A Green Mushroom

Graze boxes have been a huge help for me eating well.  I mentioned it offhand in my post about judging hunger and intermittent fasting but I wanted to give it some more focus. I've always been bad at snacking healthy.  I have a tendency to eat whatever is out on the counter or easily visible while looking around my kitchen.  This has always led to me eating a lot of candy and processed food.  I've also never tried to portion control snacks, I would just eat a bunch. Then my friend BJ Keeton told me about the wonders of Graze boxes .  Graze is essentially a subscription snacking service.  They have over 100 snacks and each one is self-contained and pre-portioned in a little container they call a punnent.   I've completely switched over to Graze punnets for snacking and it's made it much easier for me to eat healthy. One of the really cool parts of Graze is that the snacks are relatively healthy but they aren't super healthy crazy super food...

Rogue Legacy is free to pick up as a PSN subscriber this month so I downloaded it for PS4 even though I've already tried it out on PC. I launched the game while I was on my stationary bike and just kind of zoned out for a bit while playing, exercising, and listening to some podcasts. My initial reaction was the same as when I played it on PC.  I didn't like it much.  But, it was helping me kill time while exercising and most of my brain power was being used listening to podcasts anyway.  So I kept playing. The first hour or so of the game sucks.  Like, it really sucks.  Characters die almost instantly against enemies and can barely get anywhere in the game.  It's super frustrating and the first few unlockables don't feel like they help at all.  If you look back at my initial impression on the PC you can see that I gave up before even playing an hour of it because I was so frustrated with the game. Something interesting happens after about a...

I've noticed something weird as I've been tracking my calories.  I'm getting good at estimating how hungry I am... in calories. I'm doing a diet where I only take in calories during 9 hours of the day.  One of the typical diets people do is only 8 hours (one third of a day) but 9 seems to work better in my case.  For me, this is between 2pm and 11pm.  It's a form of intermittent fasting which is interesting but doesn't have a huge body of research to back it up.  The important thing is that it's working for me. I still take in a normal overall calorie intake for the day, just during a compressed window of time.  There are some extreme versions of this like the Warrior Diet but they didn't appeal to me as much.  They're a bit too extreme. Intermittent Fasting plus tracking calories has had an interesting side effect for me.  I'm learning how to judge my hunger in calories.  I know generally how many calories I need to fulfill different...

I should really write about all the health/fitness apps I use, but for right now I want to talk about MyFitnessPal.  The others might come up in the course of writing this anyway. One of the things to do when you're trying to get healthier or change your diet is to start counting calories.  Since I'm doing that right now I wanted to write about this app because it's the best calorie counter that I've found. It's an app and also a website.  All the information syncs between the two. It has a huge library of food that is easily searchable.  Any user can submit new food to it.  Other users can then confirm nutritional info as correct and it will end up in their general library for everyone to use. The last time I used it was over 6 months ago and since then they've added a new feature.  Scanning barcodes!  I can't believe how easy this makes it to track calories.  Just point your phone at the barcodes of food or ingredients as you pull t...

I'm pushing 30.  At least that's what my wife says to me when we're being sarcastic with each other.  Don't worry, I say it right back to her. I'm 28.  30 doesn't really scare me, but I do know I'm getting to the point in my life where I need to take better care of my body if I want to keep it for the long haul.  My body won't just maintain itself like it did when I was a teenager or in my early twenties. For the past 6 years I've been trying to exercise regularly and mostly failing.  I started running for fun and exercise about a year before my daughter was born but was never able to get on a regular running schedule.  Between our pregnancies, having kids, and a few job changes I just haven't had a steady schedule for any long period of time. It's hard to make fitness a habit when your schedule changes a lot.  But I keep trying. I try to do something physical every day.  Typically this is a run, but sometimes it's walking or gett...