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Jan 1 2010

My Daughter Wants to Be Ripped – Helping Young Girls Develop Self Esteem and a Positive Body Image

Summary: My six-year-old daughter wants to be strong and ripped. Good for her! Hope she still thinks that way when she’s thirteen though.

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"Look at my muscle!"

A couple of weeks ago me and my daughter head over to Monterey to check out Sharks 3-D at the Imax theater. It was the 11 am showing and there were only four of us in the whole theater. Pretty sweet seating wise, but I’m a bit bored with the anthromorphised sea turtle with the British accent. He’s our “tour guide” on this adventure. They string together a bunch of nondescript scenes and try to make  a story out of it. It just doesn’t work. The photography’s decent enough, but how many times can you see the same whale shark pass slowly across the lense before you start to doze off. Plus, there’s no explanation on how this little sea turtle manages to travel thousands of miles in what appears to be one day. They tease and hint at danger throughout but nothing really happens. I was hoping for at least one “shark kills sea lion” scene but no luck. Not even a bruised dolphin. However, my daughter totally get’s into it. She’s getting in and out of her seat, bouncing around and grabbing at the 3-D projection as the sharks and jellyfish float past her face. Great fun. Continue reading


Jan 1 2010

Super Salad Smackdown – Competing Theories on Portion Control

Summary: People’s lives will expand to their available environment. Whatever you are doing, it will expand to fill the available space. My lunch time super salads are no different.

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My lunchtime super salad. Women and children should not attempt to eat this salad. It will crush them as it is far too Herculean for their little bodies. Luck would have it, all my favorite stuff was available this day including the blueberries, the pomegranate and the corn. The mess begins when you actually dig in and try to eat it.

Every day for lunch I make a monster salad. I mean it’s huge. It’s on steroids. It’s a manly salad.

I start off with a bed of mixed baby greens, some sunflower sprouts, buckwheat sprouts and a bit of shredded cabbage. That’s the foundation. Depending on what’s in season I’ll then add sliced grapes, pomegranate seeds, fresh blueberries, sliced strawberries and whatever other interesting fruity type things I can find. I may also kick in some heirloom tomatoes, beets and fresh corn sheared right off the cob. I top it off with a fistful of walnuts, a sprinkle of fresh shredded parmesan and cracked pepper. Nutritionally it’s off the charts and delicious as fuck. I know that’s a weird way to talk about a salad, but I can actually feel my body becoming energized on a cellular level from eating the salad. Continue reading


Sep 9 2009

Feeding Picky Eaters – Try a Child’s Tasting Menu to Awaken Your Kid’s Taste Buds and Encourage Healthy Eating

Summary: Cut out the sweetened drinks and turn your kids on to a healthy “small plate with a bunch of little things on it”.

Guacamole and chips, sliced tofu dog, green beans and a yogurt desert with a border of sliced fuji apple with a mixed berry sauce drizzle topped with fresh blueberries.

Guacamole and chips, sliced tofu dog, green beans and a yogurt desert with a border of sliced fuji apple with a mixed berry sauce drizzle topped with fresh blueberries.

Most of us struggle with trying to get our kids to eat a well balanced, healthy diet. Unfortunately, we are genetically programmed to seek out salt and sugar.  In nature both of these items are very rare. Salt is a necessary component for proper electrolyte balance, and anything sweet is generally a simple carbohydrate that  provides instant energy.

The problem is that in an industrialized society, with a centralized food system that is heavily subsidized by the government to favor cheap calories, we now have extremely easy and affordable access to things that were once rare.

Normal everyday items such as spaghetti sauce and bread, that your grandmother would never even think of putting sugar in, are now laced with high fructose corn syrup. Normal foods are now sweet, and sweet foods are now super sweet. If you’re eating processed foods you can pretty much put them into one of two categories; sweet things and salty things. Continue reading


Nov 27 2007

Vegetarian Children – Raising Kids in a Vegetarian Home While Allowing for Choice

Summary: You became a vegetarian by choice. Perhaps your children should have that same choice.

I first tried being a vegetarian during my senior year of high school in 1984. I was living in Mesa Arizona at the time: a place of extremely wide, straight, flat streets punctuated by strip malls with names like “Poca Fiesta”, “Fiesta Village” and “Fiesta Mall” (I swear I’m not making this up!) I lived in a planned community called Saratoga Lakes in the Dobson Ranch area which was literally a cattle ranch back in the day before it was paved over with suburbia. So just about everything around me (my home, my school, shopping centers, parks, streets, etc) was less than twenty years old and most of it less than ten years old. My entire neighborhood and school district was less than 7 years old.

We had very few “local” businesses. Pretty much everything was a chain store. Natural food stores just simply didn’t exist anywhere in the valley. Same with vegetarian restaurants.

My reasons for trying vegetarianism were not related to any moral or ethical issues about killing and eating animals. I didn’t then, and I still don’t now, have any ethical problems with the killing of animals for food as long as the animals are raised in healthy humane conditions and their deaths are as quick and trauma free as possible. No, my reason for trying vegetarianism was a quest for better health. Over the years I had noticed a pattern. Eat meat, get heartburn. Not always, but it was the only food that repeatedly caused problems. So why did it take me seventeen years to notice this pattern and do something about it. Conditioning is the culprit. Continue reading


Nov 13 2007

Get Thee to a Potty! An Unorthodox Solution to a Child’s Persistent Pooping Problem and Toilet Training Issues.

Summary: The day I finally snapped and made my child beat years of constipation and overcome her anxiety around pooping.

It’s funny how children can be simultaneously advanced and behind at the same time. My daughter had such a split around toilet training. She was a kung-fu master in peeing but a lowly apprentice in pooping.

Physically my daughter has always been ahead of the curve. Crawling, walking, riding a bike, swimming, it really didn’t matter, if it involved gross motor skills she got really good, really fast. So it was not a surprise when she first taught herself how to pee on the toilet at about 20 months of age. Shortly after it was just not peeing in the toilet, but wiping herself, flushing, and then coming out in the living room to grab another diaper and putting it on herself while standing up. It was quite amusing actually. By age three she was in underwear 24/7. However popping was a separate issue.

Early on, at about 18 months old, my daughter had an unfortunate incident with constipation. When she finally pushed the poop out, it hurt. For someone who was only a year and a half old, the lesson was clear: pooping hurts, so next time don’t let the poop out.

Thus began the Great Pooping Wars of 2005-2007. To avoid the pain of pooping that my daughter felt was inevitable, she would hold in her poop, thus ensuring she would end up constipated. So when she finally pooped, it would definitely hurt. It was a self fulfilling prophecy. Continue reading


Oct 26 2007

Vasectomies Rock! – How Getting Snipped Can Make For An Amazing Sex Life

Summary: It’s liberating to know that no matter how hard, long or often you come there is no chance it will result in a pregnancy. This makes sex more spontaneous and enjoyable.

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Don’t want more kids but don’t want to wear a condom? Then get a vasectomy you wuss!

After about fifteen years together my partner and I decided to start a family. It’s not that we couldn’t get around to it sooner; it’s just that my partner is a highly organized person and this is where she had put pregnancy in her 20 year planner. Never seen one? They’re about two feet thick with ring binders the size of bicycle rims. You can special order them from Staples.

Now my partner had been on the pill since we started dating. Before that I’d only had a couple of partners, both whom were also on the pill. So basically I have gone most of my adult life without having to wear a condom.

When my partner stopped taking the pill about a year and a half before she was planning to get pregnant we thought we would just switch to condoms as our birth control of choice. How bad could it be right? Honestly, it was much worse than I had expected. Besides being a mood breaker, it was just kind of a numb feeling. I’ve experienced greater sensations dry humping through clothes. Continue reading