Checking in for 2013

A belated Happy New Year everybody! Hope you had a great holiday.

Sorry to say I gained five pounds from Christmas to New Years. I was good the week before and then it was the perfect storm. Holidays. Vacation. Travel. A week in my native Philadelphia, which I inevitably use to eat all the City of Brotherly Love junk I normally would eat in three months. Cheesesteaks. Hoagies. East coast pizza. Etc. I also discovered Handel's ice cream, which is from Ohio, but they have one there. Oh, and soft pretzels. How could I forget soft pretzels.

One good Philly recommendation you can enjoy where ever you live. I saw Silver Linings Playbook with my wife on New Year's Day. GREAT MOVIE! And it's set in Philadelphia. If you like great movies, or Philly, or the Eagles, or dancing, or Robert DeNiro, do yourself a favor and watch it. An endearing take on the inner beauty of people battling mental illness too. And DeNiro's character (who is banned for life from Eagles games for fighting) placing a bet on the Eagles to beat the Cowboys so he has the money to open a cheesesteak restaurant is pretty much Philadelphia porn. Heck, there's even a reference to Eagles coach Andy Reid blowing a replay challenge (uncanny timing, as Reid got fired on Monday) and King of Prussia Mall, which we visited last week (along with half of the Keystone state, probably).

Now I'm locked in on the low sodium routine, which coincidentally knocks out 90% of junk food.

- No foods more than 800 mg of sodium (roughly 1/3 of a day's allowance)
- No foods with a sodium to calorie ratio of 2:1 or higher
- No salty snacks
- No table salt

I tried this the week before Christmas with some success, but I considered it "voluntary compliance" until Jan. 1. Now it's "mandatory compliance" and I'm making some tough decisions. So far, so good, but I'm worried I'll run out of variety. It's hard. I even inadvertently had some 500 mg lunch meat on New Year's Day. But I really believe this is the right thing to do.

Here's an "aha". Over time I have really bought into the "carbohydrates are bad" line of thinking. And, of course, rice is a carb. But I was challenged by those places in the world where people live on a rice based diet and live to be 100. (Okanowa, for example)  Well, guess what doesn't have any sodium? Makes sense now. I think most processed carbs are bad, but sodium is an indicator of which carbs are dangerous and addictive, and which are probably OK.

I spent a lot of time over break preparing the new blog. It will launch on Monday. I'll send a link when it's ready.

Best wishes on a great 2013!