This past weekend at my brother in law’s wedding reception one of my wife’s relatives complained about her *christian testimony* on facebook.
Which I find more than a little amusing considering our pastor is one of her facebook friends and she is keenly aware of everything she says and does on there for that very reason.
I also find it amusing that the only people who can even see her *christian testimony* on facebook are people who already know her. Not strangers. Family. Friends. People to whom her behavior should be no new news.
And how tarnished would my own christian testimony be if I used the selection of tainted English that’s burrowing around in my brain over this to outline my contempt for their opinion? My wife’s relatives are fortunate in their cowardice – (they confronted my wife when I wasn’t around to stand up for her, and they did it at her brother’s wedding where they knew she wouldn’t make a scene) – because had they said any of this to my wife in my presence I’d have surely given them an earful despite the venue.
Carry your hypocrisy elsewhere, my crusty, bitter extended family.
I am confident in God’s judgment of my wife’s words and deeds as portrayed in our isolated little facebook village as well as on the world wider web and the vast reaches of our meatworld life.
She has nothing to be ashamed of, and if you had been brave enough to tell her specifically what *unchristian* thing you found so offensive, I think you would be surprised to find she is probably rather proud of what she’s done.
I know I am.
You are cowards.
The lot of you.
Are you a food addict?
I’ve gone off on this particular subject before on my old blog, but the absolute ridiculousness of the term begs for it to be done over and over and over again until every bloody soul on the planet takes a good long hard think about what the f*ck it is they are actually saying when they use that bloody phrase.
This video is done from the perspective of fat acceptance, and while that might seem a bit counter intuitive on a fitness-centric blog, it really, really isn’t. read more…
I’ve found one of the biggest things that sabotages my diet is food anxiety. My family lives pretty tight. We have a budget and we stick to it.
There is always plenty of food in the house.
But there is not always money in my pocket.
And that is where I get weird. If I know I have money to buy food if I decide I want it, then I’m fine and often can go hours without eating and without thinking about eating. When I don’t have money, I think about food all the time and I get anxious and antsy and will generally find some (usually unwise) way to get some money. read more…
So any of you who know me know I’m death on gym memberships and expensive equipment.
For one thing, I don’t have the money for either. But more importantly, I don’t want to be beholden to either.
So, sometimes I make do with what’s available. Like cinderblocks.
And sometimes I get creative.
For instance, I’ve recently started my son on lifting awkward weights. Like cinderblocks. But one of his exercises involves carrying said cinderblock to the bottom of the hill behind our house and then turning around and hurling it as far up the hill as he can, running and snatching it up and hurling it a little farther up until he gets to the top.
Only problem is he lurches forward as he throws and ends up on his hands and sometimes the cinderblock comes rolling back pretty fast. Images of a brained child on my back hill led me to come up with a better solution.
I couldn’t find anything aptly silly enough for a Silly Sunday post.
Or, more to the point, 4th of July weekend being the anniversary of my father’s suicide, I really wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate much silliness.
So I spent the afternoon putting quotes at the top of each of my blog pages. Quotes attributed to S. Page aren’t really quotes at all, just sh/t I’ve made up over the years and thought was cool enough to memorize and repeat.
I’ll try to keep it to the silly quotes. You can click through the pages to see the rest if you want. They’re all at the top.
Today someone died who desperately wanted to live.
Today someone was raped and couldn’t fight back.
Today someone was abused by someone they trusted.
Today someone killed to protect their family.
Today someone left a baby in a dumpster.
Today someone stole because their kid had nothing to eat.
Today someone could have helped but was too afraid.
Today someone broke free from a violent spouse.
Today someone sat in their car and remembered a gunshot they weren’t around to hear.
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Sometimes the only freedom we have is the freedom to make the choices that take us to the place where there are no more choices.
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You don’t f*cking deserve it, dad . . . but I miss you.
So in my post on water weight I mentioned that I don’t use the scale as my primary guage of weight loss.
In fact, once a month, after I weight myself, I take a body-fat reading and take a tape measure to my neck, chest, waist, arms, and thighs.
But my real day-to-day measure is how my clothes and jewelry fit.
I have had to cut two new holes in my belt in the last month and there are some pants so baggy on me now that even with a belt it is not comfortable to wear them.
The watch I got for Christmas two years ago that I thought at the time I would have to add links to, it was so tight, now hangs loose on my wrist and I can twist it around full circle without unclasping it.
But perhaps the biggest tell of all is my wedding ring.
A month ago I had to wrap yarn around the bottom of it to keep it from slipping off. Yeah. Just like the little highschool cheerleaders had to do with their linebacker boyfriends’ class rings.
And now even with the yarn it hangs loose.
I swear, if it weren’t for the copious amounts of hair on my boobs I’d wonder If I was undergoing some kind of bizarre sex change rather than experiencing the normal side effects of weight loss.
Back at the end of June (you know, earlier this week) Angry Gray Rainbows did a post in which she detailed all the things she appreciated about herself . . . and then encouraged her regular readers to do the same.
Now, I am a regular reader of her blog, but I am sooo not the touchy feely type and the thought of writing that kind of post about myself just seemed a bit gratuitous.
But after I read post after post after post of people doing this on her blog I became intrigued. The posts didn’t feel gratuitous at all. They felt . . . genuine. Raw. Real.
And those are all things I can totally get down with. So a couple days ago, I caved in and posted my own self-appreciating comment on her blog which she turned around (with my permission) and posted as it’s own post.
I even got my own manly blue waterfall out of the deal. 
So, yeah, if you’ve never checked out her blog, truck on over there. It is so worth the read.
So, what’s the deal with water weight, anyway? You hear the term all the time in regards to dieting – especially low-carb dieting – and it is usually attached to the word “just” – either with a sneer [as in, "Sure you can lose 5 lbs in the first week, but it's just water weight"] or with sympathy [as in, "Well, yeah, you gained 2 lbs this week, but I'm sure it's just water weight].
I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, “The scale is not your friend.” Not for weekly and certainly not for daily weigh ins. Not unless you KNOW HOW WEIGHT FLUCTUATION REALLY WORKS. Now, that said, I do a weekly weigh in right here on this blog. That is partly for accountability purposes and partly because I want to see what this new way of eating is doing to my body and the scale is one of many measurements I use.
But it is certainly not the only measurement. Once a month I weigh in and break out the tape measure to see how I’m changing dimensionally – and that is the measurement I am really following.
But the fact remains that most people do use a scale on at least a weekly basis if not more frequently and quite often the scale shows alarming fluctuations. Why? read more…
One truism about prison is that when you’re there you’re there alone. No matter how many people you’re locked up with. No one is going to do your time for you. No one is going to hold your hand.
Well, some of them might want to hold your hand, but trust me when I say that that’s comfort best avoided.
In my tenure as a ward of the state I spent time on many different facilities. Some had weight piles. Some even had nautical equipment. But many did not. And you didn’t always have access to it on the ones that did.
Enter innovation. Inmates, by necessity, are some of the most innovative people on the planet. I once saw a guy light a smuggled cigarette (it was a no smoking facility) using a 3″ piece of pencil lead (pried from the wood) wrapped in toilet paper. He climbed the bars and stretched through to where the wall fan was plugged in, wiggled the plug loose a little, and dropped the exposed ends of graphite across the tines of the plug. The toilet paper whooshed into flame and he was able to light his cigarette.
If anything, inmates are even more innovative when it comes to working out.
