Make Me

Pounds

I've been absent these past few days/weeks because not only have I been recuperating, I've been researching. I've been enrolled in a weight loss study for the last 12 weeks and have lost 16 pounds and have another 12 weeks to go. At the end of the 24 weeks though, I'm on my own again, so I don't want to go back to where I was, so I'm looking into option that will fit into my life and still allow me to live and lose weight.

If you watch BBC America at all you may have seen a show called You Are What You Eat with Gillian McKeith. It's a half hour show where a chubby, bad eating man or woman who agrees to eat the prescribed diet for 8 weeks and, voila! Happy, healthy 2-3 stone lost in 2 months.

The show is not without sensationalist elements. The show opens with the fatty in question in their skivvies, looking their worst and ends with a complete makeover. Apparently only the worst eaters in the UK are selected because a table of the week's food is laid out for all to see and it's always full of takeout, sodas and desserts - nary a fruit or a vegetable, even when people are feeding their families. Then McKeith analyzes a "poo sample" which, thankfully, is not shown on television. New healthy foods are introduced and the struggle to adapt to the new regime is the rest of the show.

What intrigued me is that each person seemed to get an individualized program. Some got an 8-week vegetarian diet while others got some fish. So I ordered the You Are What You Eat book from Amazon so I could check it out.

Basically, it's food combining. People who support food combining believe that certain foods move through the body at different speeds - fruits with their high water content move through your system faster that proteins, so you should eat fruits on an empty stomach. I don't know if it's really true or not, but I do definitely like one aspect of the plan - no measuring, counting or any limits on a lot of foods. No eating 14 blueberries or 3 carrot sticks. The bad thing is no dairy. Like no cheese.

So, I've been kind of fiddling around with the principles of the plan - less sugar, more whole grains, less meat and pasta. I definitely feel better. And since I cut down on the dairy I don't have that congested feel quite so much anymore.

Bigger, Better Obama's Inaugural Speech image

Bigger, Better Obama's Inaugural Speech image - graphic facilitation, Brandy Agerbeck, Loosetooth.com
Originally uploaded by Loosetooth.com

After yesterday's festivities I spent a good time checking out everyone's Flickr photos. I was planning on a great blog post about Inauguration related crafts. The post would have blown you away. Seriously. It would have been all crafty and inaugural-y and everything. There would have been several photos. You would have laughed, cried and bought a new handbag. But then I found Brandy Agerbeck's PDF of President Obama's (Gawd! I LOVE typing that!!!) speech, and really, it says it all. And she's lovely enough to include a line to her loosetooth.com site so you can download the graphic and print it out for your very own.

Feel free to view my favorites on Flickr for more Inaugural goodies. There will be more added on a regular basis!

Make a Bow

Came across this cute tute on Craftster. Bows from recycled magazine pages.  If I had managed to wrap any Christmas packages at all, this would have come in handy.

On the Mend

Okay. I think I can say I'm on the mend now.  I'm only coughing once every five minutes as opposed to once every other second. I was feeling rather sprightly yesterday until the searing cramps of a mild case of food poisoning. Thank you Mimi's Cafe.  It's probably because I was mocking the menu asterisk under french toast that warned against the great gastronomical himiny-jiminy or what have you.  Apparently my disdain was sensed and I spent the better half of a gorgeous afternoon that I felt like a normal person in the fetal position on the couch watching That 70s Show. C'est la vie.

Anyway, illness notwithstanding, I can no longer put off announcing that Celeste91 is the winner of the Make Me Hair Pin Challenge.  I really liked the the typewriter key she chose. I don't know about you, but I'm always adjusting m'pins, so the shift key really appealed to me.

Celeste wins the big shwag bag from Rings n Things. The hair pin blanks and the copper bracelet blank. I'll post later if she has a blog and or Etsy shop we can bounce off to.

Our other participant, Rebecca, had a really beautiful entry that was hard to ignore.  She used earrings here and I think the end result is really elegant and lovely.  Rebecca? You're the runner-up and as such wins 24 hair pin blanks.  Congratulations, Rebecca!

I've not been doing a things crafty myself. Other than trying to keep down lunch and looking at back issues of Interweave Knits.  I have been thinking a lot about my goals for 2009. One of my things is I need to not cut corners. I need to not be afraid of things that are hard - you know, sometimes I shy away from things that look too difficult or time consuming without considering if I would enjoy the end product enough to make the trouble worthwhile. 

Any crafty resolutions in your hat?

Post & Run

Here's a cool link to the Long Thread. She's summarized the top 100 tutorials of 2008.  I can't wait to go through them all.

Getting Well

There should be photos.  There should be stories. There should be lots and lots of things.  Unfortunately there's nothing. Two weeks of nothing.  I did nothing. Nothing but cough and hack, snort and sneeze.  Nothing crafty. Nothing knitty. No cool little project to share.

Now I'm trying to get back into the swing of things at work and figure out how to stay awake for more than an hour at a time. Which is hard to do without the siren call of television - I've watched many an episode of Monk and You Are What You Eat these past two weeks. I love a TV marathon.

We did manage to get some things done.  My mom, uncle and I made gumbo.  I tastes kind of weird to me still though.  I also made some butternut squash soup. Ditto on the tasting weird.  Everything tastes weird to me except Campbell's chicken noodle.  I made an apple crisp, which for me is like nothing, and I could smell it, so I could tell if it was good or not.  Weird how much you rely on your sense of smell when you cook.

We do have a winner for the Hair Pin challenge.  I want to make sure I have all the photos posted on Flickr first before announcing. I've been kind of lame on that.  I meant to do it last night, but I fell asleep while eating dinner.  Yeah. While. Eating. Dinner. 

I do hope you had a nice new year celebration.  I'm looking forward to sharing my artsy resolutions with you later in the week.  I have fun plans for later challenges - the next one will be announced at the end of the month. Wait for it...wait for it...wait for it....