George Rausch – Week 2
Thinking back on Week 1 reminds me of the first week of school: you don’t know your schedule, getting in late to class, being overwhelmed by thinking about all the work that you’ll have to do over the semester, and just figuring out how you’re going to make time to do all the stuff you were doing before class got in the way. The only difference this time is that if I skip class or don’t put all my effort into the homework, I don’t get an amazing muscular physique replete with six pack abs and huge biceps. I’ll just remain a lump of flesh and bones.
As you could probably see from the progression of Week 1 in my video blog, I became more tired as the week labored on. This was partly due to my new schedule of rising around 6AM daily as well as my new diet. Most notably, I got daily headaches due to withdrawal from processed sugar (I haven’t had any kind of “real” dessert in over a week). I think the best thing that happened is that a friend told me, “Your face doesn’t look puffy anymore.” Don’t you love it when you get a compliment like that and realize that you ALWAYS used to look puffy?
To my dismay, I signed up for a new credit card [the week before winning SkyFit] to get points towards a free plane ticket under the condition that I charge $3,000 in the first three months. Moreover, it gave me double points for going to restaurants. “Easy as pie,” the old me said. Under my new regimen of buying all of my food from a grocery store, not drinking alcohol, not buying desserts, and packing my lunch every day, I’m a) excited to save money and b) pissed that I may not get a free plane ticket!
In short: buying all your food as raw ingredients to cook at home and avoiding things like bars, restaurants, and eating sweets will save you a lot of money and make you healthier. Who knew that American consumer culture was designed to make you fat and broke!
I’d like to leave you with a list of some of the top things that I discovered this week:
- Plastic food storage containers (aka Tupperware) used to pile up in our kitchen. Now that I’m cooking and preparing food ahead of time, almost every single one is filled up!
- Making your own protein smoothie at home tastes better, costs less, and has better portion control than going to any juice bar or smoothie stand.
- If you are RIGHT HANDED, your RIGHT leg will be very weak when doing lunges. Very very weak.
- If you walk around with a GoPro rig shooting video of yourself at a gym, everyone wants to be your friend and talk shop.
- Steel cut oatmeal takes 30 minutes to make. It’s not like regular oatmeal. It will be chewy if you only do it for 10 minutes.
- Eating healthy can actually be very delicious once you figure out what you’re doing. No where does it say “spices” are not healthy (exception: bacon bits).
- Ingesting too much raw cacao powder (2 Tbsp is the recommended serving size) if you don’t ingest caffeine will make you act like you’re on cocaine.
- Listening to Improv4Humans podcast while doing a 45 minute jog is a lot of fun. It’s great when you laugh and all the other treadmill people stare at you with sweaty frowns. It’s not my fault you’re listening to Tom Waits while jogging.
