My World … and welcome to it!

Boy howdy am I on a rant today. It all started last week when I got my third shipment of food from Jenny Direct.

Yeah, I went back on the diet. After gaining back almost 30 pounds in one year I decided that perhaps eating without a plan might not be the best idea. So after doing a liver cleanse supervised by the N.D. from Billings Naturopathic Clinic, I felt maybe I could tackle the JC diet again. And it’s going great! In 3 weeks I’ve lost a little more than 10 pounds. Yippee!!!

Then I looked at the invoice. Then I wrote my counselor.

It seems that Nestle Corp., in it’s “infinite” wisdom, decided to ditch the “Jenny Rewards” program which gave long term clients a 15% discount. That’s a lot of money. Well, no more. First month was $611. Second month was $577.

I am not made of money. I cannot justify spending THAT kind of money (which amounts to nearly $20 a DAY) on just entrees and a snack daily. You have to add in all the fresh fruit, veggies and dairy “extras.”

I thought about Nutrisystem which is HALF the cost of Jenny Craig and is delivered FREE by my local Schwan’s guy.

Then I thought, WTF am I thinking? So I dug out my old Zone diet books, dusted them off and am busy reacquainting myself with the 40-30-30 plan that keeps, among others, Jennifer Anniston so trim and slim.

I followed it once before and easily lost 2 pounds a week EVERY SINGLE WEEK I was doing it. Plus the added benefit was I WAS NEVER HUNGRY.

So why did I quit? Well, I didn’t, really. I just sorta slid away from it, kept the weight off for over a year then had a total hyst and oh hell, in 10 years added another 40 pounds.

Which brings me full circle to the liver cleanse. Hey. WHO KNEW?! It’s not as “out there” as it might sound. I’ll leave it to those who want the info to do a google search.

So, right now I’m doing one meal a day “on my own” and eating the packaged stuff for the other 2. That should stretch my food out for 5 weeks at which time we’re off the Ireland!!! When I get back I plan on doing another liver cleanse then will really get on the Zone plan.

the other tirade?

HEALTH INSURANCE

@*#()%_^($ thieves. OK. first off, while hubby worked for the railroad we had coverage first with Travelers, then they sold out to someone and evenually we wound up with United Health Care. You remember them? The outfit that saw fit to “reward” the freaking CEO with, what was it? SIX billion dollars?! Or it might have only been one billion. All I know is I saw red when I heard that and am still pissed. All those years of denying a huge chunk of a claim then only paying 80% of what was left. Motherfrakkers.

So hubby retires. All of a sudden I DON’T HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE. Oh shit. So I go to Blue Cross Blue Shield. and pay and pay and pay. $314.60 a month for the last year. with a $5,000 deductible. Mother frakkers. 3 visits to the ND which I pay for out of pocket. $300.

Thank god I’m relatively healthy.

then last month I got a letter. They are raising my premium to $370+ a month. WTF????? so I went to ehealth.com. Filled out the form. Saw Celtic insurance would only cost me $271. OOOOOkay! Applied, was accepted, got the visa hit for $295.58 for the first month’s premium. Coverage to start 3-15.09.

OK. I’m set.

Then Saturday’s mail shows up with a frakking bill for $361.25 for March. WTF!! OVER!!!

So I got to stew all weekend about this. Called, ready for bear. Got a very nice woman who politely agreed to cancel the policy and refund my money. Then called BCBS and was loaded for bear again. Again, a nice CS rep who let me rant about $250,000 parties for top salespeople and bonuses for the CEO.

god I hate apologizing after I’ve blown my top. Well, I didn’t really yell but I wasn’t very nice either. Had to laugh about being a cranky old lady.

So where the frak is the single payer health care? I keep hearing rumblings that Obama is backing away from it because the insurance companies (who along with banks, big oil, and big business in general OWN THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT) are not happy.

Yeah. Right. What about the CITIZENS?

Here I thought I was doing SO well with my low-carb eating. Yup, up another pound (down again today). One thing I discovered was I have to give up mushrooms. Well duh. I’m allergic to molds so why was I surprised that eating sauted mushrooms caused bloat and water retention?

ANYhoo. Was perusing the Atkins forum over on one of my favorite low carb forums when I ran across a reference to a new Gary Taubes article. Here’s a sample:

I avoided bread and pasta like the plague. Soon my friends avoided me like it, too
By Gary Taubes

Give up carbs and prepare to spend the rest of your life on the defensive.

This has been my experience, at least, particularly since researching and writing Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. For me, it all began in the summer of 1999, when I interviewed a professor at MIT who said he’d lost and kept off 40 pounds by eating a high-fat diet–the Atkins diet, as it’s commonly known. Since this professor seemed like a reasonably thoughtful guy, absent of any obvious self-destructive tendencies, I decided to try the same as an experiment.

I gave up bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, cereals, pastries, sodas, and beer. Instead, I ate to my appetite’s content mostly high-fat, cholesterol-laden foods that are supposed to kill us (if not sooner, then certainly later)–bacon and sausages for breakfast and meat, fish, or fowl at every other meal. I ordered bacon cheeseburgers for lunch and ate them without the bun.

Click HERE to read the whole thing. It’s short, funny and sadly, directly to the point. If it disappears, just email me at beads @ darleenmb dot com (god I hate those spam robots) and I can send you a copy.

So. Back to my diet experiment. After much MUCH whining over on the Protein Power forums yesterday I came to the sad conclusion I needed to really DO the Atkins induction the way it’s written. So. No more cheese for a couple of weeks, no nuts etc. and watch my intake. Which is more to make sure I eat ENOUGH than to curb my intake.

STATS for Friday April 4th

Calories 1252
Fat 85.2g
Carbs 38g
Fiber 5.6g
ECC 32.4g
Protein 87g

So the carbs are WAY high because of all the cream I drank. Yeah DRANK. Won’t be doing that again anytime soon. It was yumilicious though. But I’m back to measuring it out with the tablespoon instead of the cup.

So today I’m striving for around 1500 calories that would be 20-30g of ECC (that’s the carb count minus the fiber if you don’t know), 80g of protein or more and the rest from fat. NOT as easy as it sounds. So far today I’m at 582 calories, 50.6g of fat, 9g of carb minus 8g fiber = 1g ECC and 22g protein. The carb count might be off by 2g because of the Splenda.

OK, enough obsessing about my diet.

Joe’s in Arizona playing with his buddies. He got a call a couple weeks ago from a lifelong friend and when he started whining because Larry was headed to AZ to go gold panning I said “why don’t you go too?” We were going to Colorado that weekend anyway, I figured he could just go with the guys and I’d come back in 2 weeks when the returned to Loveland and bring him home. I think he plain forgot he’s retired and can DO that sort of thing. So he’s off playing and I’m home counting fat grams. When I SHOULD be making beads.

See, BNSF bid us a fond adieu the end of last year on our health insurance. Of course nothing got said by hubby OR the railroad until mid-February. WTF DO YOU MEAN I NO LONGER HAVE COVERAGE?

Do you really want to hear this rant? Let me cut it short by saying that 30 years ago I had full coverage for $5 a MONTH. You read that right. five freaking bucks a month. I had to have my appendix out. Fully paid for. I had to have knee surgery. Fully paid for. Now I get to shell out $316 a month for a $5,000 deductible from blue cross blue shield. oh joy. Just so the CEO can have his platinumtitaniumgoldbonded fucking parachute and the investors can have their dividends.

Well, I say fuck them. Health care should NEVER HAVE BEEN DEREGULATED BY THE REAGAN “ADMINISTRATION.” That is exactly what is wrong with health care in this country. It got privatized. When in the hell are the politicians and citizens going to wake up to the truth that privatization means SOMEbody wants to make a profit and generally NOT a little one? We didn’t have HMO’s until deregulation allowed health care to become a for-profit scheme. It is my NOT unconsidered opinion that NO ONE should be allowed to profit from someone else’s misery. grrrrrrrrrr.

Oh my completely off track. Making beads. I haven’t for weeks now. but now I have major incentive. $316 a month incentive.

The new house. Not gonna happen. Get this. We are looking at a modular home. We have bought a nice lot with view (3 years ago). It’s a little less than a 1/4 of an acre. House is to be 1800 sq feet with a full basement and oversized 2 car garage. Nothing fancy. We paid about $38,000 for the lot (now said to be worth between $85-90,000). It’s paid for. Just doing the house and garage (not including the deck and landscaping?) is estimated at $330,000. FOR A FUCKING MODULAR. 3 years ago when we started down this road we were told $250,000 tops. Figure in 10% for overruns. Why the huge increase?

GAS PRICES

didn’t anybody but me think that rising gas prices would jack up the price on EVERYTHING ELSE.

uhoh. I feel another rant coming on.

It is way past time for the Feds to PRIVATIZE THE OIL INDUSTRY. To REregulate utilities. This country will literally die so the oil barons can continue to enjoy record breaking profits. they don’t care. I say, take the oil industry AWAY from them, and in exchange we won’t jail the bastards AND we’ll let them keep their ill gotten gains. I think that’s more than generous. And while I’m on that subject.

We need to return NOW to locally produced everything. When I was a kid we had a municipally owned and run power plant. We had meat lockers and local farms producing local produce. NOW we have everything trucked in from Mexico. With gas prices climbing wtf are you going to do for food? It’s going to come down to either pay the mortgage and pay to gas up the vehicle so you can get to work and then freeze and starve or eat and live on the street.

I worry about this because we live in a very rural area of Wyoming 130 miles North, West, and South of any major populations. There is NOTHING between but open land and a few tiny clusters of settlements. We no longer have a local dairy. We no longer have a slaughter house. We no longer have meat lockers or locally produced eggs. No farms except back yard gardens. What the hell will we do when we cannot afford to have food trucked in? We will starve.

What will YOU do?