Food keeps making me sick.

Let me rephrase. What I eat keeps making me sick.

The difference is, of course, that a lot of what I normally eat isn’t really food. I eat a lot of refined things. I eat a lot of processed things. I eat a lot of frozen, preserved, heat-n-eat things.
And then I wonder why I have so many gut/digestion related issues, more body fat that I like (I have no idea what percent it is, nor do I really care; I can see it.) and why I can feel it when my insulin level crashes.

Time to reevaluate the whole diet. And by “diet”, I mean the noun (the food I eat in general), not the verb (the short-term alteration of the food you eat with goal of trying to lose weight). I want to lose some fat and replace it with some muscle, true, but trying that directly hasn’t worked for me, so I’m going to try to focus on feeling healthy first and see what happens.

Many of my issues are more obvious after eating wheat/grain products, but not all of them. I don’t want to hop on the omg celiac!! bandwagon because it’s the fad-of-the-month and I hate it when people do that, especially when the symptoms are rather vague. That said, I think it’s worth checking out a gluten-free/grain-free diet, since its growing popularity makes it easier to find information and appropriate alternatives.

I’m not about to become Martha Homemaker or anything, but I want to try eating more real food and less 21st century “processed food stuff”.

Unless someone makes those food-pills from The Jetsons, ’cause I’d totally try those.

I don’t like the fact that I can’t pick an icon to use with the post. That’s boring. I love that feature on LJ, which is why I added that plugin to my WP blog.
Not sure how this will affect my interest in blogging from my phone. I really like the part how it’s as easy as Twitter now, except I don’t have to keep things super short.
This will require some thought. Maybe I can find a workaround.

Alright, in an effort to see if I’ll post on my blog more if I don’t have to remember while I’m at home, I’ve installed the WP for BB app.
Here I am, typing on my phone. Let’s see what happens, shall we?

Why do I finally come back to my blog to post something like this? Because I think it’s cool.
But also because it’s short and quick to get posted. I am a lazy blogger.

I got another ReTweet from someone really cool, and this time it was Robert J. Sawyer.

Lindsay and I went to go see him at the Waterloo Public Library last night! We got there a bit late, so I had to hover around outside because he was doing a reading from his new book (about a girl names Caitlin who lives in Waterloo) and I didn’t want to interrupt by just waltzing in. We got in during the Q&A, and it was super awesome. I’d met him before, but I’d never heard him speak. He was funny, and really really interesting. ^_^

Two things are coming up fairly shortly.
1. I’m spending a few weeks in Australia this winter (2 months)
2. I’m turning 30 next spring (7 months)

I suddenly realized the other day that not only are there beaches in Australia, but we’re practically staying on one. Beaches mean wearing a bathing suit, and bathing suits mean trying to look good. Especially for your gorram honeymoon – that’s when you’re supposed to be at your sexiest and whatnot.

I’ve skillfully avoided wearing bathings suits for about 3 years (except in a hottub once, but it was dark out and with friends) because I always feel lame ’cause I’m that weird pinkish kind of pale, and puffy.

Anyway, regardless of the bathing suit issue, I really should get fit and eat healthy.
Problem is, I don’t really know how.
Let me rephrase. I know how, but if knowing about something was all it took, I’d practically be Miss Universe.
I certainly don’t know everything, but I do know the basics: eat more vegetables, avoid refined sugars, eat more be-active-in-the-spring/summer foods and fewer fatten-up-for-the-winter foods, eat real food instead of processed food, consume fewer calories than you burn to lose weight, blah blah blah.
I also know, in theory, how the LHC works. That doesn’t mean I could stand in front of it and push the right sequence of buttons to make it work properly.

What I need is a plan. A roadmap. Something that shows me:
1. What foods to eat (and scientifically why, ’cause it’s not nearly as motivating if you don’t know why you’re doing something) and how to prepare them in various ways.
1. a) Ways to introduce more of these foods (ie different veggies) and more ways to eat them so you can actually get used to eating them and maybe grow to like them. I know me, and if something tastes like I dug it out of the lawnmower bag or the compost bin, I’m not going to eat it no matter how many times it promises to make me look like a 19 year old Victoria’s Secret model.

2. What foods to eat less of (and scientifically why) and suggestions for substitutions

3. What exercises to do, along with some sort of plan for fitting them into a person’s busy daily life

4. Not be some fad diet filled to the brim with pseudo-science and fanatical devotion to a single method. I want a life plan to get fit and then maintain my health, not to join a cult. If the science doesn’t check out, I’m not interested, and if I’m not interested it’s not happening.

5. Not cost hundreds of dollars to get set up for Step 1 (I can’t afford to dump everything in my pantry and replace it with organic stuff and build my own greenhouse right this second)

Anyone have any suggested reading? Or suggestions in general?

Short term goal: not look like crap in a bathing suit in Australia
Longer term goal: be pleased with physical self for 30th birthday
Long term goal: Make whatever it took to reach the two previous goal as effortless and integrated into my life as possible so I’ll stick with it instead of going back to frozen pizza because it’s quick and easy

tl;dr HOW I MINE FOR FITNESS??

Thinking about cell phone plans again. As in, I need a better one.

I currently have Fido. I pay $15/mo for 50 minutes of local airtime and 50 outgoing text messages. I pay an extra $15/mo for Blackberry email and BBMessenger service (Twitter is not supported). An additional $6/mo goes to voice mail.
Lame.
I’d love to have twitter support, but that’s another $15 to add non-BBMessenger data. I may love twitter, but not that much.

I’m thinking of cutting out the voicemail entirely. As it stands now, anyone who calls my cell when I’m not there to answer it can just as easily send me a text message in lieu of a voice message.
Any downside to my plan of cutting out voicemail?

Wind and Mobilicity don’t cover Guelph yet.

I’m re-reading Pride and Prejudice (for no particular reason than it came with my Kobo, and I thought I’d read it without having to analyze it for my OAC English final project). It’s a bit of a slow start, mainly because every time there’s a scene with Mr. Darcy, I keep picturing him as an adorable Jack Russel Terrier:

Amirite?

Wishbone was a really cute show.
Also, my Kobo rules.

How does it work, exactly? Mostly it works hard at confusing me. It gets even more confusing in Canada, where our parody/fair use laws are not as broad as in the States.

How does fanart fit into everything? I know Disney cracks down on any non-approved commercial use of their characters (to the point where Artist Alleys at anime cons will ban Disney-based fanart so they don’t get jumped on by Disney). The fact that Disney can do this implies that they have the law behind them, otherwise they’d get a big collective bird flipped at them. Ok, I understand up until that point.

But what about stuff like this? Or this?

We can all agree that it’s epically awesome. But how can it be legal for the artist (and Threadless) to sell for profit? The artist did the concept and the drawing, but Hanna-Barbera (Warner Bros.?) owns the characters. Fanart tend to be as popular as it is because it appeals to people who already know/like the character, so it’s using the property of the originator in order to make a profit.

It can’t just be an international case of “if the copyright holder doesn’t find out & crack down, it means it’s ok” or “if you are small-time, the copyright holder won’t bother pursuing legal action“, can it? Given how quickly these social media pillows spread through, well, social media, I can’t possibly believe that Twitter (and MySpace, FaceBook, Gmail, etc.) don’t know that these pillows exist. Heck, Gmail specifically has a rule that if you host your company email through their Google Apps, if you upload your own logo, your image cannot contain the Gmail logo. So if they don’t want people who use their services to use their logo without permission without any personal gain, it doesn’t seem like they would be A-OK with some chick selling (admittedly awesome) pillows of their logo.
Heck, I would happily own both the shirt and a Twitter pillow. Not so much because I like the original way they are presented, but because I like the character/item portrayed. Therefore, I’d be buying it because of the copyright holder’s marketing and popularization. I would likely think this zombie-hunter shirt was awesome if it showed two completely original characters, but I probably wouldn’t (want to) buy it without that extra push of “I already know and like those characters!”

Gah. I don’t get this.

Since I haven’t yet fleshed out my Evil Master Plan (Hey Lindsay, this is one of the things I want to chat about if we ever get around to sitting and talking about life) this isn’t really an update. But it is a cataloguing of things that are helping to advance my “become internet famous” goal.

If you don’t already know, I write a blog called ClutterCubed. It’s an organizational/decluttering blog, and my spin on it is that I’m not some professional organizer who lives in a house that fell out of Martha Stewart Living, and instead I’m a person who actually struggles with clutter herself (do I ever). Yeah. I started it a couple years ago, but I wasn’t very good about keeping it up, which made me frustrated, which made me less good at keeping it up, etc. Anyway.

A couple weeks ago, I had a guest post published on Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog that I read. There was a request for guest posts of reader stories, and I submit the tale of how I kicked my mortgage’s ass. I worked really hard on my GRS submission article, and I’m pleased with how well it turned out. ^_^

Anyway, the point is that my article was selected to be published, and GRS has a readership of over 70,000 people (based on RSS subscription numbers). My article received 121 comments to date, and that made me feel awesome. My traffic spiked that day (I got 12x the traffic I usually do), and the effect had a long tail (the jump in traffic is tapering off, but slowly, instead of a sharp decline back to “normal” levels).

My own RSS subscribers jumped from ~130 to ~230 that day, and over the past couple weeks has steadily climbed to over 330 where it sits today. 330 people read what I have to say, twice a week! 😀
This also turned into a positive feedback loop; the more subscribers I got, the more I wanted, so the more I’m trying to get out of my little anti-social shell and reach out into the bloggosphere (and the Twittersphere, or whatever) and actually interact with people I don’t know. This is a big thing for me.

More things have helped advance my goal, but I’ll just list them here:

Things that help my EMP goal:
1. Article published on GRS
2. Listed in a “Bloggers to watch in 2010” list (by a person who found me through GRS – their blog has about 250 RSS subscribers)
3. I was featured in a before/after post on Live it With Less
4. My own “bloggers to watch in 2010” article was linked to in an article on ProBlogger (“the” blog about blogging, with 138,000 RSS subscribers). It was just a “here’s a list of people who wrote “bloggers to watch in 2010″ posts”, but still. I got a link on ProBlogger, guys!!