I am big fan of such things. I basically don't drink any sodas or so and normally tea and coffee girl, but now it is really hot here and so I make few fruity drinks.

This one is 3 liter of water, ca. 500g blackberries +100 g sugar. Everything should be cooked for 5 min and then cooled down and put through a filter. 3 liter is about 100 oz, so the calories are about 50 ckal for 12 ounzes.
It is important to really cook it for 5 min, because everything is then better extracted from blackberries. It becomes a lot more aromatic and intensive that if you just put blackberries through a blender and mix it into water.

If you know/invent yourself any good recipes for such stuff I always appreciate hints and ideas.

It all starts with lying to myself. Bought yesterday a package of sweet bars. 8 pieces=servings. The idea was to have one once in a while. I know that I can't do it. I know that average living time of any sweets in my house is 2 days, no matter how many servings.

Meehhhhhh I have to run a lot today to work this off. It is like I have sometimes a learning disability.

I am so happy that I can and like cooking from scratch. It is a habit. A habit formed pretty early. When I was a child there was no such thing like preprocessed food. Restaurants were to expensive. And a normal way was to cook at home and even to the big extent grow your food. Until I was 6 y.o. I never even ate store bought eggs or chicken. My grandma had chickens and my grandad had a big pleasure in letting me as a 5 y.o. collect the eggs. I remember the rooster not liking me. From the age of about 10 y.o. I was responsible for a dinner. It was clearly then nothing complicated but it was my task to make something to eat from what was in the fridge when my parents came home. And it is good that it was this way. I mean nowdays it is a part of my normal routine to do a grocery shopping and to cook at least every second evening. I can have something healthy and tasty on the table in under 30 min time and it doesn't feel for me like it is hard work. It is more just normal thing. I don't have to look for recipes. I do but it is more for the ideas than for following a receipe to a t. I just know in which sequence I have to put veg in a soup and how to make meat and a side veg in one pan at the same time. Credit for this is not my but goes to my parents and grandparents. Learning to prepare my food and to like to cook is at least as useful as being able to read.

Mushrooms are now a big part of my diet. And not only boring mushrooms from the grocery store. (I found it interesting that mushrooms describe as well as general Fungus as boring champignon (special kind of fungus)). If here are any english speaking mushroom hunters, please correct me.

I go a lot for hiking and usually bring home 2~3 kg of mushrooms per hike in the fall. Today's hero is Lactarius deliciciosus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactarius_deliciosus. I wonder if it has some kind of more normal name in spoken english.




You can do a lot of stuff with this mushroom: just roasting in a pan, soups, side dishes, you can dry it and pickle it in multiple ways. It has only 20 kcal for 100 gr, is high on protein and cool in a multitude of nutritional ways.

I choose today a certain kind of pickling because I have a lot of other mushrooms that are better suitable for immediate cooking and eating. And this kind is pretty good pickled the right way.

Pickling mushrooms is an art in itself. A lot of later crispiness and saltiness depends on the kind of mushrooms you choose for it. Then there are basically two major routes for pickling: one is with added vinegar or other acid, and another is with natural sour lactic fermentation in mushrooms. The second one is a lot more difficult and requires more attention in the process of the fermentation. I chose here an easy route and added some vinegar to the water in the glass. Already in two weeks I can try them.

That's great!!

Now that is certainly h&f approved. Shrooms were sent down from the heavens from the h&f gods. I hope you can pick the right ones though, get a high or the juicy edible ones.

I love mushrooms so much, I use to just stare at them growing out of cow manure, licking my chops. Dad says why you even look, can't even eat them. So I use to kick them off the shiet and watch them blow up. Yep, ranch life was cool.

Loco,

you are not only good looking, but also a really nice guy. I appreciate your effort to make everyone feel welcome in HF. Your crusade against fat is cool. And that comes from me with my "any body acceptance" POV . Cool thing is that you are not snobbish looking down at people but actually make an effort to pull people into a healthy life style.

Mushrooms growing out of cow manure are probably wild champingons (so really good roasted) with the emphasis on probably. They like cow manure a lot . Clearly I would have to see them to identify them correctly. You did completely right by kicking them because they look very similar to one very very poisonous species: "death cap". The general rule of a thumb with mushrooms: If you are not completely 100% sure - don't!

I have a story about "death cap" and champignons from my childhood.

I spent very often holidays at my relative's ranch. And there were cows and cow manure and so. And also white mushrooms growing out of cow manure. Locals didn't touch them because they thought that it is "death cap". My mom saw them and went on picking them for dinner. All the locals tried to stop her and were completely horrified when they saw her feeding me with this roasted mushrooms. Clearly nothing happened: my mom is really knowledgeable with mushrooms and she would never have given me anything if she wouldn't be 10000000 % sure that this had been champignons. But the locals afterwards were talking that it is somehow because she has some special power that she could eat highly poisonous mushrooms without being poisoned.

At the end I want again emphasize a rule:
Don't touch any mushrooms where you are not completely 100% sure and have checked and double checked it because death can be the consequence if you are wrong.

This is how religions get started and witches get burned.

It is a wonderful morning. Feeling:


thinking of ways to enhance this feeling. Undecided between hike and yoga class. For hike speaks that it is mushroom time now and I just have this itch. For yoga speaks that I haven't done any last two weeks and I just feel how all my joints get more wooden, how I lose the flexibility. Basically yoga would feel cool.

My feet are killing me...... Cry.....

Third day in a row hikes between 10 and 20 km with carrying an increasing load of mushrooms. Hikes are also clearly not on a trail but in very foresty forest. But I love it. It is good for my mind. It is similar like yoga or if I have difficult math problem to solve. I have to focus on this task and be present. Any ruminating or being anxious just can't be happening in a forest. I love this feeling to be completely present and focused. I don't know how to explain it better.

But I have to do something with my feet. I do have good hiking shoes, but they got wet yesterday and today it was totally icky to put them on. So second pair of hiking shoes + feet massage tonight.

And I have to research how to make google to record my route and reproduce it. I would like to have a look now at where exactly I have been.

I use Strava to track my cycling routes. It's made for cycling and running so it should work for hiking as well.

https://www.strava.com/

How important are looks?

They are kind of important but in a completely different way than 10 years ago. 10 years ago looks was equal "attractive as a sexual object to the opposite sex". Now it is part of my image, part of the impression I want to leave. I can go invisible, I can go provoking, I can go "young dynamic successful", I can go hot, I can go ugly, I can go old and authoritative, I can go professional and all business like, I can go completely slobby . It is very relaxing shift. This freedom to choose the impression I want to leave was not there at the younger age. Attractive to men was completely dominating everything else then. And it was not good. For example when I was 20 I went dancing in 6 cm high heels. That was so dumb. Now I don't wear 6 cm heels ever. There is no good reason to do such crap to my feet.

And with that we go back to "fat". Getting more attractive to the opposite sex isn't a good motivation to get thin. I think that with "fat" is a little bit like with money. You have to focus on a different things. You have to focus on the cause of fat and poor and not on the fat and poor in itself. And it doesn't help to find good reasons to be thin. You have to understand exactly your "good" reasons to be fat and change them. And if you are fat you have good, logical reasons for this. And reasons not like " I am a FPOS and eat to much and drink to much and so I am fat", but more like "I am stressed out as hell and food is the only positive thing in my life. I won't deprive myself of the only good thing I have"

food food food food food.....

There are this moments where I can think only of food. Like now. I have no clue how comes. Basically I want now a reward and food is completely unconditional super cool reward. But I am not hungry. And I totally know that if I follow now this impulse I am so going to regret it an hour later. Sooo......

The question is what to do?

I don't want something special. It is this general craving .... So I am going to go for a walk now and while walking will think about what exactly my body tells me with this craving. It is basically a hole either in my body or in my soul, some kind of unfulfilled need that my instincts try to feel with food. If I understand exactly which hole it is then I can feel it somehow different.

Walked, ate a piece of bread and somehow calmed down. May be I was still hungry. I ate last meal about 15 min before my last post here. May be my stomach was full but the blood sugar still very low. I was starving before this meal.

Anyway now back to normal

This "track your activity" apps are crap.


I had one installed once. I am clearly to lazy to enter there all work-outs and every small bit of me moving my butt. But it tracks walking on autopilot when I have the phone with me. I checked what is my average per day over last 3 months : 10,3 km. Boy ....... it gives me a feeling that I am totally cool and sporty. But that is not the truth. It really counts every tiny peace of walking. And I was definitely not super active/sporty this year. So this app kind of soothes myself into: "Yeahhhhhhh, you have done something today, you have walked sooooooooooooooo much, you don't need to run/do yoga/swim on top."

Very unhappy with myself.

Did nothing, really zero for few days. Planned a longer yoga session today and ended in doing some programming instead. + Overate. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I mean programming in itself is not a bad thing but I really need to keep things balanced. And 800 ckal of sweets was so unnecessary. In the moment it seemed that the sweets improve my programming and I knew that if I won't finish this script today I will think about it the whole night. So I kind of needed to do programming. But it is actually not really so, because now I am still beating myself-up for not doing yoga. May be I should generally stop hating myself for such stuff. What a revolutionary idea!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. grrrrrrr.... Tomorrow first thing after getting-up will be a run. Then this frog is out of my way.

Now is the key moment. My to-do list is calling my name loudly. I must ignore it and go for a run. It feels right now super wrong, but I know that it is actually right and I will be hating myself more later in a day if I stay glued to my emails.

Gogogogo! Now!

Run. 30 min for 5 km. And did 40 min yoga.

Feel so much better. But it was pretty hard to start. My to-do list was swirling in my head and I felt like I have to work through it instead of running.

swimming swimming swimming.

From all things I do, swimming is the hardest for me. If I compare myself with average I am above average in yoga and running, but far below with swimming. And on top the swimming pool is pretty far from my place, so I have to bike there for about 30 min. It is kind of additional hurdle. And it is always to full, so it is annoying.

But I planned it for today. And it is good for me. And I need to do for few weeks something more joint friendly than running.

Usually I have no trouble with working out, but sometimes it is hard to lift my butt from the couch and GOOOO!. Kick myself! Kick myself! Go! Now!

I have few personality traits that I have to watch and temper pretty often. I am very impatient (horrible trait when cooking ), obsessive, competitive.......

I understand that 90% of this forum are better than me in basically any physical activity. OK may be not yoga and dancing but everything else. And still I felt today pushed by loco's excellent time to push it harder on treadmill. My normal time for 5 km is 30 min. I am never slower. And actually I think that it is OK. I run few times a week and most of the time if I see that I am faster than 6 min/km then I slow down or walk out at the end. I run relaxed. Today I tried to push hard. 23 min 50 sek. I am not unhappy. May be it is actually good that I felt pushed to really put some effort in. Not because of the time or so. It just feels good.

5k 23:50 out of nowhere?!!! Lol. You are faster than EV!

In fact, only about three people are faster than you. LolStrength&Fatness.

My personal best time for 5 km is 21 min. I am also a lot lighter than most here. That is a big advantage in running. And you got faster than 20 min pretty fast. I was very happy with my 21 min. Now I want 20.

23:10

You ran another 5k?


Don't click buttons, get on a 5k program and get to 22:00. Then get on another one and hit 20:00.

Random clicking leads to burnout and inefficiency.

I run few times a week. 5k is my standard distance. I mean it is what I always run. It is good for me because my time for 5k is 30 min. I am never slower. And 30 min is good as warm-up. My routine is that I run to warm-up and then have either yoga or Zumba or some machines. I have to watch my knees. Actually I wanted more swim instead of running next month or two but now I want 20 min and swimming is much harder than running for me.

Last time I run 5k in a race, when time was stopped by someone else and not on a treadmill was this summer as a part of mini triathlon. I think I wrote here about it. I think I was something around 25 min then.

It is easier for me all leg stuff than arm stuff. I think it is because biking and running are things that are easier to do as a part of normal life. I mean ....biking is for me transportation. It is nothing extra in my day. Nothing where I have to go somewhere and spent additional time. And for running.... I can just put on my shoes, get out of the door and start running.

Where for swimming it is very big preparation stuff I have to do to go swimming. I have to go pretty far to the swimming pool, shower, change there, swim in an overcrowded (I hate crowds) pool, change back.......

So arm stuff is a lot more sad with me. Pull-ups remain a sweet dream. May be I need MLYLT to start to do pull-ups so that my competitiveness in this area will be challenged. All others are so good in it that it seems not achievable for me and does not give me this push like loco's running time. I mean.... if G4S can do something like gazillion pull-ups...... It is not my universe.