The Steel City

It's been over a month since I've written, but it's been filled with a lot of life.

About a month ago mom & I bought a book about the Paleo diet because I have two friends who swear by it/the Crossfit workouts. I honestly couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so, so I started skipping around & didn't like the book at all. I just could not stop getting annoyed by the author & his style of writing/story telling. My mom read most of it (I think?) but she skipped the entire introduction of how he came to find the lifestyle & gave other "success stories" so maybe that was the key to getting through the book. We made a pork roast recipe with a lot of vegetables & it was good but a little bland because basically it's a "cave man" diet: you only eat things that were available to the cave men, because they apparently had low health/diet-related problems, cavities, etc. I'm a pessimist by nature, & I don't know why that is, but it makes me feel like the whole thing is hog wash.

I don't know why it's so complicated, when in reality it should be simple: eat healthy & exercise (& say your prayers!). But there's so much information out there that may or may not be true that it's confusing to people like me who haven't figured out the best permanent life diet (not 'lose-20-pounds-in-4-weeks "diets"). IS diary bad for you? Why is sugar so bad - is any of it good? If meat is supposed to be good for you, should we still not eat it since most animals are injected with hormones & other things on factory farms, and free-range product is a thing of the past? Why is chocolate Silk so deliciously addicting?

So I don't think the Paleo lifestyle is for me since it's primarily about meat & other than chicken, I don't like to eat a lot of meat.

I moved to Pittsburgh. I'm still getting settled in but so far I really like the Anthropologie up here & all of my managers/coworkers have been great. I don't get a lot of hours so I've been looking for a second job & applied to 11 places last week but haven't heard anything back from any of them, which is disheartening. I've spent the majority of my days or nights off of work looking all over the internet for openings since most places are solely online applications these days.

A great thing about the new place is that our house is at the bottom of a hill (though not entirely unexpected since Pittsburgh is basically just a city of hills). So I can get an easy workout just by walking/jogging up & down the hills. I brought my bike but I don't have a helmet or know my way around well so I haven't taken it out. I don't think that I've lost any weight but I feel like I'm in better shape so that's good! My scale broke during the move, it kept coming up at 88.7lbs no matter what I put on it so I had to get rid of it.

Jonathan gave me a free week pass to the Urban Active gym & I like it so far! I basically just stay in the movie room. When I get another paycheck or two I'm signing up at the gym but right now I can't afford it since I didn't work for almost 2 weeks before I moved I haven't had a paycheck in about a month.

A problem I'm having is finding good music to workout to if I'm not at the gym in the movie room. I typically like folk-indie-calm music in general so my ipod doesn't have a lot of upbeat songs on it other than some ABBA (love!), 30 seconds to mars, and a few others. I have some Follie music which is a french girl who sings in english but it's basically dancing music so it works for me but I haven't put it on my ipod yet.

Since I haven't written in so long this just turned into a rambling session but that's basically been my life for the last month! Reading about diets & health, moving, working, looking for jobs, & working out when I can!