Healthy doesn't have to be hard

I found an article on Foxnews.com a couple of days ago about a New Jersey woman with a very strange goal.
She currently weighs in at 602 pounds and is working her way to 1000. Yep, she WANTS to weigh half a ton.

Donna Simpson is 42 with two children and a bofriend who she says encourages her in her goal to become the heaviest woman on earth. To accomplish this goal, Donna consumes roughly 12,000 calories per day, resulting in a $750 per week grocer bill.

The article goes on to discuss various negative side effects of such gross overeating and morbid obesity. There is also a mention of how much Donna's medical bills could potentially cost taxpayers.

While I think Donna's goal is, for lack of a better word, disgusting, the article is still a pretty interesting read.

The human body is a marvel, especially when treated well. And like any machine, it doesn't work right without the proper care and maintenance.

Our country is, in more ways than one, larger than ever before.

Obesity is on the rise, along with diseases that stem from being overweight. Obesity is not partial or descriminatory. It affest every age group and race and we need to do something about it.

I have heard in e news recently of a couple of instances where something is actually being done.

In the fight against childhood obesity, both PepsiCo Inc. and the Coca Cola Co. adopted guidelines in 2006 to stop selling as many sugary soft drinks in U.S. schools.
Taking that a step further, PepsiCo recently announced plans to impliment the same changes in schools in over 200 countries by 2012.

Another story that I found encouraging describes a move being made by the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) to change misleading food labels.

Many food packages boast claims like "low fat," "heart healthy" and "zero grams trans fat." Many of these labels are misleading to consumers because there is no set standard manufacturers must adhere to when making such claims. The information is coming straight from the manufacturer and is certainly not without bias.

Currently there are no set regulations on man of these claims, meaning that one "low fat" food can vary greatly from the next.
This gives many consumers the impression that they are eating healthier than they really are.

To help make these labels clearer to cponsumers, the FDA is working to impliment a set of regulations that manufacturers must follow when placing claims on packaging.

Hopefully, measures like these will make it easier for many Americans to make informed choices about their eating habits.

While the claims mande by manufacturers can certainly be confusing, sometimes the key is to simply read the back of the package. That's where the real nutritional informaiton is found anyway.

Eating healthy has been made into some unattainable goal, somehting much harder than it really has to be.

I just follow a few rules and have managed to stay in the healthy weight range for my height. I might mention that being overweight does run my family, on both sides, so I may or may not be predisposed to the condition, but I have avoided it so far.
Of course, other restrictions may apply depending on individual health issues, but here are my rules:

• Portion control is a must. You can have some potato chips, just not the entire bag.
• Eat a good breakfast. It will help you to avoid indulging in that vending machine cinnamon roll at work later.
• Eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. This one's pretty common but it works. The more you eat of something, the more your body tends to crave it later on.

These are pretty simple, but they work for me and I think they're a pretty good starting point of you have weight loss goals. Healthy eating doesn't have to be hard. It's a good habit for evceryone to develop.

Till Divorce Do We Part

Whether I want to or not, I hear about celebrity divorces all the time. The reason for the divorce is usually that old standby, “irreconcilable differences.” I do understand that there are situations where divorce is truly the best option, sad as that may be. All too often though, it’s simply the easy way out. If we reconciled these differing views before jumping into marriage maybe more marriages would survive past just a few years.

I found an article today about a debate going on in Oklahoma as to whether the state government should be focusing its attention on the state’s rising divorce rate rather than other issues such as health care and unemployment.

Some conservatives are proposing legislation that would require couples seeking either marriage or divorce to undergo counseling first. While Oklahoma does have the third highest divorce rate in the nation, others in government are blasting these proposed laws. They call them an unnecessary government intrusion into personal lives.

This article caught my attention because divorce is something I have always taken very seriously. I’ve noticed that my opinion doesn’t seem to be the same as that of the majority of our country. I think the reason for our lack of respect concerning the matter of marriage is this:
We just don’t take it seriously enough for what it is, a binding contract.

For many people, marriage is merely a temporary state that can be mended with a divorce when they aren’t having so much fun anymore or “fall out of love.”

If more people treated marriage as a lifelong commitment, I think the rising rate of divorce would see a definite drop.

Whether you’re married, single, dating or contemplating marriage, I urge you to think long and hard about your definition of marriage.

What do you want in a marriage?

Are your expectations realistic?

Do you and your girlfriend/boyfriend/fiancé share the same values?

Is divorce an option for you in the future or will you stick it out no matter what?

I think it’s important to answer these questions and many more and to get your ideas straight before involving someone else in your life. Too many marriages fail because they are based on a shaky foundation of infatuation and superficiality. No marriage can survive on that “butterflies in your stomach feeling” for long.

Another common factor in divorce is when one person expects the other to fulfill all of their emotional needs for life and to be pretty much perfect.

I’m sure any of you who are married will attest to the fact that no one is perfect, and that’s made even more apparent when you live in the same house.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where divorce seems to be the only answer, please make sure you think long and hard before you act. Divorce may be the best option for you. As I said earlier, there are certainly valid situations that merit divorce.

But just think about it first. Or better yet, think about marriage before taking a vow you or your partner may not be able to keep.


Also, here are a couple more recent articles I found to be pretty interesting.

Divorce and Kids

Living Together

It's a Boy!!

In my last blog, I mentioned that we were still waiting to hear if our baby is a he or she. Well, we had the ultrasound yesterday and it’s a little boy! Everything’s just the way it should be; he’s a good size and very active.

The ultrasound tech was having a hard time getting any good pictures of him because he moves around so much. If any of you have ever seen pictures from a 3D ultrasound, you’ll know that they can be very detailed and you can see pretty well what the baby’s face looks like.

Well, Eli wasn’t having any of it. He’s turned facing in towards me and kept his arm up over his face the entire time, all the while moving all over the place. She managed to finally get a decent profile picture of him anyway.

As soon as we found out, my husband sent a mass text message to all of our friends and family. Everyone’s pretty excited.

Our best friends have been working on adopting a little boy from Taiwan and just got the news that they get to leave for Taiwan to get him on March 4th. He was born in November, so he and Eli will be pretty close in age. We’re all looking forward to the boys playing together and a little fearful of the havoc they most likely will wreak.

Right after the appointment, we went for ice cream and then did a little shopping. I just got the baby book, so I can start working on that.

I’m a bank teller and at work we have internet access. They pretty much let us do whatever when there are no customers. Today I spent most of the day looking at little boy clothes and checking out what we might want to put on our registry. There are way too many choices!

The first thing I did this morning though was to order the bedding we had picked out. My husband is a cop, and I found this set that is just perfect. It’s got a vintage patchwork look to it, in a lot of reds, blues and tans. But what makes it perfect is that it’s got pictures of police cars, badges, fire trucks and Dalmatians on it.

I can’t wait to get moved into our new place and get everything set up!

We’re coming along pretty well as far as buying a lot of the stuff we’ll need. The bedding was the last expensive item. We already have the crib, car seat and stroller. We’ll probably just register for everything else and hope that our friends and family help foot the bill a bit!

We’re both just so excited to finally know now. It’s great to be able to say “he” and not “it.” It’s kind of a strange feeling though. The ultrasound was the event I’d been waiting anxiously for all these weeks and its come and gone. Now it just seems a little more real to both of us.
The next big thing to look forward to is THE BIG THING.

Baby Makes Three

My husband and I have been married for a little over three years now. When we got married, we decided to wait to have kids for three to five years. We just wanted some time as a twosome to do what we wanted when we wanted and just enjoy each other’s company.

Well, last November, about one month before our third anniversary, we got a surprise. I was pregnant. I’d been on the pill for almost four years, so needless to say we were a little shocked. It’s a good thing for sure though. Having kids was something we’d been discussing more in recent months anyway. We’d just never made a concrete decision about anything. Turns out we didn’t need to, It was already made for us.

So as of today, I am twenty weeks along. We go in for my ultrasound next Thursday, so we still don’t know just what little “junior” is yet. We do have names picked out for either a boy or girl. Our girl name is Hannah Gael. I’ve had my heart set on that one for a couple of years so there really wasn’t a lot of discussion.

For a boy, we agreed on Eli Andrew. The choice for a boy was a little harder to come by though. For the longest time, every name I suggested my husband said no to. He’s a cop and every name I liked was also the name of someone he’d arrested before.

At one point, a coworker lent me a copy of Who’s Who In The Bible to get some ideas for names. I ran across Eli right away. If any of you are familiar with Old Testament stories, Eli was a priest who prayed for a barren woman, Hannah, to be able to have a child. When she gave birth to her son, Samuel, she sent him to the temple to be raised by Eli.

I liked the connection between the two names and my husband has never arrested anyone by the name of Eli. So for a boy, it will be Eli Andrew (Andrew is my husband’s middle name).

Along with choosing names, we’ve been pretty busy doing other things to get ready. I just got my stroller/travel system this week and I’m in love with this thing. I never imagined I could get so excited over a stroller. We have a crib and some clothes. Our parents have given us a few thing, including the blankets each of us used as babies. My mom even had the mobile from my crib and it still works and plays music.

We have also discovered that we’re quickly running out of space and Junior’s not even here yet. We live in a 2BR/2BA duplex, which was a bit tight for the two of us. We were pretty worried about how the space issue was going to be resolved.

Then we found out about a house for rent.
It’s across the street from another deputy who works with my husband, down the street from the sheriff and in the same general neighborhood as a couple of Highway Patrolmen. Pretty safe place right?

The best thing is that it has so much more space. It has another bedroom and a 3 car garage, all for not much more than we pay for our place right now.

So we’ll be moving in about a month, just in time to get a nursery all put together for Hannah or Eli.

What is tolerance?

We hear a lot these days about a thing called tolerance. We’re supposed to be tolerant of this, that and the other, whether it be a person’s religious beliefs, sexual orientation, political sway, or any number of other things.

The one that I take issue with is religious tolerance. I don’t mean to say that we should be hell-bent on a “my way or the highway” type attitude. I’m just a little fed up with the practice of religious tolerance in this country being limited to pretty much every faith but Christianity.

There are so many situations where Christians are discriminated against while other religions are protected. I found two recent situations where Christians were banned from wearing cross necklaces in the workplace while other religious symbols, such as Sikh bracelets, Muslim hijabs and Jewish skullcaps were protected by the dress codes.

In the United Kingdom, Nadia Eweida, a British Airways employee, has appealed to three different judges for a decision that she is a victim of religious discrimination. In a final appeal this month, it was decided by the courts that British Airways can reasonably ban Christian employees from wearing a cross at work.

What is so frustrating about this ban is that is doesn’t apply to any other religion. The courts say their reason for allowing people of other faiths to wear religious items is that those items are essential, or in the “rule book,” for those religions. Their argument is that Christians aren’t required to wear the cross and so it’s not really discrimination.

While we may not be sent straight to hell for not wearing a cross necklace every day, why is it up to a secular court to decide what acts or symbols are essential to a person’s faith?

I always wear a silver ring with footprints on it, in reference to the “Footprints in the Sand” poem as a constant reminder and a sign to others of who I am and what I believe in. The Bible doesn’t tell me to wear that ring, but for me personally, it is as essential a reminder as any Jewish skullcap or Muslim hijab.

Somehow I see this situation playing out differently had Nadia been a Jew wearing a Star of David or a Kabbalist with a red string bracelet. That certainly wouldn’t be news. I’m pretty sure the airline never would have made an effort to ban wither of those symbols, among many others, simply because they “aren’t essential to the faith.” It's unthinkable to offend any religion but Christianity.

I realize that I may offend some people with this blog and, while that’s not my intention, I know it’s probably unavoidable. Therefore, I won’t lose any sleep over it. If I do offend you, I apoligize for the perceived slight but I don’t apologize for what I’ve said. It’s what I believe. I wouldn’t ask you to apologize to me for your faith.

What I want to see happen is true tolerance. It’s a pretty far-fetched and probably impossible aim, but it sure sounds nice in theory. I want people to be tolerant of my religion, Christianity, along with the rest.

I just don’t understand why in this age it’s the accepted practice to make fun of and belittle the “fanatical Christians” but we’re deathly afraid of offending anyone of a different religion.

Rent

I have never been more fed up with renting than I was last weekend.

My husband and I have rented since we got married in December of 2006. Our first place was an apartment in Joplin. The apartment was decent and clean. The manager was great and got things done when we asked. The reason we ultimately left was that the rent increased three separate times in two years. It got to be more than what that place was worth.

While we were there, we had our share of interesting acquaintances. The girl above us vacuumed at all hours of the day and night and it sounded like she rearranged her furniture at least once a week. The old man next to us liked to catch my husband in the parking lot to talk about his prostate problems. We often had to dodge the frat boys that would play football in the parking lot.

It was an interesting place, but it was never the tenants or management that made us want to leave.

Last February we moved to Mount Vernon when my husband got a job with the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Department. We rent a duplex owned by a distant relative of my husband’s family.

The duplex was originally a house and was split into two units a few years ago. The house sits on a corner and we are on the east side. The driveway and garage are on the west side of the house. When we moved in we had neighbors on the west side that used the driveway, so we parked at
the side of the street on the east side of the house. It was fine with us.

Then the neighbors moved and we haven’t had any for several months so we started using the driveway. The garage/storage building is ours anyway (it’s ours in exchange for my husband mowing the lawn) so it only made sense to park there when no one else lived here anyway.

Last week we got a new neighbor. She’s a single mom with a few kids and only ONE car. The single car is an important point.

A week before Neighbor was to move in we get a call from Landlord asking to clear a space in the driveway for Neighbor’s single car. That’s only fair. Of course she shouldn’t park in the street. We were more than happy to oblige. We had three cars in the driveway comfortably- my car, my husband’s personal car and his patrol car. So we moved the patrol car to the street, and that left plenty of room for all of us.

So the space for Neighbor was clear and it was even the one closest to the house. How nice are we?
On the morning Neighbor is supposed to move in, we get a call from Landlord telling us that ALL of our cars must be moved to make way for Neighbor. We were never given a reason for the sudden change in plans.

Now my husband works nights and had just been asleep for a couple of hours at this point. It was also the last weekend we had all that snow. Our cars were stuck in the driveway and not going anywhere until some of it melted off. I told Landlord (nicely) all of this and said I would see what my husband could do about it when he woke up.

Well, that wasn’t good enough for Neighbor. She sent Landlord back. Or should I say Landlord’s nutty wife. That was interesting to say the least. I told her the same thing I told Landlord.

This went on all morning, and we eventually were able to move all of the cars just to put a sock in Neighbor’s complaining.

I have never wanted to buy something of my own so badly just to be able to park wherever I please. Sadly, we’re still saving so we can get what we really want.

I can only hope Neighbor learns to appreciate the finer points of our amazing surround sound system.

Eye-Opener

When I was 15, I got my first car. It was a 1987 Toyota Corolla. I bought it from the preacher at my church. It had no air conditioning, was a stick-shift and would start to shake if it was pushed past about 65 mph.

I loved that car. And so my love for all things Toyota was born.

That car was more reliable than I ever expected. When I sold it after 4 years, it had over 198,000 miles on it. That was 4 years ago and the same person who bought it from me is still driving it today. Definitely dependable.

My next car was a 1994 Celica. It was also very reliable. I traded it in last summer for a 2008 Matrix. I am head over heels in love with my new car, but I still kind of miss the old ones too. I've always driven a Toyota and the brand has never let me down. That is, until recently.

I was a little shocked when the first recalls were announced for Toyota models. Toyota has always been synonymous with quality. I was relieved that my car wasn't on the list and I didn't think about it again. After all, we're all entitled to a few mistakes and, as compared to the failures of other car companies, this didn't seem so bad.

Then there was another recall...and another. Then came more news of lawsuits followed by a statement that Toyota was halting production and sales on several models (here's a link to Toyota's website with info on the cars that have been recalled). This makes me wonder just how many more problems will surface before it's over (one of many apologies we've been hearing lately). My car still remains off of the recall list so far, but I know that could change. It certainly wouldn't surprise me at this point.

So you probably aren't sure yet of what I'm trying to persuade you to believe with this story. I'll explain a little better.

I've never been the type of person who cares about name brands or puts much value on a name. I buy very few items that are name brand and those items are the ones that have proven in the past to be worth the extra cost. The Toyota name is one of the few that I have always put a lot of trust. Toyota has built a reputation for quality, long-lasting, well-made cars. I've never had a reason not to believe in that reputation.

When my husband and I decided that it was time for me to get a new car, my only absolute must was that it be a Toyota. I narrowed it down to a couple of different models and we researched them, finally settling on the Matrix. The Matrix is almost identical in styling to the Pontiac Vibe, which is generally a little cheaper. A friend of mine tried to persuade me to go for the Vibe instead of the Toyota.

My husband I talked it over and agreed to pay more for the Toyota because of the reputation of the company. We knew we'd get more out of it as a trade-in later on and we believed it would be a higher quality car. Eight months later, I have not had a single problem, but I'm not as confident as I used to be in the emblem on the hood of my car. I'm also worried about the car losing value at the rate Toyota is messing up these days.

My point is this: Don't buy solely base don a brand name. It may very well end up costing you more money for lower quality in the end (here's an article from Consumer Reports about the advantages of buying store brands over brand names). While my car has performed well so far, I'm not so confident that it won't end up being a lot more expensive than we bargained for in the end.