Breve lattes, chicken enchiladas, banana cream cheesecake.  What do you do when your list of favorite foods looks like mine?  How is dieting even possible?  I know for me those two questions had taken me many years to answer.  One word that rings synonymous to my dieting journey is "gradual".  I had to take gradual steps to get where I am today.

I remember when my favorite vise was vanilla lattes.  Every afternoon Monday through Thursday I had that liquid dessert  on my mind.  When I found out how many calories were in just one pump of vanilla (20 calories of pure sugar!!!) I knew it was time to scale back.  One thing I know about myself is that I am very calculated in the changes I make to my diet.  I was shocked when I found out my medium latte had 4 pumps of syrup in it!  That's an extra 80 calories.

While summer should be winding down, a few things are still cranking up.   The track and field events are about to start at the Summer Olympics in Beijing.   Rick Warren of Saddleback Church is about to host a forum for presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.  And the Democratic Party will be staging their made for TV convention in Denver.   Where will I be?  In Europe, fighting cancer at the first Reel Lives Film Festival in Geneva.

A few years ago, as John Marks and I finished filming the first part of a Purple State of Mind, my precious wife was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma.   It was quite a blow.   Cancer snuck up on our family and delivered a sucker punch when we least expected it.   Unfortunately, cancer never takes a summer break.

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The best thing about a good song is the beat. Now a days, people are always making iPod playlists, car soundtracks, and video montages with that perfect song because life is just a bit better when walking to a beat.  This is most likely one of the biggest driving forces behind the sales and the obsession with the iPod.  According to arecent study there are approximately 70 million current iPod users.  [1]  Take a second and think about that number.  An average heart beats103,680 beats in a day. That means that if music was blood, there is enough music being played in to give  67,515 people breath. These white ear-buds give it’s owners the ability to drown out the societal noises of cars honking, baristas screaming and even their own thoughts and get lost in a rhythm that seems tobeat the same thump-thump of the emotions of their heart.  But why, why must there be anelectronic phenomenon to create this rhythm?  Is this world so chaotic that ears must be stuffed full ofbeats in order to truly hear?  Must footsteps really be in tune to the latest and greatest song, or were they meantto hit the pavement to different sort of rhythm? 

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I've been out with my daughters today participating in our yearly ritual of shopping for school supplies.  And as usual, I can't imagine how my tiny girls will carry the enormous bags of notebooks, pencils, folders etc. on their backs.  However heavy their backpacks might be, this year I'm making a conscious effort not to send my girls to school weighed down with my unrealistic expectations. 

You see, for better or worse, I grew up believing that the best way to prove my worth was by being the smartest girl in school.  Unfortunately, most times I failed and felt awful about myself, but that didn't stop me from trying.  In the back of my mind, I always hoped that someday I would be the leader of the pack, and the powers that be would recognize the superior intelligence that lie beneath my ordinary demeanor.

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Everybody dreams of being a hero. Like most guys, when I was growing up I used to dream about delivering the game-winning home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, or completing a hail-Mary pass in the fourth quarter as time expires to win the championship. I never had the opportunity (okay, I never had the talent) to experience such heroism, so I mostly live out my sports fantasies through real athletes, and each time I witness a last-minute hit/shot/pass/run/kick that wins the game or championship or whatever, I get goose bumps, and whoever comes through in the clutch becomes my new hero: Dwight Clark and "The Catch" in the 1982 NFC Championship, Kirk Gibson and his improbable home run in the 1988 World Series, David Tyree and The Miracle Catch in the Super Bowl earlier this year.

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Healthy pH is 6.0-7.5.  Do you know where you are on the scale?  If you don’t know what it is, you need to.

Test Your Body's Acidity or Alkalinity with pH Strips
It is recommended that you test your pH levels to determine if your body's pH needs immediate attention. By using pH test strips (Litmus Paper), you can determine your pH factor quickly and easily in the privacy of your own home. The best time to test your pH is about one hour before a meal and two hours after a meal.

Foods: are they Acid or Alkaline-forming?
Note that a food's acid or alkaline-forming tendency in the body has nothing to do with the actual pH of the food itself. For example, lemons are very acidic, however the end-products they produce after digestion and assimilation are very alkaline so lemons are alkaline-forming in the body.

My husband is a compulsive photographer.  In the 14+ years we've been together, I can't even begin to count the number of pictures he's taken of me, and as our family has grown, of our children.  He  relishes the act of capturing a moment on film and will do anything to get the perfect shot. 

Of course, being the difficult wife that I am, I am constantly yelling at him to put his camera away.  He has a beautiful collection of pictures of me crossing my eyes or making an offensive gesture to let him know just how I'm feeling about his incessant picture taking.   Would it be easier to just smile and humor him?   Absolutely.  Sorry,  It just isn't in me.

As I've discovered over the past few years, my husbands obsession and my aversion to capturing the 'perfect shot" reflects a philisophical difference more than a personality one.  Irony of ironies, I am married to an eternal optimist.  Regardless of the circumstances, my spouse always thinks things will turn out just fine. I know he envisions us at a grand old age, on a front porch somewhere, looking at his picture collection and remembering together.   I, on the other hand, am a realist.  Translation: I know that even when things are good, they can turn quicker than milk left overnight on the kitchen counter. 

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Every time the 9-5 life sets in, I begin to down coffee like it's part of my job. Not only does my checking account begin to go down (because I have fallen for the Starbucks lure) but my addiction sky rockets. In college, I would drink about 6 cups a day. Yes, you heard me: 6. I loved it. Loved the sound of it brewing, loved the taste of it, loved watching the milk swirl like a Monet painting as I poured it in....ok I sound crazy. But so was my addiction. I'd take it anyway that it came: steaming hot with a biscotti, over ice, no frills in a double shot, flavored with vanilla or carmel, or toffee nut, frozen and blended...you name, I would drink it. My addiction came to a halt when I came down with an awful cold and could not eat or drink anything except herbal tea. The bite the tea gave to my coffee-loving tongue was almost unbearable, but it was the results that kept me drinking it. Perhaps my other addiction you should know about it my love for buying books. (Which is why, although I think it's the neatest thing to be able to buy a book at the tip of your fingers, I will never buy a Kindle because just as Video Killed the Radio Star, I fear that Kindle will kill the smell of brand new turning pages....) So as I am sick, and beginning to like tea, I purchased The Ultimate Tea Diet. And in it I found a few daunting facts:

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What is winning. What does it look like? What does it feel like?

Hopefully the story below will try to answer the questions.

Once upon a time there was a young lady who I had the opportunity to train and her effort defines winning in my eyes. Her name is Noelle Hansen.

I started coaching Noelle her sophomore season of track. Noelle was unique. She had an outstanding personality but was shy around certain individuals, namely anyone who was not in her inner circle, but possessed a flamboyant personality. She was a unique individual but you would have to pay close attention to see this without being in her inner circle.

Noelle finished her sophomore season performing a 72 second 400m. This was my first year with this team. The goal was to turn this program around. I wanted winning efforts out of this team. I desired efforts from the athletes that would merit times that would compete for regional and state titles. After the high school track season finished Noelle made me her best friend. She trained 5 days a week that summer.

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This past Tuesday, my husband reported for work promptly at 8am, just as he does every weekday.  His coworkers began to trickle in, slowly, as those in the technology world are want to do.  All but one.

Two hours later, his entire department was called into a conference room and informed that one of his coworkers had been killed the night before.  A 39 year old man, living in NYC, he left his job on Monday evening and while stopped at a red light was hit and instantly killed by a driver under the influence of drugs.  My husband, stunned, described to me the surreal feeling as he passed by his friends cubicle and saw piles of papers he'd been working on the day before scattered on his desk.  Work he fully intended to complete, work that will now remain undone.

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