Senseless Banter...

I don't eat sugar or many carbs. I place a high priority on getting lots of fiber, a good amount proteins, and healthy fats. I eat a large variety of vegetables and a couple of fruits a day. I pick items that weigh heavy on the fiber side to help offset the carbs.

That said (and say what you will) I plan my diet around having 1 beer a day during the week and 2-3 on Friday and Saturday. That's my sanity, and my treat. Some days during the week...like last night and Monday, I have none. I also have none during my on call week which is once a month.

I do count calories. I do monitor my heart rate during physical activities. I use my Fitbit and also an external strap on type. It works for me, and I'm all for whatever works for anyone else.

Sounds like a good plan Rooster. It's good to reward yourself. Otherwise, any diet (calorie counting or not) is more easy to fail. We are geared for reward. Trouble is that many of us want our food rewards each and every meal as well as in between.

RoOsTeR wrote:... I use my Fitbit ...

I've been looking at Fitbits on Amazon recently and all the different types are confusing.  And one won't hook up with my Nexus 7, or maybe more won't.  I haven't checked.  Can you use it (or whatever you do with it) on a regular computer or would that defeat the whole purpose?

Fitbit users: Which one do you have?

CapeCoddess wrote:

RoOsTeR wrote:... I use my Fitbit ...

I've been looking at Fitbits on Amazon recently and all the different types are confusing.  And one won't hook up with my Nexus 7, or maybe more won't.  I haven't checked.  Can you use it (or whatever you do with it) on a regular computer or would that defeat the whole purpose?

Fitbit users: Which one do you have?

I have the Fitbit Charge 2. I'm not sure about Nexus 7 compatibility. You should be able to log onto a computer and sign in to the Fitbit dashboard.

My husband and I have the older version, the Fitbit Charge HR.

I use it directly with the app on my desktop computer. It syncs with the computer, laptop and my android smart phone. The benefit of syncing with the computer is I can enter foods from the keyboard - easier than trying to type on the smart phone.

I understand the new Fitbit Charge 2 does all the things the older HR did plus quite a lot more. 

Gloria

Is there a Fitbit in my future? Not sure. My daughter likes hers. 

Even without the Fitbit I am now down 11 pounds and feeling "light". I still have "wheat belly" (too much information? if so, sorry about that) and I should start working on that through exercise. 

In the past week Mrs TD has joined me in cutting out sugary things (e.g., sodas, candy, cookies) and lowering her refined carb (e.g., white bread) intake and has already seen the results. Interestingly I do not miss the chocolate covered coconut bars, cakes, cookies, potato chips, etc. that I craved and consumed in the past.

Breakfast this morning ... a green smoothie (almond milk, swiss chard, celery, green grapes, banana, ice cubes) made in the Vitamix.  I've not yet tried the juicer.

This low carb diet sounds a lot like a diabetics diet, so if you are looking for ideas on what to fix or cook or buy, you may search that. 

Also, there are apps that help track what you eat. I used one for awhile called SparkPeople. There is not hardware other than your phone and you just enter what you eat and it will track your carbs, calories, exercise, weight, etc. There is an app on the phone to see most of it, but then there is a website that you can print reports, etc.

I have used the Fitbit One for many years.  I find it interesting to note how far I have traveled in a day.   Can't say what it does for weight loss as it doesn't reach out and stop my hand from munching.

kauairosina wrote:I have used the Fitbit One for many years.  I find it interesting to note how far I have traveled in a day.   Can't say what it does for weight loss as it doesn't reach out and stop my hand from munching.

Interesting video Has. It does look like a ton of work to grate all those leaves though.

I haven't tried it yet. leaves and earthworm compost is free for most of us either from the worm tube or large worm bins  or something like my vermicomposting buckets. Free is free. but it does seem like some work with his method. I'm sure there another way to get those leaves fine. Maybe with a statndard composting lawn mower?

has55 wrote:I'm sure there another way to get those leaves fine. Maybe with a statndard composting lawn mower?

Just borrow your wife's food processor

I don't eat sugar or many carbs. I place a high priority on getting lots of fiber, a good amount proteins, and healthy fats. I eat a large variety of vegetables and a couple of fruits a day. I pick items that weigh heavy on the fiber side to help offset the carbs.

We tend to eat a vegetarian diet, after all we are farmers...   Meat once a week, and recently I have been trying to have vegan dinner once a week (easy with all the dry beans from my garden).  I try to stick to the 100 mile diet out of environmental concerns, and I live in a great area for that in that it is very agricultural diverse area.
 We have a loop through the forest behind our house that is about 2.25 miles, I try to do every day, and that is my fit bit. I do wonder how I would do on the days I am heavy into the gardening without the loop.  I hear the fit bits have come down in price. I tend to look back and groan at all the things I have purchased in the past that I have used for a month or so and then parked ...like treadmill, stair stepper...........

Talking of things fitness etc .

My fit bit used to be very fit , but recently it's not so fit & is covered in dust .
 The cross trainer out in the office is not so angry these days as I can't stand on the darn thing and my rolling road  does apparently go faster than a snail in reverse.

 Health wise this autumn & winter have knocked me down several times with my back , legs & possible start of Alzheimer's disease    My 3 second , 3 minute & 3 day memory is well & truly shot at present  .
If Alison gets her feathers ruffled because I haven't remembered something ...... .  Me ? ..... I don't remember much about it . ( HONEST ) 

 I'm struggling with using a pair of crutches for walking at present as It's painful the moment I stand up & pout weight in my spine plus they are causing me grief in my shoulder joints due to the  250 pounds of un tensioned muscle & bone in my skin .

I managed to get on the rolling road Monday afternoon ....... and start it ..   Did a whole 100 yards  in 4.5  minutes hanging on to the frame for support & dear life .  That little jaunt left me gasping for breath & so tired I fell asleep as soon as Alison had got me indoors & stretched out on my bed .

 Don't worry about it on my behalf folks it's all part of life's journey , I accept it for what it is .

Our Doc has started to use me as an experimental human guinea pig to try all manner of different meds I'm sure of it . 
Currently I'm eating 14 tablets a day , any more & I'll start to sound like a rattlesnake every my heart beats .

I just hope he's leaving me alone long enough for the ones he's stopping to clear out my system before putting me on the new ones.

Oh Wow Plantoid.  You are really going through it. 

The cleaners found my fitbit charger yesterday so I am using it again.  I tell myself I 
don't need it but it is a very good reminder about how much I have moved or not moved on any given day.

The very best to you Plantoid.  You sure have a good attitude.

Plantoid- what is a rolling road?  Some kind of treadmill?

Plantoid, Good attitude you have.

sanderson wrote:Plantoid,  Good attitude you have.  

+1

Plantoid   Love the line bit fit or fit bit.
Good to see you are holding up under the strain. hope you can be on less meds soon. You seem to have a pretty good memory on here

Rooting for you, Plantoid.

Gotta love Ruth.  I use her method in my perennial gardens. Everything stays where it falls.  I do spread compost on them occasionally, but not lime or cottonmeal.  And I may go bare footin but not nude.  
http://www.capecodtimes.com/lifestyle/20170310/eccentrics-soil-approach-still-used-today
Eccentric’s soil approach still used today

Friday
Posted at 2:00 AM

The famous gardener Ruth Stout did not invent mulch. By her account, God did.

Leaves that fall – and other organic materials – feed the soil through their decomposition, protect it from erosion and drought, and sustain soil creatures that aerate it. By placing such materials around plants, a gardener can smother competing weeds as well. That's mulching. It's almost a religion among some gardeners, with Stout their patron saint.


Stout's life story is interesting, and the first 60 years of it have nothing to do with mulch. Born in 1884, with Quaker parents and eight siblings, she had ambitions of being an actress or a writer. At 16, she smashed saloons with the prohibitionist Carry Nation, then worked as a bookkeeper and business manager, owned a tearoom in New York's Greenwich Village, hung out with Socialists, did famine relief work in Russia, and booked lectures and debates for freethinkers. Her stories were published in magazines. In 1929, at 44, she married a man named Fred, and the two retired to Connecticut. She took up gardening, and he made wooden bowls.

For 14 years, she ran a large and perfectly conventional vegetable garden, applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides and having a man come by in spring to plow it up. But each year she was frustrated when he turned up late, with seeds needing to be sown.

So one day she looked at her asparagus, which, as a perennial, was all mulched and going about its business, and had an epiphany. As she later wrote in a book: "One never plows asparagus and it gets along fine. Except for new sod, why plow anything, ever?" She went ahead and sowed her seeds.

As usual, she'd left a lot of cornstalks and other debris in the garden over winter, and when she brushed it aside, the ground underneath was moist and easy to make furrows in. The seed sprouted, the plants thrived, and because she left the decaying plant waste alone, it provided a mulch of sorts.

As the years went by, she never plowed, spaded or even made a compost pile. Perfecting her technique, she knew it would work better with a thicker mulch, the better to deter weeds. She rounded up more organic materials: hay, leaves, straw, seaweed, pine needles, sawdust, weeds, garbage and rotting vegetable matter. To sow or transplant, she just pulled some mulch aside, then put it back when the plants were big enough. Aside from a little lime and cottonseed meal, the garden needed no fertilizer other than the decaying mulch. As that became part of the soil, she mulched some more.

She started writing articles for Organic Gardening magazine and a book about her method, which her publisher titled "How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back." Along with its sequels, it was aimed at "the aging, the busy and the indolent" or anyone else who wanted more vegetables with less work. It won thousands of converts.

What struck me most about Stout's great mulch revelation was the paragraph that followed it, where she experiences it as "a deafening roar" and the culmination of her entire life of radicalism.


That made me curious, so I read some of her other books, which are autobiographical and cover a wide range of subjects. They're all guided by a philosophy of self-determination, instilled by her mother, who "had the habit of letting everybody follow his own inner light without any remarks from her." Though opinionated, Stout was trained to be broad-minded, and offered her own late-life joy in gardening as an example, not an imperative. When she died at 96, she was still gardening.

For a glimpse of that, watch Arthur Mokin's 23-minute documentary on YouTube, "Ruth Stout's Garden." You see her at 92, planting potatoes she has just brought up from winter storage, with long white sprouts. She rakes away the mulch, tosses them on the ground and puts the mulch back. Done!

She is wearing a housewife-y dress and cardigan, her usual garden outfit, but describes to the camera her former daily habit of gardening in the nude: "I've always loved the air on my body." Then, sitting in a lawn chair, she lifts a glass of wine, with apologies to Carry Nation.

I often follow Stout's advice in the garden, though I'm too much of a mosquito magnet for the naked part. But my hat's off to her – if not my T-shirt – for her gumption.

Damrosch is the author of "The Four Season Farm Gardener's Cookbook"; her website is www.fourseasonfarm.com.

Plantoid, keep up the good work.  Tomorrow could be 101 yards on the rolling road.

done

Love Ruth Stout.  My grandson found an old book of hers at a used book store which he gave me.  Thanks for the reminder.