In An Act Of Extreme Self-Sacrifice, I’m Engaged In Some Unhealthy Eating During Coronavirus For The Public Good

Being stuck in the house is an excellent way to ruin a diet and get fat.  Or for me, get fat again. There is a risk that I could gain back the fifty pounds I’ve lost over the past eleven months.  Anyone else in quarantine is facing this same risk. This is why I’ve already written pieces about how to make sure you get enough exercise, eat to boost your immune system, and how to take care of yourself if you get sick.  But I must admit I’ve been violating a lot of these rules.  In order to save the economy and local business.

One group of businesses and workers that are in trouble are the people who work in food service.  Restaurateurs and waiters and cooks and so forth. They’re mostly shut down, and although many are offering take out, it still results in slower business.  So there’s a risk that some of my favorite restaurants may shut down if they don’t get enough business to get through the virus.

Now there are some things available in the CARES act which allow employers to stay in business.  The Paycheck Protection Program allows them to keep paying their employees and other provisions allow them to get deferrals and assistance on their small business loans, maybe even up to a year.  But restaurants in Florida have another problem.

March and April are the high tourist season in Florida.  Well, January and February are tourist season too, but mostly for Canadians and Scandinavians.  In those months, we have 60 degree weather. By the way, that’s 15 degrees in the temperature scale (Celsius) used by the heathens of the world.  And by heathens I mean…literally the entire rest of the world. Anyway, Canadians and Scandinavians consider this temperature to be “warm” so they come in the first months of the year.

But everyone who does not live on a block of ice comes in March and April.  And they tend to go to restaurants and bars and so forth.  And the beaches. And the theme parks. But nobody is traveling right now.  By the time this virus is over, the tourist industry (and especially the restaurant industry) in Florida will have missed its peak season.  So I’ve been getting takeout occasionally to support local restaurants through the tough times. 

I started doing this when I discovered that one of my local favorites, QT Crawfish, was shut down.  It was a Cajun place with extraordinary food. I love Cajun food. I agree with Jeff Foxworthy’s assessment of Cajun food, when he said “Louisiana has the best food on the planet if you don’t really ask too much about what you’re eating.”  They eat strange things, which you really should have guessed, since the word “crawfish” is in the name.  Cajuns eat things like frog’s legs and alligators. It’s strange, but good.  It’s totally worth it. Besides every alligator I eat is one less alligator harassing me on the golf course.

But sadly, my favorite Cajun place is gone for good. Strictly speaking, I don’t know that it was killed by the virus.  But the last thing I want to see happen is my other favorite restaurants going out of business because of COVID-19.  So my wife and I have been ordering takeout at least once a week.

Normally, eating out or ordering takeout is not a particularly good idea for someone on a diet.  The food I like is generally unhealthy (that’s probably why it tastes so good) and the portion sizes tend to be a bit much.  Portion size is probably the main reason dining out kills diets. Every time I eat out, I’ll put in what I ate into the Cronometer app and I’m always stunned at how many calories I ate compared to a normal night.  But even people who are losing weight need to occasionally live a little.  

Even when not experiencing extinction level events, I intermittently allow myself to indulge in a night out with my wife where we eat entirely too much.  I think that if we cut out too much fun, we increase our risk of completely falling off of the wagon and going back to our obesity inducing ways.  If the diet is too austere, it’s easier to get sick and tired of it. So occasional dietary sin is a good thing. And now that the restaurants we love are in trouble, I have another reason to order in.

Now, we’re not going to bother getting McDonald’s.  I think they’ll survive no matter what happens. This is the coronavirus, not Captain Trips, so things will eventually return to normal.  So I’m going to try to save the local restaurants that my wife and I would miss.  And I’m going to blatantly be a fanboy and name them by name, on the off chance that it gives them some meager boost.

So first on the list is a Thai-Mexican restaurant called Nitally’s.  You read that right.  Thai-Mexican. A peculiar sort of mix that can really only happen in a truly odd place.  Like Florida. It’s a Mom and Pop store owned by a Mexican guy and a Thai gal.  Hence the odd food. They serve Mexican mole in a Pad Thai dish. They put chorizo in fried rice.  It’s rather unusual. And it’s rather spicy. 

And when I mean spicy, I mean really spicy.  The kind of spicy that has serious digestive consequences the next day.  Effectively, a gastro-intestinal hangover. But like a real hangover, it’s usually worth it.

Unlike most of the places I like to eat, this place is reasonably healthy.  Mostly rice and noodle dishes with fairly lean cuts of meat.  I can finish off the entire meal and usually not ruin my diet.  Depending on how much beer I have.

Another favorite of mine is called Urban Brew and BBQ.  It’s a restaurant that was converted from a gas station which mostly serves beer, BBQ, and fried chicken.  This is generally not a healthy option.  This is also why I’m not full keto.  Full keto would require me to give up fried foods.  South of the Mason-Dixon line, this is considered to be the worst sort of apostasy.

Although not all of it is unhealthy.  To my great thankfulness, I found that pulled pork and brisket is not that unhealthy, at least in terms of calories.  Fried chicken is a different story. Sure, the good people at this restaurant serve it with a side of collard greens, but that minor gesture towards healthiness doesn’t really counteract the exquisite, artery hardening caloric carnality of their fried chicken.  Their 24-hour brined fried chicken. It probably takes a year off of your life. But one taste makes the thought of dying young actually seem not that bad.

We also get take out from Cappy’s, a pizza place.  Pizza actually isn’t quite so bad as people let on.  Especially if you get peppers and onions and veggie type things on it.  Of course, I also get pepperoni and sausage and bacon on it. Or those little slices of ham that we call Canadian bacon for some reason.  The point is, there’s meat involved. Of course there is. I’m not a weirdo. But the veggies let me get some key micronutrients out of it too.  I just don’t put anchovies or pineapple on it. That would make me a weirdo.  And I don’t eat the whole thing at once.  Two or three slices is a full meal.

Some of you might be wondering, Chicago-style or New York style?  I hesitate to answer. There’s an entirely unnecessary cultural war between lovers of Chicago and New York style pizza.  It’s a brutal conflict on the same level as the mob wars between the Irish and Italians, or rivalries between East Coast and West Coast rappers, or animosity between people who like anchovies or pineapple on pizza and people who are normal.  The bizarre thing is that the pizza conflict is Italians vs. Italians, so it’s more of a fratricidal civil war. But Italians have a long and storied history of that sort of thing, so I guess it’s not all that weird.

This place does both types of pizza.  Apparently, they’re attempting to make peace between the warring pizza factions.  So they’re the pizza equivalent of that friar who tried to forge a truce between the Montagues and the Capulets by marrying Romeo and Juliet.  As with the two star-crossed lovers, this effort to end the pizza violence will probably end badly. The owners will almost certainly be burned as heretics.  Fortunately, I like both kinds of pizza, and can’t help but hope (naively, I’m sure) that the owners succeed in achieving pizza peace. I do what I can to support them and wish the best for them.  I guess that makes me sort of the Benvolio of pizza.

Another place we like is Moon Under Water, a British place.  They serve fish and chips and bangers and mash and so forth.  And also pastries. Which the British call pasties. Something I can’t help but laugh out loud at every time I hear it.  If you don’t know why, just be careful when googling the word “pasties”.

I’ve recently become a fan of British food, which is often maligned in culinary circles.  I’m convinced that this is unfair criticism orchestrated by the French as revenge for the death of Joan of Arc.  Or to punish the British for putting ketchup on everything. Or because of Brexit. I dunno.  

Regardless of whatever underhanded intrigues the French have orchestrated to vilify this cuisine, British food is actually very good.  Especially at this place.  The bangers and mash are extraordinary.  The only problem I have with this dish is trying not to giggle.  The fact that the British describe a large sausage as a “banger” seems very…unfortunate to me.  And the fish and chips involve fish that I suspect have been fed some sort of mutant food. The dead critter fills up the whole plate.  You have to get the fries on the side. And I know this place is legit, because the actual British people I know here in the Tampa Bay area love it.

And it’s not just British food that they serve.  The menu also includes food from various places the British colonized.  So they also serve curry, for example. The food is so good I don’t feel any guilt about cultural appropriation.  This place also has crazy good cocktails, which is consistent with the ancient British tradition of rampant alcoholism.

Not all things British are represented here, though. There’s no haggis on the menu.  Which is probably for the best. The Scottish are great at inventing things, but their contribution to the culinary arts is mostly…wanting.

The last place we aim to save is Dairy Inn, a takeout place that serves proper ‘Merica food.  Hamburgers, hot dogs, and ice cream. Basically a Mom and Pop Dairy Queen.  It’s less healthy than Dairy Queen, though, which is probably why we like it so much.  

Any good American gets a hankering for a hamburger every now and then.  And these hamburgers have a much higher heart attack per patty ratio than any major burger chain.  Which is why they’re bad. Which is why they’re good.  Burgers to die for.  Sometimes literally. Although not right away.  It’ll cause a myocardial infarction, but it probably won’t happen for a few decades.

Anyway, those are the restaurants I’m supporting through the crisis.  I realize it’s a little odd to push not-that-healthy food on a blog dedicated to health and fitness.  But the truth is there’s really no such thing as bad food.  There are certain things that are better than others, and we need a balanced diet.  But even hamburgers, pizza, BBQ, fried things, British things, and way too spicy food have some essential nutrients.  Besides, occasionally indulging in more calorie rich foods is okay.  We’re allowed to splurge every now and then. And right now, this is for the public good.  We can save small businesses from the virally induced recession.

And I realize this seems like I’m just pimping my favorite restaurants, and the chances that anyone who lives near me will see this blog post is fairly limited.  But you probably have your own favorites near you. So think about your five favorite small, family owned restaurants and help keep them in business if you can.  Tell your friends and spread the word. And frequent your other local businesses too, if they’re open. If you can afford it. My wife and I are currently able to make money from home, but not everyone can.  If you have cash to spare, spend a little to keep your neighbors in business.

Now, there is a risk you might get fat with all of this takeout, so keep doing the exercise.  And when you order in, I guess you could only eat half and save the rest for later.  When I was, growing up leaving food on the plate would be a crime against humanity.  I was raised to eat everything in front of me. But doing that as an adult produced a large gut in front of me.  Which I’ve worked hard to get rid of. So saving some food for later is allowed now.

So patronize your local restaurants, spread that food out, keep them in business, and try to keep yourself healthy and stay active.  And try not to drink so much. That’s another way people are packing on pounds in quarantine. And it doesn’t help me that Three Daughters microbrewery is selling two for one six-packs.

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Things To Eat And Drink When You Have the Coronavirus. Or Any Other Virus.

One thing that I’ve found infuriating about the coronavirus is the sheer number of shady characters trying to defraud the victims.  Some sleazebags are trying to claim they have a vaccine.  This is crap. Nobody does. Some reprobates are trying to hawk fake tests.  There’s an easy way to avoid these two things, though. If your doctor doesn’t recommend something, don’t waste your time.

But another thing we’re seeing is shady supplements that are ostensibly miracle treatments for COVID-19.  Now, as I wrote in a previous piece, there is value in getting the right vitamins and minerals to boost your immune system.  But you don’t need supplements to do this. You can get all you need and then some from a proper diet.  Besides, taking supplements is cheating. It’s too easy.

And if you do contract the Doom Of Mankind, the nutrients in supplements won’t help coronavirus go away any faster than those same nutrients in food.  So just make sure you have the right kind of foods in the house, and know how to prepare them. But eating healthy only does so much good if you’re already down with the sickness.  So what remedies actually do help if you have the virus?

I’ve identified a few things over the years that work for cold and flu and such.  Usually by looking up things online when I was miserably ill. The power of Google is powerful indeed.  And many of these things work for COVID-19. Most of these things are good for almost any disease.

Here are the symptoms, according to Johns Hopkins.  The main ones are fever, cough and shortness of breath. Some patients also have body aches, runny nose, sore throat or diarrhea.  Maybe that last one explains the run on toilet paper.  

One thing to drink is tea.  Various hot teas can clear your sinuses, warm up your insides (which can help with that dry cough), soothe some a sore throat, and provide essential antioxidants, which help your immune system.  Green tea and black tea seem to both have these effects. And I know, green and black tea seems like the sort of thing people who shop at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s drink. It’s a bit bourgeois.  But they work. They seem to take the sting out of any illness.

Of course, hot tea drinking isn’t so common in the United States.  It went out of style when a bunch of beantowners threw some tea in the harbor.  But there is another choice available.  In the holy lands of the American South, we drink iced tea.  And iced tea has the same antioxidant benefits as hot tea. And it may not have the sinus clearing effect of hot, steaming drinks, but if you’re running a fever over 100 (which is not uncommon with COVID-19) a nice, cold drink can help bring that down.

There are generally two types of iced tea.  There is the unsweetened version that is often drunk by the heathens who occupy the dark, frozen wastelands north of the Mason-Dixon line.  Then there is the sweetened, liquid, manna from heaven that we drink in the Bible Belt. And also Florida. Either of these will help with a disease, although only one will save your immortal soul.

And if you drink the drink named for golf legend Arnold Palmer (which is sweet iced tea plus lemonade), you’ll get a healthy dose of Vitamin C, in addition to the benefits of tea.  Now some of this might sound fattening, but I never said you have to sweeten these things with sugar. Artificial, science engineered, space-age sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose are fine.  But screw that stevia stuff. It’s disgusting.

Another thing that can help with a sickness is the brown ambrosia of the gods, also known as coffee.  This became very popular in America after we dumped the tea in the harbor. Samuel Adams himself said that patriots should drink coffee instead of tea.  In order to show patriotism, we should drink something we import from Colombia instead of something we import from China. I guess that makes sense.

But the high octane fuel of office workers everywhere has all sorts of anti-disease benefits.  It brings the steam, like hot tea, which can loosen up the nastiness in your sinuses. It can boost your energy (as if I had to tell anyone that), and also provide some antioxidants.

There’s a downside to these things, though.  You know how doctors are always telling you to drink fluids when you’re sick?  Tea and coffee tend to pull water out of your body. So they have benefits, but we should use these in moderation to avoid dehydration.  And you’ll want some other fluids to stay hydrated.

Of course, you can always drink water to offset the tea and coffee.  But that’s dull. Only pretentious exercise fanatics, fine arts majors (the successful ones, not the ones constantly drinking coffee at Starbucks), and general snobs drink water.  Fortunately there are options for the normal people of the world.

Fruit juices can give you essential nutrients, help you rehydrate, and can soothe an irritated throat.  Orange juice, the drink of choice among Florida men and women everywhere, can provide all of these benefits.  Lemon and lime juices can be useful too, although they lack the vitamin C content of a proper orange drink. This only works for actual fruit juice.  Orange soda and Sprite or 7-Up aren’t going to have the same effect.

And there is another citrus drink I failed to mention in my previous piece on micronutrients that help your immune system.  Grapefruit juice has both vitamin A and C. Both are good for your immune system, and the juice can cool you down and sooth a sore throat as well as any other citrus drink.  But there’s a problem.

Grapefruit is the worst.  I’m convinced that grapefruit is a cruel prank played on the human race by elder gods of Lovecraftian origin who sought to toy with the puny humans of Earth.  I can imagine the disgusted expression on the face of the first guy who ate a grapefruit, thinking he was getting an orange. I’m sure it would have made a great internet meme.

If fruit juice isn’t your thing, you can go with vegetable juice.  There are store bought drinks which have all of the vitamins you need.  And you can also make your own with a juicer, if you’re hard core. And some vegetable juices come in a spicy version that can clear your sinuses in a good way.  In fact, spicy food in general is a good way to keep the sinuses clear. Maybe that’s why Mexico doesn’t have a huge coronavirus problem yet.

There are also two things that you totally should have learned about from your mother.  Chicken soup and honey. Chicken soup will clear the sinuses, soothe the throat, and provide a variety of nutrients.  Honey doesn’t have any real nutritional value.  But it does soothe the throat.  So add some to any of your drinks, and it’ll help.

There is one thing to avoid, though.  Alcohol. I’ve written about how this can be a problem in the past.  Many of the things I’ve mentioned are wonderful ingredients in extraordinary alcoholic beverages.  And maybe you’re thinking that if you feel rotten anyway, a hangover won’t make you feel noticeably different.  But intoxication weakens your immune system. So you should not use honey or hot tea to make hot toddies. You should not turn citrus drinks into mimosas or screwdrivers.  You should not turn vegetable juice into a bloody Mary. And you should really not convert the sweetened manna that is iced tea into Long Island Iced Tea.  Just don’t.

When we drink alcohol, we say “to your health!”  But if you do it when you’re unhealthy, it produces side effects.  Like longer sickness, or death. Don’t do death. It’s weird. Save that alcohol for a time when you actually feel like celebrating.  Not when you feel like crap.

All of these are things that have helped me in the past.  One thing to keep in mind is that none of these solves all of your problems, so it’s probably good to mix it up a bit.  Have a little of each if you catch the virus. A cup or two of coffee in the morning, a cup or two of tea in the afternoon, chicken soup for lunch, and fruit and vegetable drinks throughout the day.  And maybe some bottled water too, if you don’t mind looking like a snob.

But for God’s sake, avoid the creeps on the internet pimping their miracle supplements.  Eat well, drink well, stay hydrated, and get some rest. The virus is hurting or killing people in poor health.  If you’ve been taking care of yourself, you should make it. And these remedies I’ve mentioned won’t cure anything, but they may help shorten it and ease your suffering.

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How to Make Sure COVID-19 Doesn’t Make You Fat

So I, like many people, am stuck in my house for the foreseeable future.  All is not lost, though. Since I’m a CPA, I’m able to work from home. But my wife’s business, which involves making assorted clothing and accessories and selling them at shows, is mostly defunct.  Fortunately, she’s found a way to take some of her fabric and make masks for local hospitals and elderly folk. Which is actually way more awesome than what I do.  So the day work is handled, but the problem is after work.  The selection of pastimes is limited.

When we’re not working, we spend a disproportionate amount of time on the couch.  My wife has been binge watching Game of Thrones.  Again.  Also, Lost, Downton Abbey, This Is Us, and other things that I’ve had quite enough of at this point.  For the record, I like Game of Thrones, but after the fiftieth time I’ve had enough.  All of this tube watching can’t be good for the waistline, but the normal exercise regimen is hard to do when you can’t go out in public.  Fortunately, my wife is giving me plenty of reasons to get away from her with her viewing selections. But since going for a jog is potentially dangerous, I’ve had to get creative with my workout choices.

Initially, I went back to my first choice when I started losing weight.  Which, as I mentioned in one of my earliest pieces,  is to work on the Honey-Do list.  You know, that list of things your significant other is always nagging you about.  This is more possible now that I have a couple of hours of sunlight after work. There are always a few things to be done in the yard or around the house.  For example, I spent a week raking leaves. Even though it’s spring now, leaves still fly off of the trees constantly. Seasons are not normal in Florida. Florida is not normal, if you hadn’t heard.  So raking is actually a year round event.

Running or bike riding are my two go-to activities under non-apocalyptic circumstances, because they’re effective and don’t require a gym membership, which I am entirely too cheap to buy.  I admit to being a horrible skinflint with money, but in my defense, that’s considered a job skill in the accounting world. But the onset of the end of humanity has forced me to resort to other methods.  Raking and most other yard work is nowhere near as effective as the usual choices, but it’s a decent option when options are limited. It is also effective at making my wife shut up and stop hassling me about all of the chores I’ve been ignoring, so there’s a silver lining.

Yard work, unless you do something hard core like chop down trees, is about as effective as walking.  Which is about half as effective as running or biking. So I have to work twice as long to get the same effect.  But it’s not like I have anything better to do. It’s absolutely better than watching a constant stream of This Is Us.

I am outside when I’m doing this, though.  Sometimes on the front lawn, so there is a risk of encountering passersby that are carrying the real life Captain Trips disease.  There’s a risk that one of those idiot kids who wouldn’t stop going to Clearwater beach during Spring Break will get too close.  Fortunately, since I generally have a rake or a shovel in my hand, I can give the young conveyors of contagion a whack across the head.  Which would be 100% justified self defense. And pugilism is great exercise.  

Fifteen minutes of a beatdown burns about the same as an hour of raking, according to Cronometer.  Well, sort of. I tried putting “fighting” into the app, and got bupkis. Remember, Cronometer is a Canadian app, and they’re way too polite for such things.  But “boxing” is in the app, so I guess that’s close enough. Anyway, crushing some infected young miscreant (in self defense, of course) is a good calorie burner.  So bring it on, young COVID carriers.

If I don’t feel like working outside or diving into a swirling melee to the death, there’s still hope.  There are a few ways to turn my house into a gym, if I’m so inclined. And I don’t mean using the closet rod or shower curtain rod as a pull up bar.  I’d just break it. And then break my neck. Or have my wife hassle me about breaking the rod, which is at least as bad.

I’m talking about home gym options.  If you’re fortunate enough to own a weight set, strength training is not a bad way to work off some fat.  Even if you just have hand weights, you can do yourself some good. The actual calorie burn is only average, somewhere between walking and running.  Unless you really kill yourself. A “vigorous” workout burns tons of calories. But every time I do that, I can’t move for a week, which defeats the purpose of regular exercise.  So I tend to pace myself.  And there is a hidden advantage of strength training, and that is that putting on muscle makes all of your other activity more effective.  That extra muscle mass will burn more calories with the same effort.

If you own an elliptical or a treadmill, you can produce the same benefit as running outside.  And if you don’t, you can actually just jog in place. It’s all a little dull and repetitive, though, so I try to do these things in front of the television to distract myself from the mundanity.  Unless my wife is watching This Is Us.  Screw that.

Another indoor alternative which can be done in front of the television is to use a streaming workout service.  There are some out there that you can pay for, but there are also plenty of free videos on YouTube. They invariably do the workout to songs by Rihanna or Katy Perry or whatever, so I steer clear.  Unless they have one using ZZTop as a soundtrack, I’m not interested.

If you’re not afraid to leave the house, there are a few ways to stay healthy while not risking infection.  I know a few people who’ve taken to playing golf during our ongoing extinction level event. Including my father, who is an absolute fanatic about it.  Golf is a decent way to burn calories, as I’ve noted in a previous piece.  Certain parts of Florida are saying that golf courses are “essential businesses”, so golf is still possible down here.  Of course, they’re also saying that liquor stores are essential. That’s Florida for you.

Social distancing is very easy on a golf course.  You’re not supposed to be too close, because a stray golf shot might seriously kill someone.  The only problem is that you can’t buy beer from the cart girls when you’re social distancing.  And drinking beer is really the only reason I have to play golf.  Because I suck. I really suck.  I once asked a friend what he thought my handicap was and he just sent me that picture of Captain Picard doing a facepalm.

But if I don’t want to go out, there’s another thing I can do.  And I try not to go out, since my wife makes me go through full decontamination protocol every time I come back.  Which means strip naked and shower off. Normally, stripping naked in front of my wife leads to all sorts of positive experiences, but thanks to coronavirus, it just results in me having to scrub off layers of skin until I’m translucent.

But anyway, the other thing I was talking about is wiffle balls.  I can swat a wiffle ball with a golf club all over the backyard without encountering a single person.  The nature of the wiffle ball is that it won’t go far, so there’s no risk of losing the ball or breaking the neighbors’ windows.  Or my windows.  Now, it doesn’t burn that much in the way of calories.  It’s not much better than just standing.  But it’s not as dull as some of the other things I’ve mentioned.

Another thing I can do is disinfect the house.  Wiping down surfaces with disinfectant is actually something you should be doing regularly.  House cleaning isn’t the best way to burn fat, but since we should probably do it for thirty minutes to an hour a day, it adds up.  It will burn a good 100 to 200 calories. And whenever I clean, my wife inevitably tells me (at great length) how I did it wrong. At which point, she redoes the whole thing herself.  So we both get a little workout this way. It’s a win-win.

I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t like my wife.  I mean, sure, she annoys me, but wives are supposed to do that. Every now and then she has a point and listening to her makes me a better man.  Having her around does generally make things better.  And there’s certain other things we can do together that are extremely entertaining.

But a common problem many couples are having is that the fear of the coronavirus is making them hesitant to engage in more the more horizontal forms of calisthenics.  Sex is as unsocially distanced as you can possibly get. Fortunately, there’s an easy answer. Shower sex. Also, hot tub sex. Use lots of soap, and you’ll be fine.  

An occasional roll in the hay is good for your mental health, which is something we should try to maintain in our isolation.  Although you shouldn’t actually roll in the hay.  Even if the haystack is not infested with the novel coronavirus, it’s still kind of gross.  And surprisingly itchy.

This is sort of okay exercise.  It’s on the same level as yard work.  But noticeably more pleasant. How much you burn depends on how much of a stud you are, though.  If you can go all night, you might not need to work out at all the next day. If you last about as long as Al Bundy from Married With Children, you should probably do more yard work.  Besides, if that’s how long you last, your partner will probably kick you out of the house anyway.  Might as well mow the lawn as long as you’re outside.

Although, honestly,  you shouldn’t be in it for the calorie burn anyway.  If your method of getting your wife or husband to engage in potentially procreational transactions (or girlfriend or boyfriend, if you’re a fan of living in sin) is the possible health benefit, you won’t get anywhere anyway.

So I hope I’ve given a few ideas about how to stay healthy and sane.  There are ways to stay active without leaving the house. Clean the house, do some calisthenics, lift some weights, get the yard in order, and engage in some marital bliss.  Or sinful cohabitational shenanigans, if that’s your thing. Do what you need to do to stay in shape. Because it would be a damn shame if you survived the pandemic only to die of a heart attack.

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Staying Healthy During The #Coronavirus Quarantine

I’m staying home and self quarantining, like many Americans, and over a billion people around the world.  Frankly, I’m surprised it’s not more than that. I mean, maybe you don’t need to quarantine if you live in some remote part of Mongolia or Greenland or Svalbard or Antarctica.  But the rest of us should, if at all possible.

It’s fortunate for me that CPAs can work at home.  Although I could leave, because apparently my profession is “essential”.  I guess making sure people pay their taxes is critical. Read into that whatever you like.

Anyway, sitting around the house is a great way to get fat again, so I’m keeping up my exercise regimen and maintaining my diet as best I can.  And the good folks at Cronometer released a post a couple of days ago about what vitamins and minerals help our immune systems. The only problem is they didn’t say what kind of foods have these nutrients.  

So, I guess I will, by sharing the best sources I’ve found.  Naturally, this is not an all-inclusive list. It’s just based on what I’ve been eating for the past eight months since I started losing weight.

Vitamin A is first on the list.  It apparently helps strengthen skin, lung lining, and intestinal lining.  This keeps out nasty little things, like viruses. It also helps produce mucus to trap the little bugs.  Which is gross, but noticeably less gross than COVID-19.

And Vitamin A comes from things that make good sides for barbecue.  Like steamed carrots and collard greens. A helping of either of these not only has more than you need but way more.  And the greatest of all barbecue sides, mac and cheese, has a decent chunk too.  Clearly a higher power exists if mac and cheese helps fight off a virus. So if there’s a barbecue place delivering near you, now’s the time to take advantage.

Folate, AKA Vitamin B9, is another thing that helps.  Apparently it helps create DNA for new cells. Including cells like new white blood cells to fight off a pesky virus. Folate is readily available in everything you hated as a child.  Anything your mother plunked in front of you that grossed you out. Like asparagus, broccoli, and brussel sprouts. Of course, it’s also in stuff that didn’t make you hate your mother so much, like romaine lettuce.  

And it’s also present in the brown ambrosia of the gods, better known as coffee.  Of course, you have to drink it like a hardcore office worker (6-8 cups a day) to get a significant amount.  But any CPA can do this without batting an eye. It’s the only way to keep ourselves awake. Our work is a bit dull.

Vitamin C is also a key thing for a healthy immune system.  Like Vitamin A, it helps with skin health. And it’s an antioxidant.  Which means…I don’t know what it means. But according to people who do, antioxidants clean up crap (Free radicals, whatever the hell those are) that can damage your tissues.  Preventing that damage makes you less susceptible to infections. At least, I think that’s more or less what the Cronometer article said. I’m trying to translate the jargon as well as I can.  It’s probably a good thing I never went into medicine.

Any Florida Man like me knows that oranges, limes, and lemons have plenty of this.  Oranges (or just orange juice) are by far the best.  But if you’re one of those peculiar dieters that avoids fruits because of the sugar…well first off, you’re a weirdo.  You shouldn’t be afraid of fruit. But there are options for weirdos like this. Some of the aforementioned vegetables that made you hate your mom, such as broccoli and brussel sprouts, have a decent amount of this.  And bell peppers are not bad either.

Another thing you need is Vitamin D.  Vitamin D is heavily involved in the immune system and helps create proteins that attack viruses and bacteria.  If your body is at war with the novel coronavirus, then Vitamin D is the ammunition.

Fish and eggs have some, although the amount you’d need to get a day’s supply would be fattening and expensive.  So unless you plan to guzzle vitamin D fortified milk or other fortified foods or pop supplements (which is cheating), there’s really only one effective way to get this in sufficient quantity.  

Go outside.  In the sun. Thirty minutes in the sun should be enough.  Just don’t talk to anyone. Or at least keep a distance or a barrier between you.  Yelling at your neighbor from behind the fence is fine, for example.

Vitamin E is a big deal for your immune system too.  It’s also an antioxidant and heavily involved in the immune response.  I once wrote an entire piece about how to get this, since it can be a bit hard to come by.

It shows up in small amounts in lots of things, but only a few things have a lot of it.  The best sources I’ve found are almonds and sunflower seeds. A handful or so of either of these gets you half or more of your daily allowance.  That may depend on how big your hands are, though.

Another thing you need is omega 3 and 6 fatty acids.  Apparently, both are useful, but it’s important to keep them in proportion.  Omega-6 is something that shows up in a lot of things, especially various oils.  Cook your food in most cooking oils and you’ll get some. But omega-3 is harder to come by.

One good source is certain forms of fish.  Salmon, in particular, is a good source. And if you want to avoid sticker shock (Salmon is a bit pricey), you only need two ounces of salmon to get your omega-3 allowance for the day.  A pound can last a week and a day this way.

So add a couple of ounces to a surf and turf stir fry.  Although I suppose you could add it to other things too.  Stir fry is just about the only thing I know how to cook, though.  I really just randomly throw things in a pot and hope for the best.  But if I make sure I throw in two ounces of salmon, I’ll have plenty of omega-3.

Salmon isn’t the only option, though.  Almost any fish has some in it, although none are quite so good as salmon.  Or if you’re a vegan, you can go with flax seeds. Or if you’re a cheater, you can go with fish oil supplements or flaxseed oil supplements.

The last thing on the list is zinc.  It does lots of different things for your immune system.  And it’s easy to get. I get plenty of this by eating beef and turkey.  And sometimes I get it from oysters. But only when I feel like grossing my wife out.  She finds them repulsive, and I derive great joy and schadenfreude in watching the blood drain from her face when I eat them.

There’s one other food I should mention.  Spinach. A half-cup of cooked spinach has a nice bit of all of these, including a third of the daily folate and more than the total Vitamin A you need in a day.  I guess Popeye was on to something. Spinach may not actually give you the strength to fight off burly sailors, but it will help you fight off pandemics.  So it does give you kind of a superpower.

And there is one other option if you’re feeling lazy.  Fortified cereal. Normally, I’d call this cheating, but I’m willing to relax the rules for a viral apocalypse.  “Total” brand cereal is the best I’ve found. Total will give you all of the zinc you need, almost all of the folate and vitamin E you need, two-thirds of the C, and one-sixth of the A and D.  Start the day with this and you’ll have a hard time not getting enough of each.

So I’ve figured out the diet I need to avoid the creeping doom of the coronavirus.  I’ll have all the micro nutrients I need. I’ve stocked my fridge with plenty of the foods above.  Now I just need to worry about getting enough exercise. Without leaving the house. But I’ll save that for another piece.

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Exercise #4 – Vacationing Without Getting Fatter

Early in grad school, I had an opportunity to go to the Bahamas over Spring Break.  A friend of mine had a friend who’d graduated a few years earlier and worked security at one of the casinos in Freeport on Grand Bahama island.  So we got to go to the Caribbean on a budget. We flew in on a cheap flight and stayed with him for free.

While there, we had drinks and rich food at the casino.  We would then spend time dancing (badly, because I hate dancing), at the beach, or milling around the casino floor.  Our host also took us to some of the local hangouts that were off the beaten path. The other spring breakers didn’t know about these, so there were fewer obnoxious drunks there.  And there was all sorts of local cuisine that we feasted on.

Most of it seemed ordinary at first glance, such as chicken and mutton dishes, and even macaroni and cheese.  But the Bahamians take these ordinary dishes and beat them half to death with herbs and spices. So something that seems mundane is an explosion of flavor.

Our days consisted of walking (occasionally hitchhiking) back and forth from our host’s apartment to the casino, the beach, or various other sites, drinking and eating to excess, and then availing of ourselves of the various entertainments on the island.

After a week of good times, we made our way home.  When I returned home, I stepped on the scale with a feeling of trepidation.  And noticed that I’d lost about three pounds. I couldn’t figure it out at the time, but now that I’m tracking and measuring what I eat and how much I exercise, I know what happened.  Even though we were eating and drinking everything in sight, we were also moving around constantly and staying active. So that offset the effects of all of the debauchery.

Now, not every vacation involves activity.  Many “vacations” are just family visits, so it’s easy to get fatter.  Last Thanksgiving, I wrote a piece about the amount of overeating I do over the holidays.  Although that piece was primarily about not worrying about going nuts over the holidays, the side point of that was if all of our recreation time is sedentary, we’re in trouble.  All such trips tend to involve lots of drinking and eating of rich food. But on some, we can offset this just by staying in motion.

I tested this with a recent trip to Washington D.C.  My wife and I spent time in a gin bar, gulping various outlandish forms of the stuff.  Another night we found a whiskey bar, with literally every type of whiskey in the world, including places that we don’t normally associate with whiskey, such as Japan.  We ate massive lobsters at a Cajun place, fish and chips and bangers and mash at a British place, and we went to Nando’s.

Washington is one of the few places in America that has Nando’s, a chicken place of South African origin.  A visit to Nando’s involves consuming copious quantities of spicy, grilled chicken, with a variety of unhealthy sides and sauces.  And then chasing it with craft beers. Which, as I’ve pointed out in a previous piece, really aren’t good for you.

This and the other places we went to should have been a diet killer.  But they weren’t. Because between all of this we walked through the Washington Zoo, which is free because it’s a part of the Smithsonian.  We saw gorillas and bison and elephants and, of course, the pandas. We also took the Capitol tour, then walked through the underground tunnel to the National Archives afterward, then took a leisurely walk down the Washington mall afterward.  Amongst other things.

I think on an average day we walked for about four hours.  We had to walk because there was so much drinking involved.  That much walking translates into over 1,000 calories burned each day.  When you do that every day, you can eat almost anything you want.

It’s not that hard to get exercise while traveling.  Overseas excursions also offer opportunities for unintentional exercise.  A recent trip to Africa involved a ten-hour layover in Zurich. So I spent hours putzing around this unfamiliar town, seeing sights, eating Swiss chocolate, and walking it off.

And even on stops without the long layover, I burned calories just getting through the airport.  I seem to always have the misfortune to have connecting flights that are on the literal opposite side of the airport from the arriving flight.  And in some of the world’s more ridiculously huge airports (looking at you, Atlanta), getting from one terminal to the other is a trek of heroically epic proportions.

Not to mention that you’re encumbered the entire way.  You have to keep your bag on you at all times or risk having some overzealous airport guard snatch your unattended bag and detonate it as a possible bomb threat.

And not only did I have a carry-on, but my wife insisted that I buy liquor at every duty-free store on the way.  Since a trip to Africa from the United States routinely involves three or four legs, I was toting the equivalent of a mini-bar by the time I arrived.

So not only was I taking a lengthy expedition through the labyrinthine corridors of the world’s airports, but I was also doing it heavily encumbered.  Which is far more effective at burning calories than ordinary walking.

When we got there, our trip to Africa was much more sedentary than the trip to DC.  We spent a lot of time riding in a van on safari. But the calories burned just getting there more than offset the dietary largesse we engaged in when we got there.    

And there was a lot of largesse.  Very outlandish largesse.  The restaurants at the safari lodges have wildebeest and impala and warthog and crocodile (yes, I did it) and various other things on the menu.  You can see them on safari and then return to the lodge and eat their recently murdered cousins for dinner.

Of course, sometimes we prefer something that doesn’t require two days of flying.  One thing we can do is a cruise. There are plenty of liners that leave from the Port of Tampa.  To get there, we just drive across the bay, instead of flying around the world. So it’s very convenient for us to cruise the Caribbean or the Gulf.

As usual, this type of vacation involves a lot of drinking and eating of rich food.  By the way, I swear we’re not alcoholics, we just drink socially. A lot. But combine that with touring tropical islands, parasailing, riding banana boats, or just swimming in the boat’s pool, and we come back thinner than we left.  If you don’t count liver damage, a cruise makes you healthier.

Another option is theme parks.  I know, it’s kind of a “normie” thing, as the kids say.  But it’s convenient for us. Busch Gardens is right across Tampa Bay, and the various theme parks of Orlando are only a couple of hours away.  Disney, in particular, is a surprisingly good workout. For starters, the parking lots at Disney are so far from the park that they may not be in the same county.  And once you actually get to the park, you spend a fair amount of time taking evasive action.

This is because one thing you notice at Disney is about ninety million baby carriages.  New mothers and fathers charge all over the parks, pushing baby carriages at breakneck speed.  You would think they would be more careful, but they seem to know that people will get out of their way in deference to the newborns.  I used to be annoyed by the fact that they’re effectively using their babies as battering rams, but now I look on the bright side. I find myself dodging more often than an MMA fighter, so I’m sure it’s good exercise.

And we always engorge on the massive, mutant smoked turkey legs that are ubiquitous at these parks.  Turkey legs so big you could probably beat someone to death with them. Succulent, decadent things that come with over a thousand calories.  But it doesn’t matter, because we always burn more calories than we consume.

Now I don’t think everything at the amusement park is a calorie burner.  For example, riding roller coasters is probably not exercise. There’s no exercise option in Cronometer for “screaming at the top of your lungs”.  Not that I would ever do that. I’m talking about my wife, of course. But even if it isn’t exercise, just the time you spend walking is plenty.

So any vacation which involves actually doing stuff is fine.  There’s no need to feel guilty about splurging a bit when it comes to food and drink.   As long as you stay active, you’ll avoid any weight gain, and might even lose a pound or two.  If you’re just sitting on the couch at Mom’s house, that’s different. Just sitting on any couch is a good way to expand your waistline.

But if you’re constantly moving around in some exotic locale, some state or national park, or almost any other possible destination, you’ll have no trouble keeping the weight off.  So eat whatever you want and have a good time. Just make sure you work it off by seeing the sights and enjoying the amenities.

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Bad Habits #3 – Desserts: Sugar and Spice and…Everything That Causes Obesity and Diabetes

A couple of years ago my wife and I got to witness one of my best friends from college become an American citizen.  We’d been pals since grad school, and finally, after nearly a decade living, going to school, and then working in the United States, she took the oath of citizenship.

To celebrate, we went to The Cheesecake Factory.  I know what you might be thinking. Isn’t The Cheesecake Factory a little ordinary for this kind of celebration?  It is, but she’s a fellow accountant, and we’re known to be frugal, penny-pinching types, if not outright miserly skinflints.  So going to a fancy-schmancy place was out of the question.

I don’t remember the meal that much.  I guess the food must not have all that impressive.  But I remember the cheesecake. Oh, the cheesecake. Lined up and proudly displayed near the front entrance.  A cornucopia of delectables. A veritable smorgasbord of delight.

And then I looked at the menu next to the cheesecakes and I saw the calories listed next to each flavor.  And did a double-take. And a triple-take. One slice of this stuff was anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 calories.  Meaning one slice is probably all you should eat in one day. Unless you just eat lettuce for the rest of the day.

We all went ahead and got a slice.  We were celebrating, after all. I can’t remember which kind I got, but it involved caramel and whipped cream and all sorts of other awesome unhealthiness.  We returned to my friend’s house, where I had a bite or two. I then told myself I would spread the cheesecake out over the next week. But I didn’t. After my wife and I returned home, I put it in the fridge and tried not to think about it. But the siren’s call of the cheesecake drew me to it, and I promptly ate the rest.

The cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory is extraordinary.  Unbelievable. But it’s really not good for you at all. It was at this moment that I realized just how unrealistic the CBS show The Big Bang Theory was.  I mean, it’s unrealistic for a lot of reasons (it’s a work of fiction) but one thing in particular is obviously inaccurate.  The assorted nerds in that show eat regularly at The Cheesecake Factory. But if anyone did that in real life, they would all be morbidly, mind-blowingly obese.

I don’t eat dessert-type stuff regularly, but I do occasionally get it at a potluck, a cookout, or at work.  Especially at work. As I enter the busiest time of year for a CPA, I can expect regular deliveries of sweets and so forth to the little firm I work for.  Mostly from various lawyers we work with around town.  

I’ve occasionally suspected that they do this to fatten us up so we can’t stand, and are forced to sit behind our desks, grinding out work for them.  You’ve got to watch out for those shady lawyer types. They always have a hidden agenda.

In the past, I inevitably succumbed to the temptations of these desserts, which beckoned to me seductively in the breakroom every time I went for a cup of coffee.  Which can be once or twice an hour. My work is dull, so I need lots of coffee to avoid falling asleep. Once I started using the Cronometer app, I realized just what I was doing to myself by grazing on these decadent distractions.

Now, desserts aren’t the worst thing.  Alcohol probably is, as I mentioned in a previous piece.  Some desserts involve a certain amount of fruit and grain, so they do have some nutritional value.  Unfortunately, these nutrients are frequently buried in a minefield of processed sugar, making them rarely worth it.

Let’s start with the most common dessert I see sitting in the breakroom.  Doughnuts. This is usually what we get from a client who doesn’t like us enough to get us something less ordinary or just suffers from decision fatigue when getting us food and goes for the most basic option.  This is the dessert equivalent of getting a gift card.

Your typical glazed doughnut carries about 250 calories and is heavy on saturated fat.  It has a decent chunk of B vitamins and a smattering of minerals in it. And if you get the ones that are frosted or have nuts on them, go ahead and add another hundred or so calories.  This may not seem like that much, but that’s only if you have one.  Who can ever just have one?  They’re lying there in the breakroom.  Calling out to you. Tempting you to commit dietary infidelity and come live in sin with them.  Just a couple can make a healthy day unhealthy.

Every now and then the shady lawyers will switch it up and give us muffins and danishes.  Which are what they give us when they’re feeling unimaginative, but realized that they gave us doughnuts three weeks in a row and are worried we might realize how little they care about us.  

This is not an improvement over doughnuts.  Danishes and muffins are roughly the same as doughnuts in terms of calories, nutrients, and saturated fat.  Muffins are actually worse, in a way. I remember a friend of mine (the same one I mentioned earlier, as it happens) serving me a muffin when we were studying at her house in college.  I went to put some butter on it, and she looked horrified. She asked me if it was too dry. I gave her a confused look and said no. So she asked me why I was putting butter on it then, to which I gave her an even more confused look.

It’s a muffin, after all.  Who doesn’t put butter on a muffin?  Failing to do so is an affront to all that is good and decent and right.  Peak blasphemy. Unfortunately, slapping on some butter will add about a hundred calories and very little else.  But to not do so would be to disgrace my entire ancestry. Butter is necessary, and this makes muffins the worst of the dessert options that people who don’t actually like you might give as a gift.

Usually about three weeks into tax season, we’ll start getting cookies.  This is good, in a sense, because the resultant sugar rush can offset the creeping fatigue and malaise that comes with working long hours being an accessory to government wealth confiscation.  But now that I’m actually watching what I eat, I looked up what cookies do to you.

Turns out, cookies aren’t that bad.  One normal-sized chocolate chip cookie is about 75 calories and the same goes for sugar cookies.  Oatmeal raisin cookies are, unsurprisingly, better at about 65 calories. But there’s a problem. Eating oatmeal raisin cookies is safe and boring and kind of weird.  It’s like taking your cousin to prom. I’m not going to look like a weirdo just to save ten calories.

Anyhow, there’s a reason cookies are healthier.  They’re smaller. That’s it. That’s the only reason.  Three cookies are about the same size as one doughnut. And if you eat that many, you’re getting about the same number of calories, nutrients, and saturated fats as a donut.  And I don’t know what kind of degenerate only eats one cookie, but I’m not that guy. So it turns out, cookies aren’t that great for you. Go figure.

Sometimes the more pretentious lawyers send us some exotic delight.  I remember getting a baklava one time. For those of you who don’t know, baklava is a Turkish (well technically Ottoman) dessert.  Layers of dough and nuts covered in syrup or honey.  Kind of like having pancakes for dessert. It’s sublime.  And in no way healthy. One tiny two by two slice of this has over 350 calories.  Small wonder that nearly a third of the Turks are obese. Not that Americans can judge.

Naturally, we occasionally get pies.  Usually not from the unholy attorneys.  These come from happy clients. In the past, I’ve had difficulty resisting these as well.  So I looked up what they do to me a while back.

Cherry pie must be healthy, right?  It has fruit in it. A slice has 250 calories. But nutrient wise, it’s not all that different from the doughnuts.  Other pies are worse. The Floridian delicacy known as key lime pie brings 400. Lemon meringue brings 350. My wife’s best dish ever, banoffee pie (a portmanteau of bananas and toffee, the two primary ingredients) has 400.  My father’s favorite, pecan pie, has 525. Although those pecans make it a bit more nutrient-dense than this other stuff, so you’re not just getting empty calories. Long story short, pies are a great way to get fat.

There’s another pitfall of tax season that doesn’t come from the lawyers or the clients.  There are a fair number of birthdays in the office in these months. This is because their accountant parents had sex with each other during their post-April 15th celebrations.  Resulting in a large number of January and February births. Do the math.

This means cake.  Lots of cake. Not only does the office buy cake for the birthday boys and girls, but the newly aged people in the office also tend to bring their cakes from their celebrations with their families.  It’s probably how many of them stay skinny. They foist their excess calories on us in an attempt to avoid eating it themselves.

When I tried looking up cake in the Cronometer app, it didn’t look that bad.  Maybe 200-300 calories per slice. But then I realized one of the limitations of this app.  The cake options had no frosting. Which is strange. Why would there be no “Cake with frosting” option?  What kind of raving lunatic eats cake with no frosting? Well, except pound cake. That’s different. But I’m talking about birthday cake.

Proper birthday cakes require frosting.  Unless you have no soul. Unfortunately, once we add the frosting, this can double or triple the calories.  And cake is about the same as every other dessert I’ve been talking about in terms of nutrients. So, cake is worse than all of them.  Way worse.

After researching all of this, I felt obligated to research my favorite dessert.  The Georgia classic: peach cobbler. It’s the single greatest dessert in the history of humanity.  All other desserts are hapless pretenders in its august presence. Don’t @ me.  

Sadly, it has about 500 calories per serving.  And if you slap a scoop of ice cream on top, which everyone who isn’t an ungodly heretic naturally does, that’ll add a decent chunk of calories.  The ice cream on top can make it the worst dessert ever. At least for your health. But this got me thinking. I wondered how many calories ice cream had by itself.

Fairly ordinary ice cream has about 275 calories per cup.  And if you get a more exotic flavor like, say, moose tracks, it jumps to 350 or so per cup.  Not that I would ever eat moose tracks. The name is gross. When I see the chunks of fudge and peanut butter cups in it I think “What is it that a moose leaves in its tracks that this is supposed to represent?”  The answer is…nothing normal human beings should want to eat.

Ice cream’s pretentious Italian cousin, gelato, has about 300 calories per cup.  Meanwhile, the equally pretentious yuppie cousin of ice cream, frozen yogurt, only has about 200 calories per cup. Of course, these are just the standard flavors.  If you start adding caramel and other sinful ingredients, it gets worse.

There is an upside to these three, though.  They are actually healthier than the other dessert options.  They are generally lower in calories, and they come with a fair amount of calcium because they’re dairy products.

But none of these is something we should spend a lot of time eating.  Here’s the real problem. When I eat any of these, I don’t feel full for long.  One thing I’ve learned in the process of losing weight is to be mindful of things that I eat which keep me feeling full for a long time.  Any meal or snack that doesn’t involve a decent amount of meat or grain usually doesn’t cut it.

If I snack on the desserts that the servants of darkness (lawyers) send my way, I’ll be hungry again in under an hour, and then snag another one when I go for another cup of coffee.  Which I do often. Grazing on two or three desserts in the breakroom can add a whole meal’s worth of calories (or more) to my diet. But now that I know the cost, I can take a pass. I can ignore the bewitching pull of these sugary harbingers of diabetes.

Now, I don’t think it’s good to completely dump all bad habits.  I think if your diet is too austere, you’ll risk failure. That’s why when I wrote a previous piece on alcohol, I explained that I limited it but haven’t eliminated it.  I have the same policy on dessert.  

Occasionally enjoying something unhealthy is a part of enjoying life.  The idea that I can never eat anything remotely sinful for the rest of my life is just depressing.  Since I now know what the consequences are, I just save these for special occasions.

Even if occasionally engaging in a little dessert debauchery does shorten my life, I remember the wise words that Woody Allen once said: “You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”.  Perhaps his only wise words, because he’s apparently kind of a creep. But he has a point. An occasional splurge reminds us we’re alive.

So, enjoy your dessert occasionally.  Live life. And try the cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory at least once.  It’s totally worth it. Just don’t do it every night, or you’ll end up as fat as the characters on the Big Bang Theory totally should have been if they’d eaten there as often as they did.

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Good Habits #3 – Just Get Nuts With The Diet

As of this writing, I’ve lost 40 pounds. Using the Cronometer app to count calories is working. The most satisfying part of my last doctor’s appointment was watching the nurse slowly nudge the weight on the scale from my weight at the previous appointment to my current weight. As well as relishing the look of shock and envy she gave me when the scale finally tipped. I was down about 25 pounds from the previous appointment.

The plan for my diet was simple. Try to eat 500 fewer calories than I burn and get over 100% of the daily allowance of all of the “micro-nutrients.”. Also known as vitamins and minerals. It worked because in order to get all of the nutrients I had to eat more vegetables and assorted “healthier” things. The kind of things that made me hate my mother when she forced me to eat them. This naturally translated into fewer calories.

After a few weeks, I became curious as to what these “micro-nutrients” were. Well, not the minerals. That’s pretty self-explanatory once you’ve had high school chemistry. But I had no idea what “vitamins” were.

It turns out, vitamins are certain types of organic compounds. They were discovered in 1912 by the Polish scientist Casamir Funk. Which is the coolest name ever. When your real name can also be your hip-hop name, your parents have blessed you. Sadly, because he lived in the early jazz age, Dr. Funk (also a great hip-hop name, which has almost certainly been taken by now), never had the opportunity to take advantage of this blessing.

But I digress. Vitamins are necessary for various metabolic needs in your body. Your body and certain microbes in your body produce some of them, but there are a few that are only available through food. Or supplements or fortified foods, but that’s always felt like cheating to me. Some are naturally a part of various plants and meats. Others are produced only by microbes living in these foods. Which is kind of gross, since that basically means that some vitamins are just bacteria poop.

Many are easy to get. Want some vitamin A? Eat a helping of carrots and you’ll get more than enough. Want B vitamins? Almost any meat will have it, especially vitamin B12, which is pretty much only in meat. Although strictly speaking this is one of the ones that bacteria poop out. So it’s not in the meat, it’s in the things living in the meat. It just so happens that those bacteria mostly only live in animals, not in plants. Although some types of seaweed have it, which is good news for the hoity-toity sushi eaters.

Moving on. Vitamin C is in almost any citrus fruit, which is good news for me since those are fairly plentiful in Florida. Want vitamin D? Spend half an hour in the sun and you’ll get plenty. Unless you live in the frigid northern wastelands above the Mason-Dixon line where the sunlight is not so intense. In that case, you might need to eat some fish to get Vitamin D. 

These aren’t the only micro-nutrients that are easy to come by. Want vitamin K? Eat something leafy, like collard greens. Want calcium? Have some dairy. Want potassium? Have a banana. Of course, there are plenty of other sources for all of these things, but these are some of the good ones I’ve found.

I’ve been pretty good about getting most vitamins and minerals in my diet, now that I can track which foods have what nutrients in the Cronometer app. But sometimes I struggle to get all of them. Two that I come up short on regularly are vitamin E and magnesium. The problem is that these show up in lots of foods, but not necessarily in huge quantities. It’s hard to find just one thing that provides your recommended daily allowance for either of these. Apart from supplements or fortified foods. Which is totally cheating.

So what do these do? According to the National Institutes of Health, they do… a variety of things in the body that can only be adequately described with medical jargon that has entirely too many syllables. But here are a few things (not an all-inclusive list) that happen when you don’t get enough.

Not enough vitamin E can affect your peripheral nervous system, causing nerve and muscle damage. It can also weaken your immune system. Not enough magnesium can contribute to depression and anxiety. So, not getting enough of these can make me weaker, sicker, and crazy. Although when it comes to “crazy”, that ship may have already sailed for me. Anyway, I did some research and found a few options for obtaining both.

One decent source of vitamin E that I’ve found is avocado. One avocado will bring about 16% of the RDA. And if you slap it on some whole wheat bread, it’s even better. The whole wheat bread has a decent chunk of vitamin E, and some magnesium too. Who knew that these weirdo hipster kids were on to something with their avocado toast? Another, somewhat more mundane source, is…green stuff. Collards, spinach, broccoli, and so forth. That’s the stuff I mentioned earlier that made you hate Mom when she fed it to you.

And as for magnesium? The green stuff that engenders feelings of wrath and enmity against she who birthed you also have a fair amount. And many other things that have it are surprisingly ordinary stuff has a fair amount. One potato will get you about 10% of the RDA. A cup of brown rice will get you about 20%. White rice is only 5%, though, so maybe I’ll pass on that forever.

And if you’re into the fancy-schmancy Whole Foods food, the newfound yuppie super food known as quinoa is not bad. A cup of this will get you nearly a third of the RDA for magnesium, and a decent chunk of vitamin E, among many other things.

But these foods only get you part of the way there. And some of them have a fair number of calories. I’d have to eat six avocados to get a day’s worth of vitamin E, which is about 1200–1300 calories. And three cups of quinoa (which would nearly fulfill the magnesium RDA) would bring in about 700 calories.

I needed to find something that had these nutrients in pretty large quantities, but without so many calories. And the answer was…nuts. I avoided nuts for a long time since a can of nuts is like a bag of potato chips to me. Meaning that if there’s one nearby, I tend to start eating and not stop until it’s empty. Which is probably one of the ways I got fat in the first place. So a little discipline is required. If I limit myself to enough nuts to fill a small Dixie cup (about 28 nuts) I can get the nutrients without getting so many calories.

A Dixie cup of the most common nut, peanuts, will bring in about 10% of the magnesium and maybe 12% of the vitamin E in this quantity. So this isn’t a great option, although it does have all sorts of other benefits. And, yes, I do know that a peanut isn’t actually a nut. Tell that to the schmucks who keep putting them in the snack aisle next to all of the other nuts. There’s no need to snootily remind me that they’re actually legumes. Go back to watching The Big Bang Theory, nerds. Although I guess a guy who works as a CPA has no business calling other people nerds.

But I digress. Again. Certain actual nuts are better than peanuts. A Dixie cup of cashews will bring in about a third of the magnesium RDA, and about 250 calories. The same number of almonds will bring in half of the vitamin E RDA, at about 200 calories.

And if you can find them, there are certain types of seeds that are better, if slightly more exotic choices. A quarter cup of pumpkin seeds will bring in about 40% of the RDA for magnesium. The same amount of sunflower seeds will bring in a quarter of the day’s magnesium and two-thirds of the day’s vitamin E. Both come at the low cost of only 170 calories per quarter cup. Of course, this assumes you can actually find them. Normal grocery stores don’t have this bourgeois stuff.

One additional advantage of nuts and seeds is that they’re good at staving off those mid-afternoon hunger pangs. Or, if you’re like me, hanger pangs. I’m unusually cranky when I’m hungry, and a handful of nuts will tide me over until dinner.

So, I worked vitamin E and magnesium into my diet using all of these alternatives. Grains and greens get me part of the way there, and now I supplement my diet with certain types of nuts and seeds to put me over the goal. Now I’m getting over 100% of everything. I feel healthier than ever and the weight is still coming off. Not sure it made me less crazy, though.

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Exercise #3 – How Is That Even Exercise?

Oftentimes, when I go home to visit my parents, I take a long nap in front of the TV after lunch.  This may be in part due to the nearly euphoric food coma that comes from my mother’s southern cooking.  But primarily, this is because my dad likes to watch golf after lunch.

Now I enjoy playing golf, frequently with my dad.  It’s a favorite pastime of his. But I’ve never understood watching golf.  It’s intolerably dull.  So my mother’s cooking combined with my dad’s golf watching inevitably knocks me unconscious.

Certain sports just weren’t meant for watching.  These include golf, bowling, bocce, horseshoes, and especially the ludicrous sport of curling.  This latter travesty (like golf, as it happens) was apparently an invention of my Scottish ancestors, and ranks amongst their most ridiculous inventions, right up there with bagpipes and haggis.  Any sport that involves a lot of sweeping can’t even be that exciting to play, much less watch.

But I digress.  In one recent visit, before I nodded off after lunch, I noticed something that I should have noticed earlier.  There were no fat golfers. Which is surprising, since the level of effort that goes into golf seems so minor that many of us think it only barely counts as a sport.  But take one look at almost any current PGA golfer and you’ll see that they all appear to be rail thin.

I remember one of my posher British pals telling me that Princess Anne (Queen Elizabeth’s only daughter and possibly least scandal-ridden child) once described golf as “an arduous way to go for a walk.”.  But walking is exercise, so maybe golf is pretty good exercise too.

So I tried plugging an hour’s worth of golfing (using a golf cart) into the Cronometer app.  The calorie burn is 260 calories per hour. This is slightly less than walking (which is about 340 per hour) and way less than running.  But I rarely walk or run for more than an hour.  When I golf, it lasts much longer.

It typically takes me about four hours to play eighteen holes of golf.  That may seem a bit longer than average, but…I suck at golf. I like it, but I suck.  I spend a lot of time swimming through the rough looking for lost balls. And, yes, I said swimming.  Because in Florida, the rough is mostly just swamp.  The upside of this is the swimming unloads some extra calories.  Especially if I have to outswim a hungry alligator.

The point is, a round of golf will expend over a thousand calories.  Sure, it’s not the most efficient way to get in shape. But I play golf to hang out and have fun with friends and family, so I don’t mind that it takes all afternoon.  And it just so happens that I get a good chunk of exercise doing it. As long as I don’t ruin it by buying beers from the cart girls every other hole.

In a previous piece, I wrote about how I was exercising unintentionally during college when I traipsed across campus, back and forth between classes.  So I started to wonder how some of my other hobbies and activities might also be much more beneficial than I realized.

I started thinking about some of my various slacker entertainments.  One that came to mind was pool. I spent a lot of time in high school circling a pool table with my lowlife friends.  Maybe I had actually been relieving myself of calories the whole time.  

But I couldn’t find it in the Cronometer app, because the creators are Canadian.  They still use that weirdo version of English that…actual English people use. So, I had to put in “billiards”.  This turned out to be a 150 calorie per hour task. Which makes sense, because you spend a lot of time on your feet.  

The problem is one beer per hour (and I usually have more than one when playing pool), can eliminate any positive effects.  When play I pool with a bunch of rednecks (who are really the only people who play pool in the southeastern United States), downing a few pitchers of brew is not that uncommon.  So this activity is probably a wash, at best.

Then I started to wonder about the other redneck amusements my father introduced me to when I was younger.  Such as hunting and fishing. It’s a common stereotype that rednecks are fat, beer-bellied, sweaty dudes. That’s frequently true of the ones playing pool.  But this is often not true in general. And it’s because their weekend recreations are actually surprisingly healthy pursuits.  

Fishing is something I see all the time.  When you live one hundred yards from Tampa Bay, you’re going to bump into an occasional fisherman standing on a sea wall with a line in the bay.  The hardcore types put on waders and march out into the bay for the big fish. It seems like a slacker sport, but you do actually get some good from it.  

Fishing while sitting will go through 100 calories an hour.  Fishing while standing will do away with 250 or so per hour. This may not seem like much, but if you fish all afternoon like a hardcore hillbilly, it’s going to be significant.  And the hardcore guys in waders? They burn over 500 an hour. Fighting to keep your balance against the waves while swinging a rod around is pretty good exercise.

And what about tramping around in the woods seeking furry animals to turn into food?  Hunting is a pretty good way to work off some fat. I once went bird hunting with my dad and brother.  It was basically hiking with an occasional potshot at a dove. We missed every time and ultimately took our frustrations out on empty beer cans some rednecks left lying in the woods.   It seemed like a waste of an afternoon, but I now know that this eats up upwards of 250 calories an hour, depending on how much time you spend walking.

Now deer hunting (the gold standard of good old boy sports) doesn’t do much for you.  You mostly spend time on a stand waiting to shoot Bambi in the face. Actually, that’s not true.  You shoot Bambi’s parents in the face.  You’re supposed to wait for Bambi to grow up before converting him into venison.  Also, you’re not supposed to shoot him in the face, or else you can’t hang his head on your wall.

But even spending an hour in a deer stand will do the same amount of good as an hour of pool.  And unlike pool, there’s no beer involved if I hunt. I find it wisest not to get hammered until after I put the guns down.  And the calorie usage goes up if you spend time walking through the woods, setting up in different spots.  And if you’re inclined to drag the corpse back to the truck, that’ll take away about 1000 calories per hour.

If you’re not inclined to shoot living things and prefer to murder clay disks, that’ll be about the same as standing in a deer stand.  Standing and shooting, combined with walking from one station to the next, still counts as exercise. And skeet shooting usually takes several hours, too, so those calories will add up.

But Florida isn’t a state of just rednecks.  All sorts of fancy folk retire here from all over.  So what about the bourgeois diversions that some of them participate in?  I see plenty of hoity-toity types riding around on horses. And I found out that horseback riding drains nearly 500 calories an hour.  You may think you’re just planted on your posterior, but the horse is moving, and you have to move with him to stay seated. Just keeping your balance costs calories. 

And even balancing yourself on a steel horse (which is a motorcycle for non-Bon Jovi fans) is exercise.  It’s about half as good as horseback riding. I’ve seen plenty of retired people buying a motorcycle for a post midlife crisis.  Apparently, it does them some good.

And another pastime of the retired bluehairs is shuffleboard.  Shuffleboard will get rid of about 200 calories per hour. This surprised me a bit, but I’ve noticed that the retired people I see around town are not obese.  They must be on to something.

Many of the “sports” like this which one would think do nothing for you are decent exercise.  Both bowling and the laughable sweeping sport of curling burn 300 per hour. The absurd game of old Italian men (bocce) burns about 250 per hour.  Even tossing horseshoes around burns 200 per hour. Which seems really odd, since you mostly just stand about.

Then it occurred to me that the exercise you get from these things is in part about the standing.  Just standing for an hour burns 200 calories. This explains a lot about how I stayed thin as a young man.  Both my wife and I worked in fast food for a time when we were kids. And even though we ate the crap we were selling, being on your feet for 6-8 hours in a shift offsets this.  We actually lost weight in those days.

By the way, here’s a party pro-tip: This is also an excuse to drink too much at parties.  If you stay on your feet at a party, you’ll work off the beers almost as quickly as you consume them.  Just make sure you’re not the only one standing, or else you’ll weird people out.

I feel obligated to note that some of the exercise figures in Cronometer may not be 100% accurate.  They appear to be rough averages of the number of calories used during an activity. Also, the benefit appears to vary a bit with your weight and sex.  But I’ve done many of these things as I’ve lost weight. They can’t be that far off, or else I wouldn’t be shrinking.  

All of this reminded me of some health advice I read years ago.  It said people who are healthy don’t necessarily spend hours in the gym.  It just said stay they active. We don’t always realize that we’re getting some exercise, even during our off time.  The secret is not to train for marathons or spend hours picking up and putting down heavy things. Although that certainly works.  The trick is to just reduce the time spent on the couch.  

Spend a little more of your leisure time moving around and doing almost anything on your feet.  Spend some time playing outdoor games, even seemingly low-intensity ones, instead of video games.  Do a little of this every day, and you’ll be on your way to weight loss.

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Bad Habits #2 – Libations: Why Your College Years Are The Worst Years of Your Life.

As I mentioned in my last piece, I, like many people, gained about fifteen pounds in my first year of college.  This was mostly imbibed in liquid barley/hops form. Now that I’ve started watching what I eat and tracking the calories in Cronometer, I’m stunned at just how many calories one night of college carousing must have bestowed upon me.

When I got carried away with my college pals, we’d consume a half dozen to a dozen beers (each) sometimes and then end up with “munchies”.  Alcohol is one of the few things you can consume and feel hungrier.

Then we’d end up at some all-night diner like Denny’s or Waffle House or IHOP engorging on steak and eggs and bacon and waffles and pancakes and coffee.  All the coffee. This pretty much doubled or tripled the calorie payload.

We did gain some weight, but it wasn’t out of control, by some miracle.  Actually, not a miracle, as I detailed in my last piece. But we were noticeably beefier than our stoner compatriots in the diners.  They had munchies as well, but hadn’t acquired the condition by sucking down a high-calorie liquid diet.

Alcohol can seriously add to the waistline.  I’ve always been amazed at how people who are portrayed as alcoholics on TV and in the movies are so ridiculously skinny.  Alcoholics in real life are blimps. Their protruding lower abdomens are not called “beer bellies” for nothing. 

Unless they only eat vegetables.  I guess there may be a few vegan drunks who are still skinny.  But anyone who eats anything more than just fruits and vegetables can easily ruin their diet with too much alcohol.  The number of calories you get from this much drinking is just astonishing.

The most ‘Merican of all ‘Merica beers (because it’s produced by a company that was founded by a German immigrant which was later bought by a Belgian/Brazilian company), Budweiser, has about 150 calories.  This means an entire six-pack (something done frequently in college…by the lightweights) is 900 calories. That’s the rough equivalent of a very large meal. Such as, two hamburgers. Or a very large steak.  Or about a third of a fried chicken.

There’s a reason we’re told to limit alcohol intake, apart from the liver-death-followed-by-death-death reason.  These can bring serious calories.  Unless we drink weak stuff. Wimp beers (light beers) bring about 125 each.  Beer flavored water (ultra-light beers) still have about 90. One or two of either of these is fine (if we’re okay with the deserved low self-esteem that comes with drinking this swill), but college binge drinking still makes these add up.

But the biggest offenders are the craft beers.  I’ve noticed in my town that microbreweries are popping up everywhere.  And this is apparently a national trend. Some of their beers, especially the IPAs, have extra calories.  These can weigh in from 175 to 225, with some extreme varieties carrying as much as 400.

Even two of these can turn a healthy day unhealthy.  And if you’re guzzling these at a party, they can kill a whole week’s worth of good behavior as far as your diet is concerned.  And lead to much more regrettable behavior, resulting in a generous dose of shame to go with your hangover the next day.

And there are some people for whom craft beer isn’t snobby enough.  Now they drink hard cider and mead, the former of which I thought was the choice of posh British elites and the latter of which I thought went out of style with the Vikings.  

Cider has 180 calories, which puts it in craft beer territory as far as potential weight gain goes.  Mead has 400 calories, so unless you plan to burn those calories by constantly raiding the British coast or Northern France as the Northmen who created it did, steer clear.

And as for the drinks that make women walk right past you at the bar (wine coolers and hard lemonade) these tend to fall in the craft beer range as well.  There’s no point in sacrificing my manhood and my health when I can just sacrifice my health with normal beer.

On the other hand, those newfangled alcoholic fizzy water drinks have relatively few calories.  They have only 100 or so, but there is a problem. They wind you up. The only time I drank (too many of) these, I couldn’t sleep.  I was amped up until about three in the morning.

I don’t have direct experience in this, but I’m told by people who do (i.e. various stand-up comedians I’m a fan of) that hammered and hyper is what happens when you mix cocaine and alcohol.  So if you ever want that experience without inevitably condemning yourself to rehab, chug some White Claw. Otherwise, don’t bother.

You might be wondering, how is it that we didn’t have an obesity epidemic in the 19th century, when Americans were all raging alcoholics?  The answer is, we worked for a living back then and burned off the calories. And probably died of cirrhosis before we had a chance to get fat.

Alcohol, as a rule, is the emptiest of all calories.  Almost no alcoholic drink has any nutritional value. Except for wine, which has a decent amount of nutrients with only about 125 calories per glass.  And boogie brunch cocktails have some nutritional value.  It comes from their non-alcoholic bits, though.  Better to drink fruit juice and vegetable juice without the alcohol instead of a Mimosa or a Bloody Mary.

Fortunately, the most awesome varieties of alcohol are the lowest in calories.  Liquor is less terrible than most other options, typically between 90 and 100 per shot.  Although if you mix it into cocktails, as many do, it gets worse. An Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Cosmopolitan, or even a simple Gin and Tonic has calories in the craft beer to mead range.  

Drinking liquor to excess (a fifth every day or two) is what killed a lot of cowboys in the 19th century.  But If you sip it nice and slowly, like you’re supposed to, it’s the healthiest option. My preference is the most ‘Merican of all ‘Merica beverages, the national drink of the United States, the most patriotic libation there is: Bourbon.  Sipping a couple of these over a couple of hours will leave you happy and low-cal.

And one of my local microbreweries makes a light IPA (yes, it’s an actual thing) with only 118 calories.  So I can have low-calorie beer without turning in my man card. I can feel snooty and superior as well, since I’m drinking a craft beer and not the weak, watery low-brow beers preferred by the great masses of the unwashed.

I’m not saying you should stop drinking.  Unless you’re truly an alcoholic, in which case you should totally stop drinking.  I’m convinced that one of the things that ruins weight loss programs is when people feel obligated to give up too many of the things they love.  Eventually, the urge to cheat overwhelms even the strongest will.  

The trick is to keep doing what you love, but be mindful of the consequences, moderate your intake, and choose lower calorie options when possible.  And measuring this regularly with an app like Cronometer helps. You’ll think twice before having another drink. Although if you occasionally go nuts at a party, that’s fine.  You can make up for it after you’ve recovered from the pain and remorse the next day.

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Exercise #2 – The Commute: How To Lose Weight While Avoiding Annoying People

Like many people, I often wonder why it was so easy to keep the weight off when I was younger.  Like most young people, at least in my generation, I ate the worst crap I could get my hands on (usually to avoid cooking) and didn’t seem to gain a pound.  Until college, where I gained some beer pounds, like most college noobs. The dreaded “Freshman Fifteen”. But even that weight seemed to gradually disappear.

Now some of this is physiological.  We’re told it’s harder to keep the weight off as we age.  I’m sure that’s partially true. But I also think that some of us use that as an excuse to explain our expanding waistlines as we age.  In fact, I know we do.

This is because one of my old bosses at my previous job was skinny as a rail, with a wiry, muscular build, and had an energy level higher than a guy who was thirty years younger.  Because I was thirty years younger and was practically comatose compared to this guy.  And this was still true when I bumped into him eight years after I left that job.  If he could still do it after qualifying for Medicare and Social Security, I had no excuse.

Part of his regimen was racquetball, but he also walked two miles to and from work every day.  That walking alone was enough to burn off considerable weight. It reminded me of a more extreme case my father told me about.

Just a few months after I was born, my father was posted in Korea for a year.  The rest of us moved to Georgia that year. Stuff like this happens when you’re an army brat.  Anyway, during his tour, which frequently consisted of fourteen-hour days, he was obliged to walk up and down a hill frequently, running errands between one office and another.  This was in addition to his early morning physical training that everyone in the army does.

He was doing so much walking, that his problem became keeping weight on, not keeping it off.  And it occurred to me that this is what helped me keep the weight off in college and high school.  I wasn’t walking quite so far and never ran around in heavy combat gear. But I did criss-cross campus several times a day, often laden with a heavy backpack, especially in college.

Often, I was obligated to carry a calculus book, a physics book, or West’s Business Law, or all three on my treks across academia.  All of these weigh about the same as a gold ingot. The big kind that they have at Fort Knox, not the tiny ones you buy from shady dealers who advertise on late-night cable.  And they cost about the same, except with noticeably lower resale value. This translated into miles of walking each day, while burdened with the crushing weight of these texts.  Carrying them was nearly as tiring as reading them. Nearly.

Once I graduated and spent most of my time sitting behind a desk, this daily activity disappeared.  Walking back and forth between my desk and the coffee machine isn’t the same as walking back and forth from class to class.  So the waist began to expand. But as I mentioned in my last piece on exercise, one of my current bosses rode his bike to work every day, so there was a way to put exercise into the otherwise sedentary life of a CPA.

I live seven miles from work.  This translates into a thirty-minute ride each way.  Plug this into the Cronometer app and you’ll see that this is just over 700 calories burned.  And there were other benefits to taking this approach.

Traffic is bad in my city, especially along my commute route.  So it takes fifteen minutes to drive. And I normally exercise at least half an hour when I get home.  But if I ride my bike, the commute time is doubled, and I’m getting an entire hour of exercise. So instead of commuting for thirty minutes and exercising for thirty minutes, I spend an hour commuting and exercising at the same time.  The same amount of time gave me twice the exercise.

And the second benefit was for my mood.  The traffic isn’t bad because there is a lot of it.  The traffic is bad because there are young lunatics all over the road.  And they zip in and out of elderly retirees who don’t seem to realize that their cars can move faster than a golf cart.  So I’m usually a basket case by the time I weave through this frustrating, whirling tempest of the crazy and the not-crazy-enough.

But not when I’m biking.  My city has nice, wide sidewalks for most of my ride home.  And Google maps is pretty good about finding a route that takes you through quiet neighborhoods and avoids the major thoroughfares.  So when I get home I’m in a much better mood than I would be after driving. And my day’s exercise is done, so I can just relax. Netflix and chill, which, depending on how you interpret that, can be its own form of cardio.

I know what some of you may be thinking, if you’ve read my previous pieces.  I live in Florida. If I’m biking in Florida, don’t I arrive at work a hot, sweaty, stinky mess?  Well, not if I leave early enough. Before nine in the morning, Florida is merely simmering. The temperature goes to bake, and then to broil, much later in the day.

Besides, if I stink a little, it just means people are less likely to come and bother me.  I don’t want people to bother me. Like most CPA’s, I went into accounting primarily because I’m a misanthrope who’d rather not be bothered with other people.  Any day that I get work done, talk to no one, and then go home is a good day. So being the smelly kid in the office that no one wants to be around is actually a third benefit for me.

If I can drag out of bed early enough, I can exercise on my commute.  But even if I don’t, I can work in the exercise some other way. Walk to the local convenience store (commonly known as “bodegas” in much of the freezing wastelands north of Virginia), walk to the local bar, or walk to church seeking forgiveness for everything I did at the bar.  I can even walk around while writing this blog. I use voice recognition when I do this, though. That way my eyes are up and I don’t get mowed down by the loony drivers that are ubiquitous in my city.

The trick is, drive only when you absolutely have to.  You can work in a half-hour to an hour of exercise without spending a dime, and without dealing with other drivers.  This takes a lot less commitment than going to the gym. And it’s good for both physical and mental health. Burn more calories, deal with fewer idiots.  Totally worth it.

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