Gardening - A Weight Loss Exercise Plan + Diet

Gardening can be a fascinating topic for some people - or really boring to anyone who has zero interest in plants. But if you are fascinated with the idea of growing your own food, I want to propose the following Exercise Plan / Diet.

The goal essentially is to grow your own food in your backyard. This will require lots of work (exercise), careful planning, time, cooking/baking skills, and a dose of determination.

I recommend planting the following, which I have listed in order of spectrum because I think it would be nice to have a garden that is ordered by colour:

Red Beats
Radishes
Tomatoes
Raspberries (Requires more space.)
Strawberries
Mini Red Potatoes (Smaller than regular potatoes, but tastier.)
Red Peppers
Carrots
Orange Peppers
Yellow Peppers (Because it is nice to have variety.)
Sweet Corn (Requires more space.)
Green Beans
Broccoli
Peas
Lettuce (There are many different kinds of lettuce, I recommend planting 3 different kinds so you have variety.)
Watermelons (Green on the outside, red on the inside.)
Herbs (There are likewise many different herbs, such as basil, parsley, cloves, dill, etc. They are commonly used as spices, not as a main dish.)
Cucumbers
Blueberries
Purple Cabbage
Purple Cauliflower
Eggplant
Garlic
Onions
Mushrooms

I recommend against planting anything huge like squash or pumpkins, because those plants take up a lot of space. So unless you have tonnes of space, you should focus on plants that produce more food for their smaller area. This is similar to the Sweet Corn above, which does take up more space, except that pumpkins and squash take up a LOT of space. Also don't expect to be growing any huge "prize winning pumpkins" on your first try. Most likely they will be quite small. (Also who wants to eat that much pumpkin???)

I also recommend against planting white or yellow potatoes, which contain a lot of starch and starch is fattening. I includes the Mini Red Potatoes above for variety and also because they taste better.

Baked mini red potatoes are also very tasty. Just bake on a pan, add some spices and yum!

Once you've got your garden growing your next step is to eat what you've grown. Some of that may require learning some new cooking / baking skills, but honestly the internet and youtube has lots of recipes for you to explore. Make a mistake? Oh well, you will know better next time.

The end goal is that you will be eating more healthy food that you've grown yourself - which often tastes better than anything found in a store.

All that exercise from tilling, planting, weeding, harvesting means you will have shed some pounds over the course of Spring to Autumn. Once you've harvested the food at various stages during the year you will reap the benefits of eating lots of healthy vegetables - whether they be the form of salads, stews, soups, berries with yogurt, on pizza, juicing, or whatever recipes you decide to cook up with them.

The end result is if you treat your garden as both an exercise plan and a diet plan, you are guaranteed to become a healthier weight / a healthier person in the process.

I also recommend weening yourself off sugary drinks and high sugar / high cholesterol snacks. Some foods are so addictive that people will get into a habit of eating them at a specific time every day and if they do not then they get cravings for sugary things at that time of day. (This happens to me every year when I visit my parents and my mother sends me home with bags full of cookies, squares, etc - and I end up developing a sugar craving during a particular hour of the day afterwards due to snacking on them that part of the day. Fortunately I eventually run out of them and the craving is forced to go into decline.)

There are three ways to ween yourself off addictive foods:

1. Eat less of them and stop buying them, you will eventually have to stop because you run out.

2. Go cold turkey, meaning cut yourself off from them completely. This is trickier because if they're in your cupboard / freezer you either have to ignore they are there or thrown them out. Option 1 suddenly looks more appealing, yes?

3. Eat berries. Berries have natural sugars in them, so they will fulfill your craving for sugar but you are switching your addiction from one food to a different food. Other foods that are also higher in sugar are: grapes, mangos, bananas, cherries, apples, pears, kiwis and pineapple. By replacing your addiction with something healthier this is a good way to ween yourself off sugary foods and make a gradual switch towards healthier options.

How to train yourself to Fall Asleep at Will

Once in a Blue Moon I sometimes like to talk about the importance of rest and sleep.

But what if you have difficulties falling asleep?

Like I sometimes do, although I find that usually only happens if I am either too excited or too stressed and my brain is working overtime. (I also find that such times is a great time to get out a notepad and work on poetry - like my 2015 book "Dreaming of Zen Archery", available on Kobo, Chapters and Indigo.)

Anywho, back to the matter of sleeping there is a breathing technique which can help you to fall asleep. Some people claim to have tried it and that it helped them to fall asleep in less than 60 seconds.

Side benefits of being able to sleep more often is that is slows down aging, improves your odds at weight loss, is positive for mental health, reduces health, improves cognitive reasoning and a slew of other benefits.

To test this theory I am going to have an afternoon nap and see if it works. Scroll below to see if it worked.

So what do you do?

Step #1 - Breathe in through your nose for four seconds.
Step #2 - Hold for seven seconds.
Step #3 - Breathe out slowly through your mouth for eight seconds.
Step #4 - Repeat steps 1 to 3 until you fall asleep.

This breathing method of falling asleep was pioneered by Harvard-educated Doctor Andrew Weil who studies meditation, breathing and relaxation exercises and it supposedly works because it lets oxygen better fill your lungs, calms your mind and relaxes muscles. The process releases certain hormonal chemicals that soothes your brain and induces sleep. When we are stressed our endocrine system releases adrenaline, which makes people feel excited and unable to sleep. The breathing technique supposedly counteracts the adrenaline and forces your heart rate to relax so you can sleep.

So does it work???

Well, I have a mixed review. I did fall asleep and have a nap (and was wise enough to set my alarm on my cellphone to wake my up at 3:30), however by the time I fell asleep I had given up doing the whole 4 seconds, 7 seconds, 8 seconds counting thing. The breathing / counting was too distracting in my opinion and I opted for breathe in - hold breath, and breathe out slowly. That did work for me even if the counting did not.

I was even having a nice little dream when I was rudely woken up by my cellphone's alarm.

So it does work, kind of. I may have to try it again in the future to see if the counting actually helps or if I am better off just working on the deep breath - hold - slowly release thing that I was eventually doing.

We can't all sleep like kittens and babies, but with practice maybe we can learn how to fall asleep using a deep breathing cycle.

Archery Tip, Trust your Instincts

Today I was doing some personal practice and doing two different styles of shooting: Traditional and Instinctive.

During this I was alternating distances to a doughnut-sized target, also working on my ability to gauge distances and estimating where to aim.

During one particular shot I estimated I needed to aim at a particular spot before pulling back. When I pulled back however my brain suddenly said "No, aim slightly higher" and without thinking about it I instinctually did so. Scored a bulls eye and had an epiphany about "trusting my instincts".

It was as if the instinctive part of brain suddenly said NO to the part of my brain that was based on reason and math. Instincts won and I was left with a moment of insight.

I would compare this to a zenshin moment archers sometimes experience, wherein everything suddenly feels perfect and you perform a perfect shot simultaneously.

Bras Vs Bust Firming Exercises

According to a study that came out of France in 2013, bras don't actually alleviate back pain in women and don't do anything to prevent women's breasts from sagging. In fact, the study says that it actually makes back pain worse and the breasts to sag more.

Of course, anyone familiar with Bust Firming Exercises already know this. Marilyn Monroe knew this and she has been dead for almost 54 years.

While she was living however Marilyn Monroe did a number of daily exercises in order to stay in shape and keep her famous figure.

They included:

Push-ups - which act as bust firming exercise, increasing the strength of the pectoral muscles on the chest, which hold up the breasts and keep them from sagging.

Weightlifting, including Chest Flyes (below) which also work the pectoral muscles.

Jogging, for the legs and arms.

Archery, for the back muscles and arms.

Swimming, good as a full body workout.

Stretches (some of which look suspiciously like yoga).

And while she may have occasionally worn something that looked similar to a bra (due to society's convention against women appearing topless in public), she almost never is shown wearing a bra. Many of her iconic pieces of fashion went in quite the opposite direction. No bra at all.

And she certainly did not need to wear one either. Due to her regular exercises and specifically bust firming exercises, she had no need of wearing a bra which at the time conventional thinking was that women needed to wear bras in order to prevent back pain.

According to the 2013 French study, everything we've ever been told about supporting the upper back has it all wrong. Wearing a bra does nothing to decrease back pain, and the support offered by a brassiere actually encourages the breasts to sag. The study was a lengthy one too, starting in 1997 and ending in 2012, before being published in 2013. 15 years of women in the study group either wearing a bra or wearing no bra, and comparing which ones had back pain and which ones did not, and measuring how much sagging was really happening.

Led by Jean-Denis Rouillon, a sports scientist from the University of Besançon in eastern France, he found that "bras are a false necessity."

"Medically, physiologically, anatomically — breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity. On the contrary, they get saggier with a bra," says Rouillon.

Rouillon spent a decade and a half measuring the changes in breasts of hundreds of women using a slide rule and caliper at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in Besançon. The participants were all between the ages of 18 and 35.

Of the braless women, the researchers concluded that "on average their nipples lifted on average seven millimeters in one year in relation to the shoulders." This meant that they effectively became "perkier" over time as their pectoral muscles became stronger from the added weight, as opposed to the extra strain going to the shoulders and back muscles instead.

According to one 28-year-old woman who took part in the study she hasn't worn a bra for two years now, and doesn’t expect to go back. "There are multiple benefits: I breathe more easily, I carry myself better, and I have less back pain," she says.

So less back pain, less shoulder pain, stronger pectoral muscles, better posture, stronger lungs. Lots of benefits. Learn more about Bust Firming Exercises.

Note, men who want larger pecs / chest muscles can also benefit from these exercises. eg. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a huge advocate of Chest Flyes, shown below, for its benefits of building huge pectorals on men.

Longevity Vs Peer Pressure

Can you name someone over the age of 90 who is a heavy drinker or a frequent smoker?

I know I cannot. Indeed when I stop to think of older people I know of who drank / smoked frequently, most of them died in their 50s, 60s and only a few made it to their 70s before kicking the bucket.

I cannot name anyone in their 80s or 90s who smokes / drinks and is still alive to tell about it. Which makes me conclude two things:

1. Smoking / drinking really reduces your life expectancy.

2. Peer pressure when people are younger really has a lasting effect on longevity, or lack thereof in this case.

From my own past I can really only remember a few times when people even offered me a cigarette. One of those times was at a wedding reception and all the "cool people" close to my age were hanging out near the side exit at the back of the church, enjoying the cool night air and most of them were smoking. Several of them offered me a cigarette, because I was a teenager at the time and they must've thought that I smoked. I answered each offer however with the following line: "No thanks, I quit." I feel that was a brilliant lie, but a lie nevertheless. Truth is I had zero intentions of taking up smoking just so I could hang out with other people in my age group.

Alcohol on the other hand I have a steadier hand with, having been raised in a family where it was tradition to have some wine during every Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Birthday, Anniversary, etc. Never to the point of gluttony, restraint is instilled so that the idea of getting drunk just seems stupid to my family...

However that doesn't mean that everyone in my family also believed in restraint. I had two uncles and one aunt who are no longer with is because they smoked and drank themselves to an early grave. Heavy smoking and hard liquor in all three cases. They lived long enough to see their grand-kids born, but not long enough to see those same grand-kids full grown.

Two of my other relatives have since quit smoking and cut back on the drinking. The first because his mother and father had died from it and it scared him to think he would be next, so he quit. The second had a bit of a cancer scare / reality check and has since quit smoking / drinking.

Notice something else? All the smokers in my family were also the heavy drinkers. For whatever reason those two things went hand in hand. While the rest of us, the remaining 90% of the family didn't smoke and rarely drank.

And for those that embraced this life style of sobriety and healthy living? Well lets just say that they all live into their 90s, with only a few exceptions. At present I am 37 and my grandfather is still alive, and he is as robust as ever. I fully expect to live well into my 90s or die an early death from a mountain climbing accident  (not a prediction, just a random possibility).

Still I would rather die from a random accident or old age than an early death from something that is both preventable and problematic.