LoseIt.com is the place where friends help friends lose weight. It’s also helped people lose some 7,766,000 lbs! and counting. The Bear started using the Lose It! app (free on iPhone and Android) earlier this month to track calories and exercise. There’s a related web site, so I created an account. 
My goal is to lose 45lbs by end of July, and I needed some motivation… so I posted a note in the LoseIt.com forum inviting others with a similar 40-50 goal to be my friends. Boom — ten new friends almost immediately.
Building a Social Network Around Weight Loss
Now that I know I have people “looking over my shoulder” it’s a whole lot easier to hit my target each day and get regular exercise.
For example: that double banana split I ate in the wee hours this morning? Bad case of the munchies. Yeah, I’m gonna work it off by hitting the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail and knocking off a few miles. (I use a Polar Heart Rate Monitor to track my exercise calories burned.)
It’s also inspiring to see how well others are doing! Charles Kemp, for instance — he’s lost over 80lbs and is just 9 away from his goal. Woot!
I always get a few nice comments whenever I drop a pound or two. And encouragement when I miss my mark or have an “up” day. Share as much or as little as you want; friends of friends see your comments and you’ll end up making even more friends. If you want to drop some of the holiday blubber this is the place to be. And if you’re looking for me to friend there, just search for my real name.
Tags: friends, Lose It!, social, weight loss
The concept of creating new waves of behavior to disrupt old waves (habits) is how we surf the multiverse, and find our new selves tracking along a new path in the continuum of spacetime — everything changes!
I created a daily checklist late last year, to begin a disruptive wave against some patterns (habits) in my life that I wanted to quell. On my daily list – a row of check boxes for each day, 12 checkboxes in all:
- 4 – Drink a glass of water.
- 1 – Take a walk. (Or other exercise.)
- 1 – Meditate. (15 min.)
- 1 – Eat two fresh fruit.
- 3 – Three sets of situps. (On exercise ball.)
- 1 – Take my meds & vitamins.
- 1 – Pill the cat.
It’s not too much to do every day. Most days I complete everything. Focusing on this daily discipline defocuses other desires.
The daily checklist creates a continuous wave of repeating behavior that disrupts and crowds out other behavior … breaking old habits.
Results so far: I’ve dropped 10lbs of weight, spent more time with family, more sociable, less anxious, sleeping better, clearer goals.
It is so amazing to me when I look back upon it, just a few short months ago, I sat in a circle with 50,000 others and watched The Man burn.
Burning The Man 2011
My friend Lorenzo who hosts the Psychedelic Salon podcast says “…that is by far the best Temple Burn video I’ve seen … from any year. BRAVO!!!”
Tags: American, Burning Man, culture, fire
Wow – all I can say is wow. What a fantastic review for “Oceans of Light: A Users Guide to the Multiverse” over at the iTunes Bookstore.
“A thoroughly good read … Lucky for us he’s also a terrific writer!”
A 5-Star Review by Karen Kaufman
It is especially heartwarming to know of the personal impact this book has had on a reader. It is the “epiphany” I have been living for several years now, and it keeps unfolding into more wonder and awe as the days go by.
“Ride the waves people!” ~Karen Kaufman
In another holiday season long gone, a train of mobile homes headed for New Orleans prompts Tame Bear to reflect on the 2005 Katrina tragedy. New Orleans: “Though it may never die, it will never be the same.” This episode of Tame Bear Radio presents some of The Bear’s own memories of the city of New Orleans as it was long before the storm, in a nostalgic tale from 2004 entitled “Christmas Adventure.”
Tame Bear presents an original audio podcast from 2005: New Orleans Christmas
Tags: Christmas, family, holiday, New Orleans
Procrastination is often caused by fears – many of which are blown out of proportion. Fears that my work won’t be good enough, that a client won’t be satisfied, that people will make fun of it or ridicule me or talk behind my back. Fears that it will be rejected or not appreciated or … you name it.
These are all just thoughts that can get in the way of doing productive work.
Face Your Fear – recognize you are having these thoughts and be determined to do the work anyway – that goes a long way towards shrinking fears to more realistic size so you can do your best work and get the job done.
Tags: fear, procrastination, productivity
Laying away wines for the future
Making wine and laying it aside for the future expresses an essential faith and hope in the future.
A clear red wine
This week Treesh and I racked and bottled our latest batch — thirty bottles of clear red wine made from grapes we grew in our backyard. (With this batch, we finally nailed a long-standing haze/cloudiness problem, thus the name for this wine, “Oakley Clarity 2011.”)
I always set aside seven or eight bottles and label them for the future; spacing out the aging for a year, two years, four, seven, ten… and store them away in our wine cabinet. So far, all the wines we’ve made get better with age.
Storing part of each batch for the future means that — in the future — we’ll be drinking some very good wines. This activity implies that the collection of labeled wines will be intact a decade or so from now, that they will be able to lay there in our cellar with little disturbance for years at a stretch, and the world will go on as it has, without end, without undue calamity or strife, and that even if we suffer more of life’s inevitable setbacks, there will still be good wine to drink, family and friends to share it with, and more hopeful days ahead.
I propose a toast — to the future!
UPDATE: The game is now up and running, but you need to figure out how to get started! (Big hint — follow the links.)
You know the story about the plumber who is so busy he never has time to fix his own sink? Well a webmaster can sometimes be in a similar bind.
So I’m pleased to announce today that the Oakley Studio web site has undergone it’s first major overhaul since 2007! Woohooo! Nope it’s not a dramatic design change from the previous extremely simple text-on-white layout. But most of the old javascript and legacy html table layouts have been scrapped and replaced with shiny new css styling and php scripting.
Especially worth pointing out is that Oakley Studio now has a blog of its own. Does this mean you’ll be hearing less from Tame Bear? Possibly. Not only is webmaster Peter Oakley now blogging in his own voice, but he’s putting WordPress front and center as the best foundation for any new home-based business web site, and, he’s building an affiliate program around it too.
The OS WordPress Affiliate Program
What this means is that if you bring a couple new small businesses to Oakley Studio, and they become paying customers? Then your own web site hosting is FREE. Yes, getting the word out to your network of friends and associates can not only net you free WordPress web site hosting, you can actually earn some bucks and turn it into a new residual income stream at the same time.
In addition, there’s some talk of adding a gamification component to the updated site, not real sure what that’s all about but something to keep an eye on.
disclaimer: For those of you who pay attention to these things, the online personality and brand identity known as Tame Bear is a wholly-owned production of Oakley Studio, which means The Bear is an entertainment and promotional property designed to function as an autonomous pitchman for everything from our favorite books at Smashwords and Amazon.com
If you’ve decided you sure don’t want to head into 2012 without a domain name web site of your own, then you’re definitely a good prospect for Oakley Studio web design and hosting… or we’re already working with you!
Tags: affiliates, Oakley Studio, site design, webmaster, Wordpress
You remember HAL, the psychologically conflicted HAL9000 computer in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” – locked Dave Bowman (Kier Dullea) outside in the cold of space when Dave began to suspect the computer was misbehaving? Yeah, that HAL. Well along comes Siri, on the new iPhones Treesh and I got last month. Treesh has been quizzing Siri about various science fiction stories, and recently had this conversation about Hal…
Read it here: Open the Pod Bay Doors, Siri
Tags: artificial intelligence, computer, humor, Siri
… to wear a profession of the generic state religion on my ass?
As a person of faith, I am happy to live in a country that at least pays some lip service to the freedom every citizen has to express their faith — or not.
Here in Indiana we’re given a choice of automobile license plate designs, one of which includes the phrase “In God We Trust” in a patriotic red white and blue theme. Treesh and I chose the plain blue “Standard Car” plate with white lettering on a plain blue background.
Our plate arrived in the mail today and darned if they didn’t send us the IGWT plate! Somebody messed up, or else the state really wants us to be making faith statements via fanny wherever we go.
Hopefully this will be an easy matter to resolve when we go to our local licensing bureau tomorrow morning.
