Are You Overweight? Here's How to Lose Weight?

How many different diets have you tried and failed? My guess is all of them. If you ever try one and succeed, you'll stop looking to lose weight. Diets are designed to fail, not on purpose, but because the people who design diets usually don't take into account that the people who will go on it don't plan to do it forever. What I mean is that a diet is forever.

If you live a life eating 3,000 calories a day, but you only burn 1,500 a day, you're going to gain weight. then, when you "go on a diet" where you're only eating 1,000 calories a day, you'll lose that weight quickly, but you'll feel terrible, like you're starving yourself and once you finally get down to a weight where you're happy, you "go off" the diet, if you even make it to that point. Normally, you'll drop a few pounds, then treat yourself for the quick success and never go back on the diet. Then you end up gaining back the few pounds you lost plus a few more.

OK, so how do you really lose weight? Obviously you don't want to exercise, or you want to, but don't have the time or energy, or you just don't know how. So, how do you lose weight without changing your lifestyle and without starving yourself? My solution is very easy, but also a bit of a pain in the ass. You will have to change your eating habits some, but you don't have to starve yourself.

Here's the simply instructions and I'll try to explain in a bit more detail later. Take your current weight and subtract your ideal weight. But what is your ideal weight? I'll explain that later also. Now, take 10% of that and subtract it from your current weight. That's your goal weight until you achieve it. then you start this process over until you reach your ideal weight. This may seem complicated, but now I'll explain in detail and make it simple.

Let's start with our ideal weight. Click here to find your ideal weight range.

Now take the Max Weight and subtract it from your current weight. Let's say you are a 5'2" woman and weight 190 lbs. Your ideal max weight is 136 lbs. 190 - 136 = 54 lbs. 10% of 54 lbs is 5 lbs. Your goal is to lose 5 lbs.

Now, we need to figure out how much you can eat in order to lose these 5 lbs. Your current weight is 190 so you're shooting for 185. Now, it may seem tricky, but it is so simple. Just add a 0 to the end of this goal weight, so 185 now becomes 1850. That's how many calories you need to eat. Sure, you may think that by eating fewer calories, you'll lose weight faster. You will, but you'll also be starving yourself and you're more likely to fail this diet. Try to eat as close to 1850 calories per day until you get to 185 lbs. Then start over.

Now, this will work, but in order to make it work a little faster and healthier, try splitting this into 6 meals per day, instead of just 3. 1850 calories divided by 6 equals 308 calories per meal. this means smaller portions of food, but eating twice as many times per day. Soon, your body will tell you when you're hungry and by eating more meals per day, you're less likely to snack and we all know that snacking is the thing that kills all diets.

Add in some exercise and you'll drop that weight like crazy.

Chili Recipe

Here is the absolute best chili recipe on the web.
http://chilirecipe.webs.com/index.htm

Background:
I have been working on my chili recipe since 1993 when I bought a little seasoning packet and added it, per the instructions, to a pound of ground beef. It's come a long way since then. Now I actually cut up my own vegetables and add the spices, etc. to my own taste. Below you will notice that I have both ground beef and Italian sausage. If you want this to be super hot, to where you actually will sweat while eating it, then just use the sausage and double the amount. If you don't like hot chili, then go with the ground beef doubled up.

Over the years, while eating my chili, most people would comment on how great it tasted, but also about how hot it was. I've had many requests for me to make it again, but this request was usually followed by another request to "not make it so hot this time". This was during the time when I used only the sausage and I tried many thing to try to "cool" if off some. I found the only way to cool it down was to mix in some ground beef and now I normally make it half and half.

One variation that I want to try, but just haven't gotten around to yet, is to switch out the ground beef with steak. I figure to use 1 lb of steak, probably a london broil, sliced up into 1/2 inch cubes.

Ingredients: (an asterisk * next to the ingredient means it's an estimate. I normally don't measure, I just add and taste until I like it)

1 lb Ground Beef
1 lb Hot Italian Sausage
8 Baseball Size Tomatoes
1 - 2 Baseball Size Onions
1 cup Franks Red Hot Sauce*
1/2 cup crushed Red Pepper*
1/2 cup ground Cayenne Pepper*
1/2 cup Chili Powder*
1 cup shredded Cheese (your choice of type/flavor)
1 cup Sour Cream
1 can Kidney Beans (or two if you like a lot of beans)
Assorted Hot and Chili Peppers (your choice)

Directions:
Dice the tomatoes and onions and simmer them in a large pot. Next, if sausage is in links, cut it free. Grill the beef and sausage together. Make sure the meat is crumbly, like taco or sloppy joe meat. Once the beef is completely cooked through, drain it and add it to the tomatoes and onions. Add the kidney beans. Dice and add any assorted peppers you chose (I don't normally use these). Add hot sauce.

Now you can add the spices, but only add a little of each at a time. Stir and taste after each few spoonfuls added until you like the taste. You should add about 1/4 cup of each.

Simmer for about an hour. This will make it almost soupy. It's ready to serve at this point. Use the sour cream and shredded cheese as toppings. I usually let people add their own and I serve it with dip style tortilla chips.

Just How Big is the Universe?

I watched a program recently called "Journey to the Edge of the Universe". It amazed me at just how big the universe is and just how small we are. The average person is less than 6 ft tall. The Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter. Remember digging in the ground as a kid and thinking about digging all the way to China? 8,000 miles is a long way to dig.

If we were to say that every person were exactly 6 ft tall and we lined them up from head to foot, we would need 7,040,000 (that's over 7 million) to equal the diameter of the Earth.

The Sun is 93 million miles away from Earth and is about 800,000 miles in diameter. To put this in more relative terms, if the Earth were 1 inch in diameter, about the size of a quarter, then the Sun would be 8 ft in diameter and it would be 1.5 miles away. Hold a quarter in your hand next to a wall in your home. Most homes have walls about 8 ft from floor to ceiling. The quarter is the Earth and the wall is the Sun. Now imagine that the wall is 1.5 miles away from the quarter.

It would take 704 million people lined up to equal the diameter of the Sun and 81,840,000,000 (0ver 81 billion) people lined up to stretch from the Earth to the Sun.

Just think, if the quarter was a person, then the Earth would be about 111 miles in size. You'd have to drive about 1.5 to 2 hours. The Sun would be about 11,111 miles in diameter. So, if a person was the size of a quarter, the Sun would still be larger then the actual size of the Earth. People on the Sun are roughly equal to ants on earth.

To make matters worse, or to make us feel even less significant, the Sun is a very, very small star. This website shows a nice graphic display of some large stars and the size comparison of our Sun to them. http://www.kidsgeo.com/geography-for-kids/0003-how-big-is-the-earth.php

Now I ask you, if God created everything, and he created Man in his imagine, why did he make us so small compared to everything else?

On top of size, what about lifespan? Humans live for about 80 years. The Sun has been in existance for about 4.65 billion years and is only about half way through its lifespan. This means the Sun will live for about 9 billion years. If we live for a mere 1 second of time, that would mean the Sun lives for about 3.5 years, or if we live for 10 seconds, the Sun lives for 35 years. If the sun were to live for only 80 years, then people would live for only about 22 seconds.

And the Sun hasn't been around for the entire existance of the Universe. I believe the program said the Universe has been around for about 14 billion years. In relative terms, if the Universe has been here for 10.5 years, then our average lifespan would be just 1 second, or, if the Universe existed for 84 years, then our lifespan would account for just 8 seconds of that time.

We are so small and live for such a short time. I know, in death, we probably grow to insurmountable porportions and live forever, right. Sure, those who believe in a God will certainly have an answer for this, as they do for everything. But I will still find it amazing that in the face of such greatness as the mere existance of this vast Universe, people still believe we are the most important things in it.

I think if there were a God out there who created all this and created some part of it in His imagine, then He most likely would have created the Stars in His imagine, as they are far more substantial then we.