Chew on this!

I saw in the news today that Wrigley is about to get the ADA seal for its Orbit, Extra and Eclipse sugarless gums.

At least one anti-aspartame activist would certainly disagree with Wrigley's right to this seal. Janet Starr Hull, of SweetPoison.com, says:

"Gum is now sated with unhealthy man-made chemicals and is shaped so small, it does little to no good exercising the jaw. Modernized chewing gum is no longer the healthy answer for human's instinctive need to chew, and with the addition of aspartame and other chemical sugar substitutes saturating both regular and sugar-free gums, gum today can be hazardous to your health."

Personally, I'm a gum freak. I chain-chew. Especially when I'm trying to lose weight, I try to chew gum instead of chewing junk food. I have difficulty sometimes finding gum I like, though, because I can't stand cinnamon or peppermint gum -- which is basically every gum. My favorite flavors are fruity, such as Carefree Koolerz and the Trident Fusion/Splash brands. I think Carefree Koolerz uses Splenda, and Trident uses Xylitol.

Splenda -- my favorite sweetener

Nextag -- lots of sugarless gum choices

AllBusiness - business is booming

Spammers

Oh, for the love of God. Will they never quit?

Yesterday hubby worked for a few hours on the message board, adding a question only a human would know how to answer ("What is the logo for this site?") and voila! I've had no more registrations since then. I guess the spam bots don't like having to work so hard to pretend to be human. Silly little buggers.

Just now, though, I received notification that I had a new comment here on my blog. So I'm all excited, "Someone is actually reading my lowly blog!" and go take a look and what do I find?

Spam.

Not only spam, but it's INTERNATIONAL spam. I've moved up in the world! Now I also get spam in Portuguese.

/end rant

Hot tip: Amy's low sodium bowls

For any of you out there who are like me and blow up like a balloon from the slightest amount of sodium, you will welcome this new food item just like I did.

I've always liked Amy's frozen food items, because they're vegetarian (at least most of them are, I believe) -- but usually they have so much sodium in them I can't eat them for fear of turning into a blowfish. At Whole Foods the other day I found a "low-sodium" section for Amy's foods, which disappointingly only had one or two items, but I'll take it as a step in the right direction.

The one I tried was the brown rice & vegetables bowl, which has onions (ick), mushrooms (ick), broccoli (now you're talkin') and tofu (let the Heavens rejoice!). It has 260 calories, 9g fat (only 1g saturated), 270mg sodium, 5g fiber, 7g sugar, and 9g protein. Once you get past the initial lack-of-salt flavor which we're all so accustomed to having, it's really quite tasty.

Two thumbs up, definitely. Good work, Amy. Keep the low-sodium foods coming.

Sugar=Symptoms

I re-started (again) my Jenny Craig program last week. For those of you who don't remember, I lost 75 lbs last year on Jenny Craig, then had liposuction and abdominoplasty in December. After the surgery I got so thin I looked sickly, so I started working on adding calories to try to get to a healthy weight. Then I got laid off, and I was in my final semester of college, and then we had other personal issues going on -- and so the weight started piling back on of its own accord.

Last week the scale said I had gone slightly above 161 lbs, which for my short frame (5' 4") is way too much. Granted, it's not the 198 I was a couple of years ago, but still it's too much.

Prior to starting back on Jenny Craig I suffered from tons of palpitations and chest pains and various other annoying symptoms. One week into Jenny Craig, the palpitations have reduced to about 75% of what they were. 75%! That shows you how much freaking sugar I was eating. It's disgusting to think about.

I still have caffeine every once in a while, in the form of my sugar-free blueberry green tea, but it doesn't seem to affect me like sugar does.

I'm on a quest to get back down to around 140 lbs, or maybe 135. Fat or thin, I don't like the shape of my body -- but if I'm not going to like it anyway, I may as well not like it while I'm healthier instead of not liking it while also being obese.

Choices

In these pollen-laden times, I find I must choose between lying on my left side and being kept awake by powerful palpitations but being able to freely breathe, or lying on my right side and not having to deal with the palpitations but not being able to breathe.

I've started just sleeping on my back instead.

Overwhelmed

It's been a few days since I've been able to log on to my MVPSupport4 email account. Tonight I told myself I'd better do so, so I came up to my office and logged on and saw 134 emails.

It takes me hours to go through all these emails -- which would not be a problem at all except for the fact that out of 134 emails approximately one or two are actual sign-ups. The rest are spam bots and they make me so mad I just want to scream. If they were 134 signups I would happily sit here and process them with no complaints whatsoever. (I promise.)

Each automated registration email that I receive I have to go to the registration database and look the name up to see if it's a real signup or a fake one. Sometimes it's extremely difficult to tell, so I end up looking up most of them and it takes me so very long to go through them all.

When I changed my registration process to require an email from the registrant, I assumed I was making it easier for my users to get onto the boards quickly. I put the notice on the signup page itself, and I also programmed it so an auto-response went out to each registrant reminding them of the necessity to send me an email... but only one person out of 50 actually does it. Instead I have to individually go through them all and send personalized reminders to them. Of the reminder emails I take the time to write, 95% of them come back as "email address unknown" so it was a bot anyway.

I don't know how to fix this problem. I can't prevent the stupid bots from messing with my registration form, but obviously I also can't figure out how to get the message across to my registrants that they need to email me so I can activate them. I don't know what more I can do to get that requirement across to them? I tried to make it as clear as possible, and to say it more than once, but it's not working.

It's easy enough for me to ignore any registration that does not also have an email from the registrant, but when I tried that for two weeks initially I had no emails at all -- and it wasn't because they weren't signing up, it was because they weren't sending me emails. I finally sat down and went through two week's worth of signups in order that no one was missed and I emailed them all so they could get on the boards.

I'm at a loss here. I'm overwhelmed and tired and grumpy.

Tomorrow is a new day... I will try to put a smile on my face.

Pomegranate juice

Hubby has been doing some studying on the power of pomegranate juice lately, and has been trying to get me to drink it, too. As with anything you eat or drink, ask anyone and you'll hear a different story about its benefits and risks. I did some of my own searching and found the following promising reports.

After reading the warnings I found, though, I think it's best to study everything about it you can and then go to your doctor and discuss what you should do.

Don't make your medical/dietary decisions solely based on information found on the internet!

Some links:

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20050321/pomegranate-juice-may-clear-clogged-arteries

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0322_050322_pomegranates.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060702084515.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070427123430.htm

Some warnings:

http://altmedicine.about.com/od/druginteractions/a/pom_interaction.htm

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/pomegranate-juice/AN01227

Crazy heart

I've started walking in the evenings, for about three miles (it takes me about an hour). Ever since I started the walks my heart's been doing the jumps again. There's also this weird buzzing feeling in my chest -- which really closely resembles hunger mixed with an adrenaline rush. It's quite strange, but I just tell myself it's my metabolism kicking in. In the meantime I'm left with a crazy, pounding heart that won't leave me alone. Makes it rather difficult to sleep! :)