James H. Cutts III's Weblog

Well, it's the third day of my diet and it's the beginning of my travel to Seattle. I'm going to try to moderate my eating while out at Seattle. Being carefull with what I eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I'll try not to be too restrictive, but I'll definately try to pay attention to my satiety.

I've ended up skipping breakfast this morning. That's not a great thing to do, but something that frequently happens.

While it isn't good for my diet, it makes writing up my breakfast pretty easy.

Posted by James Cutts at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, maybe they didn't actually lie, and perhaps I'm responsible for making my own decisions. Carrie and Uncle said it was 37 this morning. Well above the 30 degree cut off for bike riding. So I ignored my wall thermometer, which said 24, and dressed for biking to work.

I think that my thermometer was a bit closer to what I experienced than the announced 37. It was cold outside and quite cold on the bike at 35 mph. I'm somewhat use to the inside of my helmet fogging up on these cold days. What was interesting about this morning's ride was today the fog from my breath didn't do as much condensing on the visor, but it swirled around inside the visor creating a fog immediately in front of my eyes.

Steering and general riding was fine, but I did have some trouble remembering to down shift when coming to a stop. At the first stop light, at Business 70 and West Boulevard, I completely forgot to downshift. I was concentrating instead on the right side and breaking with both the front and rear breaks. This focus on the breaking, caused me to attempt to start off, once the lights turned green, in third gear. My bike didn’t like that and stalled a couple of times.

Once I got past that intersection, the bike ride went smoothly. I did forget once more to downshift while I was coming to a stop light. But, fortunately, I remembered to get the shifting done before I started up again.

As I rode on, it remained cold, but as I passed the thermometer behind Perry Chevrolet, it read 33. Perhaps the radio was right, and maybe my home thermometer was right as well. I live in a valley that is frequently cooler than the surrounding “high lands.”

The ride was a blast and I’m looking forward to the warmer days to come when more and more frequently I’ll be able to ride my bike to work.

And now I get to ride back home.

In addition to getting to ride home, I got to ride to lunch. It's 63 at lunch time, warm enough to make a full winter level riding gear hot. But the ride was a great deal of fun. I love riding up and down Rock Quary Rd. It has the perfect combination of curves and hills for some fun bike riding. (As long as the bike is motorized.)

The ride home was wonderful!!

I left work at 2:30 to stop by the barber shop. I've figured out the secret of not waiting at the barber shop - - Go with plenty of time and a book to read. I walked into the barber shop and even before I could get my helmet off, I was being offered a chair.

Robin was planning a Valentine's Day surprised asked me to get home about 4:00. This gave me 45 minutes in which to go riding about and that was really very fun to have that much time on a perfect biking day to get out on my bike and simply ride. I did about 35 miles over the back roads north of my house.

I wished that Robin had her helmet already and I would have suggested that we ride the bike to Ruby Tuesday for dinner.

Posted by James Cutts at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's Day Two and I haven't lost any weight. But I'm doing nicely on moderating my food comsumption. I had only half a bagel (with 2 1/2 tablespoons of cream cheese) for breakfast. And here is is 8:50 and I'm only starving. (Not really.) I have noticed that when I get a high proten breakfast, I don't get hungry as quickly.

I didn't drink any tea yesterday. So when I went to make tea this morning, I found last Friday's tea sitting in the tea pot. Not very cool. It was dark brown and slimy. I had to rinse out the pot before I made my next batch of tea.

There is a possibility that I'll be eating lunch at "cheap Chinese" today. If not, I'll be having left overs from yesterday's dinner.

I was correct in the "cheap Chinese" expectation. At our regular "cheap Chinese" restaurant, a large plate of General Tso's Chicken (including fried rice) is only $4.40, including a bowl of very good hot and sour soup. Today's hot and sour soup was extremely hot - in the spicy way. Lunch was quite filling.

Robin really blew our diet away during the evening meal. We went to Ruby Tuesday where we enjoyed a full meal and a yummy Chocolate Tallcake. The meal and the service were excellent.

Posted by James Cutts at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is the day that Robin and I have started (officially) our diets.

I've needed to moderate my consumption of food and increase my exercise for a while. So it's begun.

I intend to use this blog as a combination Food and Exercise journal as well as comments on the process of dieting. The Mikes (Mike Harris and Mike Sullivan) like to point out that the first three letters of "diet" are "die". I don't think it's that bad. Actually paying attention to my diet (meaning my consumption of food) I will be eating better and that should lead to an improvement in general health and feeling of well being.

I say this as I look into a tub of "rabbit food": lettuce, cabbage and carrots for my lunch. Fortunately, I’ve got a sprinkling of cottage cheese (about ½ a cup) and some croutons on top of the greens. Salt and pepper round out the meal. For dessert, I’ll have my tomato. This is actually a pretty nice lunch. Hopefully, it will be sufficiently filling to carry me easily through to dinner.

I had a really nice breakfast of two eggs, two strips of bacon and ½ of a bagel. I would estimate that there was about 2 ½ to 3 tablespoons of cream cheese on the bagel. According to Ann Collin's Weight Loss site there are 50 calories in a tablespoon of regular cream cheese. Kraft Foods and I wasn't able to find anything from them about the calorie content of their cream cheese. A Google search found a reference to this page but being an Austrailian web page, the calories comment was:

To determine the fat content and calories content for recipes made with cream cheese, check the package. Regular (full fat) PHILADELPHIA Cream Cheese has 10 grams of fat and 100 calories for a 30g serving. 1/3 Less Fat PHILADELPHIA contains 6 grams of fat and 70 calories per 30g serving.

I did find some interesting features at Kraft Foods' Healthy Living site. They have in their logs and journals sections for "Weekly Way-In", "Interactive Nutition Diary" and "Activity Log" . This could be an interesting resource for people who traveled (or didn't) and wanted to count calories, but didn't want to do everyting by hand.

For dinner I had a wonderful meal cooked by Robin. We had rice, roast pork and stir-fried veggies - peas, green beans, onions and zuccin. Dinner was really delicious.

I was pondering what to have as a dessert / evening snack while staying some what faithful to my diet. I would have liked almost anything somewhat sweet. Chocolate chips melted on digestives was high on my list. As was cake, pie, ice cream. Making a bowl of pop corn corssed my mine, but I thought that I didn't need the three tablespoons of oil that introduced. Then I remembered the apples in the fridge. I had one of them and it meet my desire for something sweet perfectly.

Well I seem to have survived day one.

Posted by James Cutts at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is one thing that I'm not too thrilled with about Moveable Type. There's not spelling checker. I understand the difficulty in getting a spell checker integrated into an on-line blog tool. But I still miss it. The longer blog entries are being done in a word processor (mostly MS Word because of the computer on which I do most of the blogging) and then copied to the blog.

Posted by James Cutts at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yet another weekend has gone by and I haven't gotten to ride my bike. I don't usually get much if any bike riding done during the weekend. But this weekend was cold! It was simply too cold for riding even with my winter gear (coat and pants and gloves). Yesterday, although ths sun shone and made things look nice, it remained crept just bearly above freezing..

It's possible that I may be able to get a ride in tomorrow (Tuesday, Feb. 14) as the low tonight is to be just 30 and the high tomorrow is to claimed be up to 57. It would be really nice to get a ride before I head to Seattle for the rest of the week. It looks like it should be cold and wet in Seattle - including the possibility of snow by Friday and Saturday.

Posted by James Cutts at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's another five days in a row. However, this time it's not 5 days of nice weather. It's 5 days of un-motorcycle friendly weather. It's been cold. I've been waking up to weather in the teens most of this week as well as much of last week.

I have a no-bike policy when the temperature is below 30 degrees. Although the return ride from work is normally above 30, when it is below thirty even the directly to work ride is too cold.

This morning there was a wonderfully fluffy snow that covered the ground and trees and floated gently down. The flakes were huge at 5:30 and a couple of time through out the morning, the big floating flakes returned.

Unfortunately, the forecast for the coming week remains cold. I may just have to take the bike out for a ride in the afternoon to keep the bike and me in shape.

Posted by James Cutts at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday was beautiful by the middle of the day. But it started out at 28 degrees at my house, which is below my comfort level for bike riding. My fingers get really cold when the temperature is less than 30 and I'm on my bike.

However, today was different, it was a wonderful 44 when I got up. That temperature, when fully suited with my winter jacket and "snow" overalls is very comfortable. The forecast claims that it will get up to 55 today. I wouldn't be too surprised if it reached at least that temperature, if not higher. Yesterday's high temperature at Sanborn field was 59.9 degrees. A temperature that I call delightful.

It's be a rather gray winter here, so the full and glorious sun is very much appreciated. I imagine that Seattle would love to have one of these nice sunny days. They have had a lot of rain and a lot more in their forecast. According to the Weather Underground (Seattle, WA) forecast there will be rain through the rest of the week with the "driest" day being next Sunday where the chance of rain is only 40%.

For those of you who don't know why I'm interesting in Seattle's weather, I'll be going there later this month for a couple of days of training and site seeing.

Posted by James Cutts at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)