Please see my new site at LadyHawk

Hello all,

Please join me at my new blog site. I've officially opened LadyHawk Nutrition and this has led me to start a new blog (still in Blogger) using that name.

Please read my new blog at: http://ladyhawknutrition.blogspot.com/

Please take time to visit me at my website: www.ladyhawknutrition.com

Thank you all for your support!

Maggie

Can't stop from saying "I told you so!"

While sitting in my family room last night, doing Sudoku puzzles and watching the news I had this overwhelming desire to shout out “I told you so!”
OK, I know that’s just not nice, but I feel so much better now.
And here is WebMD’s report on the same, um, report:

July 23, 2007 -- Drinking just one soft drink a day -- whether diet or regular -- may boost your risk of getting heart disease, a new study shows.
That is because a soda habit increases the risk of developing a condition called metabolic syndrome, according to the new research, and that in turn boosts the chance of getting both heart disease and diabetes.
"Even one soda per day increases your risk of developing metabolic syndrome by about 50%," says Ramachandran Vasan, MD, professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and the senior author of the study, published in the July 31 issue of the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.
To be diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, three of five criteria must be met: a large waistline, elevated blood pressure, elevated fasting blood sugar, elevated fasting triglycerides, or reduced HDL or "good" cholesterol.
"This study adds to the wealth of scientific evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages increase the risk of metabolic syndrome," says Vasan. Already, he says, the rise in sugary drink consumption has been linked to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes among children and teens and to the development of high blood pressure in adults.
Even after adjusting for intake of fat, fiber consumption, total calories, smoking, and physical activity, he says, there was still a link between soft drink intake and metabolic risk factors.
To read the entire WebMD article please click on this link:

http://www.webmd.com/news/20070723/1-daily-soda-may-boost-heart-disease?page=1

And so many of you are wondering how sugar-free soda’s can affect these results? There are two theories that I know of, and probably more theories, and they might both be factors. First, as the WebMD article goes on to say (if you click the link and read the whole thing) drinking sweet beverages, whether they have calories or not, might condition the drinker to crave more sweet foods as well. This goes hand-in-hand with what Dr. Russell Blaylock writes about in his book “Excitotoxins”; that except in Type I diabetics Aspartame actually tricks the brain into telling the body to express Insulin even though there isn’t any sugar in the system, thus lowering your blood sugar and making you hungry and craving sweets to raise it back to normal levels again.

So what do we drink? The same stuff we’ve been drinking for a thousand years: water, beer, wine, milk, fresh juice (in moderation) and many different kinds of unsweetened teas.

It's a "dirty" job but...

Well, I’ve been trying to climb the Mt. Baldy steps about twice a week, and I still have to get there this week and it’s Wednesday already! Actually, I thought today was Thursday until about 10:30 this morning and can you imagine my wide eyed disappointment when I was told it was only Wednesday? I just HATE when that happens.

Anyhoo, I decided that all of those steps were actually working on making my gluteus maximum more firm, if not smaller, and that I now needed to devise a similar (read “free and somewhat rewarding) exercise regimen for my upper body. I was provided the answer last night while I drove into my garage, where at the end of my driveway there is one very large pile of sand and another very large pile of black dirt that my Dear Husband had a friend deliver. D.H. said he was helping the guy out, and that the guy was supposed to return with a tractor of some sort to bulldoze and grade the sand and dirt into a lovely space ripe for gardening. This last part apparently never happened.

But there I stood last night, enjoying the spring weather, looking outside my garage door and admiring (cursing?) those two 5 foot tall x 10 foot diameter piles of dirt. Which needed to be shoveled. By my weak armed crooked backed body. Voila! There is my free and rewarding upper body workout!

I let the kitties outside and grabbed the shovel and panted and puffed for about 20 minutes and thought “Boy, that’s a great workout and I should be able to get these piles under control in about 20 more workouts!” Then I stepped back and took another look and realized that I might be more like 80 more workouts. Pumpkin and Scootie just ate grass and paid little attention to my efforts.

I hope I get done before it gets too hot outside in August.

On top of Old Baldy

So I’ve been sitting on my fat a$$ all winter. I have got exactly NO exercise since November, and I enlisted the motivational help of my Very Good Friend Molly to help me. We made an appointment with each other to meet Tuesday night at 5:45 pm in Saugatuck at Mount Baldy. Mount Baldhead is a big white ball that we erected by the armed forces in the 1940’s (I think) as a radar and observation tower, and is today only used as a tower to house weather cameras for local television stations. Why did we meet here? Because there are 282 wooden planked steps to the top of the hill where the ball is perched, and it’s a serious workout with a breathtaking view when you’re done.

The 282 Steps of Doom!

The rewarding view of downtown Saugatuck and the Kalamazoo River from the top of the steps. Woo Hoo!

Tea Time

You-all should know by now how I feel about soda pop. Nasty! And not the Janet Jackson kinda nasty, which is really a lot of fun. Am I showing my age?

What to drink instead? Tea! Chamomile after dinner, rooibos flavored with Jasmine, Green tea flavored with citrus or ginseng, gunpowder, dragon pearls, white Darjeeling, black tea with real dried cranberries, or my personal favorite that instantly transports me to a hot August day south of Tokyo, Japan: Hojicha.

More and more trials and tests are coming out reporting on how healthy both black tea and green tea is for you. White tea and the specialty teas like rooibos are also great for your health, but they don't have the money behind them to sponser thoses expensive tests and trials. Who cares? We humans have been drinking tea as long as we have been boiling water!

Tea bags are easy and help to control the mess of loose leaf teas, tea balls work OK, but to get the most from your tea you should let the tea leaves “breathe” or rather, float around to their hearts content for a few minutes. A wonderful tea company called Adagio Teas has come up with the perfect answer; the InginuiTea. (Man! I wish I could come up with great names like that!)

For between 10¢ to about 15¢ per cup it’s so much more affordable than sodas or specialty coffees, is natural, some of them have a little natural caffeine in them, and they have many dozens of non-caffeinated teas to choose from. If you want more information here is a link to their website or else you can click on the box in the margin to receive a $5 coupon, which will usually more than pay for your ground shipping charges.

Enjoy!

Stop eating my herbs!

There are two young female deer that live in the woods that my house is in the middle of. I don't call them "my woods" because I figure that the deer and the squirrels owned it before I did. They go by my front door every afternoon, then walk down my driveway.

This particular deer seems to have a fondness for my parsley and my sage. Notice how they are *MY* herbs. Luckily I grew enough to share.

The real reason for the poor economy

I got Ron one of those big back-pack leaf blowers for his birthday last spring, and I love it! I think he's used it twice, and I use it all the time. I cleaned out the gutters last Sunday, then I "raked" the leaves off the deck, patio (under the deck), and all around the house in about 3 hours. It used to take me 3 weekends! When I was done all I could think about is how we are loosing jobs NOT because of outsourcing, but because of gadgets like this leaf blower. I imgined that when I'm old I'll probably still be using it instead of hiring a couple of neighbor boys to rake for me. Then I thought about how that stinking leaf blower is also probably the cause of the obesity problems we Americans are having. Blame everything on the leaf blowers!

Don't get me started on the ozone layer...

I crack myself up.