Shake It Up

I'm doing P90X to get myself back into a more athletic shape. I started this past June and will be ending in two weeks (had to restart the penultimate week because I was dead tired and sore after the first week back to school - this past week). One important thing I learned this time around was the importance of protein. Last summer during fitquest I didn't supplement my running and other workouts with protein, so I lost a lot of weight (~25 pounds), but didn't really gain much muscle. So this time I hooked up with protein drink mix. Gold Standard 100% Whey is what I eneded up going with after asking questions and checking the ingredients. I mostly have the Double Rich Chocolate flavor. It's actually quite good, but has an aroma that isn't all pleasant to all. In fact, my breath afterward usually makes the wife cringe. Wanting to be able to mix with other thins than water (I didn't tend to mix with milk) I later got the Strawberry-Banana flavor. Not too bad either. No great, but certainly passable. Smells a little better too - though the wife does not like bananas, so I can't really win now can I? :)

The first two phases of the program limit carbs a lot and all phases limit fruit in the diet as well. Well, I didn't follow the diet too clasely. If I did, I'd have definitely lost more fat, but I think I did pretty well so far. I'll be posting the pre and post pix when I'm officially done. I did avoid a lot of fruits, which is hard for me, but I stil lfind it hard to get in a ton of veggies - they are expensive to buy fresh and we don't like most frozen options - or the fresh go bad before we finish. I did try tyo eat a lot of cucumbers and lettuce from our garden.

3rd phase, however, more carbs are needed. Not sure it really factors in, but I decided to turn my drink into a shake. It allows me to turn an 8oz protein drink into about a 20 ouce mini meal after my workout. Mmm-mm. It's some good stuff, and here's my recipe. Nothing special, I'm sure there are a ton out there just like it, but hey here's my take:

Chris' Choco-Banana-Protein Shake
1 scoop of Gold Standard 100% Whey - Double Rich Chocolate
1/2 scoop of Gold Standard 100% Whey - Strawberry Banana
1 Medium banana (best if frozen first)
8 oz Milk (skim)
2 Tbps Dark Chocolate Dreams (brand All natural Peanut Butter & Co.)
6 Ice Cubes

In a blender, add the first 5 indredients and blend until smooth. You might need to stop it once to push down any ingredients that got stuck to the sides of the blender.
Keeping the blender running, drop in once ice cube at a time and continue to blend on high until you don't hear any chunky sounds, perhaps doing a few sustained pulses to chop up any last ice chunks.

Pour into a tall glass and drink as is or use a straw.

Nutritional info:
538 Calories
Fat 15g
Saturated 3.5g
Protein 51.5g
Carbohydrates 55.6g
Fiber 5.1g
Starch 6.3g
Sugars 35.4g

Try it and post comments on how you feel about it. Unfortunately, you can't just buy a couple scoops of the Whey mix, but you might be able to get sample packs at the local vitamin shoppe or gnc or somewhere. You could also use a similar powder mix of a different brand. I'm certain it won't be too different, though the nutritional info would likely be different. The kicks Nutella's ass. It's different, but common. I did make this with Nutella and it tasted just great as well, so you could substitute that as well. I have also done it with just peanut butter. I use Simply Jif because it has less sugar and salt and less of the additives or others.

Chew Chew choose not to return

The wife and I went to the Green Mountain Chew Chew Fest this afternoon, an annual event where local restaurants and vendors set up and you pay for tokens for the privilege of overpaying for tiny sample portions of their foods. We've gone for about 10 years, missing one year. I always think it's a bad deal, but she loves it and we have found a couple restaurants by seeing them there that we frequent. That's the best part of it really.

Every year I try to stick to not eating anything I've tried before - or at least never tried from that particular restaurant.


The "deal": $5 gets you 9 brass tokens that you spend at the booths. Prices at the booths range from 2 to 4 tokens. You get sample sizes of dishes. Usually a few bites worth. You walk around with a map of the vendors located under 3 tents and figure out what looks worthy of taste testing and where to get it. Request the item, dump your tokens into bowl or jar or whatever and eat.

This year, the person who sponsors the event decided to charge a $2 per adult admission fee. Yep... a fee to get into a place where you for the last 20+ years got in free to spend money. We were angry, but that was only the tip of the iceberg, since 3 vendor spots listed were empty and the selection pretty much sucked for what was there.

Normally I complain about the event - being expensive for the end results [though we have discovered restaurants through being there] - but this year even my wife was annoyed and even angered. I was annoyed to the point that I wrote an email to the organizer detailing my complaints. I don't expect any resolution from it - the changes appear to be purely financially driven, so who am I to defy capitalism??

On that note, we watched SiCKO tonight. Michael Moore does a killer job at entertaining us and angering us at the same time. This country is out of control with it's capitalism and it's brought to light in me the realization - over the last few years it's been brewing in me - that the core of our evils in this country are capitalism and the driving force of much of that capitalism is christianity. I'll leave more discussion on that topic for another time, but the documentary is about the sick nature of our health care system when compared to other countries. Much like the Chew Chew Fest, if you don't have much money, it's just not the place for you. don't get hungry, don't get sick, sit down and shut up... "let the entrepreneurs do their thing - their American duties - and make a few greenbacks on your hard work".

We now have no intention of returning to the Chew Chew Fest. I have been burned enough, and now the burn is shared. Good job guys... you took what was once likely a really cool thing and turned it into the shit we now expect of anyone who tried to turn a buck on anything that might have any social value.