Uncle Josh is Half the Man He Used to Be

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Well, not literally, but I am a writer and allowed to bump the baseline, as the song goes. But I am feeling smaller, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that. This is the end of Day 13 of our Whole30 and on top of getting sick and tired thinking about and working for our food. It seems like all our free time is going into food prep and cleanup. I carve out enough time to work out three times a week, and I feel like I’m  losing ground. I started serious strength training on June 20, 2013. I did my first set of squats (5×5) at 25 lbs. On September 16, 2013 my squat was 215 lbs. It maxed out at 290 lbs that November and had read Starting Strength on the recommendation of a chiropractor, so I only needed to do three sets of five, but I did them. Continue reading Uncle Josh is Half the Man He Used to Be→

Uncle Josh breaks a mayonnaise

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This is day 6 of our #Whole30 and it was a tough one. I was tired all day no matter how much coffee I drank. I ate everything I had taken to work and was hungry by the end of the work day. Tonight was also a lifting night, and I was afraid of what the iron would do to me. I had to run and errand during the day and I turned a corner to see the sign of a sub shop and my first thought was “she’ll never know.” I was tempted. Hungry. Worried. And there was the promise of forbidden foods that would make me oh-so-very happy. I even persisted in the illusion that I could hide it. No, that’s not bread and onions on my breath, not at all. Gee, hon, I don’t know how that sub shop charge landed on our bank account.  I was, Continue reading Uncle Josh breaks a mayonnaise→

Uncle Josh Dreams of Food (Whole30 Day 2)

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Yesterday, according to Weight Watchers, I only ate about 63% of my daily allotment of SmartPoints™. I was satisfied with breakfast, but fell into hunger mid-morning and mid-afternoon. I ate raisins as a pre-lift snack and because it was cool I managed a pretty good workout between WW and dinner. Dinner was wonderful, and there was a hint of peckishness as I fell asleep. I was not prepared for the dream. It was a common scene: I was in a parking lot outside a grocery store moving soda waters and chips from the cart to my car. I opened a bag. I ate a chip. And then I had this horrible feeling that I had done something horribly wrong and betrayed everything that is good and wholesome in the world and had cheated on my wife. I was not prepared for the dream. I tried to hide my sin. I Continue reading Uncle Josh Dreams of Food (Whole30 Day 2)→

Uncle Josh Eats Lunch (Whole30 Day 1)

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Today is day one. Last night we prepped breakfast, a potato-sausage-egg casserole with onions and mushrooms and–this is amazing in context–lemon. It lasted most of the morning until about 11. Lunch is a mason-jar salad full of veggies and a can of tuna, plus an egg. I don’t plan on reporting on every little thing I eat. In fact, I’m not supposed to be eating all the “little things” and restrict myself to three meals a day. The challenge is I’ve been on an eat-every-two-hours thing for years. I have to adjust to not eating “all the time” which my co-workers may come to appreciate. (I’m sure they’d appreciate it if I didn’t eat lunch at my desk, but that’s modern work for ya!) For years I have equated “Tired” with “Depressed” and struggled to break that mental connection. I also have equated “Hungry” with “Angry” and “Peckish” with “Tired” Continue reading Uncle Josh Eats Lunch (Whole30 Day 1)→

Uncle Josh Preambles the Whole30

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Like many Americans, I have an unhealthy relationship with food. As a teenager a large supreme pizza from Shakey’s was a snack. A two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola was a thing I picked up from the 7-11 and finished by the end of trip. My memories of vegetables requiee a can opener.  I was never one for self esteem, figuring it was a quality for other people to enjoy. I was married and divorced by the time I was 22 and I turned up a snotty vegetarian tipping the scale at 300 pounds. Giving up on vegetarianism got me to 320, easy. By the time I was 29, I had married the most fabulous woman in the world who loves me despite myself. I lost my job two months before he wedding and fell back into depression and back into food. Being broke, newly married, and living in a dump did Continue reading Uncle Josh Preambles the Whole30→

Uncle Josh Fixes the Olympics and Saves a Nation

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That’s one hell of a promise in the title, isn’t it? It’s a big idea that will take a lot of planning but I think it not only can work, it can be a huge benefit to the world in general and Greece in particular. It’s commonly accepted that Rio was not ready for 2016. Swimmers should not be told “don’t touch the water because it’s nasty”. The poor shouldn’t be kicked out of their homes to make way for Olympic villages. This is a common problem with other Olympic venues. I’d have to look it up, but I think I remember hearing that very few host countries make money on the Olympics because of the temporary costs associated with running things and building things and occasionally violating people’s civil rights (assuming they have any in the host country). It would be a lot more efficient if there was one Continue reading Uncle Josh Fixes the Olympics and Saves a Nation→

Uncle Josh on Fear in the American Commons

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In the world of jokedom, the 12:30 AM phone call is the teenager out after curfew with the family car, calling to say there was an accident. Dad immediately asks “How’s the car.” It’s not a funny a joke, but it is telling about what the Dad of Jokedom fears more than the potential loss of a child or even injury to that child: Loss of the family car. Why? Because without the car Dad has to go to work on Public Transportation, which may add an hour or two to his day. (My personal record: 5 hours on public transportation back and forth for a 4-hour work shift.) But also the cost of repairing the car on a tight budget may mean “no vacation this year” or “no meals out this month” or “no mortgage payment this month” which leads to living in smaller and smaller apartments for possibly Continue reading Uncle Josh on Fear in the American Commons→

Uncle Josh Empties the Tank

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I have been lax on my strength training lately. By lately, I mean the past two years or so. I get a good run of a week, maybe a month, of consistent workouts and then it stops, and I start over sometime later, usually by pushing myself too far too fast. Too far too fast is pretty much how I feel after trying the 500-Rep Unloaded Barbell Challenge from Men’s Health. I’m no longer a MH reader, but this linked entered my world and I thought I’d give it a try to kick start myself back into training. Yeah, stupid move for a fat guy two months shy of his 45th birthday. I’m not in great shape, and I’ve never been aerobic. We walked 600 feet to Starbucks after the movie yesterday and it hurt like hell. But, being an idiot, I tried this challenge. Everything is done with a Continue reading Uncle Josh Empties the Tank→

Uncle Josh Crunches Some Numbers

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I guess it has been a couple of weeks since starting the data gathering, and Stephanie is out of town this week, so I should probably look at some the numbers I did collect. What else am I going to do, clean the kitchen? My goal of first starting by comparing 5 full years from “back then” to 5 full years of “just now” aren’t coming along as well as I’d hoped because data for the 30’s and 40’s is sparse. I plugged my data into Google Sheets which has some cool graphing features I didn’t know about until I asked for a graph. Here are the high temperatures for 2011-2016: It’s more of a saw curve than I’d expect. Here is the Daily Delta for that time period: This is the sort of noise I expected to see. The Delta is simply (Tomorrow’s High)-(Today’s High). I included the high Continue reading Uncle Josh Crunches Some Numbers→

Uncle Josh Posits a Theory about Climate Change

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This week started fairly warm. On Thursday the local high dropped by 12 degrees, and jumped up 19 on Friday. Overall it “warmed up 7 degrees in two days” but we experienced 31 degrees of change. I wondered if this sort of thing was happening more frequently than it had in the past, which could illustrate for me the effect of climate change. I like to call it Climate Destabilization, because I think it’s a more accurate term and while man-made climate change is real and happening, it’s a political shibboleth that is only denied by the ignorant or people paid by the oil industry. I don’t want to be ignorant. I want to know. I want to see the data myself. Fortunately, I have the tools to ask myself key questions and derive some answers from them. And I want to share it, because I’m that kind of guy. Continue reading Uncle Josh Posits a Theory about Climate Change→