#helped by the fact that september appears to be a normal time for stats to take a plunge bc school starts again | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

Visit Blog

Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.

Fun Fact

Mobile US users spent an average of 115.8 minutes on Tumblr app monthly.

#helped by the fact that september appears to be a normal time for stats to take a plunge bc school starts again

purplesurveys · 4 years

Text

1047

What’s the most historic thing that has happened in your lifetime? I can think of a few things. There’s 9/11 though I was barely conscious then, Osama Bin Laden’s death, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 2011 Japan earthquake, and the H1N1 and Covid pandemics. In my country, there were typhoons Ondoy and Yolanda, the Manila hostage crisis, and the Hello Garci election corruption scandal. Out of these, though, I’d say the heaviest ones to bear have been 9/11 and Covid.

What happens in your country regularly that people in most countries would find strange or bizarre?

We use a spoon and fork to eat and only really fancy shmancy restaurants give you a knife and a fork. Many eat with their hands as well, though this is way more common in provinces.

Everyone is late to everything and punctuality isn’t a thing, which is a big culture pet peeve of mine and I still like arriving early/on time anywhere.

This applies to Asia in general lmao, but shoes typically aren’t allowed or at least frowned upon if they go beyond the main entrance of houses.

We start Christmas as early as September, and we end it by the last week of January

When families get together, aunts/uncles will usually greet their nieces/nephews by asking if they already have a boy/girlfriend and/or telling them that they got fat. Horror relatives will greet you with both.

People generally like to keep to themselves, so striking a friendly conversation with strangers even if you have the pure, genuine intention to be simply friendly will just lead them to think you’re being a creep lol

What has been blown way out of proportion? The effects of video games and the question of it increasing violence among kids. Sure there’ve been gruesome accounts and no one’s invalidating those, but the overwhelmingly vast amount of people who play video games end up okay. I had so many killing binges on GTA but to this day I can’t even look at a real gun without shuddering, lol. When was a time you acted nonchalant but were going crazy inside? This is me every morning at work. 9 AM-11 AM is always the busiest period and it’s a lot of shit happening at the same time and a lot of morning deadlines to meet, but unlike college I can’t exactly call for a timeout whenever I want and have panic attacks anymore.

What’s about to get much better? I hope my fucking life is next in line. I’m tired of being tired of being tired.

What are some clever examples of misdirection you’ve seen? Probably all the times WWE would mislead viewers on a rumored return or debut of a big name by saying they’re in another city, implying that there’s no way they’d be appearing on a WWE show. This happened with Ronda Rousey and it was so fucking exciting when she finally showed up, haha.

What’s your funniest story involving a car? I don’t know, really...I don’t try to be funny when I’m on the wheel lol. Probably the time I let Angela use my car on campus, and when she needed to make a u-turn she ended up doing an awkward 90º turn and had an SUV nearly crash towards us. She had only driven a handful of times at that point so she was a little clumsy, but neither of us had any idea she’d fuck up a simple u-turn as badly as she ended up doing lmao.

What would be the click-bait titles of some popular movies? I can think of more clickbait posters than titles, but I can’t seem to remember what those films are called right now.

If you built a themed hotel, what would the theme be and what would the rooms look like? Themed hotels generally make me cringe. The most theme-y place we ever stayed at was the lodge in Sagada and it was really just more homey than anything. I’m not into themes when it comes to hotels as I find it a little cheap lol and I’ve always preferred a straightforward experience in the places I stay at for vacations.

What scientific discovery would change the course of humanity overnight if it was discovered? A way to live forever. < This is a good one. Also, maybe a huge asteroid or meteor bound to hit the planet that will make widespread extinction a certainty? I can’t even begin to imagine the panic that will rise from something like that.

Do you think that humans will ever be able to live together in harmony? I doubt it. It sounds difficult especially when you realize we’re 7 billion in total.

What would your perfect bar look like? As long as there aren’t any annoying younger college kids, who are almost always the loudest crowd and not in a good way, I’m okay with any kind of bar.

What’s the scariest non-horror movie? Some shots in 2001: A Space Odyssey are freaky as fuck. There were several scenes that included sudden HAL shots, and I did not enjoy those. How the fuck Kubrick managed to make a computer scary is beyond me. I’ve also always skipped the vortex scene with the creepy face shots after seeing it once.

What’s the most amazing true story you’ve heard? This is a really vague question... a few months ago I watched this video diary of parents who had a child born at like 25 weeks. Just way too early, basically. And they recorded the kid’s weekly progress, how she kept fighting, and her journey of being transported from one machine to another while she still needed them. It was beautiful to see her get bigger and plumper with each week that passed and it was just such a feel-good story to watch. I was so relieved when they showed footage of her as a normal, healthy toddler by the end of the clip.

What’s the grossest food that you just can’t get enough of? I know balut is pretty unpopular in the Western part of the world, but I’ll gladly eat a dozen of them in one sitting. In general Asian street food is usually considered gross - pig intestines, chicken intestines, chicken feet, pig ears, etc., but all are normal in the culture I was raised in.

What brand are you most loyal to? It’s annoying and I can’t help it, but Apple.

What’s the most awkward thing that happens to you on a regular basis? I try not to make it regular, but sometimes a mistake on my end will slip through in an email I’m sending and I have to send another email correcting myself and apologizing for the oversight. One of my least favorite parts about work.

If you had to disappear and start a whole new life, what would you want your new life to look like? I’m not wishing for much. I just wish it was easier to remove any trace of me on social media sites and have it be as if I never existed because I think that would make it easier for me to move on from...well, you know what. I still have trouble verbalizing it and I don’t feel like mentioning it tonight.

But idk, I like staying connected to my family and friends, so idk if I can ever achieve that. And that said, I think I’m bound to always keep seeing her around.

What movie or book do you know the most quotes from? I memorize a pathetic amount of dialogue from Love Actually, Twilight, Titanic, and The Proposal. What was one of the most interesting concerts you’ve been to? I guess Coldplay? They gave assigned lightsticks for each section and the crowd looked amazing when the production crew activated the lights for certain songs. I still have some of the clips because I posted them on Snapchat, so I’m really glad I did that; otherwise I would’ve lost the videos forever.

Where are you not welcome anymore? I’ve felt pretty unwelcome around her. How she could do a 180 and just not be interested in having anything to do with me is really soul-crushing.

What do you think could be done to improve the media? Fact fucking check, please. Also keeping sources balanced, avoiding clickbait headlines, being more objective than neutral, and don’t fucking sensationalize. How timely that this landed on a journalism graduate, hahaha.

What’s the most recent show you’ve binge watched? Start Up but I haven’t continued in the last two weeks :/ I think it’s because I know I’m nearing the finale and I subconsciously just don’t want to run out of Start Up episodes to watch lol but yeah, I still have four episodes left and I have no clue when I’ll watch it again.

What’s a common experience for many people that you’ve never experienced? Being close with their mom and considering them as their rock.

What are some misconceptions about your hobby? I don’t know enough about embroidery to know misconceptions about it.

What did you Google last? 2001: A Space Odyssey because I needed to be sure of the scenes I planned on citing in the question above that made me mention the movie.

What’s the dumbest thing someone has argued with you about? Not being able to find a restaurant to eat at. The backstory is a little complicated but it’s the same fight that led my younger brother to slap me across the face, and what subsequently led me to stop speaking to him.

If money and practicality weren’t a problem, what would be the most interesting way to get around town? Probably a tank.

What’s the longest rabbit hole you’ve been down? It’s always the ones on Wikipedia lol. I find weird and interesting articles on there all the time; there’s always something new to read.

What odd smell do you really enjoy? The rain, though sometimes it can be too overpowering when the humidity has been high. I like it for the most part, though.

What fashion trend makes you cringe or laugh every time you see it? Streetwear is so fucking dull to me. I never saw the appeal.

What’s your best story of you or someone else trying to be sneaky and failing miserably? Hahahaha this happened just a few weeks ago actually. My parents and I were headed out to have some ramen, and I opened the car door to hop onto the backseat. They didn’t prepare beforehand and they left the Christmas gift I asked for - a corkboard - in the backseat, so I was able to see the whole thing, unwrapped and with price tag and all. Their mortified faces knowing that their secret’s been blown were hilarious. They had no choice but to just give it up, and the corkboard has been on my wall since.

If you had a HUD that showed three stats about any person you looked at, what three stats would you want it to show? I guess the stability of our relationship, their general mood for the day, and erm how badly they need a hug because I’m always willing to give some.

What’s the best way you or someone you know has gotten out of a ticket / trouble with the law? My mom fake-cries her way out and it’s always been hilarious to see a grown ass woman do it and pull it off every time.

Tear gas makes people cry and laughing gas makes people giggle, what other kinds of gases do you wish existed? I don’t really want to manipulate people’s action in this way, so pass.

#survey #surveys

4 notes · View notes

kuriboo · 4 years

Text

YuGiOh GX Month 2020

Day 22: Stop Blowing Holes in my Ship!!

This is the rarepair day, and I, predictably, have chosen to write about Jesse Anderson/Chazz Princeton. I think about these two more than anyone really should, by this point. Decided to write some season 1 content; I like to think Jesse was enrolled in North Academy while Chazz was, and there was some reason he just wasn’t at the school at that time. This is just one possibility... But, well, this is canon divergent territory so whatever I say goes anyway, I guess.

This is obviously very late... I have lots of opportunity to write these days, but not a ton of time to put it up anywhere, and I honestly only decided to write this a week ago, or maybe two, after looking at the prompt list again in my Bastion Erasure messages. I also plan to write one more, for the Arc V day, but it’a not gonna be done in September, sorry about that. I’ll probably have it up on October. I’ll put the ao3 link for this one in the notes!

⁂

"What a week it's been, huh?" Jessed asking the bug on his shoulder

The past week had been intense. Normally, Jesse would be in class right now at North Academy. After building his deck for the entrance exam, he had risen high up in the ranks, even though he was just a freshman. Maybe it was because he had bonded with his new bug deck so quickly and so well, rather than pure dueling ability, but it still had caught someone's attention. A few weeks ago, that fella in charge of Industrial Illusions, Maximillion Pegasus, invited Jesse and his bugs to this big tournament with all these duelists he ain't met before. Today had been his second duel in the tournament, and these duels were at least as hard as the duels at North Academy were, those duels being the hardest Jesse had ever faced. He'd managed to win the duel, but it wasn't easy.

For whatever reason, though, whenever Jesse looked out to the audience, he always saw Pegasus looking at him. Pegasus always looked like he was mulling something over in his mind, but he was always looking at Jesse when Jesse saw him. It was a little strange, but Jesse wasn't going to let it throw him off. He was going to give this tournament his best shot and try to leave without regrets.

He couldn’t let himself get distracted now, anyway. He was already thinking about his next opponent in the tournament, and how to face whatever strategies they might use. He was back in the room he’d been assigned to stay in for the duration of the tournament. It was fairly simple room; there were a few chairs, a bed, a closet, and a TV. It sure was comfortable, though.

When the door to his room opened, Jesse nearly jumped out of his chair. “Whoa, that sure spooked me,” Jesse said quietly to himself as a staff member entered the room.

”My apologies.”

”It’s fine, I definitely ain’t upset or nothing. It’s not time for my next duel already, is it?” Jesse asked. He knew he would be dueling more often as the tournament progressed, but this was sooner than he’d figured it would be. His previous duel ended not long ago. Yet, it was strange for someone from the tournament staff to be here otherwise.

”It’s not time for you to duel just yet. We received this today. It’s for you.” They gave Jesse an envelope with his name written on the front.

Jesse smiled. “Thanks!”

As the staff member left, Jesse opened the envelope, his bug friends crowding around to all try to read it at the same time. It was from Chancellor Foster, from North Academy; the date the letter was sent was written in the top right. It’d been sent out not long after Jesse left North Academy. He’d set off for the tournament almost as soon as he got the invitation, since the trip itself took over a week. It wasn’t a surprise to see the mail travelled slower. Even so soon after he left, it was a letter updating Jesse on how much had happened in North Academy between Jesse’s departure and when the letter was written.

Apparently, a lot happened in a short time. A freshman from the main branch of Duel Academy had transferred to North Academy just before Jesse left for the tournament. Why the transfer occurred wasn’t clear, but it wasn’t any of Jesse’s business. As it turned out, that freshman had reached the top rank of North Academy after putting their new deck together, as part of North Academy’s entrance exam. Jesse rose his eyebrows as that. This duelist must be really good, ranking as the top duelist with a deck full of cards they’d never used.

It sounded like this duelist was going to represent North Academy in the upcoming duel against the main branch, too. Jesse wouldn’t be able to see it in person since he wouldn’t be back to the academy yet, but he couldn’t wait to hear the results.

”Chazz Princeton, huh? I’ll have to remember that you.”

As good as this Chazz Princeton was, Jesse still hadn’t dueled them yet. As soon as Jesse returned to North Academy, it would be time to change that.

A duel later, not long after dinner, Jesse was practically vibrating with excitement.

The next duel, just 36 hours away, would be part of the semi-finals. He was so excited to be in the tournament, to have made it this far, that he couldn’t think strategy right now. He didn’t know what to do with himself, but if he couldn’t get himself to prepare on the upcoming duel, maybe watching a duel on TV would help him think of new ideas? Seeing other duelists’ decks and strategies and all? Jesse turned on the TV and began flipping through channels to find a duel to watch.

He stopped when he found a duel that immediately captured his attention. It looked like the duelists were around his age? That was odd, since students usually didn’t weren’t broadcasted, especially on a live broadcast like this one.

A few minutes later and Jesse found out that this was apparently the big duel between North Academy and the main branch. He blinked. Did he forget this duel would be televised? He didn’t remember hearing that it would, but...

It looked like the main branch had chosen a duelist, too, which made it hard to figure which duelist represented which school, but after a couple of moments he was able to figure it out. The duelist in the black jacket was Chazz Princeton, dueling for North Academy. Duel Academy’s duelist had a red jacket on; it sounded like his name was Jaden. Both students had interesting cards. Jaden had these cool looking hero monsters, they seemed like fun friends to have. Chazz looked like he was using North Academy’s legendary Armed Dragon deck. The deck could appear weak at the beginning of the duel, but Jesse knew better to judge it by that. The biggest lesson any student at North Academy learned was that there were no truly bad cards. All cards could be good, as long as you knew how to use them.

Chazz had just summoned Armed Dragon LV 7. Soon anyone who was unaware of the deck’s power would no longer underestimate it. Beyond it’s powerful stats, it also had the ability to destroy all its opponents monsters, making it a force to be reckoned with. This deck was legendary for a reason. Soon, Jaden was able to defend himself from the direct attack without losing life points, but it was close. He’d barely been able to keep himself in the duel.

This was a close duel. Jesse was on the edge of his seat. Even if the situation looked bad for Jaden, Jesse knew he couldn’t count out Duel Academy’s rep just yet either.

A few turns later Jaden was able to destroy Armed Dragon LV 7 with a card effect, proving Jesse to be right. Jaden had less life points, but he now had the upper hand.

”I hope Chazz can pull through still,” Jesse muttered to himself. “It’d be nice to see North Academy win this year...” Of course, this was Jesse’s first year, so he hadn’t been present for last year’s duel. But as the school had prepared for this year’s duel, he’d quickly learned North Academy lost last year. It wasn’t a close match, either. The school’s moral, especially the chancellor’s, had been hit hard after that.

Plus, it was clear by now that Chazz’s status in North Academy had been no fluke. He was a good duelist and definitely deserved to win. Not that Jaden didn’t deserve the win either, Jaden was fairly good himself, but... Besides just wanting his school to win, Jesse wouldn’t deny that Chazz was kind of cute. That fact definitely had him leaning even more for Chazz’s victory.

After Chazz’s next turn, however, something changed.

All the sudden Jaden was telling Chazz about how dueling for fun, not for the win itself. Jesse knew Jaden was absolutely right. Jesse hadn’t even questioned whether they were both having fun. Yet, looking now at Chazz, it was clear he was stressed. Jesse frowned. He knew Chancellor Foster and the other students wouldn’t put this much pressure on Chazz to win this duel, so who was? Someone else?

Was Chazz putting some of that pressure on himself?

Many people experienced test anxiety, even people who excelled in what they were tested on. Jesse had seen it before, and experienced it himself in the past; slap the word ‘test’ on anything and people get nervous. Suddenly, people forget the answers to questions they otherwise knew. Maybe this duel could be considered something like a test. Maybe this was a bad case of test anxiety.

No matter what, Jesse hoped Chazz would be able to relax and pull through. Duels weren’t made for stressin’.

Chazz told Jaden to surrender while he still could, but Jaden was having too much fun to even think about it. Jaden hoped that during his next duel with Chazz, Chazz would be able to have fun, and Jesse found himself hoping that, too. Chazz didn’t deserve the pressure he was under.

Jaden’s next turn came, and the broadcast lost its signal as Jaden attacked. That attack would’ve left Chazz with no life points, and there was definitely no was for Chazz to avoid it. It was weird that it cut right then, but Jesse didn’t need to see anymore anyway. He already knew how the duel ended.

Both duelists were only in their first year of school, but it was clear they both were skilled duelists. Bringing out Armed Dragon 7 and devastating Jaden’s life points with a direct attack was not an easy task, especially someone using Armed Dragon for the first time. Destroying Armed Dragon was no easy task, either. Jaden, as the winner, was very obviously a good duelist.

Chazz, though? No one should think any less of him because he lost; Jesse sure didn’t. That’s just the way the cards played out sometimes. No one could win all the time.

Jesse had already been interested when he heard Chazz was the top duelist in North Academy right after transferring. Now that he’d watch Chazz duel, he really wanted to duel against Chazz. He couldn’t wait to meet him.

Though Jesse had a feeling he would want more, all he could hope was that he and Chazz could at least be friends some day. Not today, not with this tournament still to finish, but some day.

Chazz at the very least was not going to get out of a duel with him.

#gxmonth2020 #gx month 2020 #tater writes #yugioh gx #tater.txt #thanks for hosting this cool event!! Wish i hadn’t been too busy for it!

6 notes · View notes

astrogeoguy · 5 years

Text

The Crown’s Jewels, the First Quarter Moon Meanders through Bright Planets, Jupiter bears Black and Red Spots, and Neptune Kisses a Star!

Above: On Wednesday, September 4 from 9:21 to 11:33 pm EDT, observers in the Americas can watch Io’s shadow transit Jupiter, accompanied by the Great Red Spot, as shown here for 10 pm EDT)

Hello, Late Summer Stargazers!

Here are your Astronomy Skylights for the week of September 1st, 2019 by Chris Vaughan. Feel free to pass this along to your friends and send me your comments, questions, and suggested topics. I repost these emails with photos at http://astrogeoguy.tumblr.com/ where all the old editions are archived. You can also follow me on Twitter as @astrogeoguy! Unless otherwise noted, all times are Eastern Time. Please click this MailChimp link to subscribe to these emails.

I can bring my Digital Starlab inflatable planetarium to your school or other daytime or evening event. Contact me, and we’ll tour the Universe together!

The Moon and Planets

If last week was the best week for skywatchers worldwide, this is the week for lunatics – the lovers of our natural satellite, Luna! Between now and next Sunday, the moon will March across the evening sky worldwide, waxing in phase and visiting two bright planets. Meanwhile, we have a minor meteor shower underway, and we can enjoy summer constellation sights in evening, autumn ones at midnight, and our winter treats during the pre-dawn hours. Here are your Skylights!

The moon will begin the week as a delicate waxing crescent visible over the western horizon after sunset. Watch for Earthshine - sunlight that has reflected off the seas and white clouds of Earth and is illuminating the unlit portion of the moon’s near side. The bright, white star that you see below the moon (or above it, if you live south of the Equator) on Sunday and Monday evening is Spica, the brightest star in Virgo (the Maiden). Note how the moon moves with respect to that star from one night to the next.

On Wednesday and Thursday, the now healthy crescent moon will pass through the modest stars of Libra (the Scales). The moon never wanders far from the Ecliptic, the imaginary line that traces the sun’s path through the zodiac constellations. So the moon is usually within those familiar constellations, allowing you to see where they are – even after the moon has moved away from them.

Thursday will bring the First Quarter Moon phase - when the angle formed by the sun, Earth, and moon forms a right-angle, causing the moon to appear half-illuminated, on its eastern side. (East and west on the moon are opposite to sky directions on Earth.) First quarter moons always rise around noon time, allowing you to see them in the afternoon. Evenings around first quarter are the best ones for viewing the moon in binoculars and backyard telescopes. The topography along the terminator – the pole-to-pole line that divides the lit and dark halves – is being lit by low-angled sunlight which produces breathtaking vistas of bright mountain peaks and crater rims, and the deep black shadows they cast. Moon phases are shared by everyone around the world.

(Above: On Thursday, observers worldwide will see the First Quarter moon near very bright Jupiter, as shown here at 9:30 pm EDT. The following nights, the moon will hop east of Jupiter and then do the same for Saturn.)

Thursday night will also begin the moon’s dance with the gas giant planets. Look for the moon in the southwestern sky, and positioned less than four finger widths to the right (or 4 degrees to the celestial northwest) of the bright planet Jupiter. The moon and Jupiter will both fit within the field of view of binoculars. If you watch the pair over several hours, starting at dusk, you will see the moon’s orbit carry it closer to the planet. Look for the bright reddish star Antares “the Rival of Mars” twinkling below the moon. That is the heart of Scorpius (the Scorpion). To the west of Antares, three little white stars in a vertical line and each separated by three finger widths from the next one, represent the critter’s claws. Remember that Jupiter will stay with the scorpion after the moon moves away – all autumn, in fact.

On Friday night, the waxing gibbous (i.e., more than half-full) moon will hop to sit on the east side of Jupiter. Then, on Saturday night, the moon will land immediately above the Teapot-shaped stars of Sagittarius (the Archer), and a palm’s width the right (or celestial west) of Saturn. As with Jupiter, the moon will hop to the other side of Saturn on Sunday night – and the ringed planet will stay near the Teapot for the rest of this year.

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are out of sight - hidden in the sun’s glare, for now. But the two fast inner planets will bring them into view in the evening sky next week.

As the sky begins to darken this week, look for the giant planet Jupiter sitting less than a third of the way up the southwestern sky. Hour by hour, Jupiter will sink lower – then set in the west before midnight local time. Jupiter is spending the rest of this year between Ophiuchus (the Serpent-Bearer) and Scorpius (the Scorpion). Normally a planet becomes harder to see when it reaches the southwestern evening sky. But the earlier sunsets and the planet’s brilliance will keep it in view for some time to come.

On a typical night, even a backyard telescope will show you Jupiter’s two main equatorial stripes and its four Galilean moons - Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede looking like small white dots arranged in a rough line flanking the planet. If you see fewer than four dots, then some of them are in front of Jupiter, or hidden behind it. Good binoculars will show the moons, too!

From time to time, the small, round, black shadows cast onto Jupiter’s surface by those four Galilean moons become visible in amateur telescopes as they cross (or transit) Jupiter’s disk. On Wednesday, September 4 from 9:21 to 11:33 pm EDT, observers in the Americas can watch Io’s shadow transit Jupiter, accompanied by the Great Red Spot!

Due to Jupiter’s rapid 10-hour rotation period, the Great Red Spot (or GRS) is only observable from Earth every 2nd or 3rd night, and only during a predictable three-hour window. The GRS will be easiest to see using a medium-sized, or larger, aperture telescope on an evening of good seeing (steady air). If you’d like to see the Great Red Spot in your telescope, it will be crossing the planet on Monday evening from dusk to 11 pm EDT, on Wednesday from 9:20 to 11:30 pm EDT (accompanied by the Great Red Spot), and on Saturday from dusk until 10 pm EDT.

Yellow-tinted Saturn is prominent in the southern evening sky, too - but it is less bright than Jupiter. The ringed planet will be visible from dusk until about 2 am local time. Saturn’s position in the sky is just to the upper left (or celestial east) of the stars that form the teapot-shaped constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer). To find Saturn, look about 3 fist diameters to the left (east) of Jupiter. The Milky Way is between them.

Dust off your telescope! Once the sky is dark, even a small telescope will show Saturn's rings and several of its brighter moons, especially Titan! Because Saturn’s axis of rotation is tipped about 27° from vertical (a bit more than Earth’s axis), we can see the top surface of its rings, and its moons can arrange themselves above, below, or to either side of the planet. During this week, Titan will migrate counter-clockwise around Saturn, moving from the upper left of Saturn tonight (Sunday) to below the planet next Sunday. (Remember that your telescope will flip the view around.)

Tiny, blue Neptune will rise at dusk this week, and then it will climb the eastern sky until it reaches its highest point, due south, at about 1:30 am local time. The planet is among the stars of Aquarius (the Water-Bearer). Recently, Neptune has been sitting just to the left (celestial east) of a medium-bright star named Phi (φ) Aquarii. Neptune is actually moving slowly toward that star and will “kiss” it on Thursday and Friday nights this week, an event that will help you locate dim Neptune.

Astronomers call such an event a conjunction. Being so close together, both the star and Neptune will appear together in the field of view of a telescope. But blue Neptune’s light has been travelling for 4 hours to reach your eye, while the warmly-tinted light of Phi Aquarii has been journeying for 202 years! After this weekend, the distance between the two objects will increase due to Neptune’s eastward orbital motion.

(Above: The path of blue Neptune past the medium-bright stat Phi Aquarii will produce a close conjunction on September 5 and 6. Each yellow dot represents 6 hours of Neptune’s orbital motion this week. They will make an interesting sight in backyard telescopes.)

Blue-green Uranus will be rising in the east just before 10 pm local time this week; and it will remain visible all night long. Uranus is sitting below (celestial south of) the stars of Aries (the Ram) and is just a palm’s width above the head of Cetus (the Whale). At magnitude 5.8, Uranus is actually bright enough to see in binoculars and small telescopes, under dark skies – and it really does look blue! You can use the three modest stars that form the top of the head of the whale (or sea-monster in some tales) to locate Uranus for months to come – that’s because that distant planet moves so slowly in its orbit. To help you find it, I posted a detailed star chart here.

(Above: The Ice Giant planets are visible in late evening, as shown here at 10:30 pm local time.)

Aurigids Meteor Shower

A minor meteor shower named the Aurigids is underway. It peaks today (Sunday) and ends next weekend. Look for several of these meteors per hour. They’ll be moving away from the northeastern horizon, where the constellation that gives them their name, Auriga (the Charioteer), rises in late evening.

The Northern Crown Rests in the West

Corona Borealis (the Northern Crown) can be spotted halfway up the western evening sky in early September. The constellation actually sits about midway along the imaginary line that joins the two bright stars Vega and Arcturus. The earlier autumn sunsets extend our opportunity to explore Corona Borealis. This incomplete circlet of medium-bright stars is roughly 7 degrees across (a generous palm’s width). It is both a constellation and an asterism (an informal star pattern). Corona Borealis’ brightest star Alphecca is a white, A-class star located 75 light-years from the sun. Alphecca’s placement in the constellation is reminiscent of a diamond in a ring. The star’s name derives from the Arabic expression for “broken”, referring to the incomplete ring.

(Above: The distinctive constellation of Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, sits in the western evening sky - midway between the two bright stars Vega (at top centre) and Arcturus. The sky is shown for 10 pmlocal time this week.)

While the Northern Crown is poor in deep sky objects, it contains several interesting jewels - double and variable stars. Alphecca itself is an eclipsing binary system that varies in brightness by a tiny amount every 17.36 days, similar to the behavior of the star Algol in Perseus (the Hero). Eruptive variable stars are named for R Coronae Borealis, which is located about three finger widths above (or 3.5 degrees to the celestial northeast of) Alphecca. R Corona Borealis is a hydrogen-deficient and carbon-rich supergiant star. From time to time, it’s usual visual magnitude of 5.8 drops to as little as magnitude 14, possibly due to the formation of opaque carbon dust that blocks visible light, but passes infrared wavelengths. Another star named S Coronae Borealis exhibits the same range of variability, but with a 360-day period. The Blaze Star (T Coronae Borealis) is a cataclysmic variable star, also called a recurrent nova-type. Normally shining between visual magnitude 10.2 and 9.9, on rare occasions it has brightened to magnitude 2 in a period of hours, caused by a nuclear chain reaction and the subsequent explosion.

(Above: The crown’s jewels include the variable stars R, S, and T Coronae Borealis)

August-September Stargazing Suggestions - Lyra

If you missed last week’s tour of the constellation of Lyra (the Harp), I posted it here. Over the next weeks, we’ll look at some other constellations, too.

Public Astro-Themed Events

Taking advantage of the moon and other bright objects in the sky this week, the RASC Toronto Centre astronomers will hold their free monthly public City Sky Star Party in Bayview Village Park (steps from the Bayview subway station), starting around 8 pm on the first clear weeknight this week (Tues to Thu only). You don’t need to be an RASC member, or own any equipment, to join them – looks are free! Check here for details, and check the banner on their website home page or Facebook page for the GO or NO-GO decision around 5 pm each day.

Every Monday evening, York University’s Allan I. Carswell Observatory runs an online star party - broadcasting views from four telescopes/cameras, answering viewer questions, and taking requests! Details are here. On Wednesday nights they offer free public viewing through their rooftop telescopes. If it’s cloudy, the astronomers give tours and presentations. Details are here.

If the skies are clear on Thursday evening, September 5, local astronomers will set up their telescopes in Old Thornhill Village. This free event starts at 8 pm and everyone is welcome to come out for a look at the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn, and a variety of deep-sky treasures. The viewing location is Thornhill's very own “dark-sky oasis,” the Pomona Meadow - situated north of the cemetery on Charles Lane, and east of the Ukrainian Catholic Church of St. Volodymyr. Park for free at the church and just follow the paved path. The rain or cloud date is Thursday, October 3 at 7:00 pm. Dress warmly, and we’ll see you there!

Eastern GTA sky watchers are invited to join the RASC Toronto Centre and Durham Skies for solar observing and stargazing at the edge of Lake Ontario in Millennium Square in Pickering on Friday evening, September 6, from 6 pm to 11 pm. Details are here. Before heading out, check the RASCTC home page for a Go/No-Go call in case it's too cloudy to observe. The rain date is Saturday. That same evening, RASC and Durham Skies will be donating a telescope to the Pickering Public Library in a public ceremony. In case of rain or bad weather, the ceremony will be moved to the Pickering Library Auditorium (2nd floor) at 1 The Esplanade.

If it’s sunny on Saturday morning, September 7 from 10 am to noon, astronomers from the RASC Toronto Centre will be setting up outside the main doors of the Ontario Science Centre for Solar Observing. Come and see the Sun in detail through special equipment designed to view it safely. This is a free event (details here), but parking and admission fees inside the Science Centre will still apply. Check the RASC Toronto Centre website or their Facebook page for the Go or No-Go notification.

Please note: Due to some filming permits at DDO, some of our events in September have been cancelled. Here’s the updated information…

The next RASC-hosted Night at the David Dunlap Observatory will be on Saturday, September 21. There will be sky tours in the Skylab planetarium room, space crafts, a tour of the giant 74” telescope, and viewing through the 74” and lawn telescopes (weather permitting). The doors will open at 8:30 pm for a 9 pm start. Attendance is by tickets only, available here. If you are a RASC Toronto Centre member and wish to help us at DDO in the future, please fill out the volunteer form here. And to join RASC Toronto Centre, visit this page.

This Fall and Winter, spend a Sunday afternoon in the other dome at the David Dunlap Observatory! On Sunday afternoon, October 20, from noon to 4 pm, join me in my Starlab Digital Planetarium for an interactive journey through the Universe. We’ll tour the night sky and see close-up views of galaxies, nebulas, and star clusters, view our Solar System's planets and alien exo-planets, land on the moon, Mars - and the Sun, travel home to Earth from the edge of the Universe, hear indigenous starlore, and watch immersive fulldome movies! Ask me your burning questions, and see the answers in a planetarium setting - or sit back and soak it all in. Sessions run continuously between noon and 4 pm. Ticket-holders may arrive any time during the program. The program is suitable for ages 3 and older, and the Starlab planetarium is wheelchair accessible. For tickets, please use this link.

Keep looking up, and enjoy the sky when you do. I love questions and requests - so, send me some!

#astronomy #space #planets #stars #Corona Borealis #Auriguds Meteor Shower #First Quarter moon #Vega #Jupiter #Great Red Spot #saturation #Phi Aquarii #Neptune conjunction

3 notes · View notes

uniquetragedyperfection · 6 years

Text

George Watson Submitted 2007-06-13 01: 35: 08 South african hoodia Gordonii is mostly a well known diet pill that has attained a lot of publicity during the last couple of years wedding dresses for girls.

Background Safety On the Hoodia Gordonii Appetite Suppressant achievement failAbout this kind of capture GATHERED BY Firm: Internet Store The Internet Store discovers and captures internet pages through various web crawls dresses for wedding. At any given time a couple of distinct crawls are running, a lot of for months, as well as some every day or perhaps longer. See the web organize through the Wayback Machine. Collection: Wide Spider started September 2012 World wide web wide spider with original seedlist and crawler setup from September 2012. TIMESTAMPS Number Intervals Read: 102???? Stats Total Articles: 377313 Total Freelance writers: 72748 Total Downloads: 2308061 Newest MemberDibyendu Chandar ??Category Rss Feed -- http://www.ehealtharticle.com/rss.php?rss=55 By simply: George Watson Submitted 2007-06-13 01: 35: 08 South african hoodia Gordonii is mostly a well known diet pill that has attained a lot of publicity during the last couple of years wedding dresses for girls. This is caused by it is discovery instead of creation within a laboratory, through the fact that numerous movie stars and also other celebrities experience used it to quickly alter their fat for new videos or for private reasons. South african hoodia Gordonii is usually different than many fat burners or perhaps weight loss pills. What sets South african hoodia apart from different weight loss alternatives is that is normally is in your home metabolism enhancer that accelerates heart rate to cause you to more dynamic and use-up more calories. Hoodia will not make your heartbeat fast just like many goods that contain Ephedra will. South african hoodia Gordonii is usually appealing to persons trying to lose weight as it can be bought while not prescription and it does not demand a major alter in your standard of living. You can even now eat what gets you off and get rid of excess as much as some weight per week. Just how Appetite Suppressants Do the job By being a great appetite suppressant, South african hoodia Gordonii has the capacity to produce a a sense of fullness, that is certainly, it makes you not always be hungry. South african hoodia Gordonii certainly is the only one of 13 South african hoodia plant variety that demonstrates this premises for individuals. The modern world just lately discovered the Hoodia Gordonii plant which will grows natively in several ares areas of The southern area of Africa. The Hoodia Gordonii plant yet , only swells in Maltahohe, namibia. The indoor plants have long been enjoyed by the local tribe for the San Men of The southern area of Africa. This kind of plant was considered by simply nutritionists, gym people, movie stars, and in some cases Oprah to be a miracle weed, and incorporates a wide range of uses from recovering indigestion and some types of stomach problems, to curing meagre infections. Record These indoor plants have been employed by these local people for over twenty five 1, 000 years. The storyline goes that your stems for the plant definitely helped these people survive while not hunger with long hours or perhaps days because they went on hunting expeditions. They will have prolonged taken this kind of plant to fight resistant to the craving for food and water, and it has been effective your children plus size wedding dresses. The local people of South Africa as well claim that this kind of plant as well gives persons a surge of vitality, plus the general discomfort of sense good. Just how Hoodia Gordonii Stops Craving Cravings The Hoodia Gordonii, when used in tender form or perhaps in supplement form as it is normaly used worldwide, contains proven to be an efficient aid in pure weight loss. The active desire for food suppressing molecule named P57 acts for the brain named the hypothalamus, which is the minds hunger centre. P57 strategies the hypothalamus into convinced that a person has previously eaten, and so feelings of hunger or perhaps thirst appear less frequently , so persons tend to drink and eat less. It truly is plain and simple that whenever you consume less meals than you lose, you will reduction weight. Make sure to drink a lot of water because you may even even more dehydrated than normal seeing that Hoodia is going to banish every thoughts of eating or perhaps drinking. Homework The South african hoodia Gordonii shrub has been learned for its real estate for more than three decades. Over the last five years, the active ingredient in Hoodia Gordonii extract referred to as P57 was isolated and through a handle Pfizer, it is often commercialized in to food supplements in liquid, tablet, patch, and chewing gum shape. The SANL (South Africa Natural Library) was the initially agency to analyze and eventually make application for a patent about Hoodia Gordonii, in 1977. The SANL gave every rights to commercialize South african hoodia to a United kingdom company brands Phytopharm. Soon after that same year, Phytopharm conducted a lot of pre-clinical studies Ihairfashionlalamiracom_yangrj which confirmed positive results. The successful assessment resulted in their very own first anti-obesity formula that has been tested in real trials on people. The effects showed that 70% of patients come to their weight loss plans in the demo period. Phytopharm before long worked with Phizer to commercialize their fresh formula towards the United States and worldwide. It happened in 1999, A new homework facility and plantation was started in To the south South Africa to conduct constant testing and clinical homework to understand even more about the appetite controlling compounds inside Hoodia Gordonii. By far the most important problem just for researchers for Pfizer and Phytopharm was going to isolate the compound in Hoodia Gordonii, to create a good appetite suppressant item. However a large number of independent herbalists say that South african hoodia Gordonii can be safest when ever taken in their pure shape, and not known side effects can happen from currently taking just the remote P57 mixture. Side Effects And Safely The consequence of commercial products created from possibly the remote compound or perhaps from the true Hoodia Gordonii plant components commonly relate with those skilled by the basic San tribesmen. So far, not any side effects are generally reported right from taking South african hoodia Gordonii just like nausea, sweat, weakness, and depression. formal dresses for women,https://www.lalamira.com/ short wedding dresses dresses for wedding black wedding dresses

1 note · View note

thisdaynews · 5 years

Text

Norwich City 3-2 Manchester City: Canaries end champions' unbeaten run

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/norwich-city-3-2-manchester-city-canaries-end-champions-unbeaten-run/

Norwich City 3-2 Manchester City: Canaries end champions' unbeaten run

Norwich striker Teemu Pukki has scored six times and has two assists in his five Premier League games

Norwich City produced a magnificent all-round display to inflict Manchester City’s first Premier League defeat since January at an ecstatic Carrow Road.

The Canaries were missing eight players but made light of those injuries and took full advantage of a performance from the reigning champions that was careless in the extreme and characterised by chaotic defending.

Norwich were 2-0 ahead within 30 minutes after Kenny McLean rose unmarked to meet Emiliano Buendia’s corner and then Todd Cantwell finished a flowing move involving Marco Stiepermann and Teemu Pukki.

Sergio Aguero’s header just before the break hinted at a Manchester City comeback but a misunderstanding between John Stones and Nicolas Otamendi saw Buendia rob the Argentina centre-back and set up Pukki to score.

Rodri scored his first goal for Manchester City with two minutes left before referee Kevin Friend’s final whistle was the cue for wild celebrations for the home side.

The rare defeat, meanwhile, leaves Pep Guardiola’s side five points behind Liverpool.

Manchester City upset typical of Canaries’ bold approach

Reaction to Norwich’s stunning win over Man City

Lawro v MOTDx stars Chelcee Grimes, Craig Mitch and Reece Parkinson

Man City flounder in Laporte’s absence

It was inevitable City would miss the class and composure of Aymeric Laporte – set to be out for six months with a knee injury – but this display suggests the gap he leaves is even bigger than Manchester City may have feared.

Guardiola has lost quality and influence with Laporte’s injury, as well as Vincent Kompany’s departure, and his nightmare scenario unfolded at Carrow Road.

Stones and Otamendi had a harrowing time and City’s manager will know he must now rely on the pair at least until January.

Guardiola himself should not escape criticism for the defeat though after he left Kevin de Bruyne out of his starting team then delayed his arrival until after Norwich had re-established their two-goal lead.

They were mystifying decisions and a heavy price was paid.

Media playback is not supported on this device

Norwich are a really good team – Guardiola

Guardiola will also be concerned by the manner of Norwich’s goals, which ranged from poor marking at set pieces – a recurring theme – to catastrophic attempts to play out from the back.

Stones and Otamendi were nervous throughout and their lack of understanding reflected the fact they had only played together at centre-back four times in the last 20 months.

It would be ludicrous to start writing off the title hopes of a team so rich in quality but that five-point gap to Liverpool looks large when you consider Jurgen Klopp’s team only lost once in the league last season, to City, and have won their opening five games this term.

Norwich defy the odds

Norwich City’s resources were so thin that manager Farke made up the numbers by naming two goalkeepers on the bench as eight players were removed from his squad by injury.

He said he could not “park the bus” because he did not have enough defenders and instead the German relied on his customary intense approach – and what an occasion it gave the Canaries fans inside a bouncing Carrow Road.

Norwich were fiercely disciplined in defence but also ambitious and confident when they had the ball, not afraid to play out from the back.

They had 11 high-class performers but special mention should go to Ibrahim Amadou at the back and the creative brilliance of Buendia, who pressed City into submission as he proved with the third goal.

Media playback is not supported on this device

It’s a special day to beat Man City – Farke

At the head of it all was Pukki, on the mark once more with a poacher’s strike but also unselfish when he passed across the face of goal for Cantwell.

When City’s inevitable charge came, Norwich were almost out on their feet but hurled their bodies around the penalty area to block shots while goalkeeper Tim Krul performed heroics when called upon.

This was a complete performance that will send self-belief surging through Farke’s side and indeed the supporters who kept up relentless noise throughout an occasion they will remember for a very long time.

Man of the match – Ibrahim Amadou (Norwich City)

Pressed into service in central defence and making his first start in the Premier League, 26-year-old midfielder Amadou helped shackle City’s world-class attackers with a composed display

‘A special day for us’ – what they said

Norwich City manager Daniel Farke, speaking to BBC Sport:“Of course it is a special day for us and for the club, against one of the best teams in the world and when we have so many injuries.

“We had to be special in our plan for City because they are the best team in the world but we had setbacks too with our injuries. We deserve the win, we were exceptional.

“[Ibrahim] Amadou was beautiful today, playing in an unusual position, and a debut for Alex Tettey and Sam Byram too. I can’t praise the lads enough. We had so many things to overcome.

“Teemu [Pukki] was brilliant, not only because of his goals but for his work rate too. Teemu always thinks about the team first, which is why he deserves all of the praise.”

Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola on BBC Sport:“Congrats to Norwich. The first goal was from a set-piece and the second on the counter, so credit to them. It is what it is. We have to learn from this and carry on.

“Our passing was not bad. We created chances but we could not score them. They are a really good team with good players with quality, we saw that in the Championship last year. They were clinical today.

“We did not have the urgency in the final third we normally have. In football you can’t always avoid mistakes. I don’t know how many shots we had or how many they had, but football is about goals and about what you do in the boxes.”

Man City’s rare slip-up – the stats

Norwich registered only their second win in their last 15 Premier League meetings with the reigning champions (W2 D1 L12) – their other win was also against Man City in May 2013.

Manchester City suffered a Premier League defeat against a newly-promoted opponent for the first time since March 2015 against Burnley – they had been unbeaten in 25 such matches before today, including all 18 under Pep Guardiola.

Norwich’s Teemu Pukki has been involved in eight goals (six goals, two assists) in his first five Premier League appearances – only Sergio Aguero has been involved in more goals in a player’s first five appearances in the competition’s history (nine).

Man City striker Aguero became the third player to score in a team’s first five Premier League matches of a season, after José Antonio Reyes for Arsenal in 2004-05 and Wayne Rooney for Manchester United in 2011-12.

Manchester City conceded three goals in a league match against a newly-promoted team for the first time since August 2013, when they lost 3-2 away at Cardiff City.

Norwich’s Emiliano Buendía is the first midfielder to assist as many as four goals in his first five Premier League appearances since Eden Hazard in 2012.

Manchester City conceded twice in the opening half-hour of a Premier League game for only the second time under Pep Guardiola, also doing so in December 2016 against Leicester City, when they conceded three times.

Norwich striker Pukki is the first player to score in his first three home Premier League appearances since Alexandre Lacazette in 2017, and the first Finnish player to do so since Jonatan Johansson in 2000.

What’s next?

Man City open their Champions League campaign away to Shakhtar Donetsk on Wednesday, 18 September at 20:00 BST, before facing Watford at home in the Premier League on Saturday, 21 Septembr at 15:00.

Norwich are back in action at the same time next Saturday when they travel to Turf Moor to play Burnley.

#Champions #unbeaten

0 notes

toothextract · 6 years

Text

Exploring Google’s New Carousel Featured Snippet

Posted by TheMozTeam

Google let it be known earlier this year that snippets were a-changin’. And true to their word, we’ve seen them make two major updates to the feature — all in an attempt to answer more of your questions.

We first took you on a deep dive of double featured snippets, and now we’re taking you for a ride on the carousel snippet. We’ll explore how it behaves in the wild and which of its snippets you can win.

For your safety, please remain seated and keep your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the vehicle at all times!

What a carousel snippet is an how it works

This particular snippet holds the answers to many different questions and, as the name suggests, employs carousel-like behaviour in order to surface them all.

When you click one of the “IQ-bubbles” that run along the bottom of the snippet, JavaScript takes over and replaces the initial “parent” snippet with one that answers a brand new query. This query is a combination of your original search term and the text of the IQ-bubble.

So, if you searched [savings account rates] and clicked the “capital one” IQ-bubble, you’d be looking at a snippet for “savings account rates capital one.” That said, 72.06 percent of the time, natural language processing will step in here and produce something more sensible, like “capital one savings account rates.”

On the new snippet, the IQ-bubbles sit at the top, making room for the “Search for” link at the bottom. The link is the bubble snippet’s query and, when clicked, becomes the search query of a whole new SERP — a bit of fun borrowed from the “People also ask” box.

You can blame the ludicrous “IQ-bubble” name on Google — it’s the class tag they gave on HTML SERP. We have heard them referred to as “refinement” bubbles or “related search” bubbles, but we don’t like either because we’ve seen them do both refine and relate. IQ-bubble it is.

There are now 6 times the number of snippets on a SERP

Back in April, we sifted through every SERP in STAT to see just how large the initial carousel rollout was. Turns out, it made a decent-sized first impression.

Appearing only in America, we discovered 40,977 desktop and mobile SERPs with carousel snippets, which makes up a hair over 9 percent of the US-en market. When we peeked again at the beginning of August, carousel snippets had grown by half but still had yet to reach non-US markets.

Since one IQ-bubble equals one snippet, we deemed it essential to count every single bubble we saw. All told, there were a dizzying 224,508 IQ-bubbles on our SERPs. This means that 41,000 keywords managed to produce over 220,000 extra featured snippets. We’ll give you a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor.

The lowest and most common number of bubbles we saw on a carousel snippet was three, and the highest was 10. The average number of bubbles per carousel snippet was 5.48 — an IQ of five if you round to the nearest whole bubble (they’re not that smart).

Depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty kind of person, this either makes for a lot of opportunity or a lot of competition, right at the top of the SERP.

Most bubble-snippet URLs are nowhere else on the SERP

When we’ve looked at “normal” snippets in the past, we’ve always been able to find the organic results that they’ve been sourced from. This wasn’t the case with carousel snippets — we could only find 10.76 percent of IQ-bubble URLs on the 100-result SERP. This left 89.24 percent unaccounted for, which is a metric heck-tonne of new results to contend with.

Concerned about the potential competitor implications of this, we decided to take a gander at ownership at the domain level.

Turns out things weren’t so bad. 63.05 percent of bubble snippets had come from sites that were already competing on the SERP — Google was just serving more varied content from them. It does mean, though, that there was a brand new competitor jumping onto the SERP 36.95 percent of the time. Which isn’t great.

Just remember: these new pages or competitors aren’t there to answer the original search query. Sometimes you’ll be able to expand your content in order to tackle those new topics and snag a bubble snippet, and sometimes they’ll be beyond your reach.

So, when IQ-bubble snippets do bother to source from the same SERP, what ranks do they prefer? Here we saw another big departure from what we’re used to.

Normally, 97.88 percent of snippets source from the first page, and 29.90 percent typically pull from rank three alone. With bubble snippets, only 36.58 percent of their URLs came from the top 10 ranks. And while the most popular rank position that bubble snippets pulled from was on the first page (also rank three), just under five percent of them did this.

We could apply the always helpful “just rank higher” rule here, but there appears to be plenty of exceptions to it. A top 10 spot just isn’t as essential to landing a bubble snippet as it is for a regular snippet.

We think this is due to relevancy: Because bubble snippet queries only relate to the original search term — they’re not attempting to answer it directly — it makes sense that their organic URLs wouldn’t rank particularly high on the SERP.

Multi-answer ownership is possible

Next we asked ourselves, can you own more than one answer on a carousel snippet? And the answer was a resounding: you most definitely can.

First we discovered that you can own both the parent snippet and a bubble snippet. We saw this occur on 16.71 percent of our carousel snippets.

Then we found that owning multiple bubbles is also a thing that can happen. Just over half (57.37 percent) of our carousel snippets had two or more IQ-bubbles that sourced from the same domain. And as many as 2.62 percent had a domain that owned every bubble present — and most of those were 10-bubble snippets!

Folks, it’s even possible for a single URL to own more than one IQ-bubble snippet, and it’s less rare than we’d have thought — 4.74 percent of bubble snippets in a carousel share a URL with a neighboring bubble.

This begs the same obvious question that finding two snippets on the SERP did: Is your content ready to pull multi-snippet duty?

“Search for” links don’t tend to surface the same snippet on the new SERP

Since bubble snippets are technically providing answers to questions different from the original search term, we looked into what shows up when the bubble query is the keyword being searched.

Specifically, we wanted to see if, when we click the “Search for” link in a bubble snippet, the subsequent SERP 1) had a featured snippet and 2) had a featured snippet that matched the bubble snippet from whence it came.

To do this, we re-tracked our 40,977 SERPs and then tracked their 224,508 bubble “Search for” terms to ensure everything was happening at the same time.

The answers to our two pressing questions were thus:

Strange, but true, even though the bubble query was snippet-worthy on the first, related SERP, it wasn’t always snippet-worthy on its own SERP. 18.72 percent of “Search for” links didn’t produce a featured snippet on the new SERP.

Stranger still, 78.11 percent of the time, the bubble snippet and its snippet on the subsequent SERP weren’t a match — Google surfaced two different answers for the same question. In fact, the bubble URL only showed up in the top 20 results on the new SERP 31.68 percent of the time.

If we’re being honest, we’re not exactly sure what to make of all this. If you own the bubble snippet but not the snippet on the subsequent SERP, you’re clearly on Google’s radar for that keyword — but does that mean you’re next in line for full snippet status?

And if the roles are reversed, you own the snippet for the keyword outright but not when it’s in a bubble, is your snippet in jeopardy? Let us know what you think!

Paragraph and list formatting reign supreme (still!)

Last, and somewhat least, we took a look at the shape all these snippets were turning up in.

When it comes to the parent snippet, Heavens to Betsy if we weren’t surprised. For the first time ever, we saw an almost even split between paragraph and list formatting. Bubble snippets, on the other hand, went on to match the trend we’re used to seeing in regular ol’ snippets:

We also discovered that bubble snippets aren’t beholden to one type of formatting even in their carousel. 32.21 percent of our carousel snippets did return bubbles with one format, but 59.71 percent had two and 8.09 percent had all three. This tells us that it’s best to pick the most natural format for your content.

Get cracking with carousel snippet tracking

If you can’t wait to get your mittens on carousel snippets, we track them in STAT, so you’ll know every keyword they appear for and have every URL housed within.

If you’d like to learn more about SERP feature tracking and strategizing, say hello and request a demo!

This article was originally published on the STAT blog on September 13, 2018.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

from https://dentistry01.wordpress.com/2019/02/06/exploring-googles-new-carousel-featured-snippet/

0 notes

billehrman · 4 years

Text

Invest for an Economic and Profit Recovery

Market corrections force us to test our core beliefs. We still see an overly accommodative Fed providing excess liquidity; a government providing added stimulus eventually; vaccines, better therapeutics, and rapid response tests on the horizon; and improving growth overseas led by China. While there has not been a change in our overall optimistic view for the financial markets, we have made significant changes in our portfolio composition, adding great companies with more economic sensitivity looking for better days ahead in 2021 and 2022. Each of these companies navigated the pandemic successfully and are coming out with enhanced competitive positions, leaner cost structures, and a stronger balance sheet that has increased free cash flow while still investing for the future.

We funded these purchases with partial sales of our new normal winners as they rose meteorically in August, fueled by tremendous option buying. Was it Softbank? While we sold approximately 35% of the shares in many of these stocks, we maintained our total dollar exposure as we still see many years of fundamental outperformance ahead. Just as Chuck Robbins, former head of Cisco for 30 years, said, “we are at the beginning of a major new technology cycle that will last at least a decade.” If you don’t continue to stay at the cutting edge, your company will fall behind and maybe die. This has never been more evident than now during the pandemic, where we see clear-cut winners and losers differentiated by their online capability. This is the reason why we will maintain significant exposure in this area.

Notwithstanding, we see the market shifting over the next year to companies that have substantial operating leverage ahead as the economic recovery accelerates due to rapid response coronavirus testing. That’s the real near-term game changer as it will permit faster and safer opening of the global economy over the next year into 2022 when we expect vaccines to be available for all. We are confident that these companies will report surprisingly strong, above consensus, earnings, and cash flow in 2021 and 2022. Each one of these investments is selling at a considerable discount to the market and well beneath intrinsic value-creating 30+% upside over the next year plus their 2 to 4% dividends. Not bad!

The two issues moving to the forefront are both tied to Washington: a stimulus bill and the upcoming Presidential elections. How often do we say that our politicians need to focus on the needs of the people rather than themselves? We are growing less confident that a follow-up stimulus bill can be passed by months end before monies supplied by Trump’s emergency orders run out. What are they thinking? Are they willing to hurt people to influence an election? It appears so, which is abhorrent. Throw them all out. Our country needs to move back to the center, representing the majority, rather than the fringes that dominate politics. We are waiting to hear Biden respond to how his economic plan will promote growth, employment, investment, research, and higher standards of living. We continue to focus on law and order too. Regardless of who wins in November, we expect demand focused stimulus plans next year, including a significant infrastructure program with incentives for businesses to bring back manufacturing to America. We seriously doubt that the Dems would raise taxes until the economy is on the firm footing, which won’t be until 2022 at the earliest after we all can be vaccinated.

The economy bottomed in the late spring, picked up steam in July, slowed down mid-July for a few weeks as cases/death rose but then re-accelerated in August as the number of cases/deaths peaked. Goldman recently boosted its third-quarter GNP growth forecast to 35%. Yes, 35%! Goldman also raised its fourth-quarter and 2021 economic forecasts. The unemployment rate is now expected to be under 8.5% by year-end, whereas earlier forecasts were slightly above 10%. As we mentioned last week, all the purchasing managers indices improved meaningfully in August, especially new orders. The most important stat of this week supporting our view that better days are ahead was the monthly sales and inventory statistics for July. Sales rose 4.5% from June while inventories continued to decline as production has not increased sufficiently to even meet current demand. The I/S ratio is at a multi-year low, which supports our view that an economic recovery will broaden out supported by rising production, hence our move to economically sensitive manufacturing companies. We are also watching rail car loading, which is improving week to week.

The winners will be the strong, well-financed global manufacturing companies who will gain market share at the expense of the smaller, medium, size companies who do not have the financial resources to spend enough on tech needed to compete today. At the same time, we will maintain significant exposure to the new norm tech winners who are the web/internet dominators as their businesses are still in the early innings.

The key to our optimistic view that the economy will get sequentially stronger, both here and abroad, through 2021 into 2022 is rapid response antigen tests with results in less than 10 minutes. It will permit businesses to open sooner with some sense of safety. A great example of what is to come is JP Morgan asking its employees to return to their trading desks yesterday. Abbott and Roche are building production rapidly and will have billions of tests available early in 2021. Dr. Fauci is also hopeful that there will be an easy at-home rapid response test, like the pregnancy test, found by the end of the year with ample availability by mid-2021.

While we do expect that at least three vaccines will successfully conclude Phase 3 testing and be available on a limited basis by year-end, we still expect the best, most effective vaccines, to conclude testing and be available in sufficient quantity by the second half of 2021. We have not altered our view that the economy will not have an all-clear until mid- 2022 at the earliest. That means that the Fed will stay all in providing vast amounts of excess liquidity at least for the next several years, possibly five years if you believe what they have said.

We want to add that green shoots are appearing abroad too, besides China, who is well along in its post-pandemic recovery. ECB President Christine Lagarde sounded optimistic about the eurozone recovery Thursday following a meeting of the ECB governing council. As expected, she, like Powell, cautioned about further outbreaks of the coronavirus in the fall. The ECB revised upwards its forecast of Eurozone economic activity and inflation for 2021 and 2022.

Investment Conclusion

We continue to shift the emphasis of our portfolios to benefit from a global economic recovery supported by vast amounts of excess liquidity created by all monetary bodies; stimulus programs both here and abroad to help bridge to the other side; and the roll-out of rapid response antigen tests which will permit businesses to accelerate opening in 2021 safely. Finally, we expect vaccines to be found and be distributed globally by the end of next year into 2022. We, too, are concerned about large outbreaks of the virus in the fall, which may dampen growth near term, but the trend of improving sequential growth over the next two years is our base case. Also, we expect production to outstrip demand as inventories are restored to normal levels. Finally, we expect surprisingly strong operating margins, profits, and cash flow as management keeps a lid on costs and capital spending.

The bottom line is that we find the market undervalued today with new leaders emerging. We will maintain exposure to the new normal winners at the core of our portfolio as we see only better days ahead for them in this new working at home environment. We would use corrections as opportunities to add as we have not altered our long-term positive view. We like industrial commodities and gold too. On the other hand, we continue to recommend the sale of all bonds.

We will listen intently to the Presidential debates before coming to a decision. We need economic growth in order to satisfy all the financial/social obligations that we see ahead. We also need law and order offering everyone the opportunity to protest peacefully but not riot. Respect!

Our investment webinar will be held on Monday, September 14th, at 8:30, am EST. You can join by entering https://zoom.us/j/9179217852 in your browser of dialing +646 558 8656 and entering the password 9179217852.

Review all the facts; pause, reflect, and consider mindset shifts; look at asset mix with risk controls; turn off your business news networks; do independent research and

Invest Accordingly!

Bill Ehrman

Paix et Prospérité LLC

917-951-4139

0 notes

simpleseo · 5 years

Text

Exploring Googleҳ New Carousel Featured Snippet

Posted by TheMozTeam

For your safety, please remain seated and keep your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the vehicle at all times!

What a carousel snippet is an how it works

This particular snippet holds the answers to many different questions and, as the name suggests, employs carousel-like behaviour in order to surface them all.

There are now 6 times the number of snippets on a SERP

Back in April, we sifted through every SERP in STAT to see just how large the initial carousel rollout was. Turns out, it made a decent-sized first impression.

Depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty kind of person, this either makes for a lot of opportunity or a lot of competition, right at the top of the SERP.

Most bubble-snippet URLs are nowhere else on the SERP

Concerned about the potential competitor implications of this, we decided to take a gander at ownership at the domain level.

So, when IQ-bubble snippets do bother to source from the same SERP, what ranks do they prefer? Here we saw another big departure from what we’re used to.

Multi-answer ownership is possible

Next we asked ourselves, can you own more than one answer on a carousel snippet? And the answer was a resounding: you most definitely can.

First we discovered that you can own both the parent snippet and a bubble snippet. We saw this occur on 16.71 percent of our carousel snippets.

This begs the same obvious question that finding two snippets on the SERP did: Is your content ready to pull multi-snippet duty?

“Search for” links don’t tend to surface the same snippet on the new SERP

Since bubble snippets are technically providing answers to questions different from the original search term, we looked into what shows up when the bubble query is the keyword being searched.

To do this, we re-tracked our 40,977 SERPs and then tracked their 224,508 bubble “Search for” terms to ensure everything was happening at the same time.

The answers to our two pressing questions were thus:

And if the roles are reversed, you own the snippet for the keyword outright but not when it’s in a bubble, is your snippet in jeopardy? Let us know what you think!

Paragraph and list formatting reign supreme (still!)

Last, and somewhat least, we took a look at the shape all these snippets were turning up in.

Get cracking with carousel snippet tracking

If you can’t wait to get your mittens on carousel snippets, we track them in STAT, so you’ll know every keyword they appear for and have every URL housed within.

If you’d like to learn more about SERP feature tracking and strategizing, say hello and request a demo!

This article was originally published on the STAT blog on September 13, 2018.

https://simpleseo.biz/exploring-googles-new-carousel-featured-snippet/

0 notes

paulpowder2-blog · 5 years

Text

hCGChica’s hCG Diet Journal – Round 5 – Final round

Read/Watch my own hCG Diet Journey As It Unfolded:

September 23, 2012

I considered loading for 3 days since I’m a “smaller” person now, but after 2 days I felt I loaded extremely well- I consumed 4000 calories and 300 grams of fat EACH loading day. I think that’s sufficient. My stomach and intestines seemed to let me know that anyway, so I called it good.

My net loading gain for Round 5 of HCG Injections was a 1.6lb gain. I gained 2.2 lbs after the first loading day, and lost .6lbs the following day. Here are my stats for the 2 days (compiled into 1 list) of what I ate and their nutritional values. The total breakdown for both days combined was 7938 calories over the course of the two days, 600 grams of fat, 452 grams protein, 168 grams carbs.

HCG DOSAGE FOR THIS ROUND

I am injecting 125iu’s this round and this dose seems to work best for me in general these days. I feel very not hungry on 125ius.

NO EXERCISE (FOR ME) WHILE ON THE HCG DIET AND WHY

I have seen a lot of people manage to exercise while on the weight loss protocol with no problems or side-effects. If you are an average healthy person, just overweight (ie. You don’t have any obvious autoimmune, thyroid or other chronic illness problems) when you embark on the protocol, and you have already been pursuing an exercise protocol prior to starting the protocol, you very likely may be able to continue that exercise while on this diet plan.

I don’t fit into that “average healthy person” category- even though I’m actually very healthy- I’m not average. I have a couple of autoimmune conditions- hashimoto’s for one (where your body attacks your thyroid) and while I have gotten the point where most of my conditions are non-existent in that they don’t give me symptoms, I still seem to find that I simply cannot tolerate exercise while on the diet- it just appears to be too much for my delicate system- to lose so much fat AND exercise at the same time appears to be too much “stress” for my body to handle.

When I personally try to exercise while on the diet plan, I find myself having enormous uncontrollable cravings to eat, the diet feels mentally and emotionally very difficult, and I’m extremely exhausted. All things I simply can’t handle on the protocol if I want to be successful on it! So I forego exercise while on Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, even though I’m an avid Crossfitter (check out this video to see what Crossfit is all about- it’s THE best training program I’ve ever seen and my own results prove it!) in normal day to day life. Taking a simple 3 or 6 week break is worth it to me to lose several pounds of fat (Round 5 I lost 10 lbs of fat!) that I can’t otherwise lose in regular life.

My pre-hcg diet:- 7-10 days before starting the hCG Diet protocol

I’ve done this before and it’s worked well for me to break sugar cravings and to get into Ketosis right away. I take about 7-10 days before loading for the diet, and I eat very low carb, high fat diet. No fruit, no grain, no starchy veggies, no sugars at all. I keep the fats very high- this creates a feeling of satiety and makes the switch over from a diet higher in sugars and carbs much easier, for me at least.

I am very sensitive to sugar and before Round 5, I found myself feeling a little out of control with my eating habits for about a week while we were moving and things in life were a bit stressful. Doing the pre-hcg “diet” cuts the sugar/carb cravings almost immediately and really gets my body and my mind in the right place for starting the weight loss protocol in the best possible way.

September 24, 2012

2 lb loss for my first vlcd day. That puts me at 132.2 this day. Body fat monitor showed a drop in 1 lb of fat. There is always some water weight loss at the beginning of any diet- you can’t expect all fat loss right from the beginning, so I’m ecstatic for the 1 lb fat loss.

I think I fat loaded well enough because I haven’t experienced almost any hunger on the first vlcd day of the diet which is great because even though on the majority of the weight loss protocol one should experience almost no hunger if they are on the right dose of the hormone, the first few days of being on the very low calorie portion of the diet DOES often include feeling some hunger that is a little hard to deal with as your body adjusts to the new diet and the hormone circulating in your system.

While I wasn’t hungry this first day, once I again I did experience a small bout of low blood sugar in the later part of the afternoon- for me that’s anything under 80 on a blood glucose meter, and I was at 75 when I tested it about 5:30pm. This often occurs for me during the first few vlcd’s because I don’t eat the fruits on p2 and I never include the grissini/melba, which makes the diet extremely low carb- thus getting low blood sugar is more likely at the beginning. The low blood sugar always does go away on it’s own however after the first few days, despite the fact that I continue to not eat the fruits and grissini/melba. If you decide to try this please do be careful- if you are prone to low blood sugar I would full research trying this first as I’m not sure just anyone could do this and feel well.

To fix my low blood sugar I ate a chopped cucumber salad and yogurt with salt and that brought my blood sugar up to a normal level for me which is about 90 on a blood glucose meter. Nice that I didn’t have to eat a spoonful of sugar huh!

As usual, I was ketosis right away after the first vlcd day- I am always able to achieve this when I eat low carb for about 7-10 days prior to starting Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, then load clean aka low carb. I like the idea of getting the most accomplished as possible when I’m on HCG Injections round and I feel by clearing excess carbs out of my system in advance, my body is able to get into fat burning mode more quickly since there are very few carbs to burn first.

September 26, 2012

XNJKHGQWBQHU – A little more about HCGChica- HCG TAG on YouTube

My real name?

My name is Rayzel Lam here on YouTube and the web

RX or Homeopathic HCG?

I have always done prescription hCG and in fact, I’ve used a total of I think 6 different brands of RX hCG now as well- I feel in general like they all worked equally well. The only difference I noticed was that depending on the brand, I might need a slightly higher or lower dose of the hormone to get that “no hunger” effect.

hCG Injection or sublingual HCG?

I have always done injections- the reason is 2 fold- one, I’m cheap and injections are cheaper because you only need the half amount of the hormone as for sublingual, and two, and most importantly, hCG injections ensure 100% delivery of the right amount of hormone to the right place (your fat, not your stomach and gastric juices!) I generally don’t like to take chances with my body when there’s a way to be sure I get the best result.

The first two rounds of HCG Injections I injected the hormone into my stomach, but about the time of Round 3 I found it actually causing me some paint to try to inject in my stomach which causes me to think I either didn’t have enough fat there anymore or possibly I had built up some scar tissue or had some excess skin- whatever the case, starting with Round 3 of the diet I began injecting in other places- outer and inner thigh, buttocks, arm- pretty much wherever I could find a nice meaty patch of fat!

What do I do for a living?

For the most part, I’m a mom. I have a 3 year old son, and a husband I’ve been married to for 12 years and I take my role of caring for my family pretty seriously. I treasure that I can raise my son the majority of the time. That said, I also work part-time on this website and diet “things”- responding to emails and writing quality helpful content on my website and recording YouTube videos to help you guys get the best out of your weight loss journey. It’s changed my life enough that I find a lot of joy in helping you guys get similar results.

What was your most interesting job?

I used to teach singing and rhythm classes to children at park and recreation centers in my area. The age ranged from 18 months to 7 years old. I really enjoyed seeing especially the little ones learn basic singing and rhythm- I find little kids in general to be pretty darn cute. The other kind of interesting job I used to have was a painting business that involved faux finishing- things like painting clouds on ceilings and distressed/aged plaster finishes on walls. The part that makes me feel all “cool” and proud of myself is that a couple times I used some 3 tier scaffolding that put me up about 20 feet in the air to reach the top of some taller homes. Scaffolding is not rigid- it has movement to it which feels very scary and unsettling at first, but after a little bit you get used to the movement of it and pretty soon I was swinging up and down and around that thing like a little monkey! I think my painting business was one of the things that contributed to my developing my chronic illness though as I was young and stupid and never took the proper precautions when handling all the different chemicals and fumes involved with painting.

Are you the only one in your family who has struggled with weight?

No- I wish. My mom and her entire side of her paternal family have all dealt with weight struggles. Almost all of them were pretty big people and most of them died from complications of diabetes. I think there’s a genetic component involved as I naturally have a very big appetite for such a little person. I can out eat my 6′ husband any day no problem, and I know my grandfather was quite the eater as well. Thankfully since I’m not aware of how sensitive I am to sugar and avoid it like the plague and have lost so much fat with the diet, I can say with 100% confidence I’m nowhere near being even pre-diabetic anymore. It seems likely to me that many of my ancestors were also very sensitive to sugar which pre-disposed them to all getting diabetes later in life, but of course at that time it was an unknown. I’m very thankful for all the knowledge and research that can now be done with the advent of the internet to discover what to do best for my personal body.

Have you tried any other weightloss program and what were the results?

I have tried WeightWatchers about 3 times. I never experienced much success with this program at all, although I know many have. I don’t think I ever lost more than 5-7 lb with it. It’s sad that I was so misinformed at the time- the 2nd time I tried weight watchers, I wasn’t really “overweight”. I had a few excess pounds I could shed, but was in good shape otherwise. I remember we went backpacking into the wilderness for 9 days. During that time I hiked many many miles up and down steep grades with about 40 lbs or so on my back and of course we didn’t eat a whole lot- just the notorious freeze dried backpacking meals “just add hot water” stuff. When we got back I went into my weight watchers meeting and was dismayed to see I had gained 2 lbs. I got so discouraged I quit after that. If I’d known then what I know now, that wouldn’t have happened. NOW I know that anyone who spends 9 days doing exteme physical activities is going to have some water retention going on, as well as some muscle building. That 2 lb gain was nothing to be ashamed of! At the time I couldn’t figure out how I could possibly do all I did for 9 days and then “gain weight”- what I thought was fat. Thankfully I’ve educated myself enough now to know that when I know I’m doing the right thing for my body- eating clean and working out- I don’t have to worry about a scale change like that- it’s my body doing something good. It’s sad that I wasted so much of my younger years getting discouraged by instances like this that would then cause to give up in some way and start doing real damage to my body like stopping the workouts or eating sugar because “I was fat anyway” or because “I already gained weight and failed, might as well finish it off.” That’s one of the reasons that I touch on the topic of body composition and muscle vs. fat more than lightly on this website. I’m trying to bring an awareness to us women that my mother’s mother didn’t have and thus wasn’t able to pass on to my mother or to me. I still wouldn’t choose to weight watchers again even with my current knowledge, as my personality just doesn’t work well with a daily “counting” of anything like calories or other numbers- it just feels too limiting to have to do that on a daily basis for extensive lengths of time. However, I do feel the meetings that weight watcher groups have and I like to think that the hCG community on YouTube is able to achieve the essence of these “group meetings” to support and help each other stay motivated.

Funniest or Worst Weightloss Program You’ve Ever Tried

This is a weight loss “program” of my own making. One time in order to lose weight for a fast approaching recital that I was dancing in, I walked 8 miles a day, every day, for like a week. I would walk 4 miles in the morning, then come back and walk 4 miles in the evening. It’s possible that I combined that with the master cleanse where you drink just water and lemon with a little maple syrup. Needless to say I got some pretty major shin-splits doing that much of just one activity. I did lose about 6 lbs or so and felt “thin” for the show, but of course it came right back on afterwards. The things that we’ll do to look good in front of people right?

Do you have any chronic health issues, do you believe they are a result of abnormal fat?

I do have chronic health issues- thankfully I can now say that despite still having the autoimmune “condition” known as hashimoto’s thyroiditis, I am now symptom free so I don’t really consider myself chronically ill anymore. However, since about the age of 21 for about 6 or 7 years, I did deal with varying degrees of chronic symptoms without knowing the cause. Some of my symptoms were extreme fatigue, inability to exercise without getting extremely depressed afterwards, not being able to handle even the excitement of family and friends around because it would make my fatigue too profound and debilitating. Originally my illness was not caused by abnormal fat as I wasn’t overweight to start with. I think I have a predisposition to autoimmune disorders and there are few things like the chemicals and fumes I was exposed to without protection in my painting business that may have been a trigger for them. However, as I got sicker, I did start putting on weight and toxins are stored in fat- its very plausible to me that my body getting fatter and storing toxins that I was exposed to like mercury (I had a blood testing showing dangerously high levels of mercury in my body which I had to detox from) increased and made my symptoms worse. Losing all that fat that no doubt had a lot of toxins bound up in it I have no doubt has contributed to better health for me.

Do I have my Vitamin D levels tested/checked?

I have had it checked a few times and it’s always been abnormally low- my last test I think was around 20 or 25. I have supplemented with high dose vitamin D drops in the past. However, the nature of my body is that it’s just very….autoimmune. I have discovered that my body is so sensitive that I cannot take supplements in general without having bad health symptoms. I have to be careful about being in the sun as well- the sun makes my symptoms surface and get worse. So even though I have low Vitamin D levels, I feel much better not supplementing as of now. Perhaps that will change in the future.

What does hCG mean to you, how did you learn about?

This diet plan has changed my life. Originally I learned about it quite by accident while researching the topic of Candida on a health and wellness site. While on the site I happened to notice a forum that with a thread titled something like, “does the hCG diet really work?” or something to that effect. I was curious because I had never heard of that diet before, and of course I was overweight, so naturally I was curious. I started reading and the whole idea was so foreign- I had never heard anything remotely like it which really piqued my curiosity. It sounded too good to be true, but I came across the youtube vlogs of real people doing the diet, showing their actual results that I knew wasn’t some fake, manufactured advertisement. The clincher for me was that I could really tell when looking at the before and after photos of hCG dieters that these individuals were really losing fat because their bodies just looked so well balanced and well formed when they were done. There was none of that skinny on top fat on bottom look. They looked toned and smooth. So I made the jump and the rest is history- size 16/18 to size 2 now. HCG helped me to get in control of other areas of my life as well. While Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) is the not the sole reason that I’ve recovered my health, it’s an important component. For instance, removing gluten from my diet forever was something that has made a difference in my health as well, but I never had the willpower to full remove gluten until I did the hCG diet. Since I didn’t eat the melba/grissini while on p2, I inadvertently ended up being off of gluten for close to the 3 month mark between phase 2 and phase 3, which is the amount of time doctors say you need to remove gluten for in order for your gut lining to heal before reintroducing it to see if you are really allergic to it or not. Losing a lot of weight quickly was motivating enough that as a side benefit I was off gluten long enough to see that I really was allergic to it.

September 28, 2012

After 5 days on the hCG Diet, I’m down 5.6 lbs for Round 5 of HCG Injections. Pretty snazzy! Keep in mind I did have my loading weight to lose, so my net loss so far is about 4 lbs- which is still super snazzy!

HUNGER SCALE AND HCG DOSE

I’ve really been trying to use the hunger scale from Robin Woodall’s Weightloss Apocalypse and I’ve been finding myself not even eating the entire 500 calories most days so far. Which, by the way, is okay, as long as you’re not hungry and you eat your 2 proteins for the day. Dr. Simeons did state in his original protocol for the diet that you may omit anything you wish from the diet on a given day, except for the 2 protein portions which you must always have. I’ve pretty much only been eating 350-400 calories the first portion of this round when I eat based on hunger. Which brings me to being very glad I started my dose at 125iu this time because I really have not been hungry at all pretty much from day of this round of hCG.

FINDING THE RIGHT PLACE FOR AN HCG INJECTION

I’ve been observing that it’s best to find a place to inject that is nice and fatty, wherever this may be, because my belly area has lost a lot of fat so I’ve been searching for other places to inject. My arms actually have quite a bit of “padding” so I injected the hCG in my arm and I found myself having some of the least hunger I’ve had when I did that. Throughout the rest of round 5 I also injected in my inner and outer thigh and my bottom- as long as the place had plenty of fat, my hunger was nil.

INVESTIGATE AND MAKE ADJUSTMENTS WHEN NEEDED

Now that I’m seeing myself lose fat a bit more quickly this round as opposed to last round, it’s helping me come to some more conclusions. Round 4 of the protocol I lost very little weight and it’s the only round that I have experienced this- 7 lbs in 23 days on this diet plan is considered super slow. Now as I see this round go so much faster, I feel perhaps the cause of my slow losses in Round 4 is due to trying to keep exercise in the picture while on the vlcd. Round 4 is the only round that I continued trying to go to crossfit while on this protocol- the first week on the vlcd I went to crossfit 2 days and kind of “gave it my all” in class. Also that first week, I lost about 2 lbs net in the first couple vlcd days and then my weightloss pretty much grinded to a screeching halt entirely for the next 9 days. This is pretty abnormal on the diet. Typically weightloss on the diet is fastest during the first week, while it gradually gets a little less with each passing week (although of course it’s still a lot more weight than one would lose on any other diet!) What I think now is that trying to exercise so intensely while on the protocol was not something my body could handle. My body either needed to be losing fat or building muscle- I was asking too much of my body to focus on both at the same time. I have noticed that some on this protocol have been able to exercise while being on the diet with no problem, and to you guys- great! But if you are anything like me and have any autoimmune disorders or other chronic health issues (like adrenal fatigue or low/hypothyroid), you may want to think twice before lifting that barbell or jogging 5 miles while on Human Chorionic Gonadotropin.

Listen to Your Body On hCG

Even on the diet, as straightforward and strict as the protocol is, it still shouldn’t be viewed as a one size fits all plan. It really is important to listen to your body when you’re going through this weight loss journey- if I tried to copy what others were doing over and over even though it kept not working for me, I would never get anywhere. Take all the information you find of people’s experiences on the diet, see what seems most similar to how your body would react, and try it. If it doesn’t seem to work well, investigate and adjust.

Below you can see a comparison of how much weight I lost in the first week of the hCG Diet on each of my 5 rounds:

Round 1 of hCG: lost 8 pounds the 1st week- starting weight 172 pounds, 34.5% bodyfat Round 2 of hCG: lost 7.8 pounds the 1st week Round 3 of hCG: lost 8.2 pounds the 1st week Round 4 of hCG: lost 4.4 pounds the 1st week (this was a weird round where I hardly lost anything) Round 5 of hCG: lost 5.6 pounds 1st week (this is with starting weight of 134.8 pounds, 23.2% bodyfat) As you can see Round 4’s 1st week of weightloss on the diet was rather pitiful. I can’t be sure it was the exercise, but it could be one factor.

The point is to keep track of events and numbers throughout your hCG journey so that you can get the best results in the long term.

This time I left the exercise out, even though I missed it dearly, and I lost a lot more fat this time. Now I’m right back Crossfit, swinging those barbells and working on the next phase of building a health new me.

hCG Diet: Avoiding Food Allergies on the hCG Diet- R5P2VLCD6-10 from hcgchica on Vimeo.

October 3, 2012

Update on my 5th round of HCG Injections. As a reminder, I am taking prescription hCG, as i have with every prior round. I always test my hCG to make sure it’s potent. This particular round is my first round using ushcginjections hCG, which hCG comes from a compounding pharmacy right here in the United States. As of VLCD 11, I am down 7.4 lbs in 10 days. I’ve been eating to hunger and thus finding myself eating even less than 500 calories most days- probably more in the 400 calorie range. 125Iu has been my sweet spot dose for no hunger the past 2 rounds. I have great energy and no cravings. So I’m very happy with the way this round has been going. 127.4 this morning. I started my round at 134.2 after loading. I actually lost .6 after my first loading day.

This round has been pretty easy except for this past weekend, which brings me to talking about the importance of pacing yourself while on this diet. If there’s something that you know really tires you out or drains out, it would behoove you to try to avoid that situation. I let myself get into one of those situations over that weekend and found myself so spent and exhausted that the diet felt almost unbearable for a couple days. It’s much better to spare yourself for the short period of time you are on the diet and save stressful/draining situations for after the protocol. I know this isn’t always possible, but whatever you DO have control over, put those types of things off till later.

If it’s too late and you already find yourself feeling horrible on the diet because of getting too tired or something similar, drinking tea with stevia is kind of my fall back to get through it. Drink tea and more tea. And more tea.

Everyone may not be like me, but when I don’t feel well, I find myself really wanting to eat something. Since I can’t do that on the diet, drinking lots of hot tea sweetened with stevia makes things manageable.

There’s something else I’ve done very differently this round. I recently had a comprehensive food allergy test through a company called ALCAT. They test hundreds of foods, spices, dyes, supplements, herbs, etc. Since I have a couple autoimmune conditions (Hashimoto’s is the main one) I really felt that it was appropriate for me to investigate this aspect of addressing my health. I have already been fairly symptom free for some time now when it comes to my Hashimoto’s due to a variety of other things I’ve done. There are a few posts on this here. I have found the testing results to be pretty accurate- there were a number of foods that I was already suspicious of before taking the test and the test confirmed my intolerance to all of these very foods. Of course, there were also a number of foods on the test that I was unaware that I was unaware of having a sensitivity to.

What’s interesting to note regarding my test results and how that has to do with the diet is that I discovered I apparently have an intolerance to many of the foods listed on Dr. Simeon’s original protocol for the diet. Many of the foods. Like literally, most seafood and at least 3/4’s of the vegetable list that Dr. Simeon’s left for us. And as we all know, the list of foods that’s okay to eat on the diet is already strikingly small- am I right or am I right? You can pretty much count the veggie option on 2 hands and the meat choices on 1 hand.

So I had to really think about how I was going to do this round. I already knew that I didn’t want to eat the foods that I’m allergic or intolerant to while on the protocol this time. Allergies = inflammation = less weight loss. I felt that avoiding these allergen foods could cause me to have a better round on Human Chorionic Gonadotropin because of not causing inflammation in my body.

I chose a number of alternative vegetables to eat instead of the ones I’m allergic to (hint: this is off protocol- proceed with caution- don’t do this unless you have good reason as I did). I was still careful with my choices- I checked the nutritional content of the veggies to make sure their calorie and carb content was still in line with the other vegetables on Dr. Simeon’s original list. The vegetables I ended up including almost daily on my 5th round of the protocol are mushrooms, broccoli, red bell pepper, zucchini and crooked neck squash.

Since I don’t eat the grissini or fruit on p2, the diet is very low in carbohydrates the way I’m doing it, so I feel that I have a little more leeway with my vegetables without causing harm to my fat losses, and I’m careful to eat reasonable amounts of these protocol vegetables to make sure calories and carbs don’t get out of hand. So far this has been working great for me this round. Regarding meats I have been having the chicken breast, but also have included Trader Joe’s nitrate and nitrite free Ham lunch meat. Again, this is off protocol, but my test said I was allergic to many of the protocol meats, so I had to come up with some other alternatives.

So far so good!

Remember, eating off protocol foods on this diet plan is not something that you would do needlessly. However, it’s good to be open to alternatives should you find, like myself, that your body doesn’t tolerate certain foods or supplements.

October 4, 2012

Drumroll please…..2 lb drop on VLCD 12 of Round 5 of HCG Injections. 125.4 down from 127.4 yesterday. That’s 9.4 lbs in 11 days now. Yup. Pretty happy if I do say so myself.

Also wanted to give you a bodyshot in my size 2 jeans (you’ll have to watch the vlog for that)!

This pair is actually comfortable now- I did manage to squeeze into them before this round started, but they certainly didn’t fit well enough to leave the house in.

I have been quite surprised to be honest to be 125 lbs and to be both losing so quickly still and to have so much non-hunger. Keep in mind I’m just over 5′ tall so I certainly have room to go lower still, but honestly, it’s still surprisingly that the fat is coming off so easily at this point in the game.

This round I have been using a new hCG source- ushcginjections – they dispense hCG that is actually made in the U.S. At a compounding pharmacy right in Florida. I’ve been very impressed at how I feel on this Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, so I can happily recommend them to others.

The other difference about this round is that I’m avoiding foods I’m allergic to. You can see my post on this here.

The last thing thing that is different about this round of the diet is that I’m injecting in a variety of other places than usual- I’ve injected in my upper arm and my inner and outer thigh. I find that when I find a nice fatty place to inject, my hunger is the least.

That’s it for this day’s update on my own personal weight loss journey. Now I’m going to go find something to help you guys with….

October 5, 2012

Occasionally I get requests to see some of my Crossfit skills in action. I’m still a total beginner at Crossfit, but I am proud to say that certain things like my pushup capability has increased astronomically since I first started.

Had a .8 weight loss this morning, putting me at 124.6 on VLCD 12, so in honor of that I thought I’d do 8 pushups (watch the video for that!)

I have had excellent energy on this round of HCG Injections, which I’m loving. That has not been the case of every round on the diet- some rounds my energy has been horrible and I’ve been very fatigued, and other rounds, like this one, I feel great.

I could be wrong, but I think part of it could have to do with the fact that toxins are stored in fat and at different points on the HCG Diet journey, one may feel yucky as their body is releasing fat that may have higher amounts of toxins stored in it- thinks like heavy metals (mercury), and other chemicals. I must be to the point of losing fat that didn’t contain anything too nasty since I’ve been feeling so good. Don’t take my word for it on this topic- I’m just ruminating on this thought- I still need to research this idea more myself.

October 12, 2012

I’ve been very happy with what I’ve accomplished with this round of HCG Injections. At this point I had intended on ending my round, but ended up extending it to a full 6 week round.

I may not always have a factual answer for your hCG questions, but I’ll give you the from-my-experience-and-what-I’ve observed-in-others answer. To be honest, sometimes it’s these types of answers that I find to be the most valuable anyway.

That’s how I learned the most about this weight loss protocol to begin with. Just doing my research on the forums and on youtube and just seeing what people were experiencing in real life.

Sometimes I find that supposed “facts” about the diet– for instance those “studies” that hCG haters like to mention that have been done on th e protocol are pretty useless to me (and to you) because they didn’t do any hydrostatic body fat testing in those studies, so there was no comparison done between how much fat and muscle loss there was in the two groups- the hCG takers vs. the placebo takers. “Weight” is deceiving. That’s why I think seeing what actually happens to people in real life is what is most useful and most reliable when it comes to information.

October 13, 2012

I was down to 123 lbs today! That’s a 1.4 loss on the scale since the previous day. Pretty cool ya?

INCREASE IN CALORIE INTAKE HALFWAY THROUGH HCG ROUND

Earlier in this HCG Injections round I found I didn’t even need the full 500 calories when I ate to hunger and felt good. As this round continues I find myself eating the full 500 and even a little bit more and that is what my body wants right now.

I’ve started incorporating the miracle (shirataki) noodles again this round. I had decided to wait to use them this round until I really needed them, and that time has come! Incorporating them made me feel more satisfied and even more relaxed and less stressed as a result. I have used the shirataki noodles now on almost a daily basis for 4 out of my 5 rounds with success.

Update on Off-Protocol (Rogue) hCG Eating of Foods

I’ve done quite a bit of experimentation on myself this round because of my food allergy test that I had done a couple months ago telling me that I was actually allergic (or I should more accurately say had a food intolerance) to many of the foods on Dr. Simeon’s original protocol list of foods. For more info on that see my post here.

As a result I’ve been eating many off protocol veggies this round as a trial- foods that i’m not intolerant too. So far this seems to be doing well with my body. An example of my off protocol meal yesterday was a soup of mushrooms and chicken breast simmered in water with salt, then add the miracle noodles at the end. It’s super yummy and very satisfying.

If you decide to make any changes to the original weight loss protocol as I have, just do it in an informed way. It’s probably not a good idea to just randomly start eating different stuff, because you can hurt the outcome of your results on the diet, but certainly there are times when changes may be necessary.

People are pretty in tune with their bodies sometimes. For instance, I’ve heard a number of hCGer’s mention on their youtube vlogs “oh I can’t eat cabbage on p2, it makes me gainl”. To an outsider this might sound totally silly. But you know what? Don’t knock it. Very likely what they are saying is true- probably they have a food intolerance to cabbage that causes inflammation when they eat it thus causing problems with weightloss. So it’s worth it to trust your body a bit and to realize that no one size can fit all people. Sometimes adjustments do have to be made.

I have lost more fat this round eating off protocol vegetables than the last round eating the designated p2 foods. Again, the foods I choose was done strategically though- I’m very careful with the carb count of the veggies, etc. and since I don’t eat the fruits or melba on the diet, I feel that enables me to have a little more freedom when it comes to my vegetables.

One other thing I do incorporate while on the diet is 2-3 teaspoons of half and half each day in my black tea.

Getting Back to Family Life Soon

There’s a time and place for everything. I’ve been feeling like I need to get back to my family life now as this round of protocol concludes. I don’t know about you guys, but sometimes on this diet planI tend to be not nearly as useful to my family members. I don’t cook nearly as much and my husband has to kind of fend for himself and I find myself making a lot more sunbutter and jelly sandwiches for my son than usual. Breakfast? How about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Dinner? How about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. My guilt gradually increases until I think to myself it’s time to start cooking real food again before my son’s muscles fill up with jelly.

I know some of you guys can identify with this. But you know what? It’s okay for a period of 3-6 weeks to be focused on you while you get yourself to a healthier place- that will give you many years of good health to then share with your husband and children after your done with Human Chorionic Gonadotropin right? You sometimes have to look at the long range scope of things in order to put yourself first temporarily without guilt. But there comes a time when you feel you’ve achieved enough to accomplish this and you’re ready to get back to being the hero of the family.

October 17, 2012

I had planned on ending Round 5 of HCG Injections at the 3 week point, but after TOM (time of month) came and went, I felt much better (after feeling really crabby and yucky pre-period), so I decided to continue on Human Chorionic Gonadotropin.

As long as I can feel fairly well while on the protocol I have no problem continuing. It’s when I start feeling to unwell or too grumpy for too many days in a row that I start thinking that it’s time to get off the protocol for the time being.

RESULTS FROM PAST FEW VLCD DAYS:

VLCD 20 results: -1.4 lbs

VLCD 21 results: + 1.4 lbs (TOM- always gain water weight from TOM coming)

VLCD 22 results: – 1.6 lbs to 122.8 lbs

VLCD 23 results: +.2 lbs to 123 lbs

VLCD 24 results: -1.8 lbs to 121.2 lbs

So far I’ve lost 13.6 lbs total in 24 days, which includes the fact that I lost ground for a few days due to the 1 day I cheated on the diet this round (it happens you know?)

In the video I mention the weird observation that it seemed as if the hormone injections was affecting where I lost fat- almost like spot reducing. In retrospect, I don’t think that was occurring and I think it was just a fluke- so please ignore that part of the video will ya? Hey, a girl can dream can’t she? :)-

Lastly, my average weight loss for this round has been .5lb/day which is excellent considering that is the normal average weightloss for any woman on the Diet, and to still be losing this average when I’m getting quite tiny is great. I’ve lost so much in my hip and thigh area this round that previously somewhat large skirts (in the size 8 and 10 range) that I could still wear, just lower on my body, no longer can be worn at all- they just fall off they’re that huge.

October 23, 2012

I am 120.2 lbs on Day 35 of the VLCD of Round 5 of the HCG Injections. My video has a bodyshot of what I currently look like at this weight. Since I started at 172 pounds and a size 16/18 and in this video you’ll see me wearing a size 2 pair of jeans, I think that speaks volumes for what Human Chorionic Gonadotropin can do if you follow the protocol properly from start to finish.

I didn’t really mean for this to turn into a long round, but since I was feeling better this last week and I won’t be doing another round of the protocol for quite some time, I felt it might be nice to make the most of this current round.

I’ve lost 14.6 lbs in 30 days and so far 9 lbs is fat. I’m very happy with this ratio

My omron monitor is showing that I’m at 19.8% bodyfat which equals out to 24 lbs of fat on my body out of the 120 lbs that I currently weigh and what’s interesting is that I just had a hydrostatic body fat test done a couple days ago and it actually lined up perfectly with what my Omron handheld body fat monitor said. This was my first time having a hydro body fat test being done while still on phase 2 of the Diet. Usually I wait until I am in Phase 3 to have the test done. I have discovered as I’ve gotten leaner that when I’m NOT on the Diet, the omron body fat monitor is not as accurate as when I am on the diet. I think the extra food, fluids, and glycogen etc, that my body has when I’m in my normal living state change the monitor’s readings a bit, although just as a reference I still find it useful.

What Shirataki Noodles Package Looks Like

Shirataki noodles are also called Miracle Noodles- the miracle noodles can be purchased online and are a bit pricier purchased under that name brand. The Shirataki noodles as you see here in this video can be purchased as most local asian markets or ethnic markets- you will find them in the refrigerated section. It will often say “yam noodle” or “yam flour” in paranthesis on the package. There has been some confusion over people seeing this and then thinking the shirataki noodles contained actual yams as we americans think of them and thus starch but this is not the case. The asian shirataki noodles are actually made purely from soluble fiber (fiber meaning our body does not digest it as any calories to us) from what’s called the Konjac Root in Japan- whoever translated this onto the package from chinese put it as “yam” but it’s really this Konjact root that it’s made from.

MAKING USE OF THE HCG YOUTUBE COMMUNITY

I have found the hCG community on youtube to be a wonderful place to both get and give support on the Diet. It seems like many useful and successful protocols for things like losing weight, getting fit, or getting away from an addiction involve a group of some sort. There’s cycling groups, jogging groups, AA for alcoholics and weight watchers meetings to name a few. People do well with a support system in place- especially people who are in a similar situation to you. That is why if you are doing the protocol, the youtube community of vloggers and commentors is what I think of as an irreplaceable resource. I address how to go about getting and giving support on the protocol on my FAQ page here: Where to Find Support and Help on the hCG Diet

Since the Diet is somewhat controversial (ie phrases sometimes heard: you are INJECTING? or….you are injecting WHAT??? or…..you are eating HOW MANY CALORIES??? Oh my goodness you are going to STARVE YOURSELF!!!) many find they don’t care to tell too many in their immediate network of friends or family they are doing this diet because they don’t feel like dealing with all the questions and/or well-meaning warnings that come across as put-downs since they have not full researched the protocol. So many us like to wait to let the results speak for themselves, at which point sometimes the minds of those around us become a little more open. Before this happens though, you need a support network- the protocol is NOT easy as some might say. It’s FAST but not easy. I treasure and hope you will too, the Human Chorionic Gonadotropin youtube community.

OCTOBER 23, 2012

Let me put your minds to rest- I am not re-losing weight, but let me explain my unique hCG journey.

I got a question from someone on youtube who was a little confused by my weight loss journey at first (after all I have 175+ videos!) so I wanted to make a video and blog post that gives you a synopsis of just what I’ve personally been doing with the hCG Diet protocol and why it could appear at first that I am re-losing weight (ie losing weight with the protocol, then re-gaining weight, then re-losing that same weight again with the protocol, and so on), when in reality, I’m losing new fat with each subsequent round of the protocol. I’d like to show to you here the unique way I’ve been using this weight loss protocol.

If you were to watch every single one of my 175+ videos it probably would all make sense, but let’s face it, I’m not that egotistical to think that most of you will have time or even want to do that!

So it can appear on the surface as if I can’t keep the weight loss off as I keep re-visiting similar numbers on the scale- ie. 127 lbs, 124 lbs, 122 lbs, etc. So let’s get started.

I Have Maintained Almost 100% Of All My Fat Loss from the hCG Diet…

aside from Round 2. I have done 5 rounds of the diet plan now, and 4 of them I have done well and maintained almost all the fat loss from them, without having to go back on the protocol to “re-lose” weight. So I have not gained back fat after doing the diet. Here’s a chart that shows everything in a nutshell. As you can see, how many lbs of fat I have has continued to drop with each successive round, despite re-visiting similar scale weights.

Comparison Chart of hCGChica Body Composition on each hCG Round:

(Round 2 was a wash so it’s left out)

April ’11/End of Round 1: 144.8lbs 34.5% bodyfat 49 lbs fat 95.8 lbs lean mass

Dec ’11/End of Round 3: 124.8 lbs 27.5% bodyfat 34 lbs fat 90.8 lbs lean mass

May ’12/End of Round 4: 127.5 lbs 23.91%bodyfat 30.5 lbs fat 97 lbs lean mass

No ’12/End of Round 5: 118.8 lbs 17.9% bodyfat 21.3 lbs fat 97.48 lbs lean mass

Dec ’12/Currently off hCG: 124.5 lbs 18.8% bodyfat 23.49 lbs fat 101 lbs lean mass

My 1st round of the weight loss protocol started in February of 2011 and it’s now December 2012. I take really long breaks between rounds of this protocol as well, and during that time I eat really healthy but I eat a pretty good amount of food quantity-wise, I don’t count calories, and I maintain my fat loss- I don’t gain back fat while on the protocol. I know this because I have period hydrostatic body fat tests done to show how much fat and muscle I have on my body (as shown above). I’m getting close to my 2 year anniversary since starting the weight loss protocol, and I’m happy to show you how far I’ve come, while spending the majority of the past 2 years NOT on a diet at all, hCG or otherwise.

My Journey with the hCG Diet Is Unique

My hCG Diet journey is a little bit unique I guess you could say because I have certain goals in mind that don’t necessarily have to do with being a certain scale weight or a certain size in clothing. I have in my nature that I love to do things that require being fit like hiking and doing pushups. I’ve always enjoyed sporty type activities, even as a little girl. I was a daddy’s girl all the way and I spent many a good hour biking, fishing, jet skiing and hiking with my dad. I was definitely the ultimate tomboy down to hating lace and the color pink. In high school I was 1 of 3 girls in the weight training class, and 1 of only 2 girls actually lifting weights (ie not just sitting around flirting).

So once I realized what this protocol could do now as an overweight adult in her 30’s with a chronic autoimmune illness, I’ve been trying to see how far it will take me. I’ve basically been trying to cycle my way down to a lower and lower body fat percent, not to a lower weight necessarily. This means I’m trying to achieve a high amount of muscle mass compared to fat mass on my body, which in turn makes doing things that require being strong and fit much easier.

When my husband and I were dating he used to call me a deer because of the way I would bound down the hiking trails on the way back- my quads were nice and firm and strong and my body fat was low enough that I didn’t feel heavy to myself so I could easily almost run along the steep downward trails. As I got overweight and out of shape, I could no longer do this and just walking carefully on a downward slopping trail would often feel scary as if my thighs weren’t strong enough to hold me up and that I might actually collapse under the weight of my own body.

hCGChica’s hCG Rounds Timeline- Sort Of

Round 1 of the hCG Diet

My 1st round of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin I lost about 27 lbs in about 42 days and I had no problem keeping this weight off for the next 3 months while I was off the protocol. I ate pretty much low carb during that time, went to Zumba a few times a week, and did not count calories.

Round 2 of the hCG Diet

Round 2- that is what I would call a failed round because after losing weight on round 2 I re-gained most of that weight in the following 9 weeks after that because I did not adhere to phase 3 nor did I eat healthy (ie. I was living on sugar again for that entire 9 weeks). So I did have to re-lose this weight. What can I say? I messed up that round, I think most of us mess up at one point or another on our weightloss journey. I think that just means I’m human like the rest of you.

So I re-lost this weight plus more with Round 3 of the diet.

Round 3 of the hCG Diet

December 2011 I finished Round 3 of the diet and lost about 21-ish pounds during this round. At that point I ended up at about 124.8 lbs when I went in to have my bodyfat tested hydrostatically. My results showed I was 27% bodyfat with 34 lbs of fat and 90.8 lbs of lean mass adding up to the 124.8 lbs total that I weighed.

4 Month Break

I took a 4 month break from the protocol after this. During that time, I spent 3 months trying out a new fitness thing called Crossfit, a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and heavy weightlifting type program. Which I love and still do regularly to this day. You can look for a Crossfit gym in you area by googling it. During my 4 month break and going to Crossfit regularly, I gained “weight.” However, almost all of this “weight gain” was muscle, not fat. AHA!!! The light is coming on now right?

When I went in to have my hydrostatic body fat test at the end of March, I weighed 132.5 lbs, a gain of 7.7 lbs in 4 months. Out of that 7.7 lbs, 7 lbs was muscle, so only about a half lb of my weight gain was fat. This put me at 25.91% bodyfat, which if you’ll notice is actually now a smaller bodyfat percent than at the124.8 lbs I was 4 months prior because of the high amount of muscle gain with almost no fat gain. So I actually maintained 99% of my fat loss from the diet plan during that 4 months, despite “gaining” almost 8 lbs, not to mention all the fat I lost from round 1 as well.

So during that whole 4 months, I was not counting calories, I wasn’t even eating low carb anymore- I was eating a healthy amount of fruit and some rice products, going to Crossfit 3-4 times a week for 1 hour each time, and I kept off almost all of the fat loss, no problem.

Round 4 of the hCG Diet

April 2012 I did Round 4 of the protocol. This was my first “short” round of just 3 weeks long on the diet. I only lost a little over 5 lbs this round, down to 127.4, but I actually have LESS fat now at this higher weight, than I did at 124.8 lbs at the end of Round 3. Let me show you the comparison here.

End of Round 3: 124.8 lbs 34 lbs fat

End of Round 4: 127.4 lbs 30.5 lbs fat

So here I weigh 2.6 lbs more but have 3.5 lbs less fat after doing Round 4. Since muscle is pretty much always a good thing, you can look solely at my pounds of fat to see if I was now in a better place with my body or not, and the answer if you look is decidedly yes! After Round 4 I was now 23.91% bodyfat, a loss of 3.1% bodyfat during that 3 weeks of the diet.

5 Month Break

I took a 5 month break this time from the protocol. During the next 5 months from all May through the end of September I again was going to Crossfit 3-4 days a week, not counting calories, eating healthy but a lot. I don’t eat no 1200 calories okay? I eat very liberally, and I eat a lot of fruit as well (after phase 3 of course). I eat a lot of fat, meat, veggies, fruit, nuts, and dairy. I probably take in at least 2000 calories if not 2500. I’m not saying anyone can do this, but I believe because since I was going to crossfit, my body was funneling this into muscle growth. During that 5 months I once again “gained weight” and went from 127.4 to 133 lbs. That’s a 5.6 lb “gain.” Out of that 5.6 lbs however, 5 lbs was muscle.

End of Round 4: 127.4 lbs 23.91% bodyfat 30.5 lbs fat 97 lbs lean mass

5 months later: 133 lbs 23.2% bodyfat 31 lbs fat 102 lbs lean mass

So once again almost all the weight gain was muscle, and I had kept off ALL but a half pound of fat that I lost with the hCG Diet. Keep in mind that not only am I keeping off the fat from the latest round of the diet, but pretty much all the fat from the previous rounds as well.

So hopefully you can see so far throughout this whole weight loss journey, except for Round 2- that one’s a wash- we’re tossing that one out of the window- I’ve maintained almost 100% of my fat loss with the Diet.

Round 5 of the hCG Diet

October 2012 I started Round 5 of the diet and finished it in November 2012. I’m writing this blog post some time after making the video so I can give you the full stats for Round 5. I lost over 9 lbs of new fat during Round 5, putting me at 118.8 lbs and 17.9% bodyfat with 21 pounds of fat at the time my hydrostatic body fat test which was a few days into phase 3.

End of Round 4: 127.4 lbs 23.91% bodyfat 30.5 lbs fat 97 lbs lean mass

5 months later: 133 lbs 23.2% bodyfat 31 lbs fat 102 lbs lean mass

End of Round 5: 118.8 lbs 17.9% bodyfat 21.3 lbs fat 97.48 lbs lean mass

1 month later: 124.5 lbs 18.8% bodyfat 23.49 lbs of fat 101 lbs lean mass

Now it is the middle of December 2012 and I “gained weight” again, but as you can see above, 2/3rds of it was muscle when tested hydrostatically. I did gain a couple pounds of fat at this point, but at 18.8% bodyfat which is getting fairly low for a woman, I’m very happy to be stable where I’m at and am very happy with the fat loss that I am keeping off, which is the large majority for it.

I’m basically maintaining a fat loss of 35.5 lbs out 37.7 lbs of fat lost. And this is all actual FAT my friends. Not water weight, not muscle, not glycogen, not just weighing less because I haven’t eaten yet and my stomach is empty.

Is 124 lbs the same as 124 lbs? Not Necessarily…..

The last thing I’d like to leave you with which is pretty exciting to me because I couldn’t have achieved this without hCG Injections is the following stats:

Dec 2011/End of R3: 124.8 lbs 27.5% bf 34 lbs fat 90.8 lbs lean mass Size 6

Dec 2012/ 1 mo. after R5: 124.5 lbs 18.8% bf 23.49 lbs fat 101 lbs lean mass Size 2

If you compare these two stats, you’ll see that my weight is almost EXACTLY THE SAME, about 124 lbs, yet now I have 10.5 lbs less fat and 10.2 lbs more muscle at the same weight!!!! Okay, sorry, I should kick the enthusiasm down a notch I guess, but this is huge!

Let’s break down just this past years’ results from December 2011-December 2012

Lost 10% bodyfat and stabilized at 8.7% bodyfat lost- from 27.5% to 18.8% bodyfat

Gained 12 lbs of muscle

Lost over 10 lbs of fat

Was on a “diet” for only 9 weeks of the entire year

10 months- the rest of the year- eating 2000-2500 calories (my guesstimate) NOT on a diet.

Went to Crossfit just 3-4 hours a week

Enjoyed my life

Walked around in size 4 jeans all year long

Almost all fat loss with protocol kept off with ease

This is not to say that after the diet plan you can go back to eating cartons of ice-cream and extra large fries 3x’s a week and expect to maintain your weight. But you won’t be able to maintain you fat loss if you do that after any diet. You must seek and find healthy replacements to your old comfort foods- that is what I have done and that is what the rest of those who are maintaining their hCG weightloss have done as well. It’s not as hard as you might think. Pinterest is a great way to find sugar free, gluten free, grain free recipes, and you will be more motivated to do this once you are happy in your thinner, fitter body.

Summary of This Mouthful of A Story

Anyway- this is a really long story to share a very short point which is that the weight I’ve “gained” this past year after doing the diet has been muscle, not fat. So even though I’m about the same weight that I was a year ago, I’m much smaller visually. I was a size 6 at this weight a year ago, and now I’m a size 2 at this same weight. Not to mention much stronger and healthier.

It was important to me to share this with you out there researching this diet, because the protocol has proven SO effective for me (as my results and statistics show) and I really want everyone out there to know what can be achieved with it’s proper use.

Of course, I cannot attribute my strength and increase in muscle to the Diet, and going to Crossfit has been a huge part in re-shaping my body- the definition and solidness I have to my body now has a lot to do with Crossfit. But let me point out that not 1 single solitary ounce of my fat loss came from Crossfit. 100% of my fat loss was due to Diet alone. That is why I have really enjoyed cycling Crossfit and the Diet because they go hand in hand- crossfit is great for building muscle, at least for me, and Human Chorionic Gonadotropin is great for losing fat.

I’m all about using the most effective technique to reach my goal. How about you?

October 24, 2012

LOST ANOTHER 1 LB OVERNIGHT ON HCG INJECTIONS

I was down 1 whole lb on both the scale and my Omron handheld body fat monitor. That puts me at 119.2 which is CRAY-ZY. I haven’t been under 120 lbs in many years. I think I was about 120 lbs when I got married, and that was 12 years ago when I was 19 years old. So being 119 lbs is a distant memory from my late teens.

I have discovered with the way that I usually do the protocol (replacing the fruits with 0% Fage greek yogurt which makes the diet very low carb- I don’t recommend this for just anyone), that the body fat monitor is very accurate for my body while I’m actually on the protocol when compared to hydrostatic body fat testing- when I had a hydro done while on Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, my Omron monitor actually matched up exactly to the hydrostatic body fat test results which was surprising. When I’m off the protocol it’s not as accurate- somehow having a higher amount of perhaps carbs, glycogen, food in instestines, etc. makes it so that the body fat monitor is off by 2-3%, but that’s still not bad and overall is still a useful little tool and it’s consistency is fantastic- for me anyways.

CHEATING MY WAY TO A PULL-UP

I have something exciting to report today! Pull-ups are typically not easy for women to do. Even when I was thin and fit back in my teens I remember trying to do pull-ups for a long time and eventually I managed to do 1 pull-up once, and then I could never do it again! Obviously once I was out of shape and overweight I couldn’t even begin to pull my body up on a pull-up bar, much less actually do one.

As I’ve been attending Crossfit now for close to a year, I’ve been gradually getting stronger but still couldn’t do a full pull-up. Not even half a pull-up. When I took a break from Crossfit to do my 5th round of the diet in October 2012 I left with enough strength to pull myself up maybe about 1/3rd of the way to the bar.

So I was totally dumbfounded when the other day, a few weeks into being on the protocol, I walked up to my pull-up bar at home, and proceeded to do an entire pull-up, all by myself! I really had meant to just check where my strength was and make sure I hadn’t gotten a lot weaker from being away from exercise and from losing weight with the diet for a few weeks (ie. I know there is very little muscle loss with this protocol but it’s something I am always “watching out” for). There’s a little video clip of my “re-enacting” my first pull-up. I actually did almost 2 in a row.

I feel like I’ve totally cheated and it’s awesome! Who can not workout and go from a 1/3rd pull-up to a full pull-up almost overnight? An HCG Dieter I guess! I guess what has happened is that I’ve lost enough body fat and my body fat percent had sufficiently lowered quickly enough to then allow my upper body strength to suddenly be strong enough to pull my whole body up, whereas before I still had too much body fat compare to strength to do so.

WHY CAN’T WOMEN DO PULL-UPS?

I could be wrong, but I think perhaps one of the reasons that it’s so difficult for women to do pull-ups is that we are all fairly bottom heavy, compared to men. We carry a higher percentage of fat on our hips and thighs, and typically our upper body is also not naturally as strong as men, so this creates a situation where it’s rather impossible to do a pull-up without first changing your entire body composition. Thankfully, with the diet, this is totally possible.

As an example of how fat and body fat percent plays a role in pull-ups, there is a woman trainer at my crossfit gym who does Oly Lifting (olympic weightlifting). She is getting super strong and can lift really heavy weights, even overhead. She is not super stocky either- she looks very good, but looks like your average woman, with a good amount of fat on her hips and thighs that is not unattractive. She recently told me that she gave up trying to do a pull-up. She’s very strong, but apparently her body fat percent and the amount of fat she has on her lower half is too much for her upper body to be able to pull herself up to do a full pull-up.

Fat Loss Is Not Easy or Not Possible for Many Women without the hCG Diet

That’s why I say I feel like I totally cheated my way into doing a full pull-up. And I’m proud of it! It seems that for some women, it is easy to gain strength, but losing fat is another story. For all those women who cannot lose fat by other means, this diet is in my opinion the answer. This lady has been living on almost a zero carb diet in order to try to shed a few pounds of fat, and I don’t think it’s gotten her very far in that department.

I have discovered I am like her. Going to Crossfit, I find I build muscle and get strong VERY easily. But I do not lose fat easily. I haven’t lost a single ounce of fat going to Crossfit for the past year. Now of course, I wasn’t eating to lose fat which is really where fat loss will occur- with changes to diet- but this female crossfit trainer HAS made those dietary changes with very little to show for it.

Fit the Tool to the Job

It makes more sense to me to match the tool to the job doesn’t it? That is why I use Crossfit for getting strong and building muscle, because Crossfit is what does that best for my body, and why I use the Diet and HCG Injections for losing fat, because that is what accomplishes this most efficiently (or as it appears, it’s the only thing that will help me lose fat at all, not just most efficiently).

October 27, 2012

I had no intention of this turning into a long round of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, but that’s what’s happened. I’ve been feeling great and continuing to lose fat and have no hunger, so there really wasn’t any reason to stop under those circumstances.

I have about 5-7 VLCD days left with the HCG Injections, and then the 72 hours of VLCD without the hormone.

I was down 1.4 lbs on the scale today, but 1 lb down overall as I had a .4 gain yesterday. That puts me at 118.2 lbs! I’m just over 5′ tall so for anyone who is feeling that weight seems awfully low, it’s not awfully low for a shortie like me.

As of today, I’m 54 lbs lighter than when I first started the weight loss protocol, and technically I’ve actually lost quite a bit more than that if you add in the 1 round of this protocol that I didn’t do too well and gained back that weight and the had to re-lose it, and also the loading weight I had to of course lose with each round- all things considered I’ve probably lost more like 70 lbs. But who’s counting?

Transcript:

Hey guys! HCGchica! I’m just checking in. Today is VLCD 35 of round 5. I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. I had no intention of doing a long round this time but I ended up feeling so good and I’ve been continuing to lose fat so I figured you know what I’m just gonna go ahead and go as long as I’m feeling good so technically I’ve got about maybe 5 to 7 VLCD days left with the shots and then I’ll probably be going into P3 after that.

I was actually down 1.4 this morning so that was really good. I was actually up .4 yesterday so technically I’m down another pound which puts me at 118.2. Oh my goodness! I just, I can’t believe that. I haven’t been that small since before I got married actually. I think I was about 120 when I got married so again I’m just over 5 feet you guys not even 5’1 apparently. I thought I was 5’1 then I went to have my Dexa scan and they measured me and she said. Well you’re actually not 5’1 so I don’t know. I’m either already shrinking or I’ve just been wrong all this years.

Anyway my body fat, pounds of fat, is down to 22.5 pounds of fat. Hopefully I’ll continue to see that go down even a little bit more for the weight that I’ve lost. And my ketones where actually a little higher today at 10 and I think it’s just cause didn’t drink quite as many liquids yesterday. I still drink enough but just a little less than usual. So anyway I’m really happy about that I’m still feeling so energetic and so good. 3 new people to sub to I wanna mention real quick. The first 2 I think are on their first round just started blogging recently- I’m sorry if you hear planes on private airport like right next to our house and on Fridays everyone is flying maybe out to their vacations homes or something, I don’t know. So anyway the 2 ones are msnomojo and Pinskygirl and I will have the link to their actual channel below in the description box and then the 3rd one is HCGbeautyvlog she’s not new to this protocol but she’s somewhat new to blogging but I really would like you guys to check her out because she is both a make-up artist and a skin care specialist and so she is doing a lot of work to discover the different types of products that are safe to use on the protocol and she’s checking in to all the different brands. The drugstore brands, the high-end brands and she’s putting a lot of work into it so she’s gonna be doing some of that information on her blogs and she’s just a wealth of information on that topic and I know she’s gonna be posting a lot of information about that. You know I have got a lot of questions from some of you guys about what products to use and that’s just something that I just don’t know the answer to so she’s gonna have a lot of good answers for that and I’m actually going to be having a wonderful comprehensive report of all of her different brands that she’s checked out and the different products that are okay to use on my website in the near future, so I’m really excited about that.

Anyway, so that’s my update. Again my website is HCGchica.com if you guys needs to just answer questions about the diet there is a link on there to email me privately if you want. For anyone who has emailed me you know that I take quite a bit of time and respond to each of your emails in a very lengthy in depth ways so I really do care that you guys get the best out of this protocol. So anyway, as of today I’ve lost 54 pounds lighter than when I first started the weight loss protocol and technically I’ve actually lost quite a bit more than that because I had 1 round that I had to re-lose that way and of course there is loading weight and all that kind of stuff so all and all I’ve technically probably lost closer to 60 or 65 pounds or maybe even 70 but as it stands today I’m 54 pounds lighter on the scale I’m somewhere around 19% body fat which is totally phenomenal that actually puts me into the athlete category which is really cool. I never expected this weight loss journey to be able to get me that far but it has so I’ll just keep it short and sweet today and I’ll talk to you guys soon. Take care. Bye.

October 31, 2012

Today’s vlcd 39, which I just can’t believe! I was down 1.8 lbs on the scale today. I have only really been checking in on my “good weight loss” days, which is usually every few days. On the days in between I often will lose nothing or even have small gains- for instance the last 3 days in a row I was up on the scale .2 each day, but then today had a huge 1.8 lbs loss. That’s just how my body rolls it appears. A quick explanation on partially why this occurs is that, TMI, I don’t have a bowel movement everyday while on this protocol. There is simply so little food and my digestion is rather slow anyway, that on this protocol it slows down to once every 2 or 3 days. So there is some build-up on my non- elimination days that will contributed to my zero or small weight loss days. Additionally I eat miracle noodles (shirataki noodles) on the diet, and depending on what time of time I have them or how much of them I eat, that can affect my scale weight temporarily as that bulk is in my stomach and intestines processing. Sorry I know this is kind of gross, but when it comes to this weight loss protocol, it’s best to divulge everything you possibly can because you just never know when it may help someone else.

Anyway, my big loss of this morning puts me at 117 lbs today!

I am undecided if I will stop the diet tomorrow or go a couple more days.

See, I am getting very close to having 20 lbs of fat on my body, which is kind of a bit of a special marker to shoot for. You see, the hydrostatic body fat test technician I spoke with told me that no person, no matter their size or height, needs more than 20 lbs of fat on their body. It’s okay to have less than 20lbs of fat too, but you don’t need any more than 20lbs. Since I’m getting so close to that number it would just be really neat to reach that major goal.

However, in the end, it’s important to me to make my decisions like this based on how my body is feeling, not on a number.

My total losses to date from Round 5 of HCG Injections alone so far is about 17.4 lbs. I’m very happy with this at my smaller size. If you are just starting out on the diet and have 40-50lbs+ to lose you will lose weight much more quickly than I on hCG.

Novermber 2, 2012

Today is R5P2D41 (round 5, phase 2, Day 41) which is technically my LDW (last day weight) for the hCG Diet with HCG Injections. I’m a comfy size 2. I seriously NEVER thought I’d see the day I was this small again- I’d written that off forever a few years, especially after being pregnant and giving birth. But crazier things have happened I guess. I’m thankful just about every day to have so much of my health back, in part due to this weightloss journey.

I had a huge 2lb weight loss on the scale this morning putting me at 115.6 lbs (I’m just over 5′ remember? S’all good). BUT as I realized later, I was coming down with a nasty cold and I believe the large drop was just dehydration, as my weight went right back up to 117.6 lbs the following day. So I did end up making my adjusted LDW weight 117.6lbs.

While I’m not happy to be coming down with son’s cold, I’m glad that I managed to stay well till the end of my round. For any of those of you who’ve experienced it, being sick while on the protocol is neither fun nor advisable. Usually if you continue to stay on the protocol while sick, you’ll find that you stay sick a lot longer AND you don’t lose as much weight. So it’s just bad on all accounts.

If I get really sick while on hCG I would get off the hCG Injections and start again later once I was better. Yes, it can suck to have to put a pause on losing weight, but I have found that I have much better long term weight loss results when I stick to logic and leave my feelings out of it (ie. I want to hurry up and lose all this weight now! Today!) Being more methodical about it has proved to create more lasting results for my body.

Because I was feeling so yucky yesterday (sore throat, very bad headache, etc) I found myself eating more than usual- it just felt like my body needed it. I tried to be smart about the extra calories though (no momemts of madness where I run through Mcdonalds or anything) and ate extra 0% fage greek yogurt and extra meat protein. I’m guessing my calorie count for yesterdays’ VLCD was probably more like 800-900 calories.

I didn’t take any before and after measurements from this particular round- just felt lazy I guess! But I am so much smaller from the start to end of this round. Some of the pants that were quite snug when I started Round 5 using human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) shots are now literally almost falling off they are so big in the waist, hips and thighs.

I did take many measurements of course before and throughout my hCG Diet journey, and I highly recommend measuring many different places on your body that you might not naturally think of. That’s because I found I lost inches in many places I would have just skipped over entirely had I not seen someone else on youtube suggest it. My neck for instance. From the start of the hCG Diet until now I’ve actually had my neck circumference drop 1.25 inches! Who knew? It was 13” around at the start at 172lbs and now it’s 11.75” at 115lbs.

Now that I am a comfy size 2, I found myself a pair of $1.99 Calvin Klein jeans in a size 2 at the thriftstore- yay me! Great find.

That’s all for my update today- happy losing hCGer’s!

November 16, 2012

FINAL BODY FAT TESTING RESULTS FROM ROUND 5 OF HCG

A few days after the end of Round 5 of HCG Injections, I went for hydrostatic body fat testing once again. That day I was 118.8 lbs (about 1.2 lbs over my ldw), and my hydro results were as follows: 17.9% bodyfat, 21.3 lbs fat. Woot woot! Better results than I would ever have expected.

Adjusted LDW

While I found myself at 115.6 lbs on the day of my LDW (last day weight) of the diet, it so happened that this was a special 1 day dip into the 115 territory, before my weight went right back up to 117.6 lbs the next day and stayed there. In retrospect, I had come down with a nasty cold, taken some aspirin, didn’t eat much all evening, and was dehydrated which lead to that 115 number the following day. So it wasn’t a real number to go by, although it was fun to see such a small number on the scale, if only for a day. So my adjusted LDW is 117.6 lbs.

Current Weight in P3

As of now, I’m 123.2 lbs, a couple weeks into P3. I’ve been eating super clean and I’m pretty sure that most of that weight is muscle and glycogen stores. Since I wasn’t eating any fruit on Phase 2, that made the diet extremely low carb and now that I’m eating a little more carbs, my muscles are filling back up with water.

Navigating Successfully through P3 on the hCG Diet

After my 3rd round of this protocol I had this same experience where my weight seemed to want to fly up several pounds right away, and at that time, I kept fighting it by doing steak days and fast days, etc. Of course my weight would temporarily drop from these days, but then shoot right back up. I had started going to Crossfit by then, and at one point my wise husband told me that maybe I should just trust my body- I was eating clean and working out, probably my body was just gaining muscle. After that I tried to relax a little instead of forcing my body to stay at one number on the scale so much. A few months later when I went to have my body fat tested I found that my husband was right- out of a whopping 7.5 lbs gained during 3 months after the 3rd round of the protocol, 7 lbs of it was actually muscle! Only a miniscule half pound was fat.

Since I experienced this back then, when I found my weight doing the same thing this time after Round 5 I decided to work with it and not try so hard to force it to stay at 117 lbs. I knew I had lost about 5 lbs of muscle (turns out I didn’t actually lose 5 lbs of MUSCLE as in the actual muscle fibers- a 2 week follow up hydrostatic body fat test showed I had already re-gained almost ALL of that “muscle”- it must just be glyocen stores as there’s no way that I could really gain 4 pounds of solid muscle in just 2 weeks, working out just 3 times), so I was expecting that my body was just wanting to gather this back quickly, which again is what proved to be the case.

I’ve also had some other crazy factors to consider- having a cold and TOM (time of month) approaching.

Thanks for reading you guys!

My entire hCG Diet journey has occurred with the use of hCG Injections only.

November 22, 2012

This is one blog post where you really MUST watch the video. I can’t write for you here how big my big pants are on me just after 1 round of hCG. The pants I’m wearing were snug both in the hips, thighs, and waist right before I started Round 5 of human chorionic gonadotropin at 132.5 lbs. The day I have these pants on in the video I’m about 124 lbs and you can see they are pretty much falling off they’re so big. There’s at least 3 inches of space in both the thigh and waist area. This is a good example to show that we don’t want to shoot just for weight loss but rather size loss. That’s why this protocol is so great, because you are actually losing a high percentage of actual FAT on the diet. You can see my before and after weight loss journey photos here.

I just want you guys to see how much can be accomplished with this weight loss protocol in just one round of 40 days (I used HCG Injections myself) even if you are technically not “overweight” or already what you might consider “small.” Ie. you look normal to everyone, but still have fat on your body you could safely and healthfully lose.

Sometimes we think of losing weight as being more difficult the smaller we get, but that has not been my experience on this weight loss protocol this round. I did not expect to lose as much fat as I did- almost a full 10lbs of actual fat this time in fact.

December 4, 2012

I apologize, this particular blog post is sorely late- for the record, the date of this video is actually December 3, 2012, close to 2 months old. But I really want to have my whole HCG Diet story on my blog for any small benefit others may get from it.

I had a follow up hydrostatic body fat test about 1 month after the end of R5 on the protocol. I wasn’t sure that my LIW which was 117.6 was something that I could really stabilize or maintain- as it turns out I did end up reaching 124.4 lbs before my weight became more stable, and at that time my hydrostatic bodyfat test said that I was 18.8% bodyfat fat, with 101.2 lbs of lean mass, and 23.2 lbs of fat, 124.4 lbs total.

In the first two weeks of Phase 3 (p3) I gained 7 lbs. It’s nice to know that out of this 7 lbs, 5 lbs was muscle and/or glycogen stores and just 2 lbs was fat. Not that a 2lb fat gain is great, but I think I probably ate too much right out of the gate in P3 (I tend to get carried away sometimes) and also, I wasn’t sure if 17.9% bodyfat would be easy for me to maintain long term or not. So I’m currently 18.8% bodyfat which is still fantastic. Honestly pretty much anything sub-20% bodyfat is just icing on the cake.

I’ve been in the 124 territory for about 2 weeks, so I feel like it’s fairly stable at this point (lets hope!).

Weight doesn’t fly up on the scale for most once P3 of HCG Injections comes, but for me I kind of knew it would at least to some extent, mostly because since I usually don’t eat the fruits on P2, that makes the diet extremely low carb and I knew my glycogen stores in my muscles would be depleted- as soon as P3 comes and there is an increase in calories and a small amount of carbs in vegetables, nuts and dairy, that glycogen would come back, and that weighs something. So I know that 5 lbs of muscle I gained in 2 weeks isn’t just actual muscle fibers- I just don’t think that would be possible- but I do think it makes sense that it could be a large percentage glycogen.

January 2, 2013

SYMPTOMS OF LOW THYROID AND ADRENAL FATIGUE

Well, it’s officially two months since the end of Round 5 of HCG Injections on the HCG Diet for me. I’m in Phase 4 (P4)- which is basically just normal, healthy, everyday eating.

I want to discuss my own personal health today because I think it could help others reading it to possibly recognize if they have any hidden health issues themselves. Sometimes we get used to what we might think of as certain little “quirks” to ourselves, that in actuality, are simply health symptoms, that if addressed, could let us lead a happier more full life.

If you have some of the symptoms that I mention below, but your doctor says your thyroid lab tests are normal, please don’t leave it at that. I have discovered many many people go untreated because they really DO have thyroid or adrenal issues- the standard tests that are done are woefully inadequate- the following are some resources to research this important topic. In fact, my own lab tests came back “normal” for a long time, until my condition finally got SO bad that it finally did show up the generic testing- but you shouldn’t have to wait several years to get treated as I did. The following are what I consider to be the best information out there on hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia.

Dr. Mercola’s Interview with Dr. Lowe regarding Low Thyroid

Stop the Thyroid Madness Website- a wealth of information on thyroid and adrenal fatigue and all the things “they” never tell you.

Natural Thyroid Solutions – check the latest updates and news section and Q&A

I have been dealing with some chronic health issues for several years now and went untreated for most of it because I didn’t know what was wrong with me for many years (this was not for lack of diligent searching for a cause). But I’ve been pretty much symptom free and off all thyroid medication and adrenal support for over 9 months this past year. I never actually expected to be off my thyroid meds as usually the condition I have (hashimoto’s) and the resulting low or hypothyroid condition isn’t curable.

HOW I GOT OFF THYROID MEDICATION

My improved health happened over a number of months as I lost weight with this weight loss protocol, attended Crossfit and got more fit, completely eliminated gluten 100% from my diet, and saw a holistic “dude” (he’s not actually a “doc”) who helped me to address some chronic infections he discovered through muscle testing and treated with homeopathy and rife machine frequencies (google that one).

The only reason I even considered getting off my thyroid medication at all was because I was suddenly feeling very sick and yucky, in a way I’d never felt before, and the holistic guy I was seeing confirmed that my body was functioning very well on it’s own and that I no longer needed the thyroid meds technically. It made me very nervous to wean off it as I visualized what I used to feel like pre-medication, but as soon as I did, I felt much better, and spent the next 9 months living like a normal person- having normal energy, working out, all without medication, which was shocking to me considering how I used to feel without my thyroid medication (couldn’t work secularly, had to sleep many hours each day, had chronic fatigue and some fibromyalgia symptoms- extreme pain in my feet after standing in my kitchen to cook a simple dinner, etc.). That entire 9 months of 2012 I spent most of it feeling great with great energy and none of my old symptoms.

THE 3 AMIGOS: STRESS – LOW THYROID – ADRENAL FATIGUE

But stress is a killer isn’t it? Or maybe we should say stress is a life-sucker. You’ve probably heard that adage “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” right? I have yet to see this happen in my case. My chronic health issues started at just 21 years of age, when autoimmune triggers were turned on in my body from different stressful situations in my life. Stress and difficulties in life have always seemed to wreak a havoc on my body that have permanently changed how my body operates. My husband and I both came to the realization recently that I have not been myself the past couple months. Back in September we lost our house to foreclosure and the process of that, along with the stress of finding a new home and moving our whole home ourselves with a small 2 year old in tow wasn’t exactly stress free. I got through the actual process very well and was pretty proud of myself- almost felt like a small version of a female super hero, but I believe my body is now experiencing the delayed stress response to that period of time. Along with the fact that I now work secularly again- something I haven’t done in years.

I didn’t notice it at first because the symptoms were a bit subtle and infrequent, but after considering the past couple months, we realized that many of my old familiar symptoms that I used to experience when untreated were there again.

Uncommon Reaction to Social Interaction

For anyone who doesn’t know, one symptom of low thyroid function, which I experience in full force when my condition is not being managed well, is the inability to handle social interaction and feel good still. Even though it’s what you might call a “good stress”, social interaction is a stress on the body. If you’re a normal person, you might spend some time with family or friends and come home feeling happy and refreshed at the good time you just had. Or even if you didn’t have a good time, you might come home kind of irritated, go to sleep and wake up and go about your normal business just fine the following day.

What happens to me specifically is that after hanging out with people, whether I had a good time or not, I will later become very depressed for seemingly no reason. It will last for a couple days, before the depression cloud lifts and I feel normal again. The depression is bad enough that it’s pretty debilitating and something that makes you want to avoid scenarios that cause that. I want to mention this because it’s one of those things that is very difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it and even harder for them to understand. If you are reading this and realize that you experience this, please consider that you may have some unresolved health issues, that if addressed, could enable you to enjoy people’s company again.

I haven’t experienced this in quite some time, but lately noticed it was starting to happen again.

Uncommon Reaction to Physical Activity

Another symptom of low thyroid and or adrenal fatigue that I would experience is the same resulting depression after taking a walk on concrete for any length of time. I haven’t put my finger on it completely yet, but I have discovered a slow walk on the sidewalk for a half hour or more will cause me to feel very bad later- debilitating fatigue and depression. This seems especially silly to me now considering I still attend Crossfit 3-4 times a week, for an hour each time where I sweat like nobody’s business and my whole body get’s worked super hard, and I feel good after these sessions, yet a slow walk will cause me fatigue later. It’s a strange anomaly that I still don’t understand why it happens, but it does. Years ago before being treated this symptom was bad enough that any physical activity caused the chronic fatigue and depression reaction, no matter what it was. There could even be an endorphin rush initially, but within a matter of a couple hours, this dark cloud of depression would descend. We are not talking a mild case of the blues- we are talking an I-don’t-know-how-I-can-go-on-living hopeless kind of feeling.

More Cold Than Those Around You

Thirdly, I’ve been extremely cold again lately, and I don’t live in a snow state. I’ve been so cold that I’ve actually found myself googling “warmest coat” and considering specialized jacket options that only researchers in the antarctic usually wear because I can’t seem to find a coat that keeps me warm enough to enjoy the outdoors this winter.

There are many more symptoms that I won’t detail here today. These are the main ones that I’ve been experiencing again.

Treatment of Low Thyroid and Adrenal Fatigue

So what this means is that I’m trying myself back on a small dose of thyroid medication. I take Cytomel– also called T3 or active thyroid hormone. This is very different from what the majority of thyroid patients are put on by their doctors- most take T4 medication like Synthroid, Levoxyl, Levothroid or Unithroid. If you haven’t researched this yet, please look into the differences between T3 and T4 thyroid medications– it can mean the difference between feeling symptom free and feeling like crap.

I have yet to know if my current symptoms are mostly thyroid or mostly adrenal or a combination of both, or maybe it’s something entirely new or different. It’s a bit of a guessing game sometimes at this moment and takes time to figure out. I have experimented with taking small doses of cortisol again too in the form of Isocort. The results are mixed. Sometimes I feel better, sometimes I feel worse, so I don’t know all the answers yet. The important thing though is to do something. If I do nothing, I definitely won’t figure it out. By trying different things I hope to find the solution and the right balance for best wellness again.

What I will tell you is that, even though I’m once again experiencing a blip in my health, between taking Cytomel thyroid medication for 2 years and then somehow recovering my health and not needing it for almost a year, I have spent the last 3 years of my life feeling REALLY GOODcompared to the previous 6-8 years before that. If you can get proper treatment, you CAN feel good again. Don’t give up on yourself and finding wellness. Make the above links in this post a start to your research on this.

February 22, 2013

Hello everyone!

So it’s February 21, 2013, and it’s been about 112 days since the end of my 5th round of HCG Injections – so almost 4 months now. And actually, my 2 year anniversary since I started my weight loss journey is tomorrow I think. I can’t believe it’s been that long.

I have been extremely stable in the 126-127 lb weight range for over 2 months now. I’m not eating low carb now- I’m eating very healthy but it definitely doesn’t classify as low carb. I just think that’s important to mention because sometimes I hear people claim that you have to eat low carb the rest of your life to maintain weightloss from the diet plan which is totally not true.

Every person’s body is different, and I don’t doubt that some individuals may need to eat low carb long term, but not everyone since I don’t have to. I get 3-4 hours of intense exercise a week, in the form of Crossfit, and I eat baked potatoes, rice, and rice milk, corn tortillas, refried beans (from the can), and fruit as carbs. Sometimes I even have 2 baked potatoes (with butter and full fat sour cream) in one day.

Some days I eat quite a bit of food, and some days I don’t feel as hungry and I eat far less. It has really varied, but overall, it seems to be working for me as my weight is extremely stable right now.

I am not counting calories, so I have no idea how many calories I’m taking in, but on the days I more, I’m positive my calorie range is somewhere between 2200-2700 I bet. I’m not a bird eater.

However, I do eat very healthy- even though it’s not low carb, I don’t eat any kind of refined sugar at all, and I’ve been 100% gluten free for 2 years now.

I like to make these updates now and then so that you can see the living proof of long term maintenance of a healthy body after Human Chorionic Gonadotropin is totally feasible, and not difficult.

Have a nice evening!

Rayzel

April 9, 2014

This is the first of a series of quarterly updates now on how life is going in maintenance mode since ending my last round 16 months ago (actually I just realized it was 17 months- sorry guys- some of these posts I’m working on for 2 months at a time so the timeline gets skewed). Mainly because there is not enough information out there for AFTER hCG. You know, that decades long part of life? Seems kinda important given the time period it spans.

While I have maintained my weight loss, it’s not like every single day of the last 16 months I’ve been the exact same weight. So I’m hoping that perhaps by sharing my triumphs, my struggles, and how I work at keep things in balance without gaining large amounts of weight back and bringing things back to level on my own when needed, this might aid you in doing the same.

I’ve been pretty much between 123-125 lbs for the most part. A few highs and a few lows here and there.

So what I have been up to, aside from taking….

80 photos of asparagus

48 photos of yogurt

166 photos of spinach

92 pics of fennel

91 photos of lemons

114 photos of cucumber

and 168 photos of onions?

168 pics of ONIONS?? Yup, true story. For an up and coming gallery of P2 protocol foods! Now you’re thanking me.

I reached 15% bodyfat. Man oh man. I completed hCG 16 months ago at 17.9% bodyfat with 21.3 lbs of fat, and really my goal the majority of this past 16 months has simply been to maintain my level of fat but to gain additional muscle and get stronger at crossfit.

This was after a not so pleasant body fat test done on February 15th, showing a 1lb fat gain and 1lbs LOSS of Muscle – WHAT???

I sat down to analyze what went wrong. The 1lb fat gain was not such a big deal to me- it’s easy to overeat and the 1lb fat gain was over a period of 4 months since my previous body fat test in October 2013 – that’s easily fixable and understandable. What didn’t make sense was the muscle loss. There should have been a muscle increase with 4 additional months of crossfit, a couple which were 4 days a week, and not only did it stay the same, it dropped.

I narrowed down the 3 things I felt may be contributing to this odd outcome:

I was still on a low dose of thyroid medication and realized I probably no longer needed it.

I had gotten lazy about eating protein after workouts – sometimes not getting around to eating a meal till 2-3 hours after crossfit, on a regular basis.

Was fasting intermittently about 1x a week. Once I bumped up my crossfit to 4 days a week I thought perhaps it was too much for me?

I got off my thyroid medication (that day in fact). Since the medication I took was active thyroid hormone, T3, also called cytomel, it is a known muscle stripper if taken in excess of what the body needs and can definitely cause muscle loss. I had other indicators that I no longer needed the additional thyroid hormone, but I had been nervous to actually get off of it. In fact, I had tried several times in the past several months, but always got nervous that my weight would go up so I would resume taking it. This time, I felt this was enough proof that I really didn’t need it anymore and that now it was actually making things worse for my body, not better.

Warning! I was only on a tiny dose so it was okay for me to get off overnight like this. Had I been on a higher dose I would have had to wean off slowly over time. Obviously, most people do this with the aid of a doctor. I have come to find for myself that dosing by symptoms has been better for me, and I got my t3 from Mexico.

I decided to be more responsible about eating soon after my workout – the last 6 weeks I have made sure to come home and cook up some chicken or ground beef right away and eat it, along with either kale salad or some clementines.

I only fasted twice in the past 6 weeks. However, I actually AM still kind of fasting on a regular basis in the sense that I still don’t eat breakfast and I still often don’t eat before 2pm. But as far as an actual all day fast where I don’t eat until dinner, which I was doing about 1 day a week prior, I am rarely doing at the moment. Since I’m crossfitting 4 days a week and then of course on recovery days I feel the need for some fuel, I’m finding there just aren’t as many good opportunities to fast – a day where I’m recovered from a workout and not working out that day are few and far between. So I made that adjustment to fast less often.

These changes obviously were the right choice for me since I dropped an entire almost 5lbs of fat in the last six weeks and had a gain of 2lbs of muscle. VERY PLEASED.

The only other thing that changed in the past 6 weeks between these two tests is I had some follow-up lyme disease treatment, and it’s possible that it may have allowed my body to do better.

First I want to make it clear that I have NO testing to prove I have lyme disease. The testing for this disease is notoriously poor with frequent false negatives. I came to this conclusion myself after researching the various symptoms and seeing my health decline in a similar fashion over the past 10 years. I strongly feel that’s what I’ve had all this time. Back in November, I spent a whole month out of town getting an alternative lyme disease treatment involving cold laser and rife frequencies. I can only tell you I came home a changed person. I’ve been so much better since then that it’s like night and day. But in the last month, I had started to feel like I might be regressing just a tad. I went in for some follow-up and there did seem to be indication through the muscle testing that I did have some residual lyme going on in the “hatch stage” of the lyme organisms’ life cycle, which I’ve been getting treated for the last 4 weeks. Once again, I feel improvement in my symptoms. Whether or not this contributed to such a great body fat test this time around I don’t know. I’m including it because it’s another “different” thing that was going on during this time.

Dairy free Nut free Gluten free

What I do eat (examples further down): Veggies Meat Occasional grain- usually white rice (when I eat Thai- yum) and organic corn (tortillas and popcorn mostly) Fruit

Eating more raw veggies.

I am eating whole heads of kale for a salad- stuff like that. Warning though! This is not something you can just jump into- you need to gradually increase raw veggies you’ll experience some major painful indigestion (don’t ask me how I know).

Getting to Crossfit 4 times a week.

I have been a solid 2-3 time a week crossfit gal for 2 years, but as I’ve gotten stronger and my body has changed I have found I can easily handle going more often without too much soreness. That being the case, I got in a pretty solid 4 day a week crossfit routine this month- it just feels good and really is something that keeps me grounded.

Occasionally I buy packages of dried fruit- the unsulphured kind- dried mango is a favorite of mine- however I can only do this now and then because invariably I eat way too much it in one sitting and have this sensation that my stomach is fully of a bunch of gummy stuff. So yes, I do not have completed control over something so sweet at this time, so most of the time, I simply don’t buy it.

I’m a total wuss when it comes to confrontation- no need to explain the details, but in short our landlady got very confrontational with me over a misunderstanding and it was hard for me- I’m a sensitive soul- always have been and I’ve learned to except it. Since I live a pretty sheltered life- husband treats me great, I work from home so I don’t frequently come into contact with rude strangers etc, it’s rare for me. I was an emotional mess- the kind where you wander around the house crying and aimlessly cleaning up at the same time while trying to process how you feel. It was challenging for 2 reasons- first, the fact that I could turn to food to comfort myself, which would have been super bad timing for my body and my emotional health as I had just resolved that day to do some super clean eating for the next week, and 2ndly it happened about an hour before I was supposed to leave for crossfit. I contemplated not going- I felt horrible and really didn’t want to leave and go work out. I wanted to sit with my pillow and watch tv with a big bowl of popcorn and one or two P3 smoothies to top it off.

I triumphed on both accounts in the end- my son and I both headed to crossfit (he has his own kids crossfit class once a week as well now and I hated to disappoint him). I told myself I should at least get myself there and I could always choose to not work out once I was there. I worked out. It felt good. Didn’t take the sadness away but what’s important is that I took care of myself instead of harming myself because of being hurt by someone else. I stuck to my commitment to eating clean that day as well- now tears in popcorn bowls that day.

As you can see, I’ve been to crossfit 4 days a week steadily most of the past 3 months. And it’s felt great!! Many new accomplishments and PR’s during this time.

Here’s a fairly large meal I had about 4:30pm after coming home from crossfit around 2pm. It’s leftover pasture raised chicken, sweet potatoes, and hummus for the chicken, with several pats of butter strategically placed all over the dish. I was full when I finished it.

I thought it would be fun to record my weight before and right after this meal. Just because we ladies take scale weight a little too much to heart sometimes and forget how much our food weighs when we eat it.

And this is literally at 4:52pm, less than half an hour later after I finished that meal:

Amazing huh! 2lbs worth of food was in that plate.

Here’s some more examples of meals and snacks I eat:

Read/Watch my own hCG Diet Journey As It Unfolded:

Want Support? Motivation?

29,000+ hCGers Join

hcgChica's Email Tribe

Yup, I want this!

Source: https://hcgchica.com/hcgchicas-hcg-diet-journal-round-5/

0 notes

neilmillerne · 6 years

Text

How to Start Powerlifting as a Female: Staci’s Story

Ladies, meet your new hero.

Men, prepare to be humbled.

My friend Staci, or Spezzy as she’s known around the Nerd Fitness community, has one of the best transformations I’ve ever seen:

Working a sedentary desk job, Staci slowly packed on weight and ate like a typical unhealthy American. She also smoked a pack of cigarettes a day.

She tried to get in shape doing what many people start with: she ran a lot and essentially starved herself. She dropped to an incredibly low and unhealthy weight and developed an eating disorder.

She fell in love with barbell strength training and started lifting HEAVY weights.

She’s now in the best shape of her life, healthier and happier than ever before, regularly competing in powerlifting meets and deadlifting 430+ pounds!

Now in 2019, her journey continues to inspire MILLIONS around the world.

For the women out there who are scared about “getting too bulky when lifting weights,” this article is for you.

If you are intrigued about powerlifting and don’t know where to begin, this article is for you.

If you’re curious what happens to a gal who packs on 40+ lbs of muscle and starts lifting heavy weights, this article is for you.

Staci has transformed inside and out over the past 8+ years, and I want this story to inspire you to go pick up a barbell the next time you’re in a gym. It’s been a privilege to watch her journey day in and day out for those 8 years: Staci actually joined Team Nerd Fitness in a full-time capacity in 2012!

In fact, she’s now our lead female trainer in our 1-on-1 online NF Coaching Program!

Without further ado, here’s an interview/8-year-retrospective/how-to juggernaut of an article on my hero and yours, Staci Ardison!

Staci’s Origin Story: 170 Pounds and Unhappy

This is a picture of Staci back in 2009 before she decided to make some changes in her life.

Starting around age 16, she put on weight relatively steadily through high school, college, and beyond, when she reached her peak at 170 pounds in 2009 at the age of 25.

I asked her what a normal day was like before she tried to fix her health:

I’d get up at 7, go to work, have a Slim Fast shake because I never had time for breakfast. I wasn’t a big snacker but I ate a lot for my meals; I’d typically go out to eat for lunch every day and get a sub or something from D’Angelo’s or Subway, and it was never the 6″ one, it was the big one. And chips. Lots of chips. Or french fries. Getting home I’d either go out to eat with friends or plop in front of the TV playing video games for hours.

My favorite meal was tacos and nachos. I just asked my old roommate what I used to eat because I didn’t remember, and she said “You used to sit in front of the TV with a big plate of meat and cheese and go ‘Hm, I guess I should have some chips with this.'” On many occasions, we’d order pizza or takeout around 11PM too. On top of all of that, I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day!

And that’s when her doctor told her that she had high cholesterol and needed to lose some weight if she wanted to live a long healthy life.

Except that she wasn’t really sure how to lose weight, so she did what most people do when they want to lose weight:

Eat way less and run way more.

She joined a gym and started doing the elliptical as much as possible (“because that’s what you do when you want to get skinny, right?”).

STACI: At first I was only able to make it 10 minutes, but eventually got up to about an hour at a time on the elliptical.

I always thought that being super skinny would make me happy, like it was the one missing piece of my life. Everything would just magically be solved if I could just be skinny.

I bought countless exercise machines for my apartment, which all ended up sitting in the corner gathering dust. I bought DDR thinking that if I could exercise in a video game, that would do it. It didn’t.

I even tried “Sweatin to the Oldies” (which, for the record, everyone should do, because it at least gets you laughing and moving). Nothing stuck.

Until I was finally ready. I can’t say what it was, but I just got up one day and said: “OK, I’m going to do this now.” I didn’t set a date ahead of time, I just woke up knowing it was time.

Along with the elliptical workouts, I joined Weight Watchers. But as I started to feel the effects of the weight loss, I got obsessed. I’d weigh myself every day; I got a scale that measured every ounce so I’d know exactly what I lost. How my day went was always based on the number that was on the scale. If I had lost weight, it was a good day. If I had gained, I was worthless and didn’t deserve to have a good day, and had to do a second elliptical session to punish myself.

Following this unhealthy plan, Staci went from 170 pounds all the way down to 110 pounds over the course of a year. And then she started to open her eyes…

STACI: I did lose the weight that I needed to lose, but instead of “finding myself” and becoming comfortable in my own skin, I ended up being LESS comfortable. Everything I did was based on appearance. I couldn’t do certain things because either my body wasn’t “ready” or I was afraid I’d gain an OUNCE back.

I started looking in the mirror and seeing 30 things that needed to change; I developed severe body dysmorphic disorder. When the elliptical and calorie restriction stopped working, I became bulimic; I was just so desperate to be thin. I was tired all the time, I had no energy to do anything even when I was sleeping 10 hours a night. The bags under my eyes were insane. I simply wasn’t getting the nutrients I needed.

It was at this point that I was dating a bodybuilder who informed me I was doing it all wrong. This got the idea in my head that there was a better way, and I started to research nutrition and strength workouts. I got a set of 5lb dumbbells and a Jillian Michaels DVD and tried doing pushups.

I remember struggling to do chest presses with the 5lb dumbbells. And I wouldn’t use weights at the gym because I was so scared of looking like a fool in front of all of the guys on the weight floor. Seriously terrified.

As I found more info on nutrition, I started questioning Weight Watchers, and finally stopped going after I asked a question on how something was healthy and he pulled the line, “we’re not trying to get healthy here, we’re just trying to lose a little weight”[1]. I started doing more research and began my transition to eating more Paleo in April or May 2010. I upped my calorie intake to around 1,500 a day and immediately started to feel better.

Staci starts weight training, goes full Paleo, finds Nerd Fitness

On June 1st, 2010, Staci’s work office opened up a gym with free weights, and she started training.

Because she was working out with coworkers and friends rather than random strangers, she felt comfortable giving strength training a try; she felt okay asking coworkers questions on different exercises and less self-conscious that she was doing everything wrong.

Over the next few months, from June until late August, she continued to educate herself on eating better and getting stronger:

STACI: I finished the Paleo transition in August or September, and stopped counting calories, which was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life; it’s a freedom I can’t even describe. I just ate when I was hungry. I gained weight, but I stayed the same size clothes, so what the scale said started to matter less and less. I went from 110 pounds at my lowest to around 130 pounds (both pictured above) and felt GREAT about it. My scale broke in May of that year, so I threw it away and only weigh myself probably once a month these days out of pure curiosity.

It was right around this time on her search for Paleo diet information that she stumbled across Nerd Fitness and saw an article about the Legend of Zelda (her favorite video game series too). She joined our community and continued to put her focus on strength training, and made sure she ate enough to fuel her workouts. She also sought out professional help for her eating disorder and body dysmorphic disorder.

After tons of encouragement from members of the Nerd Fitness community (including from Jon aka “KnightWatch,” now another NF coach) Staci began barbell training:

Deadlift

Squat

Overhead press

Bench press

And just focused on getting really strong with those movements!

For Staci, that first barbell encounter was electric: “When I say that the second I touched a barbell I fell in love, I’m not joking. People say to me, “Oh, it’s not healthy to lift that much….” Lifting to me is like going and playing basketball to someone else. It’s a hobby and a passion. I’m not doing it because I have to, I’m doing it because I want to. I’m simply happier on days that I deadlift.”

And that’s how Staci jumped headfirst into the world of powerlifting.

Over the following six months, she strength trained like her life depended on it, keeping track of her gains and making sure she ate enough to continue getting stronger. She learned the movements, took tips from others, and constantly checked in with the Nerd Fitness Community.

Here are her weight training stats for those first six months:

She raised her deadlift from 135 pounds to 315 pounds, added 50 pounds to her overhead press and 50 pounds to her bench press.

You’re probably wondering what happens to a woman’s figure when she goes through this transformation and puts on even more weight. Allow me to show you!

Download our comprehensive guide STRENGTH TRAINING 101!

Everything you need to know about getting strong.

Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training.

How to find the right gym and train properly in one.

I identify as a:

Woman

Man

Staci Builds Muscle and Loses Fat

Believe it or not, Staci is 11 pounds heavier (142 pounds) in the picture on the right (May 2011) compared to the picture on the left (131 pounds, October 2010).

So what the hell happened?

How the heck does she look like she weighs less even though she weighs more?

She packed on muscle while getting rid of fat.

Another 2 years go by and Staci gained yet ANOTHER 8 pounds.

(AUDIBLE GASP)

Clearly now she must have gotten too “bulky,” right?

You’re probably wondering, “Why is she getting leaner but somehow also gaining weight?”

The answer is simple:

Magic.

Okay, maybe not magic. It’s time to bust the worst and most pervasive of the myths relating to women and lifting.

YOU DON’T GET BULKY LIFTING WEIGHTS:

When you strength train with very heavy weights for low numbers of repetitions, you build incredibly DENSE, tight muscle. If you are eating at a caloric deficit, you are keeping the muscle you have and burning the fat on top of the muscle.

So how did Staci gain weight, then? BECAUSE SHE WAS TRYING TO. On top of super heavy strength training, Staci was eating 3,000-4,000+ calories per day (all healthy calories, mind you) to put on the extra weight.

YES, when you lift weights, your body shape WILL change. When you work out and lift, you’ll develop a body that looks more like an athlete – which may not be the super skinny Kate Moss look, but it’s a naturally healthy look.

Which brings me back to Staci.

Although she was training in CrossFit for 2+ years (you can read about our thoughts on CrossFit here), after hitting a goal of competing at Regionals in 2012, she decided that she just LOVED lifting heavy, and switched to training on her own, focusing mainly on strength, with some fun conditioning like swimming mixed in here and there.

For the next four years, Staci continued to pick up very heavy weights, eat more calories than most men, and really focus on getting stronger.

In those four years, Staci put on about another 10 pounds.

Surely by NOW she would get too “bulky,” right?

Surely this is when the whole “women who lift weights get bulky” myth gets proven correct…right?

Hmmmm……nope!

Staci’s Training in 2019

Okay so here we are another 5 years later! What is Staci doing these days?

Did she:

A) Did she become a yoga fanatic?

B) Did she keep powerlifting?

C) Did she fall in love with gymnastics?

D) All of the above?

Spoiler alert: all of the above. Duh.

Building a solid foundation of functional strength allowed Staci to work on other skills and pick them up quickly.

I asked Staci what her overall goals are these days:

My overall goal, sport-specific aside, is to be able to do whatever I want to do whenever I want to, without warning, without my body holding me back. And by that I mean if a friend calls me tomorrow and says, “I found a secret treehouse in the middle of the woods, but we need to hike a gigantic mountain and bike 50 miles to get there,” I want to be able to say “I’m in” without hesitation. So I always want to push my body’s limits. Plus, it’s fun!

I really enjoy competing sometimes, but my main goal isn’t to be the best at one sport – I have too many goals I’m working towards!

And rather than tell you about Staci, I’d rather share some recent training videos from her exploding Instagram page:

5 strict muscle ups in a row? No problem:

A post shared by Staci Ardison (@staciardison) on Dec 29, 2017 at 10:21am PST

Deadlifting 325lbs for 8 reps? No big deal:

A post shared by Staci Ardison (@staciardison) on Dec 28, 2017 at 5:44pm PST

Pull ups on a rope? Sure, why not:

A post shared by Staci Ardison (@staciardison) on Dec 27, 2017 at 10:41am PST

Crazy yoga poses with her adorable dog Madi? But of course:

A post shared by Staci Ardison (@staciardison) on Oct 25, 2017 at 6:34pm PDT

Handstand practice for funsies? Hell yeah:

A post shared by Staci Ardison (@staciardison) on Oct 5, 2017 at 5:40pm PDT

Making a 405lb deadlift look super easy? Yup:

A post shared by Staci Ardison (@staciardison) on Sep 21, 2017 at 8:42am PDT

3 sets of 12 reps at 200lbs, no problem:

A post shared by Staci Ardison (@staciardison) on Dec 5, 2017 at 5:42pm PST

HOW STACI IS ABLE TO DO ALL OF THESE THINGS:

Staci can do all of the above because she built a foundation of functional strength.

She got really strong at big movements like the squat and deadlift, and bodyweight movements like push-ups and pull-ups. She cut her body fat percentage so she wasn’t carrying around excess weight. She taught her body that being strong feels good, and learned that being strong makes her happy.

She also did a few other key things for each of these activities:

She slowwwwwly progressed with each exercise, and had a strong foundation to start with!

She followed very specific progressions when it comes to gymnastic rings.

She followed a progression when it comes to handstands.

She had a yoga routine to follow (we have a whole course starring Staci with fun yoga routines).

She also had help! Although she learned a lot on her own, Staci over the past 7 years has worked with different coaches and trainers to learn specific skills or improve her ability in certain movements or lifts, as well as help her with proper programming and periodization. After all, a coach can be a game changer and having somebody who can check your form and offer guidance is like turning on cheat codes for strength gains.

So that’s where she’s at now, but there’s a big question I haven’t answered yet: Just WHAT was she eating to fuel these workouts? After all, we know from Nerd Fitness that nutrition is 90% of the battle when it comes to strength gain and/or weight loss!

So here is her exact nutritional strategy!

Staci’s Exact Nutritional Strategy

Oh what’s that? You want to know EXACTLY how Staci eats too? Of course you do, you’re reading Nerd Fitness and you want all the nerdy specifics you can get your hands on.

Let’s start by taking a look at what Staci eat through the first few years of her transformation.

Here’s an exact week for her back in mid-2012:

Every Sunday (or whatever works, but usually it’s Sunday) I cook a few pounds of chicken. I then portion it out and keep them in Ziploc bags. If I don’t have time for that, you can get all-natural precooked sausage (both chicken and pork) that works just as well as a “bring to work” meat.

5AM pre-workout: (first thing in the morning): protein shake. (nothing special). It’s not Paleo, and I love every sip of it. Then I go and work out. If I go to the gym with a full stomach, I will not leave with a full stomach. 🙂

7:30AM on my way to work: apple or pear.

9:30AM sweet potato with cinnamon. I keep them at work, and cut them up, throw it in the microwave for 5 minutes with cinnamon. Comes out amazing.

Another protein shake somewhere in here between breakfast and lunch.

12PM lunch: two of the bags of chicken I precooked and a bag of the Steamfresh vegetables. The entire bag is about 3.5 servings of vegetables. My favorite is broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots.

Lunch 2: spinach salad with shrimp, red peppers, green..

https://ift.tt/2GwMT3G

#How to Start Powerlifting as a Female: Staci’s Story

0 notes

albertcaldwellne · 6 years