Eating too much food all of the time can cause you to gain weight? True or False?

BYU recently came out with a fascinating study on gaining weight: The result? If you do not show restraint when eating food, you will gain weight. Yes, you read that correctly. If you do not show restraint when eating food, you will gain weight.

And if you didn't know what restraint was, they tell you: Restrained eating is choosing not to eat as much as you'd like. And then more explanation, 'You need to restrain from unhealthy foods, from high caolorie food. If you don't, you will gain weight.'

Shocking. So, now I can remember this study when I go out to eat and I order a triple cheeseburger, supersized fries with cheese all over it that I am not showing enough restraint and that I will probably gain weight. Before reading that study, I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why I was gaining weight. Now I know.

I have also heard that there is a ground breaking study on how if you do not exercise then you will be out of shape.

Here is the genius study
As sidenote--before anyone ever does a study like this again, will you please contact me and let me know because I would do a study like this for HALF of what others are charging and I would come up with the same conclusion...simply by using common sense.

Troublemaker Beckham turns 3

Beckham. He is our crazy little funny independent boy. Every day goes by with us laughing with him, laughing at his crazy little stunts, pulling our hair out as he hits his crazy 2 and 3 year old stages.







He has had his health issues. While Carter has had broken bones and stitches, Beckham has had health problems. Just three weeks old, he was struggling with his breathing and he came down with RSV and was hospitalized for over 10 days. Nothing worse than seeing your tiny little guy with tubes all over his body.





He hit a point where he wasn't eating, he was always itching himself and he was just looking like a pale sickly boy when he was around 2 years old. After some doctors visit, we figured him out--He has a severe peanut allergy and really dry skin. So, we opened up our own little pharmacy and he is doing great now.




He is a pretty picky eater...unless it is chicken nuggets, spaghetti, chicken noodle soup, cake, bread, graham crackers, cheesey goldfish and Chex cereal . He can eat those things at anytime anywhere. One bonus is that he is not really a candy eater. He doesn't have much interest in it...like I said, it doesn't necessarily mean that he is a great eater, but he doesn't eat candy.






He is a rascal. If you gave him 3 things in life, he would be happy for hours--blankets so he can climb inside and roll around and play in them for hours...and dvds which he loves to throw off the top of the staircase, flip them around like little frisbees and put them face down on the wood floor and push them along...and a bucket full of tennis balls for him to throw around and chase.






He is a great kid because he is our independent soul. He wants to do things his own way on his own schedule. We could fight him for 30 minutes and try to force him to put on his pants or we can show him his pants and have him walk away and then 5 minutes later he will come back and put them on himself. He won't put on his socks and shoes until we are walking out the door and he asks for help before then, it will be war! He loves being tickled. Kisses on the neck or rolling around on the ground, well, he could do that for hours. And he expects you to be able to do it for hours.


He loves his brother Carter. He teases him and he drives him crazy, but the two dig each other and get bored quickly if the other one is not around.

Happy Birthday Beckham. You are our awesome little boy.

Random holiday stuff

We had a fabulous New Years Eve party at my sisters house where we eat food, we watch our nieces and nephews showing off their skills in a talent show and then we watch a real bad mormon cheesy movie. Mission Accomplished and it was a great time as usual.


So, I got a call from my buddy Brandon two weeks ago asking me to play in an open doubles Tennis tournament. I said yes simply because Brandon is a great player and I thought he would be able to carry me to glory. Well, we played in it and we won the tourney! We had some tough matches and we won the finals 6-4, 7-5. The biggest disappointment was not getting a Championship belt like they give in wrestling. I was wanting to wear one to work and around the house. I have put the trophy we won on display above our fireplace if any of you are wanting to come by and touch it though.

If anyone is interested, we would be happy to loan to you a 3-year old. The plan would be to loan him to you for about a year and then you could give him back to us when he turns 4. The other option is that we could drop him off at your house at 8am and then you could return him back to us around 7pm. If interested, give me a call.

My brother Josh and his family surprised the family by doing the 42 straight hour drive from DC and just showed up at my mom and dad's house announced. Fun to have them in town. Crazy of them to drive straight through.

After one of our matches, we went out with Brandon and Alissa to an ice cream place a few nights ago. Let me give you a couple of tips on when you should turn around and leave an ice cream store without ordering:

• Nobody is there and its only 8pm.
• You break out into a sweat when you enter the store because it is probably 95 degrees in there.
• They serve mexican food. Yes, it is an ice cream store that will also whip you up a burrito.
• Nobody is there and its only 8pm.

Yeah, we left without ordering anything.

Christmas with 27 nieces and nephews and 14 adults...well, lets just say, it was wild. There have been sleepovers, sledding excursions, games and other stuff. We need to all take a break now.

It is fun to see the Utes get to a big BCS bowl game and they play in the Sugar Bowl game tonight. Go Utes!

Best of 2008: Movies and Television and other cool things

So, here is my annual list of the best television and the best movies of 2008 as well as some other happenings from the past year:

Television
My television list looks very similar to last year though two shows broke onto the list and one show (Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia) fell off the list due. Its Always Sunny is still very funny but the characters are so morally corupt that it is hard to like them at all. With that said, I am not going to recommend any of those shows because they may be a little risque or they just be a bit over the top, but here are my favorites from the tv world this past year.

1. BattleStar Galactica: OK, I won't talk about it anymore on this site but it is still frakkin' awesome.
2. Dexter: Great storytelling and it takes a lot that this show makes you really like the main character who just so happens to be a serial killer. Each episode is interesting, scary and highly entertaining.





3. 30 Rock: Week in and week out, the funniest show in television. The characters are absurd and always funny and always absurd and always funny.
4. Burn Notice: Set in beautiful Miami about a former CIA agent who was 'released' from the CIA and he spends his days and nights helping others and trying to figure out why he was 'burned' by his agency.






5. True Blood: if you can get thru the naughty scenes (too many), the story is actually pretty cool about vampires trying to fit in or not fit in with the human population.
6. The Office: Often uneven but still a lot of fun.








Movies
1. Dark Knight: It is hard to get cooler than this movie. You had a great performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker...the storyline was dark and brutal and terrific.
2. Tropic Thunder: Over the top and often offensive, it was also terribly funny. Definately not a movie that I will recommend to others but a movie that I would happily watch again and again.






3. Dr. Horribles Sing Along Blog: Not a full length movie as it sits at around 45 minutes but it has laugh out loud moments and it is written by Joss Whedon (Buffy and Serenity fame) which would make it worth a viewing for that reason alone.
4. Iron Man: another comic book movie (which once again shows my obsession with anything comic book related) which did not feel like a comic book movie. How can you not love


Other cool things from the past year:

• Carter taking tennis lessons and starting kindergarten
  
• Beckham continuing his craziness.
• Obama winning the presidency...whether you are a democrat or a repub, it is pretty cool.
• Utah Utes going to the Sugar Bowl.
• Brodi's dad Dennis kicking cancer's arse.
• Cool trip to South Carolina and Georgia
  

A slightly bloody yet always entertaining Christmas Eve ragin' party

Some quick Christmas pictures...

Christmas eve was spent with Brodi's parents and her sister and family. It was a ragin' party and you can tell how lucky the boys were all by their new stylin' pajamas.








Carter had a bell that he got to swing around and have it 'bong', 'bong', 'bong' until he got a little too excited with the ringing and it ended up bonging him in the nose. Blood flowed freely but I stepped in and took control of the situation.





With myself being the only adult male that is not actually a doctor (though I can probably tell if a cow has mastitis in the udder...that makes me a doctor somehow, doesn't it?), I put my skills to work as I expertly bandaged up my poor boy. After getting him fixed up, we listened to Brodi and Erin (both drunk on diet coke) play up a few Christmas carols on the piano. And then we called it a night.

Short Shorts and getting in trouble

So, time for a totally random story, but I remembered this story because it happened right before Christmas, about 17 years ago. I played hoops for West High School. And let me just say...our uniforms were old. That means that those uniforms have been washed and washed and washed. And dried and dried and dried. And that means a lot of shrunken shorts and shirts. I was either the shortest or the second shortest player on our team and I was one of the younger ones which meant that I got to pick last and because I was one of the shortest, I usually ended up with the 'small' uniform. Now, it was small to begin with...but after 5+ years of being washed and dried, they became itsy bitsy.

Basically, I was wearing a speedo on the basketball court. West High thrived on intimidation against other schools due to our reputation. Let me just say--there was NOTHING intimidating about me coming out in that uniform. Other players on our team had to deal with the same thing, so most of us wore spandex under shorts...but they had a High School rule my Junior year that you could wear nothing like spandex under your jerseys unless you had a Doctor's Note that allowed it (seriously, how stupid is that). So, I ditched the spandex and wore longish boxers under my jersey shorts. The two pictures that I have included here are from my Junior year so that you can see just how tight those bad boys were.



So, big game is here: West High vs. East High. I was a West student but I lived in East High school boundaries, so I had a bunch of friends that went there...add to that, it was a huge rivalry. The stands were packed in our game against them at home.

First half was over and it was a tight game. So, we go out to start the second half and we are about to inbound the ball. All of a sudden, the ref blows his whistle to stop the game before the 2nd half even begins. The ref points at me and says 'Fix your shorts Johnson.' I look down and my boxers had gone below the shorts. I kinda fiddle with my boxers to hide them better under my shorts, to no avail. Now, the audience is quiet because nobody knows why the game isn't starting. The ref yells at me again to fix my shorts so I keep trying. My coach yells at the ref asking what is wrong and the ref says back to him that I have undershorts coming below my shorts. The crowd is dead quiet. My coach looks at me and asks me whats wrong and I tell him that it was my boxers. My coach shakes his head and yells at the ref: "Its his underwear, lets play' and the ref yells back at me and my coach 'I don't care if its his underwear, he needs to fix it or he gets a technical.' Yep, let me just say, once again, that every fan in the stands was now hearing (it was amazingly quiet in the gym as people were trying to figure out what was going on) my coach argue with the ref about my underwear. How awesome and disturbing is that?

So, the coach has to pull me out of the game and tells me to go down to the locker-room to fix it. I am running off the court as everyone is trying to determine exactly what kind of boxers that I am wearing. I get down to the locker-room and a teammate is there to get me into the lockerroom (we had to lock the doors down there so that we weren't robbed and he had the key). I run in and I am trying to figure out what to do...and my teammate kindly offers me his underwear. Yeah, I turned him down. Thanks for the offer though, that was sweet and incredibly creepy.

I decided to keep on wearing my boxers though I ended up pulling them up to the my chin nearly so that they would not show. I ran back up to the gym and thankfully I did not get a standing ovation for being able to fix my underwear. I had no problems the rest of the game except for the discomfort of having my boxers about 6 inches higher than they should have been. And yes, we lost that frakkin' game, no thanks to the ref. This story does have a good ending though as thankfully, my senior year, we got new jerseys and my barely-legal basketball shorts were finally thrown away.

Crank up the Christmas Music!

Brodi loves her Christmas music. Now, if it is not Christmas season, I don't think she has ever listened to it...but if its after Thanksgiving, the station is tuned to Christmas songs. I really don't care much about Christmas music...until I noticed the fabulous bands that have Christmas CDs out there:

What better way to get in the Christmas spirit than turning on the NightRider/BayWatch superstar David Hasselhoff? He is a sensation over in Germany and I love European things, so this seems like a perfect match. We all know that he can act with the best of them, DeNiro, Pacino, etc...so obviously, he can probably carry a wonderful tune.







I mean if his music on this Christmas cd is anywhere near the production value as well as the singing chops on this Hassehoff classic (pay attention to the special effects which are truly special:


If this doesn't satisfy my Christmas music needs, there are several other albums out there which I would expect would be nothing but fabulous. NSync has Justin Timberlake and they also have a Christmas album. I mean, who wouldn't buy that? And who doesn't love Michael Bolton? If you are looking for a swingin' Christmas, it appears that the Bolton has come through. I will keep you updated on the quality of all of this music.