barnson.org Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.

I just started goofing around on Facebook. I know, I know, Justin, you've told me for years that I should use it. Anyway, it's pretty cool; I'm up to around 200 "friends" on the site now, mostly people I know from school and work. I recently updated my status to show the fat-loss progress I was excited about:

New weight low today: 214.5 lbs. First time under 215 in half a decade. Another five pounds, and I'll be at my lightest since age 21.

My friend George McEwan asked me,

So are you eating canned air followed by a chaser of water? What are you eating to hit those weight goals?

Facebook, unfortunately, has a limit on status comments that is restrictive. Here's what I came up with to condense a plan that normally would take pages to describe into a Facebook-friendly length.

Bodybuilding.com's resident twelve-week transformation specialist, Kris Gethen, has put out a free video series on how to do your own twelve-week transformation with him as your virtual personal trainer, with a video for every single day of your transformation:

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/12_week_daily_video_trainer_main.htm

As I'm sure many of you have noticed, I've slowed down a lot on the blog postings. Despite my goal of "a post a day", I've realized that I just don't have time for all the things I want to do in a given day without sacrificing something.

One of the revolutions in personal diet management in the 2000s has been online diet-tracking software. Two of the leaders in this personal tracking area are Fitday.com and LiveStrong.com's The Daily Plate.

So on my "week off" from training -- and with a very relaxed eating regimen -- I decided to get my blood tested. This is after 6 months of low-carb and 4.5 months of lifting, with about 50 pounds of fat lost and 10-15 lbs of muscle gained. I was pre-diabetic before starting, and unfortunately diabetes isn't really reversible... just controllable.

I admit it... I didn't vote for the guy. But this quote today about his feelings on where our political party has gone in the past thirteen years or so sums is up perfectly.

Santa Claus apparently is aware of my current fitness fetish, and graced me with one of the much-ballyhood, infomercial-promoted "Iron Gym" units. For those unfamiliar with it, it's a chin-up bar that you can hook to a doorframe and take down without any permanent mounting hardware.

Received a question regarding eating low-carb from a rugby player over on my my favorite bodybuilding forum; I'm a little out of my element here, since I don't play rugby, but some general advice seemed in order to answer this guy's questions.

A number of co-workers and I embarked on a twelve-week weight loss challenge recently. Here are my starting and final stats.

Got this question in one of my forums, and I thought I'd address it here.

Does anyone know some high fat snacks that can be consumed on the move other then peppirami and nuts?

Try one of Mark's low-carb protein bars from his web site:
http://www.musclehack.com/homemade-protein-bar-recipe/