Veggies — Frozen or Fresh?

I eat frozen veggies for a number of reasons. They’re cheaper than “fresh” — in my local supermarkets it’s almost impossible to find any vegetable that costs less than $2.50 a pound. On sale I can load up on frozen for less than $2 a pound. But that’s not all that’s good about frozen. With frozen there is no prep work, no washing, no trimming, no cutting out questionable bits, no waste. And speaking of waste, when you cut stems, discard outer leaves, etc. you are throwing away parts of a vegetable that you just spent a good deal of money on, so that vegetable becomes even more expensive by virtue of you throwing some of it away. Because frozen are ready to use, and in many if not all cases fresher when they were frozen than the so-called “fresh” veggies you paid a small fortune for at the supermarket, I am more apt to eat vegetables, something few of us consume enough of. Having worked in restaurants I also am not as enthusiastic about allowing other people to decide what goes into my dinner, so I cook at home  — easy fast stuff like stir-fry or fried noodles or soups. When I see others spend a crazy percentage of their income on eating out for virtually every meal, I not only am disturbed by the waste of money, but by what is being added to their food that they themselves would never add if they were cooking at home. Also, people who can’t even feed themselves because they don’t see the importance of learning how to cook a few dishes are nuts. And don’t get me started on women who want to get married and have children who laughingly admit they don’t know how to cook and don’t intend to learn. What kind of idiot thinks it’s smart to brag about the fact that they can’t perform even the most basic task essential for their own and their children’s survival? What kind of irresponsible mother does not teach her own kids how to cook? Apparently, millions of ‘em, including my own.

What’s Behind The Obsession Of “Getting Huge”?

Quite a few guys I have known that had what I considered a spectacular physique ruined it, in my opinion, because of an obsession with size.
One friend, who weighed 145 lbs. when I first met him, became obsessed with weighing 250 lbs. I asked what was that all about, that “magic number” of 250. He couldn’t explain it, but he was totally jazzed as the scale went up. As a smaller bodybuilder eventually weighing 175 lbs., he was enviably cut, hard, healthy-looking and proportionate and all agreed he looked great. However as he neared his goal of 250 lbs. he was puffy, smooth and ungainly-looking. A good portion of his gains was comprised of fat weight in contrast to his previous lean muscle weight. He also decided he needed a few thousand dollars’ worth of really bad tattoos to enhance the ugliness, but that’s another discussion altogether. He ruined his once-beautiful body. I saw his obsession as being not much different from people addicted to plastic surgery; they were never satisfied.
I pointed out, in an attept to point out how pointless his magic number of 250 was, that if he was using the metric system as 95% of the world does, that he would not be aiming for the 250 lb. number, but rather some other number. "250 lbs. equals 114 kilos," I said. “There’s no way you’d be all excited about an ideal goal weight of 114 kilos; instead your goal would be rounded off, most likely to 100 kilos, which is 220 lbs.” This argument went over his head. He thought he looked great at 250 lbs. He was blind to his water retention, bloat and complete lack of definition, but to each his own as they say. He seemed to think he looked like the guys in the film 300 and in fact used that film as his inspiration for his workouts despite his transforming into someone bearing no resemblance to the actors.
One of my former workout partners laughingly referred to this phenomenon as Magic Mirror Syndrome.