Although I am not obese yet, I have to watch out for the foods and drinks that I select.

In order to make smart eating choices, you need to eat fresh foods. Of course you need to like the food you choose otherwise you can’t keep up with your new eating lifestyle. Dirty drinks like Slim-Fast does not motivate me. It makes me quit after the first zip.
The “tool” that I used to select my food is the USDA National Nutrient Database. This database has lists of foods sorted by nutrients.

Click on the USDA logo below to go to the nutrients list.

So I took the list that sorts food by Energy (Calories) and highlighted foods that I really like and are low in calories. I repeated this process with other lists, like the cholesterol list. Healthy items, that I have highlighted on both lists, are now topping my weekly grocery list. If I didn’t go through the nutrient list, I would have missed several delicious low calorie food items.

Another good site to use is: calorie-count. This site grades foods and provide nutrition facts. I have always been told that I should avoid food items where more than 30% of the total number of calories comes from fat.

This means that reduced fat Jif creamy peanut butter is not a healthy choice. Even when the label on the jar reads: reduced fat. Luckily this site provides me other brands that have healthier peanut butter. Be careful though, less fat does not necessarily mean less calories. Calories are only one component of selecting healthy foods.

Bad food choice: more than 30% of all calories is coming from fat.

Besides selecting healthy foods, I have a hard time to stay motivated to a healthy lifestyle but found a good support solution. On the Internet, there are several weight loss forums that show pictures from people before and after their weight loss. Many people look beautiful after their weight loss. Losing more than 20% of your starting weight makes you physically and mentally a different person. My compliments to those people with a significant weight loss. You are my motivator.

Here are 2 sites/forums that show before and after weight loss pictures. Take a look yourself, pretty awesome transformations you will see on these sites.

Do you have any tips or cool websites that can help people with their weight loss? Please let me know.

Disclaimer: I am not a weight loss expert and can not be held liable for the information in this posting. Please consult with your doctor before starting a weight loss program.

Omron HJ-112 Digital Premium Pedometer

Tanita BF681W Family Scale Plus Body Fat Monitor with Body Water

CalorieSmart – Handheld Electronic Calorie Counter (Silver)

I hope this blog post will inspire you to take similar action that I took this morning.

Christmas day is over and I hope you had a great Christmas celebration. In my blog post yesterday, I talked about my “disappointing” gift but today, I want to stand still for the people that don’t have a luxury life. In other words: people that don’t have a roof over their head and a good daily meal to eat.

Yesterday afternoon, before I visited family to celebrate Christmas, my wife and I were watching television and saw families that were not able to celebrate Christmas in the way we are able to.

Their children did not get a nice Christmas meal and there were no presents under the Christmas tree. Of course, they showed the sad eyes of the children.

When I looked around in our living room, the floor was covered with presents and gift wrapping paper. My defective TomTom navigation system was laying in a corner, abandoned to be returned to the manufacturer.

While visiting my family later that afternoon, I also noticed the nice gifts everybody received. Notebooks, a video camera, a Nintendo game computer and even a Sony playstation 3 were given.

I was still thinking about the poor people that were shown on television and got a guilty feeling. When I feel guilty, I want to get ride of that feeling as quick as possible so when my wife and I went home, I told my wife that there is one more gift that I want to give. She was surprised and said: “Patrick, you have given me already so many nice gifts this morning.” I explained to her that this gift was not a gift to her but to a charitable organization. My wife was surprised that those words came out of my mouth but she understood and agreed immediately.

Because it was a late evening, I decided to make a donation early next morning.

Today, after I got up, I researched on the computer for the best charitable organization. There are so many charitable organizations to choose so I found a website that was able to help me out with the selection of a good organization.

The name of the website is: Charity Navigator with web address: charitynavigator.org

This website provides ratings for thousands of charitable organizations in the world. You can search for organizations in your state and by different categories.

I choose for a homeless shelter in Portland, Maine and made my contribution. I feel good about my donation and don’t feel guilty anymore. Life is all about sharing the good life.

Please check out: charitynavigator.org and make a donation to a charitable organization of your choice.

Let me know if you have guilty feeling towards people in need as well and how you handle these feelings.

A recipe doesn’t have to be complex. The same applies to blog writing, I believe. But I wonder if adding different flavors and I mean different article subjects will have the same positive affect on my blog traffic. This blog is less than a week old so I don’t expect to receive answers but feel free to give me your opinion.

Of all my favorite recipe sites, I prefer Allrecipes.com. This site shows the number of ratings of each recipe. If over 200 reviewers provide 4 stars for a recipe than the recipe has to be good and often those 4 star recipes are easy to make. I have tried many recipes and all most all of them are a success. Although I am a mess maker in the kitchen, I love to put delicious bites together. All good cooks are mess makers I have heard

Making good dishes and meals requires good kitchen equipment. My 2 best pieces of equipment is the KitchenAid 5-Quart Mixer and the Matfer Exopat Nonstick Baking Sheet. I believe there is no better mixer that has excellent power and the non stick baking sheet works awesome and is very cheap. The mat gives you better results and even the carmalized sugar in my bacon wrapped smokies recipe is easily to remove. Currently, you can get this mat for less than 10 bucks.

My top 5 favorite recipe sites are:

1. Allrecipes
2. Foodnetwork
3. Epicurios
4. Taste Of Home
5. Recipezaar

My favorite recipes that I have tested:

Bacon Wrapped Smokies
Greek Baklava
Mexican Baked Fish
Clam Chowder
Caramel Pecan Pie

Get my favorite kitchen equipment pieces at Amazon.com:

Kitchenaid Professional 5 Plus KV25GOXGR 5-Quart Bowl Lift Stand Mixer

Taylor Commercial Waterproof Digital Thermometer

Zojirushi BBCCX20 Home Bakery Supreme Bread Machine

For this reason, I am always listening to online radio sites that have multiple music channels or different types of music genres. I hate it to switch back and forth between different sites.

In addition, I have a requirement that the site needs to be easily accessible. Below you will find my top 10 online radio station list. I have to admit that Music Choice listed on number 10 can be difficult to navigate but it is an excellent radio/music site. If you find a better site to be put on the number 10 position, please let me know!

If you live outside America, please be aware that there might be some restrictions due to licensing policies. RadioGuide.FM has easy to access radio stations from many different countries. There are some excellent European radio stations.

Top 10 best online radio/music stations:

1. SHOUTcast

2. Pandora Radio

3. AccuRadio

4. Last.FM

5. AOL Radio featuring XM

6. Yahoo LAUNCHcast

7. Live365.com

8. Sky.FM

9. RadioGuide.FM (easy site to access radio stations from many different countries)

10. Music Choice (You must be a high-speed internet customer of Comcast, Cox, Road Runner/Time Warner, or Conway to login to the site. Look under Channels)

Apple iPod classic 120 GB Black (6th Generation)

In Car 4-in-1 Mp3 Wireless Modulator/fm Transmitter for Sd Card, USB Pen (Flash) Drive and Mp3 Players (Like Ipod). Black with Remote Control.

Motorola H700 Bluetooth Headset *Cosmic Blue/Silver*

Assessing myself, I need the following ingredients for success:

• Good tools;
• Learn the skills needed for each tool and repairs;
• Patience;
• Just do it attitude

Getting good tools is easy. I read the reviews on Amazon.com and buy the tools that everybody raves about. For me, this means an average user review rating of 4 stars or higher.

Within a few days, the tools arrive at my house. I don’t even have to get out of my house. Awesome, especially when the Christmas gift shopping rush is on.
With excitement, I open the delivered boxes and take out the tools. I look at the tools with pride, flip them around a few times and wonder out loud: “How the hell, do I use this tool?”

One of these tools that I bought is a welding machine. Yes, I know now that it is not easy to weld two pieces of iron but one day you just have to do it…

In the past, I have bought many Do It Yourself (DIY) books but the books didn’t provide me all the tips and skills I needed. I need to see a tool in action and get tips and tricks on how to use a tool efficiently and most importantly how to use it safely.

Video instructions are my rescue. On sites like, Expert Village, YouTube and Google Video you can find many instructional videos. Below you will find an instructional welding video that I gave good reviews.

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Village Expert has thousands of instructional videos.

Unfortunately, the Expert Village video site does not give you the option to link to an embedded video on your blog so I am showing you an instructional video from Expert Village through YouTube.

So if you want to learn a new skill, search on the video sites for instructional lessons. Although watching a joke or music clip is nice once and awhile. Your time is better spent by learning a skill anyways.

My Top 5 Video Instruction Lesson Sites:

1. Expert Village
2. YouTube
3. Google Video
4. Blip.tv
5. Yahoo Video

People connect with other people through public messages, photos and video messages. For a lot of youngster these sites are their main communication tool to get in touch with friends and family. In fact, for a lot of youngster, this is the only way they communicate with their parents.

It is amazing how open people are and how freely people feel with publishing personal information on their social networking page.

People don’t realize that information found on their social networking page can be used against them.

Often they use a nickname so the real name is not displayed but when you read the public comments under many MySpace profile, you get a lot of information.

People leave comments with their phone number, when they are on vacation, what they hate and love and how they think about their employer.

Photos say more than words and can cause you a lot of trouble as well. When I hire a new employee, I google the candidate and she or he better look professionally on their website photos. Do I see your drunken face than I won’t hire you.

To demonstrate how easy it is for people to track information on site like MySpace, please type or copy and paste the following line in a Google search bar:

“I hate working at” site:profile.myspace.com

You have to add quotes around: I hate working at so these keywords stay grouped together. Of course you can add a company at the end for more specific searches but you get the point.

Even a search on a company name alone makes an interesting read. Type this into Google: “citizens bank” site:profile.myspace.com

The sky is the limit on the keywords that you can search on and in many cases; you will get more search results in Google than searching through a search box on a social networking website.

Removing information that is stored in the search engine database is very difficult and stays stored for many months. Google makes many copies of websites and calls this: cached websites.

Before you publish anything on the Internet: think twice, write once.

Please tell me what you think about the information that people are willing to share with the rest of the world.