10 Health Questions From A Vegan

1.) What do you do (Professionally)?

I am a clerk in a very busy Emergency Room.

2.) Are health-related New Year’s resolutions a good stepping stone or just Holiday Remorse?

I think they can be a great stepping stone, especially with diet changes, since most of us have probably overindulged in ways we're not proud of during the holidays.  However, veganism is not a fad diet, entered into solely to lose weight.  You can begin a vegan diet for that reason, but I don't think you'll be able to stick to it, as a true lifestyle change, without having a deeper philosophical, ethical and/or health-related conception of it over the long haul, however you might personally define that.  The beginning of a new year though, when most of us in the northern U.S. are a bit more hermetic or introspective and have some time on our hands, would be an excellent time to begin.

 

Biggest Loser Week 1

During my first week of the biggest loser 2012, I lost 2.37% which is a better start to the competition than last time (which I ultimately lost 32 pounds). I wish that I could be happier with that. But quite frankly, I decided to play the game a little more this time around. Let’s just say that before my initial weigh-in, I may have been super hydrated.  Some people would say that this is like wearing ankle weights and is cheating. I must respectfully disagree. Putting on ankle weights is adding artificial weight. The difference is between artificial and superficial. The water weight is superficial but still legitimate because I had actually to imbibe the liquid.

Sleep Outside For A Week (Winter Edition)

During the summer, I thought that sleeping in the cold would be easier because you can always add more layers to warm up. Do you know what they call such thinking? Stupidity. There is a reason why people only camp outside during warm weather.  It didn’t occur to me until I had already done both that the biggest difference is the gap in body temperature to the weather outside. In the hottest places in the world, it may be slightly higher than 100 degrees outside during the overnight hours. This is only a few degrees higher than a person’s body temperature. The entire week that I slept in January, it was around 27 degrees, or roughly 70 degrees lower than a person’s body temperature.

My Biggest Loser Competition, An Introduction

BIGGEST LOSER 2012

At my work, April 1st brings the second bi-annual biggest loser competition. Last time, I placed second losing 32 pounds and 12.6% of my total body weight. This coincided with my month of vegetarianism, where I progressively got more strict with my diet. This was something that I already had planned for the blog and I extended out to two month for the sake of the competition. For the first week, I maintained a pescatarian diet (fish but no other meat), the second week I was a normal vegetarian, the third week a vegan, then I juiced for the rest of the time. But, as it turns out, I kept putting off writing about it and I gained back a lot of the weight that I had lost. I had already decided to do this again when there was the announcement for another biggest loser competition. This time,