Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Since I've resumed regular workouts, I thought I'd try a different electrolyte mix called Electrolyte Stix . Mike Mutzel over at High Intensity Health (no affiliation) sells an electrolyte mix with calcium, salt (Redmond's Real Salt from Utah), magnesium malate, potassium citrate, creatine, and taurine. There's no junky ingredients and even though lemon-lime was the only flavor available when I first bought a box, I liked the taste. I usually hate lemon-lime.  Image from Myoxcience.com . The good: When I have a packet of it mixed with a glass of water during workouts, I feel good. I don't end up feeling tired or off, or having a pounding heart. When I feel that way, it's often from a lack of electrolytes (especially salt or potassium). I've also built up a noticeable amount of muscle over the past few months without overly strenuous workouts; maybe the creatine helped. The bad: If I have this every day, my face swells up, which I found out is from too much ...

My best fermentation recipe yet! Perfect for fall. Ingredients 4 small apples, peeled and shredded 1 cup chopped raw cranberries (a food processor with an S blade works well) 1 celery stalk, thinly sliced 4 T brown sugar 1/4 cup maple syrup* Filtered water Your choice of sugar-loving probiotics (I used Biotiquest Ideal Immunity) Special equipment Canning funnel Quart jar and lid  Fermentation weight (optional) Fermentation device (I use a heating pad in an insulated grocery bag) Combine the apples, cranberries, celery, maple syrup and brown sugar in a bowl and mix. Put the canning funnel on the jar and spoon in the mixture. Add enough water to cover the ingredients. Put in the probiotics, opening the capsules if applicable. With a clean spoon or knife, push the probiotics into the jar and move the ingredients around to bring air bubbles to the surface. Put the fermentation weight in the jar if using. Put the lid on loosely (or use a fermentation lid).  Ferment until the mixtur...

I'm down to a weight I never thought I'd see again. It's not because I was trying to lose weight, but trying to gain muscle. After a couple of months of lifting weights for two one-hour sessions a week at home, I'm down five pounds and I've had to start wearing a belt. Not me--but those look like the 15-pound weights I curl. Photo from Pexels.com . This is a pleasant side effect of working to maintain strength and bone density instead of becoming weaker as I age. Body composition is something Dr. Davis and others have begun hammering home. A large portion of weight lost on a diet is from muscle--some of it in your heart and organs.  I've been using the weight training method described in the book  The Resistance Training Revolution by Sal Di Stefano. (If you're an Inner Circle member, you can watch a meetup with Di Stefano on the site.) What I love about his method is that I don't feel exhausted and beaten up during or after workouts, even though I use...

How do you recognize a bad situation when it's like the air you breathe? Literally is the air you breathe? A couple of really bad days, years apart, finally clued me in that cooking fumes were giving me sinus headaches, which led to neck pain. So I ordered a range hood and stopped cooking onions in the meantime. Sinus problems and neck pain--absent. To the best of my recollection, no house I ever lived in (until last week) had a properly working range hood, or any range hood. My previous house had a small, east-facing window next to the stove that might have helped. But when I lived in a dorm, I don't think I ever had a cold, and the only sinus pain I remember from that time was during a bad allergy season. I put in a range hood last weekend. It's ductless--it doesn't vent to the outside, but filters the air through charcoal filters and recirculates it back into the kitchen. For its maiden meal, I sautéed peppers, onions and zucchini. I could smell the peppers cooking,...

The PRIME Act Remember the panic buying and food shortages of 2020? When grocery store shelves were cleaned out and restaurants closed, I recommended a family farm that raised beef (previously bought by closed restaurants) to my coworkers. The PRIME Act has been re-introduced to help family farms like this. It was introduced in 2020 to remove the requirement for most livestock to be processed at a relatively small number of industrial-size slaughterhouses.  Smaller, local "custom" slaughterhouses could be used instead for meat staying within the state and would eliminate the need for those animals to travel for hours in trailers. Custom slaughterhouses "must follow federal, state, and local health and safety guidelines and are periodically inspected for cleanliness and safety— similar to how restaurants are inspected," says the Institute for Justice . Critics say the PRIME Act would make the meat supply less safe, but similar laws already apply to poultry.  The Fre...

Sometimes it takes a lousy day to make you figure out what's wrong. And today was a lousy day. First, it took an half an hour to get through the line at the understaffed Kroger. When I came home, the house still smelled like onions from canning chili the day before, and my headache and sore neck started getting worse. I ate some leftover chili and roused myself to go shop for a new washer, since mine is leaking from the bottom, as the plumber I called for a clogged drain discovered. An appliance repairman on YouTube said washers are badly built nowadays; I bought a brand unlikely to break down for a good seven years or so. It set me back three times what I paid in the 90s for a Kenmore that lasted at least 20 years. There was no use shopping for a used one here in Indianapolis: people here use appliances until they're worn out. By mid-afternoon, I was back home and took some Mucinex for my sinus pain...and realized I'd felt OK while I was out shopping. It was like Christmas...

My glasses had never fogged up in the summertime until last week. T he heat index (temperature with humidity) was 100 to 115 F , or 38 to 46 C. Hospitals saw an increase in heat-related illnesses last week , and even with a reprieve on Saturday, the glass doors to the grocery store had so much condensation, they looked like someone sprayed them with water. Hopefully, the knuckleheads who think the heat warnings are just climate change propaganda have had the sense to come in out of the sun. Or the moon: even at 10 PM, it felt like a sauna outside. Photo from Pexels.com .  For an easy meal and to avoid heating up the house even more, I made a charcuterie plate of sausage, bleu cheese, pâté, hummus and avocado and a salad and had a glass of magnesium tea . For dessert, I made  frozen yogurt . I also picked up a chicken at the store. Read ingredient lists when you buy sausage or roast chickens--some contain carrageenan (a sickening thickener). Or roast chickens can taste like ted...