I’ve started the SLIMQUICK Cleanse today, though I’m a couple hours behind schedule because I slept late, because I’m sick.

Can I just say that the Rise and Shine Liver Flush is going to kill me? OMG. My brain/stomach just doesn’t know how to handle the idea of “warm lemonade” and it was a struggle with my body to drink (and keep down) the warm water with lemon juice. Part of it is because I was queasy to begin with (yay sick!) but I had the same problem with the lemon flavored Theraflu... warm lemonade = ick.

So I’m having Breakfast now (blueberry smoothie) and took some starting measurements. They’re really depressing.

Weight: 157.6
Butt: 43 inches
Stomach (at largest part for me): 40 inches
Waist (actual): 33 inches
Hips: 38.5 inches

(oddly enough, my WHR seems to still be within “healthy range” haha)

The first caplets come before lunch.. I’ll be following the actual Cleanse diet pretty closely today (assuming I can find trout for dinner). Tomorrow I’ll let you know my thoughts on the caplets, and how today went. I’ll be posting scale weight (taken first thing in the morning, after I pee, before my shower, just like today) daily.

Wish me luck!

SLIMQUICK Cleanse series: Intro · Day 1 · Day 2 · Day 3 · Final Review

My whole life, I was pretty skinny.

As a child, my doctors would (mostly jokingly) ask my mother if she ever fed me; she replied with a stoic “Doctor, she eats more than me and her brother combined. Yes, I feed her”. I suppose the amount of running and jumping and falling and climbing I did factored into that, but the truth was I could eat all i wanted, and did. People would be amazed at how much I could eat, and ask me where all that food goes. My typical answer was “to my toes!” My nickname was Katie No-Butt Wagner. It was true. There was no meat on me, anywhere.

When I hit Jr. High and the joys of puberty, I became “curvy”. Still skinny, but with hips that could move a mountain. I’m Hispanic; I expected that. I wore a size 7 juniors jean which was too big for me because a 5 wouldn’t get past my hips. I wore the same pants until college.

In college, my metabolism was still a good friend of mine, but without marching band to keep me moving all the time, I gained a few pounds. No really, only a few. I was not a victim of the Freshman Fifteen; it was more like 5 pounds, max.

After I dropped out of the art school (that’s a whole other story for a different blog post), I got into kickboxing and other strenuous activities. I dropped those last few pounds and was wandering around in that elusive size 5 for a while. I was stoked; I looked good and was in my prime! Wheee. If only I had known those days were so short!

In the 2 years that I’ve been in Portland, I’ve gained a lot of weight. Granted, I probably needed to gain 5-10 pounds, and I did, and felt pretty good… but it didn’t stop there. I am the heaviest and biggest I’ve ever been, and I am not happy about it. I’m not “fat” persay, but having always been so thin, this is kind of a downer for me.

So, now I’m ready to do something. I chatted with the people at Jenny Craig but really, my problem isn’t portion control, so I don’t think that’s quite the right thing for me. My problem is that I eat bad foods and drink too much beer. Ah, beer. Portland has more microbreweries per capita than most places do.. anyway. I know that if I just start eating better foods, and working out more, I can lose the weight. I wanted something to help jumpstart me though.

I’d heard people raving about The Master Cleanse a long time ago, but it just stricks me as way too extreme and probably extremely unhealthy. I can’t imagine not eating for 10 days. And the salt water chug? No thanks.

Recently, on my plane ride back to Portland from a vacation to LA (where I ate horribly, because I was on vacation, sigh), I was reading a Glamour magazine and saw and advertisement for SLIMQUICK Cleanse; a 7 day cleanse option made specifically for women that helps with issues specific to women’s weigh loss. It’s a supplement that you take while still eating actual food, so it seems less drastic than other programs.

I did some research on my good old trusty friend Google, but I couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound like a sales pitch or fake reviews. But, I did find the Cleanse package and the followup SLIMQUICK Caplets for a damn good price, so I figured.. what the hell? I’d try to kill two birds with one stone.

So I bought them, and will be starting the SLIMQUICK regimen (including their recommended diet [as closely as possible, as I’m allergic to most fish] and excercise plan) on Thursday next week to see if I can drop some weight (I’d start tomorrow, but it’s my birthday tomorrow and damn it, what good is a birthday when you’re on a diet?!) (when I get paid, so I can actually afford to buy healthy foods) for Bird One, and I’m going to document my experience for Bird Two; that way, when the next girl that wants to drop some pounds Googles the product, they’ll hopefully find my saga that will be full of useful information. Yay!

Wish me luck!

SLIMQUICK Cleanse series: Intro · Day 1 · Day 2 · Day 3 · Final Review

disclaimer: comments will be monitored more than normal on these posts; I don’t need some sap coming along being rude, and I also don’t need a million weight loss spam comments on my blog. You know who you are… *dirty looks*. Trusted, registered members can post normally (when logged in) but all other comments will be in a queue for moderation.

In what has been dubbed “the dumbest move Twitter has ever made”, Twitter made a “small settings update” that turns out to not be so small after all, and has the Twitter community up in arms.

Their blog post doesn’t even hint at the gravity of the change. They took away people’s ability to choose what they saw. So really, they made things worse for everybody.

One of their reasons was that only 2% of their users were opting to view @replies to people that they weren’t following. I admit- most of the time I had the feature turned off. But I’m still mad that they took it, and here’s a few reasons why.

1: I did occasionally go in and turn on @replies to people I didn’t follow, because it was a good way to find new, interesting people. This is why the 2% that had it on did so, I assume. It was nice to be able to pick and choose when I saw those replies.

2: So, when the ability to choose was turned off, people started mangling their replies by starting them with other symbols before the @reply, which forced it on my FL. Ok.. so, by taking away my ability to turn off @replies to people I didn’t follow, I’m actually now BEING FORCED to see them because everybody is dodging the filter. Thanks, Twitter.

3: I hate being given the ability to choose, then have it taken away because “big brother knows what’s best for you.” Yeah. Bite me.

So Twitter has now “reversed the settings change”, except for the part where they only show up if they’re not actually replies. O…k… question! How many of those @replies are not replies? Doesn’t that take away the whole “reply” part of it? Isn’t it then a “mention” which Twitter just recently added that confuses a lot of people? Oh wait. That’s the best part about this whole thing. Apparently Twitter took it off because “it was confusing”.

The whole thing is dumb. Every day I find myself wishing more and more that Google had bought Twitter instead of Jaiku. Twitter shot themselves in the foot with this one- could this be the beginning of the end?

Here are some other articles on the issue:
Goodbye People I Never Knew
Is This Why Twitter Changed It’s Reply Policy?
Only A Little Reversed
Twitter Decides We’re Not Smart Enough for @Replies

Yep, so like I said in the closing paragraph of Spring Time!, moving servers is a HUGE headache. I have a laundry list of things that don’t work at all, work sometimes, will work after I completely restructure things, are stuck somewhere in the DNS world, etc etc etc.

Right now I’m working on why removing index.php from my URL’s works on some browsers and not others, and trying to figure out why the hell it was working for a day and then stopped working when I wasn’t even touching the sites at all.

Subdomains don’t work as easily as they used to, my email has to be outsourced, I don’t have a cpanel and nothing is where I expect it to be. It’s driving me up the wall.

I’m looking forward to everything being done, I can’t even tell you how close I am to ripping out all my hair. Just a status update. I’m going out of town this weekend and really hoping my websites don’t self destruct.