In August of 2022 I attended the Toastmasters International Convention in Nashville, TN. While there I met a fascinating lady from Taiwan. Her English name is Ines Wen.
Ines has been very involved with Toastmasters activities in Taiwan for some time! She is part of a team that produces a podcast for Toastmasters called Lets Toast.
She interviewed me for their podcast while we were at the convention. Below is that podcast interview.
District 67 podcast – Let’s Toast
Here is part 2 of my guest interview on the Are You Awesome Today podcast! Stephen and I had a great interview, and he does such a great job facilitating a podcast.
Give it a listen here – Are You Awesome Today Pt2
I had the awesome opportunity to be a guest of Stephen Shaner on his podcast – Are You Awesome Today?
Stephen is a friend and fellow Toastmaster who lives in middle Tennessee. He has written a book call The Art of Being Awesome! His book was one of the inspirations I had to complete my book! You can find his book on Amazon, and it is a motivational short read.
He is also known as the Attitude “Chiropractor”. I have found that he just has a way of navigating folks to a more positive attitude just by talking to him!
In episode 1 we spoke about the seasons of life. Seasons is the last chapter of my book Blackberry Wisdom, and a great topic to discuss with friends.
Listen to his podcast here – Are You Awesome Today?
On Monday, 11 Oct 21 I gave the last required speech to earn my DTM or Distinguished Toastmaster award! I have now completed 2 Toastmasters pathways and what a journey it has been!
Less than 1% of all Toastmasters ever earn the DTM. Why? Well because it is hard, it takes time and dedication, and it takes help from others along the way.
I shared in my speech the accomplishments I had in and outside Toastmasters, as well as the lessons I have learned. I will share a few of the highlights below but the full speech is available in the YouTube video.
Toastmasters has a proven system for developing communication and leadership skills.
Pathways is the Toastmasters education system for developing communication skills, while club and district roles develop leadership skills.
DTM is the AWARD, but experiences along the journey is the REWARD !
I started using Zoom back in the Fall of 2019. It was a convenient way to meet with the officers of my Toastmasters club. We would meet in person and then alternate the next month to online. And was a pretty good little setup for us.
Then COVID-19 hit! And it forced us to use Zoom as a means for meeting in the club as well as officer meetings.
So I am no expert at Zoom, but I have used it a fair amount.
I put together a short video with some tips and tricks on using Zoom. I hope you find it helpful if you are new to Zoom.
To download Zoom to your device go to zoom.us . You should use the application instead of running from a web browser. I don’t even think that is an option, but want to point it out as some have asked how to properly view a Zoom meeting. So that is the first step.
With the free account you can share have a meeting with up to 100 participants. They had a 40 minute limit on each meeting, but have lifted that restriction during the virus lock-down.
The best thing to do is download and start using it by yourself to get comfortable with the settings. Test your video and audio from the settings menu. You can even record yourself to see if your background, lighting, audio and camera view are to your liking.
Give it a try. Let me know if the comments below if you have any questions.
Happy zooming!
I have enjoyed the new foods I have found and eaten on my plant based diet. I do like a good variety of fruits and vegetables. The only thing that will make me feel better about my plant based diet will be to eat the fresh fruits and vegetables from my own garden.
So to increase my possibilities of fresh veggies that I know are grown organically, I built my own greenhouse.
This rest of this post is to show some of the stages on how we built the greenhouse. I want to thank a few folks who helped make this dream a reality. My dad helped me more than anyone and worked tirelessly with me till it was finished. My son helped weld the cattle panels. And lastly I got the inspiration and blueprints from TexasPrepper2.
So my pause from the plant-based diet was to enjoy the festivities of my son’s wedding. And boy did I enjoy!
I ate pizza, macaroni and cheese, sweet tea, brisket, pork, cakes (it was a wedding already!), ice cream and all sorts of other goodies during the wedding weekend. I did not really push away from anything to eat the whole weekend – which started on Thursday.
Friday night I actually got sick with diarrhea. Not sure if it was the MSG on the brisket or all the sweet tea I drink that day, but something just did not agree with my system. So the day of the wedding I was in recovery mode not eating a lot, and drinking lots of water.
There were left overs on Monday and I worked through some, but found my way back to eating more plant based food. And then on Tuesday I was back to just plant based meals.
What did I learn from this pause?
I learned that I do like the taste of cakes and ice cream, but it leaves me feeling empty and sort of sick inside. I guess I have finally pushed through the sugar withdrawals and can do without sugar. When I do eat or drink those things I just do not get the same satisfaction as I used to.
Eating those kind of processed foods also make my body feel sluggish. I did not feel as sharp as I do while eating a plant based diet.
So now I continue my journey of eating a plant based diet. I am not perfect, nor am I super strict about what I eat, but I am doing much better than I was when I first started this journey. I look forward to learning more food options and how these foods affect me.
The way I really feel is this – I like to release pounds from my body more than I like to eat empty foods. That has been my biggest and best eye opener!
I just started reading Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s book Eat to Live, and it is really revealing about why we should be eating a plant based diet. With all the big money that surrounds the food industry it is no wonder that this message will take a long time to get out and be adopted in American culture.
Not sure who I heard this from, but I thought important to share because it really helps with my mindset. I am not becoming a vegetarian, but rather a nutritiocian!
Well my doctors visit was nothing short of an anticlimactic meeting.
I started this plant based diet for a few different reasons, and one of the main reasons was that I want to get off the blood pressure medicine that I currently take.
I know that I cannot just stop taking the blood pressure medicine, and I do agree that my doctor needs to help me decrease the dosage until I can stop taking it. So I was hoping my diet change would help my blood pressure.
I have been actively measuring my blood pressure on a somewhat regular basis for about 3 months now. With the help of fasting I have been able to release weight and lower my blood pressure. I have also added different vitamins to help with my cardiovascular system. (Dr Ohhira’s probiotics, RegActiv, Kyolic, and magnesium)
Armed with my documentation and new diet that is making changes with my body I was looking forward to seeing my doctor. I was hoping that he would see my hard work in documentation and dietary changes and would rave at my efforts. I was even hoping for a good conversation about what dietary disciplines would benefit by blood pressure and overall health.
The day of my appointment I was at the doctor’s office a bit early – I was anticipating this visit. I came into his patient room and the nurse took my weight and blood pressure – both which had improved since the last visit! So I just knew this was going to be a good meeting with my doctor.
Then he finally comes in and asks the normal questions. I start to talk about my new diet habits and he continues on with checking BP and heartbeat. I show him my documented weight and blood pressure chart and within 30 seconds he hands it back to me. He says looking good – keep up the good work. Reduce my blood pressure medicine by half and come back in six months.
Anticlimactic! All that I hoped for in the visit was just a flash. No substantial talk about diet over medicine. No talk of diet at all.
To be honest, I didn’t really expect a lot from my doctor. Today’s American doctor is trained to diagnose the symptoms and prescribe a medicine. No direction for diet is addressed – that would be for a dietician – not a doctor.
Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” But Hippocrates is not a modern day American doctor. I don’t fault my doctor, he is just working within the guidelines that he has as an American physician with our current healthcare system.
My takeaway is to invest my efforts in improving my own health. No one cares anymore for my body than I do. So, my search for knowledge and understanding of the human body continues!
I need to come clean about something. My success so far with the plant based diet has been augmented with intermittent fasting.
So what is intermittent fasting? Intermittent fasting is an eating style where you eat within a specific time period, and fast the rest of the time. My intermittent fasting schedule is 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating daily. I am not able to do it every day, but I certainly have been trying to the past 2 weeks.
The first thing every morning I drink 16 ounces of water. I will then take my vitamins and blood pressure pill, and a shot of a apple cider vinegar and juice mix. I might take a cup of coffee next, or just off to work with water.
I will drink water and coffee right up to 10:30 or 11:00. I will eat a snack at that time, and will continue to eat as I want or can until 6:30 or 7:00.
I am still learning about fasting. I have discovered it hard to find good information on fasting, and I believe simply it is because it is difficult to make money from fasting. People eat less – not more or even any specialization foods when you fast. You just don’t eat. There is no money in that you see.
I have found some good research and reporting from a Dr Fung. He has several videos on YouTube. One that I have learned from is here. If you are even half way interested in what I am saying about fasting – then take some time to listen to him and keep learning from others.
I am also a fan of multi day fasting, but I will save that for a different post. But just want to say that you have to learn to get past the pain of hunger at times knowing that you will not die or starve to death. I now understand that hunger pains let me know that I am on the right track. Feeling bloating from eating too much would be at the opposite end of the spectrum of sensation.
I will continue this regimen for at least two more weeks.
One week down with my effort in a plant based diet!
Results are pretty good to me:
I strayed from the diet only one time the first week. I had a hamburger (no bun) on Saturday night. It was from a local grower so I felt good about the beef, but it was not plant based of course.
So one variance in a week is a success in my book. Especially for the first week.
The first part of the week I felt good most of the time, but found a need for something more in the afternoons. I ate all I wanted, but my body was saying that I was missing something. I believe it was sugar. It is a weird feeling to describe – not so much a hunger pain which I am familiar with, but a feeling of there is something more my body says it is missing. Gotta fight that sugar monster!
I ate all the fruit, nuts and veggies I wanted, but no starches. I am going to adjust that this week by adding some starches to my diet – but no sugar. I also may eat meat a couple of times because of the planned events this week. We will see….
