Archive for June, 2009

The Perfect Weight Loss Diet Plan For Women

Posted in Fitness, Food on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Athena

Pre-Breakfast:

1 glass of warm water with 1 teaspoon of lemon juice
(The sourness of lemon might give your jaw a temporary paralysis, but the warm water will make it more palatable.)

Meal 1: Tea- half cup fat free milk + half cup tap water + Ginger + very little tea spice
(No sugar. A tspf of tea is the right amount of caffeine for the morning. Tea also helps fight increased levels of cortisol which is produced when you are training hard. The milk will provide some calories early in the morning. I used to drink coffee, but I got to know that tea is always a better option as coffee exacerbates PMSing and dehydration.)

Meal 2: Breakfast

1/2 cup oatmeal (the classic one) + 1 cup milk
OR
1 cup sprouts+ 3 egg whites + 1 toast
OR
Apple/strawberry (sim. fruits) + 1 cup yogurt

This would be the hardest part of your day. The oatmeal without sugar tastes worse than boiled paper. [Don't ask me where have I tasted boiled paper now.] If you hate oatmeal, try one of those tasteless cereals. Add some berries or an apple to the cereal if it triggers your gag reflex. But get used to this tastelessness in breakfast. Anything delicious comes with loads of sugars and sodium. And we want to spread our sodium/sugar quota throughout the day in a balanced way. The sprouts are good, but try not to put too much salt in it. But, if you are going to workout after your breakfast, it’s OK to replace the apple with a banana since you are going to use all that sugar that comes with the fruit.

Meal 3: Post breakfast snack

A fruit – preferably orange, apple, pear etc.
OR
1 cup of Low Fat Yogurt

Meal 4: Lunch

Salad + lean meat + blue cheese dressing (only 1 teaspoonful) + 2 Toasts (no butter. Or any 2 slices of bread of your choice. Make it wheat.)
OR
Salad + Lentil soup (This is a great vegetarian source of protien. You can also use 1 tbspf of oil  )

Salad-> lettuces, tomatoes, carrots (I use 1 carrot and carve ribbons out of it. It’s easier to eat that way), spinach (great source of iron)

Lean Meat -> Tuna (or any fish for that matter), Chicken (I don’t eat beef, but if you are a beef person, you can check out options for lean beef. )

Meal 4: Post Lunch snack

Protein berry shake
1/4 cup de-seeded red berries
1/4 cup  strawberries halves
2 tbspf of Low Fat Vanilla Yogurt
1/2 cup of Fat Free Milk
1 teaspoonful of whey protein (you will have to choose this one according to your needs)
3 ice cubes

Blend all of the above.

Replace your evening coffee with this shake. You can also replace the yogurt with a scoop of low fat vanilla/chocolate ice cream.

Meal 5: Dinner

Lentil soup/tomato soup (not the condensed one)/ Vegetable soup- 1 small serve
Grilled Chicken breast/grilled fish fillet (salmon/tuna)

Try to eat your dinner before 7 PM.

Meal 6: Post Dinner snack/Midnight snack
1 scoop of Low Fat ice cream for something sweet
(relieves that craving)

OR

1/2 cup oatmeal + 1 cup tap water + a pinch of salt + a pinch of pepper
(For something NOT sweet. Oatmeal will also work as a late night fibre supplement. Always good for digestion.)

Well that’s that.

Some extra tips:

1. Eat at an interval of every 1 & 1/2 hours.

2. Drink at least a Gallon of water. If you workout, keep drinking water while working out and don’t count that water in your daily water quota.

3. It’s ok to binge on weekends if you are able to keep up with this diet along with a semi-strenuous workout routine (such as, 40 mins of HIIT every morning coupled with a split weight training routine.)

4. The day you feel low on energy and you don’t want to do any heavy workout, resort to Power Yoga. It’s easy to do it when you are trying to get used to this kind of routine.

5. Try not to use too much canned food in your diet. It’s full of preservatives. Bad for health and weight reduction.

Warning: This diet is heart wrenching. You will hate your life and your self for torturing your taste buds with this diet. It’s tasteless for most part and requires tremendous self control and challenge. But it bloody works. :-D

Happy dieting!

And God said,”Let there be light!”…

Posted in Politics on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 by Athena

…and Obama Haters went and flipped the light switch off!

“What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country.”
- Excerpt from Obama Haters Silent Enablers by Frank Rich

I can’t understand this! For once, God said, “Peoples of America, here, out of all the ‘goodness’ that I can shower upon my children, I have given you a man who is honest. May you now learn to live in peace.”

And still there are people in this Country who fail to see God’s (if you believe in it) point! I mean…c’mmon! How long are you going to stay deluded and be coaxed by people like Bush and just keep fighting with everyone? One man at least seems to want peace, and is trying his very best to be NOT corrupt; you completely overlook all of that and instead, embrace social and racial prejudices against him?

Get a clue Obama Haters!

The Google *Metaverse

Posted in personal on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 by Athena

*Term metaverse taken from sci-fi novel Snow Crash

There is nothing more pleasant than to wake up after 6 hours of really disturbed sleep and find your address bar suddenly gone from your firefox browser. You think, maybe you did something wrong. You think,”You stupid lay user you! You probably hit one of those hidden buttons designed for some invisible way of removing the address bar. Well, enjoy your own work! Go ahead and try accessing your wordpress / Facebook /Orkut & other sites through Google! You are so stupid you probably deserve it!”

Well…now that you have f***ed it up this bad, you feel that you should at least *try* to find a solution. So, you go to the Google search bar (which is the only thing working in your navigation bar), and type in:

“My firefox address bar is not working! Help!”

…and get ready to trudge through all the 1000 forums where someone might have posted an answer. You actually found a forum called BUG#240242 in Mozilla Firefox. This is how the thread goes:

Summary: At random, the location bar ceases to load pages

Steps to reproduce:
1. Enter a URL in the location bar
2. Hit the Enter key or click the green arrow

Expected Result:
URL opens in tab

Actual Result:
Nothing. No new page will load from the URL bar in any tab.

In reply to it, someone had written:

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately we can’t fix it, because your description didn’t include enough information. You may find it helpful to read “How to report bugs effectively” http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html. We’d be grateful if you would then provide a more complete description of the problem.

The next reply is the first user, typing pages of information according to the forum’s instructions and there are several such versions of the same problem typed again and again. Apparently, everybody has, in some or the other, ended up confused and with their address bars missing. And no replies with any solutions in it.

You get the message. You are pathetic. Just like every other goddamn lay user on this earth.

So you find that it’s a firefox bug and no one really knows how to fix it. You allow yourself to panic. A lot. Because you have a press release to finish and you will need an address bar for your research. And Because if the big shots of the open source community don’t know how to fix it, then there is nothing in the hell that you can do except dilate your pupils and make a face like you have just eaten a rotten egg…
you see, a browser without an address bar is very painful and annoying.

Humph! You don’t want to get back to the horror of using Internet Explorer again- those hundreds of pop ups, that snail mail speed and those mps crashes. So, you finally will have to turn to a new browser. Painful still, but doable. You have heard about google chrome. Maybe you should try it.

You go to Google and search for Google chrome and get to the place where it says “Download google chrome” and click on the button. It will take you to the terms and conditions page. For a second you wonder if it says,

“Listen! We are Google, and your relationship with us is very special, as in, we value our slaves. Please get your branding done as soon as possible ‘coz in the near future, when the revolution hits the world, and if you aren’t a Google-ite, then we won’t be able to save you….at any cost!”

But only for a second.

Of course you don’t read the T & S page since you know it’s absurd. No one. Absolutely no one *actually* reads the T&S pages except for those paranoid morons who have nothing else to do other than to sit and read 20 pages worth of legal jargon and call themselves Hackers. Also, no corporation (even if they are as genius as Google) can own the world and its people or make you a slave through a browser T&S contract.

You passingly remember that, in a Resource collection lecture, your sneaky looking Journalism professor was able spell out the names, social security numbers, addresses, habits, paranoias, names of toilet bowl cleaners and cars owned by you and all your neighbours by “Googling it”.

You agree to the terms and services page as casually as you have done to other T&S pages (most of which said that they are entitled to read each and every word that you write to your wife, children, that other woman next door, and your secret brotherhood emails to your highschool friends; that they have copyrighted your soul and your first borns.)

You check the “please help google by sending all the crash reports for better services” box. You wonder if it has a double meaning. But you check it anyways. You are a conscentious citizen.

The download begins. Blue bars flicker. It will only take 1 min 24 secs. A minute and 24 seconds later you have the latest version of Google Chrome.  You open it. A simple page loads up.

It says,” As you visit sites, thumbnails of your most visited sites will be shown as soon as Chrome loads up.”
You wonder if it will show that free porn site that you visit like a thousand times in a day.

Chrome is definitely faster than firefox, looks more lightweight and viola- it has an address bar! A sudden calm is settling somewhere in your mind. You are sensing happiness and satisfaction. It’s like someone has given you your regular dose of morphine. And now you can browse- teary & red eyed – for another 24 hours and maybe more, continuously. You wonder why such silly things bother you so much. You must be crazy. You smile, kick back and continue your daily grazing around.