swede; mind power.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Christmas, Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.