Four-letter word: odds and ends

So I wrote that post last night, and then on the treadmill this morning, I thought of more things to say.  Things you might want to know, because I'm helpful like that.  Actually, I hope none of you are dieting.  Or not dieting, like me, but still trying to be healthier.  But here are some more thoughts, anyway.

First off, music to exercise by.  The key for me with exercise is having good music.  I'm a bit of a music nut-- every few weeks I spend several hours setting up playlists for myself, for driving to UTown, for dinner music, for running errands, and especially for the treadmill.  ITunes is my friend, I can't tell you how happy it makes me to be able to mess around with playlists.  But anyway.  The current music that is getting me moving:

How Bizarre-OMC
I Want You-Savage Garden
SOS-Rihanna
Shut It Down-Pitbull
I Know You Want Me-Pitbull
You Make the Rain Fall-Kevin Rudolf
All For You-Acey Alone
plus several Lady GaGa and Black-Eyed Pea songs

And I still have days when nothing but "Tubthumping" and "I Know I look Good" (Lady Te) will do.  Fair Warning:  I rarely notice the lyrics, so some of those are definitely, um...., adult.  I'm pretty sure I'm glad I don't understand Spanish so I don't know exactly what Pitbull is saying in "I Know You Want Me" (although I do know enough to get Calle Ocho and uno dos tres quatro).  :-)

All of that to say:  if you have any other suggestions, let me know.  

Secondly, a friend of mine is doing the Flat Belly Diet, which she really likes.  We've already discussed my inability to follow a diet plan, so I'm not going to do it, but I do love the recipe for water that she passed on.  Mainly because how can you not love a recipe for water?  I'm a big water drinker anyway, so I get plenty of water on my own, but at meals--especially with spicy food--I want something besides water.  So what you do is get a half gallon pitcher, grate some ginger into it, slice up a cucumber and a lemon, and shred some fresh mint into it.  Fill it with water and let it sit overnight.  Strain or not, as you like.  It's actually really good.  And since I can never leave good enough alone, I sometimes add a sliced orange, and I usually leave out the ginger, although I love ginger, because I don't have it in the house very often.  Or only do a quart of water and then add sparkling water when I'm ready to drink it.  I love carbonation.

I did actually buy the pocket guide for the CarbLovers Diet after reading about it in a magazine.  As already stated ad nauseum, I'm not going to follow it as a diet.  But it has some great recipes in it for healthy food that just look like stuff we would eat anyway.  But hello, do they ever have to feed anyone that's not dieting?  Since I'm feeding dh and MadMax, too, I have to at least double the recipes.  They think half a pound of pasta will feed four people?  seriously?  When it is just the three of us during the school year, we go through a whole pound in one meal, and trust me, I'm not the one eating lots.  Dh is a true athlete, and he's so busy at work that he rarely has time to eat.  He starts eating when he comes in the door and doesn't stop until the kitchen is cleaned up, which means all the leftovers disappear.  And he can still wear the same size pants he wore when we got married.  It's a little disgusting.  and MadMax is at that age where he has two hollow legs.  But I'm slowly becoming a convert to whole wheat pasta, which they recommend.  Partly because it's a lot better than it used to be. 

and finally, in that same magazine, I read about a study that was done comparing exercise on an empty stomach vs. after breakfast.  Turns out that if your goal is weight loss, it's much better to exercise on an empty stomach--it made about a 40% difference.  Which surprised me-- I always thought you should eat something before exercising, so I always did, even though I'm not hungry when I wake up.  It works really well for me,  but it wouldn't work at all for dh and Nell, who wake up starving.  And plus, they aren't exercising for weight loss anyway, they're exercising because they inexplicably love it.  What's wrong with them?

and that's it.  this post is proof positive that I can go on and on about absolutely nothing.  When I sat down, I thought it would be a quick list, about half the length of my usual posts.  I did spend several minutes trying to figure out how to make the paragraphs shorter, because I worry about that since Bloggers are Supposed to Keep their Paragraphs Short.  But I don't know how you'd split these up.  I'll stop now before this one gets too long.