Category: Health and Fitness

How to do Something Hard- The 5-Day Fast

***Daily updates posted at the bottom***
There are a lot of swears in this post but not because I’m mad. I’ve just cutely named future iterations of me catchy things like F*ck-This-Sh*t Me. F*ck-This-Sh*t Me is a key figure since this post is all about fasting and I’m pretty sure I’ll regret the whole thing by Monday afternoon but it’s a fun post. If you don’t want to read any swears the takeaway message is I’m doing a 5-day fast and it’s important to do hard things every once in a while.

Having just finished a delicious meal of pizza and fried-chicken, Late-June Me agreed to partake in a 5-day fast starting the week after July 4th because why not? “Wow, that’s so brave of Late-June You,” you might be thinking. Nope. Late-June Me is just an asshole. Continue reading “How to do Something Hard- The 5-Day Fast”

Staying Mentally and Physically Fit During Social Isolation

Well, March has been a real shit show. We thought January was a terrible month then March said, “Hold my Coronavirus.” The entire planet is supposed to be practicing social isolation so we don’t infect each other but most of our parents rotate between pulling their cash out of the bank like it’s 1945 and thinking this is all some hoax from the democrats.

The whole thing is kind of an introvert’s dream, but also I don’t like being told what to do. Either way, we seem to all be stuck being homebodies for the next few weeks. Continue reading “Staying Mentally and Physically Fit During Social Isolation”

Free-Range Morality- What’s the Deal with Eggs?

What kind of chicken eggs does everyone buy? I’ve been thinking about eggs because last time I was in the grocery store there were 47 different versions for sale and I feel like some of them were made up. There were pasture-raised, free-range, organic, ethically treated, verbally abused, vegetarian-fed, cage-free, farm-fresh and even white eggs. It’s a pretty overwhelming process trying to figure out which version of this breakfast staple most closely defines me as a person.

Here’s the thing: I want to buy eggs from the most well-treated chickens on the planet. Maybe not the most well-treated, but at least from chickens that aren’t treated really poorly.

But, here’s also the thing: I don’t want to be taken for a ride by some bullshit chicken egg marketing campaign designed to trick hippies and liberals into paying more for the same product.

What’s a conscientious frugal egg-buying blogger to do? Continue reading “Free-Range Morality- What’s the Deal with Eggs?”

The Slow-Carb Diet- How to Lose Fat While (Still) Eating Donuts and Pizza

Saturday, 6/22/2019 Slow-Carb Diet Cheat day.

  • 6:30am- Protein/collagen shake in almond milk 250 calories
  • 7:00am- Coffee with coconut cream 50 calories
  • 7:30am- 3 eggs 1 cup sauerkraut 300 calories
  • (8:50am- 75 kettle bell swings with 50lb kettle bell)
  • 8:55am- 1 cup grapefruit juice 100 calories
  • 9:00am- One chocolate filled donut 240 calories
  • (10:30am- 10 pull-ups 50 air squats 25 push-ups)
  • 10:45am- Two donuts- Jelly filled glazed and twisted glazed 600 calories
  • 11:00am- Black coffee with cinnamon 5 calories
  • 1:00pm- Black coffee with cinnamon 5 calories
  • 3:00pm- 1 1/2 cup Dreyers Drumstick ice cream with one tablespoon Adam’s crunchy peanut butter 710 calories
  • 5:30pm- Ramen from Yuzu 600 calories
  • 9:00pm- Dragon’s Milk 11% Stout 600 calories
  • 9:30pm- 3 cups Dreyers Drumstick ice cream with three tablespoons Adam’s crunchy peanut butter 1590 calories
  • 10:00pm- Guacamole and chips 400 calories
  • 10:30pm- Bed
  • Total cheat day calories 5450

Now that Game of Thrones is over we have nothing better to do with our free time, so we started reading Tim Ferriss’ best-selling book The 4-Hour Body. In it he shares a wealth of information from how to lose fat, quickly gain muscle, improve your sex life, and even how to properly swing a baseball bat. It’s an interesting book that’s well worth a look if you’re into any of those pursuits.

The above list of food is what I gorged myself on during one of my Saturday cheat days. If you look closely you’ll notice a few random quick workouts, grapefruit juice, and lots of ice cream. Don’t worry, it’s all part of the plan…I think.

Trying out the slow-carb diet.

First off, I hate the word diet. It’s a bad word that brings up negative connotations and sadness for a lot of people. I think there can be a benefit to drastically changing your eating habits for a short time in certain circumstances, but the reason most diets fail is because they aren’t sustainable. You should strive to have a healthy diet, not be on a healthy diet.

That being said, let’s talk about this new diet I’m on for some reason.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if this diet is going to work or if it’s sustainable long-term. It’s an experiment and this post is only Part I. 

Many of the people who follow the slow-carb diet lose tremendous amounts of weight in a short time. I don’t have a tremendous amount of weight to lose, but I’m still curious if it can help me lose that last bit of belly fat. Plus, I’ll try any diet that allows me to eat as much ice cream and pizza as I can manage to shove into my mouth.

As a baseline I’m 180 pounds, approximately 14% body fat, and I’ve been doing Intermittent Fasting pretty consistently for about a year. Intermittent fasting and cutting way down on beer has already helped me lose most of the belly fat I had acquired. I’m curious to see if the strictness of this diet is the extra push I need to get abs and finally make my grandmother proud, or if eating a carton of ice cream every Saturday somehow has negative results.

One negative right out of the gate is I will be giving up intermittent fasting for the first few months. One of the slow-carb diet keys to success is eating 30g of protein immediately upon waking. “When you skip breakfast, you fail,” my buddy Tim says. So, intermittent fasting is out, for the time being.

I really like the lifestyle of intermittent fasting and I’m curious how the slow-carb diet stacks up in comparison. Overall I’m happy with my body, but if simply changing WHEN I eat certain foods and replacing a couple others is the difference between having a six-pack and having a fluffy tummy, then I’m on board with the experiment.

I’ll evaluate my results over the course of a few months and I’d like to eventually combine intermittent fasting with the slow-carb diet to see if the two counter-act each other or if they enhance each other. If Tim Ferriss was a religious leader he would be very okay with this experimentation of the faith because he’s all about experimentation.

Changing your diet

There’s two ways to look at any relatively extreme eating regimen– I can’t eat x, y and z, and the ONLY benefit is a healthier body vs I get a healthier body and the ONLY thing I have to do is NOT eat x, y and z. It’s a subtle difference, but an important distinction. In one case you’re looking at what you’re missing out on: foods x, y, and z. In the other you’re looking at what you’re gaining: A healthier, more attractive body to exist in.

I try to think about this distinction while I’m gagging on Brussels sprouts while my ice cream sits lonely and cold in the freezer. Saturday, my love, Saturday.

The basic idea of the slow-carb diet is if you follow these five rules (as outlined by Tim Ferris in his book The 4-Hour Body) you will lose fat.

1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates (or anything that can be white, cauliflower is an exception).

2: Eat the same few meals over and over again.

3: Don’t drink calories.

4: Don’t eat fruit.

5: Take one day off per week and go nuts.

It was rule #5 that really caught my attention. Once per week you are instructed to eat anything and everything you can think of. Go nuts. The last several Saturdays (my designated cheat day) I’ve consumed between 5,000-6,000 calories by eating as much as I want of whatever I want. It’s been years since I’ve allowed myself to eat donuts. I might have accidentally opened Pandora’s box. If Part II doesn’t come out for over a year and consists of home videos of me being 340 pounds rolling around on the ground crying because we’re out of sugar puffs, then we’ll know this diet backfired.

Cheat daaaaayyyy

Saturday is cheat day, and on cheat day I feel like this…

slow-carb

My internal emotions are that of a kid licking a sucker on top of a monkey bar set saying, “Nananabooboo you can’t get me (fat).” The other six days my internal emotions are decidedly more reserved.

More like this…

On days that aren’t cheat days I’m allowed to eat as much as I want, just not of foods anybody wants to eat a lot of. Non-cheat day foods include lots of beans, mixed vegetables, eggs, fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchee, salads and meat.

So, Saturdays are a lot of fun on this diet. The rest of the week is good patience building. Here’s what I eat on days that aren’t cheat days:

6:00am- 30g protein drink first thing in the morning as per instructions. (Kind of a gray area. He says don’t drink calories but I assume that means empty calories like juice and soda. In his book he says a protein shake is okay but whole food is ideal to get the 30g of protein when you wake up, if you can stomach it.)

First Meal 8:00am-3 eggs, sauerkraut, pinto or black beans

Second Meal 12:00pm- Steamed mixed vegetables, pinto or black beans, sausage pieces

Third Meal 4:00pm- Large salad with pinto or black beans, sometimes with a meat

Fourth Meal 8:00pm- Tuna with mayo, relish, onions, mustard, pickled asparagus, etc… Beans, probably.

Every. Single. Day.

So, not super fun. I don’t literally eat the same thing for every meal, but those are the basic ingredients that I mix around. The times aren’t exact either, but that’s the basic outline. It’s actually not all that bad. You can mix flavors up by adding or subtracting an ingredient or two. He says most people greatly over-estimate the variation of food they eat in a given week.

This is close to how we normally eat. The main differences are we had to cut out white rice as a staple and replace it with more beans and lots of vegetables. Sadly, I had to cut out my evening ice cream and whiskey, and instead of fasting until noon, I now eat as soon as I wake up.

On non-cheat days you’re allowed to have red wine, but no beer. He doesn’t get into whether or not you can have whiskey, but it’s good mental training for me to limit my whiskey consumption to one or two nights per week anyway.

Yearly Physical

On July 12th I had my yearly physical. This is unrelated to the slow-carb diet other than a couple of my numbers were concerning to Mrs. Burrito Bowl. Turns out my cholesterol was high despite being a freedom loving red-blooded American. On top of that my glucose level had jumped from 81 mg/dl in 2018 to 102 mg/dl in 2019, which is some bullshit. And yes, I am well aware leading off this article bragging about eating an entire carton of ice cream, only then to admit being borderline pre-diabetic might be sending mixed signals. What can you do?

I’ve been doing the slow-carb diet for about three weeks so far, so I don’t think enough time has elapsed for that to be the cause of my less than stellar blood results. My cholesterol was high last year, but I had halfway chalked those results up to having a pizza eating contest the day before. Mrs. Burrito Bowl says that’s not how those tests work, but she also wanted me to stop having pizza eating contests. Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it too. She’s a nurse so, hard to say who is right.

It is possible the cheat days on the slow-carb diet might be turning me into a 56-year-old diabetic who’s about to have a heart attack -OR- my numbers might be precipitously falling and there just hasn’t been enough time elapsed to really get back into optimum range.  Only time will tell.

slow-carb

I spent most of Friday evening scratching my head about my glucose levels. I’m a healthy guy, damnit. I have abs in the right light. I can do pull-ups. Why the f*** is my blood glucose above 100 mg/dl?! I am not a good candidate for diabetes, the needles scare me. I get uncomfortably hot just being in a doctor’s office. Why did Mrs. Burrito Bowl make me eat so much broccoli?!? I’m getting myself worked up.

Just breathe. Wim Hof.

What I learned though is that being on the slow carb diet (or ketogenic diets) can artificially raise your blood glucose levels. It doesn’t mean you’re actually pre-diabetic. When you’re on a ketogenic or slow-carb diet your body starts burning fat for fuel instead of sugar (which is the whole point) so your body just gets rid of the access sugar through your blood. I might have totally messed the science up. Listen, I’m not a doctor. Read this article if you want to get into the nitty gritty of it.

It theoretically is possible that I actually do have elevated glucose levels and the fact that there can be a false positive due to being on a slow-carb diet could just be a coincidence. If I were a betting man I'd bet that my reading is artificially high, but it's silly to take chances with your health so I will get my glucose levels retested and report back on PART II of this post (which doesn't exist, yet).

Here’s an updated picture of my glucose reading.

slow-carb

Mrs. Burrito Bowl is a saint with her diet so she legitimately was not surprised that I might be pre-diabetic. Nonsense. It was a false positive you guys. Let’s not worry about it again. The high cholesterol could be genetic, diet, or a combination of both.  That one I can’t sweep under the rug so easily. The high glucose though? It’s not a thing. Continue following my dietary advice (I am not a physician, consult one before following any of my advice, even financial).

Things I love about the slow-carb diet so far

I love the idea of being able to have one guilt-free cheat day per week. I think this is huge. Not only does it actually help you lose weight faster than not having a cheat day, but mentally saying, “I’ll see you Saturday, pizza,” is way easier than, “I guess I just don’t eat pizza anymore.”

I’m typically fairly strict with my diet, but I do allow myself pizza, beer, ice cream etc. if the mood strikes. The mood tends to strike more often than not. So, I guess maybe I’m normally not that strict. But, I don’t allow myself to just buy a box of donuts and force feed myself until I’m sick. On cheat day though, that’s exactly what I do. (Editor’s Note: After inputting my blood test results I might not exactly be coming across as someone you should aspire to follow diet-wise. I’m in pretty good shape though guys, honest.)

When you change your relationship to food the diet isn’t that hard. Here’s a few things I try to keep in mind when I feel discouraged or Saturday feels like it’s particularly far away.

  1.  You can eat whatever you want, just not right now. This is great stoicism training and it reminds me I’m not in a hopeless loop of never enjoying my favorite foods. We could all use a little more delayed gratification in our lives.
  2. Food doesn’t have to always taste amazing. Broccoli is a bullshit vegetable, it just is. Just get it in there. Its purpose is to provide you energy, not to make your mouth have an orgasm.
  3. What you eat affects how you feel ALL DAY. You can eat a donut and have mouth pleasure for a few seconds, and even that euphoric sugar rush for a few minutes, but eventually that feeling will be gone and you’ll be left feeling groggy and tired. Conversely, you can spend a few semi-uncomfortable minutes eating healthy food and you’ll feel energetic the rest of the day. I’m always struck with how much worse my body feels on cheat day. It’s way more fun, but I’m usually battling a headache, grogginess, and a general lack of energy on Saturdays.
  4. Eating healthy doesn’t have to taste bad. I know the last two points were me complaining about how much less fun it is to eat healthy, but once you give in to the sweet defeat of eating healthy, it’s not so bad. There are plenty of ways to make beans, vegetables, and meat taste very satisfying. Spices, hot sauces, and oils go a long way on steamed vegetables.
  5. Mrs. Burrito Bowl is going to take away all the things you love if you don’t get your glucose and cholesterol levels in check. This is good motivation. But also, I’ve been eating a lot of broccoli lately. Maybe that’s the issue. You guys, I am so relieved I found a few articles about artificially high glucose tests when on low-carb diets. I know I could just edit that entire section out, but I want you to appreciate what an ordeal I’ve been through tonight. Cheat day was almost ruined. How could I enjoy eating an entire pizza knowing my glucose levels were dangerously high? It would have been much harder.

Fitness

I finally rejoined my gym and I’ll be incorporating a new exercise program into my life- Occam’s Protocol. Occam’s Protocol is a program detailed in the 4-Hour Boy and will go along with the slow-carb diet. The two are semi-conflicting, as one is for muscle gain and one is for fat loss, so I might regret doing both at the same time. But, I’m a wild man, let it ride.

The general idea of Occam’s Protocol is you do a total of about 10 minutes of exercise split into two workouts. Each workout is two exercises, one set to failure each.

It sounds absurd, that’s why I’m so excited to try it.

Workout A is military press and lat-pulldowns, workout B is decline bench and leg press. I’ll do a post just on this as I think it’s an intriguing idea. The goal is to get to the minimum effective dose that gets you results.  The key to the one set is you do each lift at a 5×5 cadence. Five seconds up and five seconds down. It’s super hard. I did workout B on Wednesday and I still can’t walk right. Instead of spending an hour in the gym, you can spend 10 minutes and get almost the same results. So far I’m very intrigued. We will see.

Anyway, wish me luck.

Here’s a few more articles relating to health you might enjoy:

(Seriously though guys, I’m pretty healthy.)

A Bunch of Weird Things We’re Doing to Be Healthy

Purchasing Financial Independence $11.57 at a Time

The But First Method- How to Eat What You Want and Still Lose Weight

How to be Happy with the Body You Have

How do you feel about your body? I’m talking about the whole package- the look, the shape, the general complexion, its abilities, and its shortcomings.

On a scale of body confidence are you more like this…

or like this…?

Continue reading “How to be Happy with the Body You Have”

Doing the Things- How to Get Going When You’ve Lost Motivation

I recently took a several month hiatus away from doing most of the healthy things I normally do.  Towards the end of Mrs. Burrito Bowl’s pregnancy I had a pretty good routine of getting to the gym, shaving occasionally, intermittent fasting five days per week, drinking apple cider vinegar for some reason, Wim Hof breathing and making sure to end my showers with a minute or two of cold exposure. After Baby Burrito Bowl came into the mix most of those healthy routines stopped. Here’s a picture of her for no reason other than she’s super cute. Continue reading “Doing the Things- How to Get Going When You’ve Lost Motivation”

The Burrito Bowls Eating Burrito Bowls- Our 2018 Cost Per Meal Analysis

We ate food all last year.  Just the whole time.  We were routinely caught eating things.  Many of you probably assume we ate burrito bowls for every meal.  That’s not true, sometimes we ate oatmeal.

I wanted to clear the air just in case any of you were like, “Hey, that Burrito guy seems cool, but what’s his grocery situation?” I don’t know if any of you are questioning whether or not I deserve having burrito bowls as my moniker.  That’s why we’re all here.

First off, how can we possibly know how much we’ve spent? Great question. We aren’t food price scholars.  Instead, we use a free app called Personal Capital.  The way it works is you link your credit cards, investment accounts, debts, checking accounts etc., and it gives you a snapshot of your entire financial life.  All our grocery spending, restaurants, Amazon Prime purchases etc. are all categorized.  Very powerful stuff.

This is not actually an article about you getting Personal Capital, even though you should download it.  This is an article about how much we ate in 2018.  Since Mrs. Burrito Bowl is on top of things, she’s already categorized all of our 2018 spending into various groups. This makes it theoretically possible to figure out how much money we spent per meal. I don’t really know if that’s how you’re supposed to use the word theoretical.  Let’s not dwell on it.

Here’s how I’ll break it down:

There’s two of us who eat food that isn’t breast milk, and if you figure three meals per day for 365 days, that’s a total of 2190 possible meals for 2018.

Next we’ll look at how much our overall grocery bill was for the entire year.  These numbers aren’t exact as it’s possible to buy things that aren’t food from grocery stores.  Close enough, I always say.

So we spent $7,120 on groceries in 2018.

That equates to 598.63 per month.  The per month isn’t really important information other than it’s easier to visualize a monthly breakdown.  So let’s take $7,120 divided by 2190 possible meals.

7120/2190= 3.25

We spent $3.25 per meal on groceries. Thanks for reading this article.

But WAIT!  That’s just groceries.  We’re frugal, but we didn’t eat in every meal.  We went out.  So $3.25 is artificially low.  How much did we spend being social and fancy at restaurants?

Our total restaurant bill for 2018 was $2,757

That comes out to $229.85 per month.  Wow.  That seems like a lot.  Maybe we really are fancy people. Does that feel like a little or a lot to you? Also, how cool is this blog now that we have screen shots? Can you believe how professional these circular graphs look?  Me either.

I think we could have eaten out a little bit less, but we got great value when we chose to go out.  Frugality is about life optimization, not deprivation.  We ate out rarely enough that we really appreciated every time we paid someone else to make us food.  It was never monotonous for us, it was always special.

Mrs. Burrito Bowl was pregnant for most of 2018, so I was going to blame our higher restaurant bill on that, but the chart above shows our biggest two months of the year were January and February, before she was pregnant.

So now to get our more accurate total we need to add $2,757 to our $7120 we spent on groceries.

2,757+7120= 9,877.  Yikes.  That seems like more money.  So now to get our real cost per meal we take 9,877 and divide it by 2,190 total meals.

9,877/2,190= $4.51

Okay, so really we spent about $4.51 per person per meal on food.

We also spent, (ok I spent) $331 on alcohol for the year.  If you add that into the mix that’s $10,208 total spent on eating and drinking, which equates to $4.66 per person per meal.

In total we spent about $4.66 per person, per meal.

Just for fun we’ll do one more calculation.  We spent $10,208 in order to shove things into our faces.  What’s that per day?

10,208/365= 27.97

We spent $27.97 total per day on eating and drinking, about 14 bucks per person.

What do those numbers tell us?

First, we spent a lot more than we wanted to, but probably a lot less than most people.  For those $4.66 we ate really well.  We buy the more expensive eggs, the more expensive grass fed meats, and we hardly ever eat cheap fillers like pasta and bread.  We did eat a lot of burrito bowls.  Like, a lot of burrito bowls.  You can really bring the cost of a meal down with some bulk beans and rice.

Second, a lot of our food budget was taken up eating out, and we don’t eat out very often.  Eating at home is so much less expensive than going out to dinner.  I don’t think people realize how much getting takeout once per week, or getting a nice dinner in the city once a month, adds up.

We probably get takeout or go out to eat once or twice per month. Despite that, eating out ended up being a whopping 38.7% of our overall food budget!  Plus, when you eat at restaurants you’re not getting nearly the quality of ingredients as you do when you eat at home.

Third, to calculate this we put all our groceries into the calculation.  Sometimes people try to calculate each individual meal, but then they eat a bunch of snacks throughout the day that they don’t really count.  Our price per meal is just an average of what we eat throughout the day, not necessarily our meals.

Fourth, eat your leftovers.  We used to be really bad about making food then shoving it to the back of the fridge for several weeks until we were scared to eat it.  It would hang out in the back for a couple more weeks until we were afraid to even open up the container to throw it away.  Not an ideal situation.

We were much better last year at dating our leftovers and eating them all before they go bad.  If you’re throwing food out because you just never get around to eating it, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Pretty fun huh?

How much did you spend eating and drinking in 2018? If you’d like to get a handle on your finances you should download Personal Capital so you can do fun things like figure out your net worth and how much you’re spending on groceries.  It’s a free app and is well worth every penny.

If you want to try Personal Capital use this code, link your accounts, and we’ll both get $20!  Hooray.  Download Personal Capital and get $20 cause you’re real as real gets

This post may contain affiliate links if the above link counts as an affiliate link. I’m not really sure how technology works.  

If you enjoyed this article please share it with your friends and enemies

Here’s a few more articles you might enjoy regardless of how you felt about this one:

Mr. Burrito Bowl Goes to Jury Duty

Cocktails and Whiskey

11 Smart Ways to Lower Your Grocery Bill and Eat Healthier

 

 

Elimination Communication- Potty Training Our Newborn

My wife and I have started doing the elimination communication method with Baby Burrito Bowl.  It’s basically potty training at an extremely early age.  We started with Baby Burrito Bowl when she was two weeks old.

“Why, why would you do that?”- typical response.

We live in Portland, so we have a lot of hippie influences.  Also, poop is not a lot of fun.  Baby poop is considerably more fun than toddler poop, however.  We like that diapers exist because we enjoy the convenience of not having baby shat all over our floors, but we are fearful of the day Baby Burrito Bowl starts to eat solid food.  Once that happens her innocent infant defections turn to satanist toddler explosions and I’m not psychologically built for that.

Mrs. Burrito Bowl would like to add that we’re also doing it for environmental reasons.  The sooner she gets potty trained the less diapers we’ll use.  Using less diapers will not only save us money, but more importantly, save the planet.  I’m not sure how it works, but the less diapers that end up in landfills the better.

Fun Fact: Every 100 diapers you save counteracts 1/15 of a second of Al Gore's private jet use. Together we can make a difference.

Enter: Elimination Communication.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, the basic idea is you try to read your babies thoughts and facial expressions in an ill-fated attempt to time when they need to use the potty.  Once you think you’ve arrived at that magical moment, you hold them over the potty and say, “Psssss…” or make a grunting noise.

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes it looks like this:

She’s gotten a lot better at it, though.  So usually it looks like this.

Today it looked like this:

The “Psss…” sound is when you want to signal them to pee and the grunty noise is when you think they need to poop.  You hold them against your stomach so they can feel your abs flex when you make the grunting sound.  They start to mimic the grunt and it helps them release their poop.

It’s really funny when we grunt and this tiny human mimics with a miniature grunt of her own.  That cute little grunt alone is worth the effort, but not dealing with toddler poop is the real prize.

They lead the dance, you just get them to associate the noise.

Eventually you can get them to pee on command.  If you’re about to go on a long car ride and really want them to pee beforehand you hold them over the potty and start making “Pssss…” sounds in their ear.  Then, they pee.  This is obviously great because they won’t spend the next two hours with a wet diaper.  Baby is happier and parent is happier.  Win-win.

“I feel like this won’t work.” – Skeptic

Right?  You wouldn’t think it would, but it does.  Babies are born being able to control when they release their waste.  Leaving them in diapers until they pee or poop trains them to ignore this control.  Then, we desperately try to retrain them to listen to their bodies once they reach the age that their poop becomes possessed by demons.

For the most part they naturally wait until they wake up to pee or poop.  They don’t usually pee WHILE they’re sleeping.  This is a good starting point for knowing when they probably need to go.

We noticed Baby Burrito Bowl would do her thing about 5 minutes after waking up from a nap.  If she’d been awake for a while she would also get a little fussy right before she needed to go.

When she was two weeks old we tried it for the first time.  She woke up from a nap and I took her diaper off and held her over the potty.  As soon as I grunted she sent an explosion of baby poop into the toilet.  It was amazing.  I’ve never been so happy in a poop-related instance.

It doesn’t always work this well, and we still go through a lot of diapers, but Baby Burrito Bowl knows when we hold her over the potty it’s time to get to work.  She still goes in her diaper, especially if we’re not on top of our game, but she goes a significant amount in the potty.

The goal is to get less and less waste in her diaper and more into the potty, until eventually her diapers are always dry.

My sisters did this method with their kids and they were all 80% potty trained by about eight months and 100% potty trained by eighteen months.  They were out of diapers completely before most people even begin to think about potty training.  Their kids would be running around with pants constantly falling down because they didn’t have the expected bulk of the diapers to help hold them up.  It was a hilarious byproduct of the elimination communication method.

There are downsides to this method, namely- It takes a lot of upfront work.

Doing the elimination communication method means spending a lot of time grunting in the bathroom while your baby stares off at the wall.  For the first while they don’t actually know what the sounds mean.  You just have to do it enough times that they associate the sound with the feeling of needing to pee or poop.

Baby Burrito Bowl likes to poop mostly in the mornings.  This means when she starts grunting at 6am we can’t just let her fill her diaper while we happily sleep.  One of us has to get up and take her to the bathroom and sit with her until she goes.

We are only four months into it but so far we’re really happy with how she’s doing.  It’s not entirely a linear progression.  Some weeks she does better than others, but overall we all get better and better at it.  We get better at reading her and she gets better at communicating that she needs to go.

If you’re thinking about trying the elimination communication method I highly recommend it.

If you got value out of this article please share it!

Also, here’s a few more baby related articles, if that’s your thing.  

January Recap- Pooping, Crying, and The Baby Did Stuff Too

11 Best Ways (For Men) to Tell Which Baby is Yours at Daycare

Saying Goodbye to the Dink Days-Preparing for Our Baby Girl with FI in Mind

If you’re interested in learning more about the elimination communication method here are a couple other resources:

Diaper Free Baby

godiaperfree.com

Also feel free to start a conversation with us on Twitter @MrBurritoBowl

 

 

 

The Dad Bod Method- How to Get in Shape When You Can’t Get to The Gym

I’ve recently acquired offspring which has substantially limited my gym time to being almost nonexistent.  Instead of allowing myself to slowly morph into an amorphous blob of fat and regret, I’ve started to follow the world renowned Dad Bod Method.

What is the Dad Bod Method you ask?

The basic idea is this:  Instead of sectioning off large amounts of time for the gym I do little bits of exercise here and there.  Also, use your child as weights whenever possible.

“This sounds made up.  Did you make this up?” – Anonymous

I will admit, I may be playing fast and loose with the terms ‘World renowned’ or ‘method’ but I feel it’s a good place to start if you want to get in shape when your free time is limited.

Maybe you don’t have a free two hours to spend at the gym.  Do you have a free minute or two?

Our choices are either a) let our collective bodies fall completely out of shape, or b) exercise when we can.

I choose b.

Ready for the secret to the success of the dad bod method?

“Yes!”- Henry, Reader from Kentucky

When I come across a few free seconds, I do some sort of exercise.

“OK! What’s next?”- Exuberant reader

There is no next.  That’s it.

Boom.  Life changing, isn’t it?  I’ll repeat myself so the lesson really hammers into your subconscious.  When I have a free minute or two, instead of sitting there getting fat, I do a quick exercise set.

Not every time I have a free second, mind you.  Just some of the time.  I’m not a lunatic.  I’m not just constantly doing push-ups when I’m not immediately occupied.  You don’t have to do very many sets throughout the day to get in great physical shape.

Doing a few push-ups before I pick Baby Burrito Bowl up or a few air squats while I’m holding her is the difference between being fit and slowly losing my muscle.  I won’t get the body of a greek god this way, but I won’t get the body of Peter Griffin, either.

It just takes a little more effort to do five push-ups than it takes to do zero push-ups.  But, when you add up all those tiny amounts of effort you end up with vastly different results than the alternative.

I also incorporate Baby Burrito Bowl into my workout.  When I’m holding her I do air squats and lunges.  Instead of just bouncing her in the most economical way possible I attempt to focus on a particular muscle group.  Maybe that means treating her body like a dumb bell and practicing my curls, or straightening my arms and doing shoulder raises.

Disclaimer: Baby Burrito Bowl loves it when I exercise with her.  She does not like sitting still.  When she’s crying and I start to move around and exercise with her she calms down.  So just think on that anti-exercise-with-babies people.  

Here’s a few pictures of us in action:

Hold baby like so…
Do lunges while offering baby to the sleep and/or poop gods in order to gain their blessings. Repeat each side x 5.
Hold baby like a dumb bell
Curl baby. Repeat until baby is relaxed and swole town is reached
Babies love being helpful.  Hold baby in outstretched arms…
Gently rock baby to each side until abs are firm and baby is asleep
Babies respect parents who have flat abs and make them feel like they’re on an amusement park ride.
Squat down holding baby, making sure to bend at the knees, not the waist.
Launch baby into air making sure to safely catch baby once he/she returns from orbit…just kidding don’t do that at all. This last one was a joke. I mean, squat with your baby, sure. But, for real, don’t throw your baby.

Obviously, the number one key is getting those gains safety.  We’re trying to get huge safety muscles.  At no point do I put Baby Burrito Bowl in any danger, nor do any type of lift with her that would be unsafe.  I never tax my muscles to the point where I’m holding her while attempting to get out one more rep.  This should go without saying but the last thing the Dad Bod Method needs is a bunch of morons ruining our good name by doing overhead snatches with their wee ones.

I have a few contraptions around the house to make quick exercise easier.  Almost all of us have floors in our homes so push-ups, sit-ups and planks are easy options.  We have a pull-up bar that camps out around our bathroom door.  It’s easy to walk by and do a pull-up or two real quick before going into the bathroom.  We also have a couple kettle bells and an ab-wheel thing.

When you’re watching TV at night set a timer for every fifteen minutes.  When the timer beeps do a quick set of push-ups or air squats.  Another option is to do workouts during commercial breaks or between episodes if you’re watching Netflix.

Pavel Tsatsouline Protocol

The dad bod method is similar to the philosophy of Belarusian fitness expert Pavel Tsatsouline.  His basic exercise philosophy is if you can do ten of something, don’t do ten, do five.  Never tax your muscles out completely.  Do more sets, but less reps.

I don’t have time to tax each muscle to failure.  It’s a happy coincidence that doing a bunch of shorter, easier sets might actually lead to better results.

The most muscular I’ve ever been was during my time working as a manager of a retail shoe store.  I didn’t have time to go to the gym so instead I brought kettle bells and bands into the store.  When I didn’t have a customer I’d go into the back and do a set of shoulder presses or whatever.

Over an eight hour shift you can do a lot of random exercises.

Because I never knew when a customer would come in I wouldn’t go to failure.  I didn’t want to have to walk out onto the sales floor all sweaty and out of breath.   I wasn’t purposely following the Pavel Tsatsouline protocol but, through dumb luck and necessity, I made my own version of it.

The dad bod method is different from the Pavel Tsatsouline protocol because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t incorporate babies into his regimen and mine is more throughout the day rather than during a specific time at the gym.  You know what?  They’re different, okay?

Here’s a podcast with Tim Ferris and Pavel Tsatsouline if you want to hear him go further into his method.

Tim Ferris Podcast with Pavel

I hope you enjoyed this article.  Now go do some push-ups.

Feel free to share this article with anyone in your life who has kids and would like to save money on exercise equipment.

Oh, while you’re here go ahead and read one or two of these articles.  I mean, you don’t have to.  You know what, never mind.  I just don’t want you to feel obligated.

5 Easy Ways to Get Back (and stay) in Shape

Where FI and Frugality Intersect

Optimism- You’re Not Getting Any Younger

 

How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions…From Annoying The Rest of Us

Ah, at long last it’s officially the end of 2018 and almost the Year of Our Lord 2019.  Ever since 2018 proved to be little more than 2017 in disguise we’ve been patiently waiting for 2019 to save us from the drudgery of modern time keeping.  How did everyone’s New Year’s resolutions from 2018 end up?

People like to start off the year with New Year’s resolutions because the New Year only comes around once per year.  It’s a good excuse to not start getting your life in order in October, or March, when you’re thinking about your personal shortcomings.  Knowing you can put off any would be self-improvement for at least another month or eleven is more than enough reason for most of us to partake in a New Year’s resolution.

Despite an all-time failure rate of approximately 97.4%, New Year’s resolutions continue to be one of our most cherished American past times on par with baseball and diabetes. Continue reading “How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions…From Annoying The Rest of Us”