Thera-Band Flexbar Hand Exerciser

There was a time when I could drink alcohol every night and never get a hangover. I could lift weights like crazy and would only get the normal soreness. But now that I’m approaching 40, things are changing. After drinking for three straight days, I tend to start getting hearth burn and will get hungover. And now when I lift heavy, my joints ache like Hell. It sucks.

The worst of these has been my elbow pain, which apparently is called Golfer’s Elbow even though it’s not from golfing. I’ve done everything I could to help from rest, to cortisone, to smoking several pounds of medicinal marijuana, but nothing helped. The pain just wouldn’t go away.

Thanks to the Internet, I found the Thera-Band Flexbar Hand Exerciser. It claims to cure Tennis Elbow and has an exercise that they’re currently testing for Golfer’s Elbow, so I decided to give it a shot. I’ve only been doing the exercises for a few days, so I can’t say if it works or not, but I’m hoping it will. I’ll let you all know if it does.


Omron Body Composition Monitor With Scale

Continuing my end of year theme to try and get healthier, I decided to pick up a new scale because my old one only did weight and nothing else. First, I needed one that went high enough to even weigh my fat ass since most scales won’t even work with fat people, which is something that I always found odd — it’s like how a lot of exercise equipment that have weight limits of 250 lbs.

I also needed something to track body fat percentage since I wanted to monitor my progress by more than just weight because I tend to add muscle rather easily, so I didn’t want to be discouraged by weight gain if it was muscle. After some research, I went with the Omron Body Composition Monitor With Scale. It maxes out at 330 lbs, does body fat percentage and a whole lot more – body mass index (BMI), skeletal muscle, resting metabolism, visceral fat, and body age. What’s more, it has sensors for your hands in addition to the feet sensors, so it’s supposed to be more accurate than most body fat scales.

The good news is that it works great and provides a lot of helpful information. The bad news is that my fat ass is so out of shape and I have a body age of 80 according to the scale. I guess if I was in great shape, I wouldn’t be worrying about it as much so I’ve got to start somewhere. I just gotta deal with the fact that I have a long road to wellness ahead of me. :)


LifeSource Blood Pressure Monitor

After my brother’s big hospital scare, I figured I’d start trying to be a little more healthy; particularly get a little more hearth-healthy. And in order to monitor the path to wellness a little better, it made sense to pick up a blood pressure monitor. I did a lot of research and it turned out that my massive 18.5″ pythons are just too big for most of the monitors that were reviewed out there. Luckily, I found the LifeSource Blood Pressure Monitor with AccuFit Extra Large Cuff, which supports up to 23″ ‘guns’.

I’ve been using the thing for about two weeks and it’s turned out to be a really great product. It’s very easy to use, the memory functions and rolling averages is very valuable and it’s shown me that my heart health is pretty much in the shitter right now. I guess I can no longer brag about having a very unhealthy lifestyle but with great blood pressure and perfect cholesterol ratings. While I still don’t know if I’ve lost the perfect balance of cholesterol that I’ve always been blessed with, I do now know that my blood pressure is consistently in the high-normal range. I guess all the smoking and drinking has caught up with me…

The funny thing is that the only time my blood pressure gets into the “normal” range is after I chug an entire bottle of vodka… So, the alcohol is apparently saving my life! Anyway, if you’re a big guy that often sells tickets to your gun show, you might want to pick up this monitor to see how well the heart’s doing. It’s been an eye-opener for me.


Holiday Gift Guide

Okay, it’s not really a Holiday Gift Guide — I’m just doing some cleaning of my junk so I have a bunch of things up for auction on eBay just in time for Christmas! Here’s what’s available:

I’m hoping to get $1,000,000 for these, so don’t be cheap! I have a pretty gnarly midget hooker addiction that’s cutting into my meth budget, so if these don’t net me some money fast, there’s a good chance I might be short a couple of thumbs in the very near future.

 

I also have some great deals on Craig’s List, but unless you’re local it doesn’t really matter to you. Sucks for you, though, as one of the things I’m selling there is my used and never-cleaned Real Doll that I’ve rocked daily for the past 9 years.


Taking Another Stab at Juicing

My younger brother had a major medical scare and was in the hospital for about two weeks — about eight days of which was spent in the ICU fighting for his life. He’s out of the hospital now and is following the doctor’s orders in the hopes that his heart can get back to 100% health.

While I have lost some weight and have been exercising at least semi-regularly in the past year, the fact that he’s two years younger, has significantly less body fat, doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink alcohol has made me think I need to do a little more with regard to keeping my heart healthy.

One of the things I’ve decided to do is start juicing again — not steroids, but making and drinking vegetable and fruit juices. I had done this in at times in the past, but it had always been too much of a hassle to maintain. I had one of those Jack Lalanne’s Power Juicers based off of the centrifugal style and while it got the job done, it was a bitch to clean, was super noisy and seemed to waste a lot of vegetables when juiced.

Since this is something I’m hoping to stick to for more than a few days, I figured I’d do some research to see if there was a better way. What I found is that there are these newer “slow” masticating juicers that handle juicing greens a lot better, are significantly less noisy and are much easier to clean. As these were my main issues with my current juicer, I was over-joyed to learn this and decided to figure out a good slow juicer to pick up.

After reading several top 10 lists, I opted to go with the Omega VRT350 because it was well-reviewed, didn’t come with a $1,000+ price tag and its vertical style meant it wouldn’t take up too much counter space. It came in today and after trying a few different juice combos, I must say that I’m absolutely in love with it. The clean up was super easy, there was almost no noise, and I was able to get about five times more juice out of the vegetables and fruits that I used in comparison to what I had been getting from the centrifugal juice. It was every bit as advertised and more.

At $379.99, it’s quite a bit more expensive than the juicer I will be throwing out tomorrow, but the extra price looks like it’ll be well worth it — particularly as I will be able to spend a lot less on the leafy greens like spinach, kale and swiss chard to get the same amount of juice. Plus, while I obviously can’t verify it, the masticating method is supposed to deliver more of the important enzymes and nutrients since there’s less heat in the process, so I’ll be drinking a much healthier juice.

The only negative I’ve found so far is that since the hole is smaller on this unit, you have to cut up the fruits and vegetables that you user more than in my other juicer. I’m also currently unsure if it handles the skins that well and there are warnings about seeds, which I didn’t have to worry about before. Nevertheless, I’m extremely happy about my purchase and would recommend the Omega VRT350 to anyone looking for a high-quality juicer.


Mutant League Fantasy Football

Since there wasn’t enough people at work interested, decided to join this 14-team league with a lot of current and ex- videogame journalists including my boys Brandon Justice and Jeremy Stein on Yahoo! called Mutant League Fantasy Football. The draft was last night and it was my first draft for a keeper league, so I was pretty excited about it since I hadn’t done one of these before.

The keeper status scared me away from my normal draft strategy of loading up on RBs with my first 4-6 picks and trying to get QBs, WRs and TEs late. My team is, obviously, questionable at RB because of this, but it seems pretty solid overall. Here’s what I ended up with:

QB: Aaron Rodgers
WR: Julio Jones
WR: Brandon Marshall
RB: Kevin Smith
RB: Issac Redman
TE: Antonio Gates
W/R/T: Antonio Brown
K: Matt Prater
D: NYG

BN: Cedric Benson
BN: Randy Moss
BN: Ryan Williams
BN: Ronnie Brown
BN: Nate Burleson
BN: Jahvid Best

I think the team is pretty strong outside of the RB situation, but if the injury bug hits a lot of the top backs like typically happens, I might be able to solidify the position over the waiver wire over the course of the season. I may regret the move, but this is pretty much the first time I’ve ever played Fantasy Football where I had a legit QB from the start and didn’t depend on picking someone up after the draft to lead my team (i.e. – Cam Newton last season and Michael Vick the season before). Time shall tell if it works out for me.


1-on-1 Basketball Should Be In The Olympics

There’s talk of 3-on-3 basketball coming to the Olympics in Rio in 2016. And while I’m actually kind of interested in that, as it would be more interesting to watch than the 5-on-5 with mostly mis-matched teams, I think 1-on-1 is the way to go (or they just do both, as there are a billion medals for sports like diving and gymnastics).

Just think about it…it’d be a way to crown someone the world’s greatest individual basketball player. It would be awesome to see 1-on-1 matchups between guys like Kobe, Lebron, Melo or Durant. Plus, I’m pretty sure Spain’s Gasol or Germany’s Nowitzki would actually have better chances competing at 1-on-1 than depending on their countries’ depth competing against stacked 12-deep “Dream Team”.

The only issue I see with it is that the US Olympic Trials might actually be more exciting than the actual Olympics tournament, but I guess that happens sometimes in swimming so that’s not a massive deal breaker.

They could even take the wrestling, boxing or weightlifting approaches and split them up in classes — but rather than do it by weight, height or position, have a Seniors group. This would allow us to see Dr. J versus Larry Bird or MJ versus Magic. It would be the most popular sport at the Olympics and definitely better than Trampoline.


My Electronic Cigarette of Choice

My favorite brand of electronic cigarettes is without a doubt V2 Cigs. Give them a shot if you’re looking to quit smoking and want to try an e-cig. :)

 


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609 to 702

Thanks to the debt reduction, my credit score has gone from below average/poor (609) to average/good (702) from February compared to today. I expect this to jump to above average/very good by November when I have all my credit card debt paid off. And, then maybe someday I can join the 760 club with excellent credit…


15 Down, 1 To Go

Over the course of the past 8 months, I’ve paid off 15 of my 16 credit cards and now only have my $12,000 Citi AMEX to go before I’m debt free. This is after finally paying off my $8,000 Jet Blue AMEX on Friday. If I’m able to stick to my ultra strict budget — where I pretty much only spend money on essentials — I should be free from debt by the beginning of November 2012.

Now, if only I can manage to start making progress on the weight loss again, as I’ve been stuck in the 320′s for the past 10 1/2 weeks. I know I’ve been lifting hard and am adding muscle, but it’ll be nice to get under 300 by the time I’m out of debt. It should be doable at just 1.5 lbs a week, but I’ll need to get past this sticking point first!


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