Admittedly I was jaded long ago when it comes to liars. When I was growing up I used to believe that most people told the truth. Boy let me tell you I like most people that believed that were in for a rude awakening! All of the untouchable honest people in authority fell from grace [...]]]>  

Admittedly I was jaded long ago when it comes to liars. When I was growing up I used to believe that most people told the truth. Boy let me tell you I like most people that believed that were in for a rude awakening! All of the untouchable honest people in authority fell from grace so to speak. Teachers, policemen, legislators, presidents and even clergy! So what is a person to believe?

First let’s examine what honesty is and if you – like me, assume that a lie is the opposite of honesty, we can agree on a definition of honesty.

Politics always seem to be the most blatent examples of lying. Nothing has changed though – politicians all seem to tell half-truths in order to get the last minutes votes.

What is honesty? Simply telling the truth even if it hurts the person hearing it. Do we all tell the truth? Nope – we have all learned sometimes honesty is not the best policy. Early on children learn if their parents ask about the homework – say yes, I did it. Even through you may have completed most of it. The child then scrambles the next morning to complete the assignment in time and who was hurt?

I can think of many more examples of lying that seem to be ok and justified and hence – many would say honest (because no one got hurt and things seemed to work out better). So in light of a ‘loose’ definition of honesty does then lying mean omission of facts that will sway a person to your point of view because your point of view is right?

Do the ends justify the means? One can get into a discussion of ethics easily here as egocentric persons would argue that lying is better than telling the truth if you can have your way.

What does this mean practically? Does it mean you can never believe anyone again? No but you have to take what anyone says with a grain of salt. It is funny but if I get stopped by a cop – I ask myself what his frame of reference is and I consider if I can deal with him honestly. I have the same concerns from co-workers, bosses, clergy, lawyers, and anyone I meet.

What do you think of salesmen or commercials? Are you one of those people that think the big companies with the best commercials tell the truth? There must be some of you out there because they keep the lies coming at us fast and furious.

The commercials I dislike the most on TV are the drug ads. Have you ever wondered why the public would be target for ads when we cannot prescribe the medicines ourselves? Why do the drug companies thing we will ‘ask our doctor about (insert overpriced pharmaceutical here)’? Are our minds so easily convinced of nonsense that we just agree with any deep voice and sincere looking actor/actress on the TV?

There is a lot more to how products get advertised and hence we are lied to but you get the picture. The drug companies are trying to sell product. The have a responsibility to their shareholders and not to their customers really. They don’t care if an existing drug works as well (but will soon go generic), but rather they want to take market share from the other drug company or transition their existing customers to their new product.

So what I’m saying is through a chance of other self-interested parties including government, hospitals, and doctors – they will all watch their bottom line. And if everyone is lucky – the medicines will actually work and keep the cost of health care artificially high.

Sorry I did not mean to go on a rant about any one company/product but they are all like that. I’ve not seen any exceptions in any business, profession, nation, or people.

So what can you do to make things better (or as good as it can get)? Help educate your children and friends how the world works – as many buy into these delusions of marketers. For instance when shopping, name brands may not mean anything. Compare ingredients and realize the generic item may be made by the name brand manufacturer for a discount.

Listen to what people say and then watch what they do.

Don’t buy anything from a telephone or door to door salesman – if you really want the item – shop it from reliable stores or websites.

Don’t take investment advice from financial planners or brokerage houses  – These people do not beat the stock market. If you don’t want to learn finance but want to invest in stocks, bonds or mutual funds, invest in an indexed fund. You will beat the professionals most of the time and avoid the brokers that want to churn (constantly reinvest for their commission) your money.

Look at yourself. Do you tell half-truths to other a lot for not really good reason? If so start picking you words carefully so you can tell the truth more often. The only thing you have going for you in this life if your good name. If you lose that – life will get harder.

My final piece of advice is to hope for the best in people but act only on verified information. That way you can protect yourself and still have a positive outlook even if you find yourself surrounded by liars (I should explain during the political season I am on liar overload… I’ll cheer up eventually)!

Welcome back to leananmean.com. I made the decion last March to close this website down but over the the many months I’ve missed the oppertunity to speak out on various goings-ons around me. I guess I have a big mouth and I need an outlet to expouse my views.

What you can expect from [...]]]>  

Welcome back to leananmean.com. I made the decion last March to close this website down but over the the many months I’ve missed the oppertunity to speak out on various goings-ons around me. I guess I have a big mouth and I need an outlet to expouse my views.

What you can expect from me is the occasional post about anything that seems interesting – especially if I think whats out there is not the whole story. I should have pleanty of fodder. I will continue to speak about heath and fitness too as this is an interest of mine.

What’s happened this year of interest in my life? I was promoted to Rokudan (6th degree blackbelt) in Kenpo. That was totally unexpected but perhaps should not have been. Let me explain. A few years back I received our organizations lifetime acheivement award and a couple years back I was entered into the Kenpo Hall of Fame. I created a website for the karate school here so I guess it should not have been surprising that 10 years after my 5th degree promotion (where I had to write a thesis), that I would get the largely honorary (no specific deliverables) promotion to Rokudan.

Anyway I am happy to have the new degree and I’ll try to live up to the standards of this honor.

On the weight loss plan – I am not focusing on any diet anymore (as that seems fail mostly) but I am going to try and achieve a balance of mind, body and soul. I’ve never had a problem keeping my mind sharp. I have an MBA and I received my windows 2008 system administrator certification from Microsoft this year (3 tests).

As far as my body, injuries and appetite have been my downfall. Interestingly enough working out at the karate school (specifically sparring) and bag work at home (throwing punches incorrectly) have actually kept me from working out. I’ve inured my wrists, hands, knee, and feet over the last year and had to take time off for recovery. Although I’ve tried to do different exercise – it was a challenge this year.

As far a soul – I’ve reconnected with my Catholic roots and I’m trying to reconcile the child understanding of the faith with the adult version. The child version was far easier… all I had to do was go to church with my parents. Now I have to actually study the bible and ask the Lord for forgiveness as well as find time to worship, help the needy and pray. Whew… I actually find it all very rewarding and I feel like I’ve plugged a missing dimension in my life.

As far as the plan forward – mostly it is the body that needs work. I am not dieting any more but simply going to eat healthy meals (yes – fewer calories than I actually need but I’m not counting) with the good tasting foods I grew up on. For instance I’ve started drinking whole milk (from no milk since I was a kid) because it is very satisfying and helps be stay full.  Many more examples but in a nut shell I am feel satisfied all of the time now and should slowly take off the inches.

I’m steadily working out again since my last sparring session. I re-injured my knee and cut my face. The face injury healed fast but the knee still smarts. But I am able to bike, hike, walk and do bag work. This year I am going to stop sparring for the most part as 80% of the time I get injured. I don’t really need to spar to stay in shape for self defense and I’m not going to fight a MMA match anytime soon so why go overboard. I’m not anymore. I’m gonna be smart about this now.

Welcome back and I hope you stop by from time to time. I also wish all a happy new year!

When I started this blog I had just started MySelfDefenseBlog.com the year before and was really enjoying that blog. I was envisioning a blogging empire as the previous ebusiness venture on eBay did not turn out to be very profitable. So I reasoned blogging about stuff I was interested [...]]]> Update – I re-opened LeanAnMean.com on 12/29/2011.

When I started this blog I had just started MySelfDefenseBlog.com the year before and was really enjoying that blog. I was envisioning a blogging empire as the previous ebusiness venture on eBay did not turn out to be very profitable. So I reasoned blogging about stuff I was interested in would translate into traffic revenue.

Well that never quited happened with this blog as I put my time and effort into my other blog. I did make some efforts to get this one going but as it happens – my life got very busy and all I could muster was my feeble attempts to keep it alive.

Last year I almost closed the blog down after I came to the same conclusion but decided to widen the scope to include some of my other interests like business and economics. At that point I guess the blog had truly lost its focus.

Along the way having a blogging empire no longer seemed to have the same allure as it once did. If you know about blogging you know there are plenty of ways to monetize a blog and most of them are methods I am not a fan of. For instance you can use a third party services to have a pop up solicit your email address for further marketing attempts. You see the thing in real life I don’t like slick sales routines. One can also sell stuff or ideas to convert site visits into money but as I did not want to sell my weight loss eBook or sell useless trinkets (or similar stuff that I do not value) I did not go for this either.

One other way to get a website popular is to do a lot of link exchanges. You see the 800 pound gorilla uses how many incoming links a website has to decide ranking and how much search traffic to send to the website. The thing is I did not nor do care to link to websites I don’t like or read.

So my vision changed and I did not ever put in the work to get this site off of the ground so on that level it is no longer the joy it once was to continue working on this website.

I still have my first love, karate as the subject of my other blog. Even though I am not ever going to master the internet universe, on that blog I still have plenty to say and will continue with blogging there.

As for the friends I have made blogging here; I am very happy about that! I will continue to visit your blogs as they have and do interest me.

Thank you for visiting and if you are still interesting in my opinions and you like issues surrounding self-defense, karate, mma and such – please visit http://myselfdefenseblog.com.

Whats more I would hazarda guess and say that fad diets of any genre do [...]]]> The word “diet” is becoming passe like vampire movies. Everywhere I turn there are diet pills, commercials, books, websites (yes this I guess is one more to a point) and people espousing the latest, greatest diet! I am sick of diets!!!

Whats more I would hazarda guess and say that fad diets of any genre do not work. Now wait a moment – I’m not saying you cannot lose some weight with many of them, I am saying that if you are trying to reverse obesity – diets are not going to do the trick.

Here is what I have found to work. Eat or burn less calories than you take in. Now how you decide to do that is the only trick. You can pay some company the big bucks to “do their plan” or figure it out for yourself. The cool thing is if you figure it out for yourself (hopefully) you will find a compromise (yes – there will be some hard decisions) you can live with!

Now I happen to like eating less and exercising more because this is a good strategy for getting fit. But the devil is in the details. In this post I will go over how my diet is helping my overall fitness level and will not focus too much on exercise (see other posts for that). To start the conversation I found a couple of videos stating that diets do not work for your perusal.

While I agree with most of this video and really like how the focus is not on diets, I will say that one can try and eat healthy, love them self, increase activity levels, lose weight slowly, and still love themselves! I do understand that liking/loving yourself is the first step to making healthy changes.

I also agree that diets do not work. If the focus is short term to loose the love handles to strut your stuff at the beach and then go back to the “normal” way of eating – that is an unhealthy attitude I think (I’m not a health professional).

I think making “lifestyle changes” is the proper approach. This includes moving more and eating less calories than one burns (assuming you need to lose some fat). I don’t think anyone should starve themselves because how can someone eat like that for the rest of their lives? No what I am talking about if changing your food choices from high calorie to lower calorie choices (cumulative over the whole day) that meet your needs. If you need to lose fat, then you would eat less calories than you use reasonably.

What is reasonable? I would guess a pound a week for most people is doable without too much pain after they get used to the idea. Exercise should make this easier too such as walking for 30 to 60 minutes a day. Most people have tons of down time they use up watching a tv show they don’t really like. Why taking the dog out for a walk daily would accomplish exercise for you and your dog!

Here is what I ate yesterday.

• Breakfast
  • egg sandwich with cheese and low-cal margarine
  • glass of orange juice
  • banana
  • orange
  • coffee with half and half & splenda
• Lunch
  • 1/2 torpedo roll with 3oz roast beef, slice of cheese and low-cal mayo
  • diet root beer
  • banana
  • orange
• Dinner
  • turkey burger with slice cheese on full torpedo roll
  • two red potatoes
  • two carrots
  • diet orange soda

The calorie totals are about 650 for breakfast, 450 for lunch, and 600 for dinner or a grand total of 1700 calories. You see I am shooting for 1500 to 1800 calories a day. I was not hungry all day and I did a 45 minute boxing workout on the bag.

The trick is consistency for me. I find if I jump off of the reservation too many times a week – I will have a wash in calories but the way I eat is not really a diet (I don’t count anymore while I am doing it) but rather a way of eating I’ve grown accustomed to doing. We have junk food for my son but I mostly stay away from that.

This doctor makes a good point about seeing a health professional for advice. If the doctor does not feel comfortable making recommendations he or she can refer you to a nutritionist. The main point here is if you find yourself obese, you probably have not been making good food choices so you will have to “adjust” what foods you already like to ones you CAN eat for life!

Another good point is to visit USDA website for approved dietary guidelines so you can see the latest recommendations for healthy eating choices!

So I say Diet Smiet! Go figure out how to transform your diet into YOUR healthy living plan.