Today, Sept 26th, 2008 is the start of the Crossfit flab challenge. I got another fullbody scan from Bodycomp Imaging, I have a new food plan and a new set of goals. My diet hasn’t improved much since the summer time, as you can probably tell from the last few weeks of food logs.

However, I have dropped 0.5% more body fat since my last scan, and unfortunately some lean mass as well. The problem is that I’ve been eating too many carbs and too little protein and fat. Our guest speaker today, Skip Chase of Mt. Baker Crossfit gave a great talk about eating right. I’ll sum it up for you, eat the Zone diet. No sugar, get all carbs from veggies and fruits, eat fats, eat protein. Oh yah, skip the trans fats, no hydrogenated oils and supplement your diet with fish oils.

I have to eat 17 zone blocks a day. However, since I want to put on muscle and drop fat I’m going to eat more protein and fat and less carbs. Kelly Frankson, our resident o-lifting guru, gave me a fantastic bit of advice:

1. For the 17 fat/protein blocks use those as a minimum that I should be eating everyday. So I need to eat at least 119g of protein and 26 grams of good fat a day. Whoa, that’s a lot.
2. For the 17 carb blocks, use those as a maximum. So I need to keep carb intake under 153g a day. Which should be pretty easy.

So this weekend I’ll be tweaking my nutritional plan. Taking out all the sugars, putting together meals with lots of protein and fats, carbs only from fruits and veggies and documenting it all here. My goal is to gain weight, and if possible lose body fat. I was aiming for 9% body fat, but if I can drop down to about 12% bodyfat this year… sweet!

On an achievement note today I set a new personal best for the Squat Clean. Here’s a video. I was aiming for 175lbs today but broke that with a 180lb squat clean. Current bodyweight is 171lbs. I was very proud of this! :)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also in the heat of the Crossfit moment I committed to the 75 burpee challenge. Our Flab Challenge is 75 days long. On day 1, do one burpee. On day 2, two burpees, and so on to day 75. Weee…fun.

For dinner I had a eclectic mix of Mexican and Japanese. Not too unhealthy but nowhere near the Zone diet that I should be following. The afternoon snack did not provide a lot of energy for Crossfit. Legs were a little weak for the front squats.

Oh and after dinner was followed up by a round of bubbletea. So bad!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted by email from Ben’s Food Log (posterous)

Improving my diet has been something I fail at regularly. Carrying around a notepad and pen is such a hassle.

That’s why posterous is a great tool for me. I can just use my iPhone to document everything. Posterous’ ability to post posts is the key feature that would make it easier. Plus because it is online I can distribute the work with each meal rather than type everything in at the end I’d the day. Sweet!!

Posted by email from Ben’s Food Log (posterous)

I’m blogging this from my iPhone. What will happen is that an email will be sent to post@posterous.com, some magic will happen and this text and the photo attachment will be posted on the blog.

So cool! The Posterous team has done an amazing job making this service available.

Posted by email from Ben’s Food Log (posterous)

It is impossible to ever see the Whole Picture. The Whole Picture is at least fifth dimensional. Our vision is limited to the third and we can only guess at the forth.

Well this is how I feel today…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today on Get Rich Slowly there is a very good guest post about insurance. I’m sure a lot of people don’t think about insurance enough, especially a lot of young adults. It is a rather boring subject and not that interesting to discuss.

It is one of those essential must knows on the path to becoming a responsible adult. In fact, if you have kids, a mortgage, a spouse or anybody that depends on you it is just negligent not to have insurance.

I thought the best advice from the article is a section about choosing the right balance of insurance to match your needs. It is appropriately entitled, Pick your poison:

Everyone has unique insurance needs. These are my own family’s experiences. If I had two cars again, I’d buy a used one and carry liability based on it. If I were a single woman with no kids, I would probably rent or own a small condo, and have only enough life insurance to pay for my funeral and settle my estate so my mom wouldn’t have to do it for me. If we didn’t have dependent children, I wouldn’t have as much life or health insurance coverage as I do. When we’re older and have more money in retirement, we’ll carry less insurance.

None of this stuff is fun to think about. But it’s a simple and unavoidable fact that we all die.

You may die from a car accident, a work accident, cancer, heart attack, infectious disease, or just old age. Most of the time, you don’t get to chose when or how you check out. You also don’t get to choose whether or not you or your children will get seriously ill. I’ve known lots of healthy people who’ve lived well and still gotten cancer, and I know great parents whose children have died from brain tumors, leukemia, and heart disease. You can control what you eat and whether you exercise, and that will mitigate your risk, but it doesn’t eliminate it.

I think the trick is to choose all of your insurance coverage options carefully based on where you are in life today, and who would be impacted if you were hurt, fell ill, or died. But do not forget to update your coverage based on your own needs and circumstances as you move forward and experience changes. Sometimes you will need more; sometimes you will need less.

I don’t get it. Why didn’t the President come to Canada to talk to Stephen Harper about the price of oil. Canada is the biggest exporter of crude oil to the United States. That’s right, Canada is #1, Saudi Arabia is a not so close second.

It would make sense to talk to the #1 source first before talking to the #2. This news article, Canada tries to cool oil prices, has some good information. It say that while Canada is the #1 exporter for the United States it only has about three percent of the World’s oil production. Yet we sit on fifteen percent of the World’s oil supply (yay for us).

For most of us, what we’re really concerned about is the price of gas at the pump. This is a whole lot different than the cost of crude oil. There is refining, marketing, futures, contracts and a whole bunch of other things in the middle before a barrel of oil gets into your car as a liter of gas. The Consumerist has a good featured article, Why Is Gas so Freakin’ Expensive, which summarizes a meticulous 324 page researched report how gas prices are set. The report, Gas Prices: How Are They Really Set? is available in PDF form.

In a nutshell The Consumerist’s report says gas prices are set in a complex matter of futures and contracts. What that means is the Saudi’s aren’t blowing smoke. Speculators are driving up the price of gas. The demand by countries like China and India are driving up the cost of gas. We (everybody) are using too much. Supply and demand.

I updated MostlyGeek with the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King. Previously the site used Twitter’s JavaScript badge to display my latest tweets. There are a number of advantages to using Twitter Tools over the simple badge: 

1. Automatically tweet a new blog entry
2. Automatic downloading of my latest tweets
3. Automatically blog tweets