Fast: Day 30

Posted in Food, Juicefast, Personal on September 30th, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

So, I didn’t update as much as I would’ve like to, but most people know already anyway because everyone was so involved with what I did. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support and understanding. Lots of people have asked me about it, called and mailed me about how I was doing and things like that are very necessary when doing something like this. I only made the full 30 days because of you guys. :)

Weight : 126 kgs (-9 kgs)
Mood : Energetic, but mentally aching for some solid food ;)

Juice intake: At the end I drank a little less juice because my stomach couldn’t handle having so much juice on one day, so mostly I tuned down to 3-4 glasses of 500ml

Water intake: 3,0 ltrs per day

Exercise: daily a 30-45 minute walk (except since last saturday, when I brutally twisted my ankle)

After all, I can happily look back at this past month and can honestly say I have done a great job. I’m feeling a lot better, I have plenty of energy for everything, my skin isn’t so darn dry anymore and I even lost some weight. Losing the weight wasn’t exactly the main focus of this month, but of course it’s a great ‘side-effect’ to the juice-fast.
I think that with my new diet which is going to be implemented starting tomorrow, I will still include 1 glass of juice as a replacement of a meal every day, because I love the energyboost right after drinking one. For athletes, I can seriously consider drinking one before and after exercise, it works a lot better than the usual hydrants and shakes. From tomorrow on, I am going to try and go back to basics with all food; No food that’s been processed, organic if possible/affordable and of course try to eat the food as pure as possible. Aside from the fact that this is way more healthy than what I did before, it’s also a new challenge for me as a cook to try new kinds of food and recipes. Luckily, I have the internet at my disposal and lots of websites give tips and amazing recipes, like the Fruit Pursuit [1] for instance, which gives a fun to read blog about eating and living healthy with lots of tips and tricks and amazing recipes, which I know I’m going to try to make them all somewhere in the near future.

If I am invited for dinner somewhere, I’m not going to impose a strict diet for me on them and neither am I going to complain about the food, but for myself I’m going back to basic.
Bottomline for me is; Lots of fruits and vegetables, combined with beans and nuts. Less potatoes and grains, way less meat (and this will be my biggest challenge ;) )and fish, and trying the shun the satured fats alltogether.

Again, I couldn’t have done it without you people, thanks for your support!

ps: I am probably going to do shorter juicefasts all around the year, perhaps 1 day every month. While shorter juicefasts are not as effective as the month I have done now, they are still enormous energyboosts and detoxing.
[1] http://www.thefruitpursuit.com/

Fast : Day 1

Posted in Food, Juicefast, Personal on August 30th, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

I promised to keep you all updated about the juicefasting, so I’m going to start on day 1, and I will try to update at least once per week  :)

Weight : 135 kgs
Mood : Optimistic

Juice intake:
Breakfast : 500 ml apple with grapes
Lunch : 500ml apple, cucumber, garlic
4 o’ clock: 500 ml apple, cucumber, garlic
Dinner: 500 ml cucumber, rhubarb, lettuce, apple
9 o’ clock: 200 ml leftovers from dinner

Water intake: 2,5 ltrs

Exercise: 45-minute walk

So, at the moment I’m feeling quite while, even though I haven’t had solid food for over a day now. Fair is fair, this is just the first day, and I never expected this day to be the worst anyway, but it feels good knowing that the first day went by better than I imagined in the first place.

Fast

Posted in Food, Juicefast, Personal on August 28th, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

So, after reading a post [1] on the blog Suushi.nl, I watched the movie/documentary ‘Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead’ [2] and had a mayor eye-opener and decided to follow the example of the main character and go fasting for a while. In this case it means a juice-fast, which means I will consume no more than the juices of fruits and vegetables and drink only water. This seems very radical, and it is, but I think it’s the only way for me to actually lose some weight and improve my health.

What scared me the most, was that the main person in the documentary was actually in a situation very close to mine. Same overweight, same daily exercise (though I have been starting to walk every day since a few weeks) and he had mayor health issues. While I’m not dying, I see rising problems with my health as time progresses, I have headaches a lot, I’m sick a lot and my body is continuously strained by the weight I have to carry around with me (135 kgs). One thing was very different though… He’s 41, I’m 24.

So, here I am, a few days before I start ( I start on tuesday) and I’m completely motivated to really do something about  all of it. I bought myself a juicer, I’m gathering recipes for juices and I’m really stoked about getting this done, and of course to stay healthy after the fast as well with a healthy diet consisting mostly of fruit, vegetables and nuts and avoiding things filled with carbohydrates, food from packages. So yes, this also means I’m going to eat less meat, which is a big sacrifice for me but also one that is necessary.

I will update this blog at least once a week to report progress and tell everyone how much I hate the world because I’m so darn hungry ;)

[1] http://www.suushi.nl/2011/08/foodie-suusie-the-revival/
[2] http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

 

Review : Jackies NYCuisine Deventer

Posted in Food on July 22nd, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

It’s been a while now since I’ve last visited a new restaurant. So I was really excited to visit a restaurant in Deventer which I have been anxious to go to for a while now.

The first impression of the restaurant was already a very good one. We stepped out of the rain and into the hallway, to be greeted right away by the extremely friendly waiter. After I give him my name to verify my reservation, he took our coats and guided us to a nice little table next to the windows overlooking the kitchen (which looked very neat, by the way!) and sat us down. I ordered a black russian, which wasn’t something they usually made, but after they verified the contents with me, they made me one anyway without making a problem out of it.

Read more »

The Food Category

Posted in Food on July 22nd, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

In the past, I had a blog on which I posted reviews of restaurants I visited. Being a huge fan of good food and visiting restaurants and having worked in the business myself, I think I can offer a fair opinion about the complete picture of a visited restaurant, so I did.
The blog bled dry because I didn’t really put much time and effort into it, so I had it disbanded, but now I want to revive the review-section again and post them on this blog, which I update with some regularity. So, it’s not going to be a whole blog dedicated to food as it was before, but a new category on my personal blog containing reviews of restaurants and maybe some of my own creations if I feel like documenting them :)

Read the next post about the restaurant I visited yesterday, to start off the new category with a fresh review!

Map Artist

Posted in Hobbies, Personal on May 31st, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

For a project of mine, Erian LRP, I’m looking for someone that can draw some maps for me for use in a Live RolePlay setting. Erian is a (dutch, for now) LRP-system based on DnD rules and will eventually be released under the Open Gaming License, but the maps will remain a part of the setting, so they will not go into the system-content.

I have no budget for this, so I’m looking for someone who is willing to do this for free or for someone to point me to open source software which I can use to make good looking maps. If there is proprietary software available which is infinitely more useful, for a good price, I’m open for that as well.

Also, if interested, anyone can join in on the project as an artist, since I will need artists to make a “Monster Manual” and “Players Guide” as well. Those pieces of work /will/ go into the system content though, so any work submitted to that, is going to be part of Open Content.

Please direct anyone interested to this post, many thanks!

Regards,

Pete

Photoproject – Marilyn Monroe

Posted in Photography on May 18th, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

 

I have thought about this for a while, since I’m a real fan of Marilyn Monroe. Do I really want to try this and risk screwing up, or do I just leave the project be and risk getting no amazing photos?
I decided a while ago that I wanted to continue down this road anyway and that I was going to search for model(s) and preferably also a stylist for good measure, so that’s why I’m posting this for more exposure.

The project is trying to recreate some of the amazing work of Sam Shaw, one of the photographers who worked closely with Marilyn Monroe. In this post are a few examples of his work, to give you a bit of an idea. I’m searching for models that could look like Marilyn and a hopefully also a stylist that can accompany us.

Please know that this is a personal project and that I can’t pay anyone for it except travel expenses, lunch and all other costs that need to be made.

Reactions can be done by either commenting on this post with your emailaddress attached, by PMing me on facebook or twitter.
Of course, if you know someone else that’s interested, please point them to this website.

sneCMS – a new project

Posted in Hobbies on May 15th, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

Okay, so I have been trying to force myself to learn better html/css and php for a very long time now. Similarly, I have been annoyed by the lack of lightweight, easy to use content management systems. I’m often asked to put up a very small website on very short notices, and I always run into the fact that usually most CMS-es are way to bloated. I really like Concrete5, which I encountered a while ago for the first time, but I guess the wish for a real simple and easy content management system was still in the back of my head, that’s why I decided to combine my wish for a new cms and the will to learn to code and start a new project: sneCMS – Simple and Easy CMS.

For the time being, I will update on this blog and I’ll probably keep doing that in the future, but when the first version comes out, I’ll put up a website at sneCMS.org.

New start

Posted in Personal on January 14th, 2011 by Peter van Arkel

So, yeah…

My old blog broke down and I really couldn’t be bothered fixing it. It had survived multiple upgrades from ancient versions to a pretty recent one, but it did not survive the crash of old cthulhu. Sure, I could’ve used backups, but that didn’t work out, site was slow as hell for no apparent reason and as I said before, I really couldn’t be bothered putting more work into it.
Now it’s time for a new blog, which I’m going to use for posts that are too long for facebook or twitter, so it might not be updated very much, but I’ll try to update as much as possible.

I know it’s already almost summer now, but still, best wishes for 2011 and many happy returns on this blog, I hope.