Lost a Brick!

Today, we're celebrating three weeks of daily bike workouts and I've lost about a brick of weight (six pounds)! This bike here only set us back about a hundred bucks on Amazon and we've already put a few hundred miles on it. Bonnie likes to watch The Good Place while she rocks out for around an hour. I've subscribed to Peloton Digital and have been doing various interval rides, as well as some strength training classes and even some yoga. In 30-minutes on the bike, you can easily sweat off 400 calories.

So, you don't need one of the fancy Peloton bikes to get a killer work out. While I'm sure they're great, we save a couple thousand dollars and we are losing weight, have more energy, and sleep better. Thanks to Tequila, we still enjoy our evening cocktails.

The other thing we do is keep a very close eye on our calories by using My Fitness Pal. We still eat very few carbs (under 30% mainly naturally occurring) and make up the other 70% of our food with protein and fat. Yerba Mate teas keep us focused, and less hungry though most of our meals are so filling, that's rarely an issue. We drink a couple of protein shakes a day generally pre-and-post workout and we've found some really interesting foods like Shirataki--a Japanese noodle with no carbs and virtually no calories, more on that later.

So, three weeks of fitness and now we come to the real test--travel. I'll be on the road for a few days, where things generally fall apart for me. Let's see if I can stay on track. I don't know if any of this will be interesting to anybody but hopefully, there's at least a tidbit of useful information for you.

The Magic of Tequila

We're starting our second week of eating clean and we've made a few interesting discoveries--the best of which is the health benefits of tequila! During the first week of our health regimen, we still had a few glasses of wine in the evening. While we were staying on track of our calory count, the weight loss was slow. Turns out that even a few glasses of wine can really slow down weight loss results.

After doing some investigation, we stumbled on a few articles that mentioned the health benefits of tequila. So, we switched from white wine to tequila and soda and our weight has been steadily dropping. I've now lost nearly four pounds in just under two weeks.

Here are a few other tactics we've implemented:

1. We count our calories using My Fitness Pal (my goal is around 1500 calories a day).
2. I've started wearing my Garmin VivoFit band again which reminds me to get up and move around every hour.
3. We try not to eat snacks after dinner with the exception of some nuts right before bed.
4. We're both logging at least six miles on the upright bike every day. I do a high-intensity interval work out every other day.
5. On cheat days, we eat the foods that we want but we still stick to our caloric budget.

We could probably lose weight faster by not drinking at all but for now, we're really happy with the progress we're making. Salud!

Safari Logs

I can't believe we've been back from India for two weeks. Last night I dreamt of tigers. I woke up craving Indian food. Luckily today is our cheat day so we'll be having plenty of Paratha, Curried Cal, Pakora, and Samosas. Describing India in words is limiting because it's the colors, the smells, and the tastes that make it such a dizzyingly wonderful experience.

On this last trip, we went on the equivalent of eight safaris, four in Kanha and three in Bandhavgarh. It's hard to say which were the best. We had the best tiger sighting in Bandhavgarh so that's definitely the one that stands out the most. Here's what that sighting looked like, as shot by our uber awesome naturalist Shiv:

Make sure you listen with the sound up, this sub-adult tiger was very vocal which really added to the intensity of the sighting! To see the footage that we shot. you'll have to wait for the film to come out.

This sighting came at the very end of a long safari day where we had one nice sighting in the morning and then a mother and her cubs teased us mercilessly for the better part of the afternoon. Time and time again, we would see their fresh tracks where she was leading her cubs, one by one to the watering hole. Her prints would be on our fresh jeep tracks. I hope one day we get to film a tigress with her cubs but for this trip, it wasn't to be.

If you plan to visit India in January for Safaris, dress accordingly. It can get down to freezing in the morning and then back to the high 60's or 70's by the afternoon. That's a cold ride first thing in the morning in an open gypsy! I can't imagine what trekking in Siberia would be like. Maybe one day.

I know I need to record more of these safari stories so I don't forget them. Next time we'll talk about first sightings, you truly never forget them!

Nutritional Update!

We're a few days into our fitness kick and it's time to make some adjustments. Low carb is great but as Vegans, we really do need to supplement our diet with legumes, brown rice, and occasionally whole wheat pasta or bread. More than anything, food without any of these things gets pretty boring. There's only so many soups, salads and stir-frys you can eat day in and day out...

So, I think we will take a closer look at the Vegan Food Pyramid and add back some more fruits, grains, and legumes. Here's the updated pyramid:

This seems way more sustainable and will provide us with tons of great cooking options. We were essentially trying to modify a non-vegan low carb diet and it was way too strict and too dependent on tofu and soy-based products.

By the way, have you read about the new plant-based food plate that the Canadians have developed? It's pretty awesome to see an entire country advocating for a plant-based diet! Check it out here.


One other simple thing we have done is take some simple advice from Tim Ferris, essentially, we are not adding non-dairy creamer to our tea or coffee and we try to eat a high protein breakfast first thing in the morning.  We've also gotten an upright bike so we intend to add some cardio to our regiment. the best part about working out is that it's a good idea to have a carb snack before and after so now we get to have whole grain toast with peanut butter. Cardio for the win.



Alright, time to hit the bike. Is it day four? Feeling good and looking forward to our cheat day tomorrow!

Our Obsession with Tigers

What is it about tigers? When we started making the Hidden Tiger we were spending a lot of time with captive tigers at Tiger Haven, an incredible sanctuary that happens to be close to Knoxville. The more time we spent with these tigers, the more we wanted to study the impact of captive tigers on wild tigers.

That impulse has led us to some of the most tiger dense areas of the world, Ranthambhore, Kanha, and Bandhavgarh in India, and Bardia in Nepal. Having spent time with wild tigers, our lives were forever changed. We wanted to make sure we would always in some way be involved in tiger conservation. Seeing a tiger in the wild is a sublime, almost spiritual experience, and it's addictive.

We'll be sharing more about the film over the next few months and hope to have a cut ready for film festivals for this fall. Maybe this blog should be titled Film, Food, and Tigers?

Quitting Processed Food.... Ugh!

So, yesterday Bonnie and I decided to start getting in shape and eating better. We are already Vegan so that's not an easy choice to make... Essentially, we're following a low-carb diet, more specifically, no sugar, no white bread, white rice, essentially no bread of any kind and really no processed food.

As part of the journey, we'll be posting pics of some of our meals and even some recipes. And we will be looking forward to our cheat days!

Here was today's breakfast, a tofu scramble with broccoli, onions, and mushrooms, seasoned with turmeric (also for the nice egg color), garlic powder, and cayenne pepper.

For lunch, we had a killer chopped salad with lots of greens, celery, carrots, broccoli, onion, topped with fake chicken and fake sausage and sprinkled with flax seeds, nutritional yeast, and oil and balsamic vinegar. Man, we sound like hippies now!

I made a nice soup this afternoon which we had as a snack. It's mainly a veggie stock soup with lots of cabbage which sort of ends up the consistency of noodles. I make variations on this "Asian Noodle Soup" pretty frequently so one day I'll post a recipe.

Tonight we're having some sort of super healthy stir fry with wine of course. No booze until our cheat day! Two days down and I have to say I slept really well last night and I feel pretty good! Sleep has been a little weird since we got back from India. Nothing like a 10 1/2 time change to mess you up!

OK, my first real post--that was fun!

Welcome!

We just got back from India for our documentary film about tigers, the Hidden Tiger. Here's a crazy image of us shooting a female subadult tiger. More about this later!