tips for all you cougar fans out there!

picture by Mark Philbrick

 

 Here are a few of the links that have been keeping me informed about the cougars during the preseason.

http://www.ksl.com/index.php?sid=&nid=497  Cougar Tracks by Greg Wrubell

http://www.cougarfan.com/teams/football/  The latest BYU football news all in one place

http://byucougarcrazies.blogspot.com/  A rabid fan

http://www.thefansports.com/blog/  A blog for various Utah sports (unfortunately that means the Utes too)

http://www.byucougars.com/  The actual BYU website

Go Cougars!

Rivalry week.

Great to see the Cougars finally crack the top 25. Well, this is the week.  Finally rivalry week is here and I am excited to bash with my Utah-fan friends.  I was looking through the stats and from the 1920s to the 1960s Utah dominated the rivalry winning almost every game. Then in the 1970s-1980 BYU dominated winning almost every game. Then in the 1990s it is split 5 to 5. So far in the 2000 it is 4 to 3 in Utah’s favor so we have to win Saturday to even it out–4 to 4. I think the two teams are more evenly matched then I have ever seen them this year. Both almost identical win/loss records and both with a 7 game win streak. I always hope BYU kills Utah like they did in 1989 70-31, but the last 10 years (except 2004) have been determined by 7 points or fewer. I love close games with any other teams playing, but when it is BYU I want total domination. I thought we would get that last year since we dominated everyone else, but Utah always plays their best game against us, so I never know what to think. I am predicting a show-down and a very intense game where I am standing the whole time and sweating bullets. This year it is likely to come down to the last play of the game like it did the last 2 years. While I am worried I think that BYU will be the last one standing–because Max Hall is a fierce competitor. Go cougs. Lets trip the “running utes”!

More on Health

1. Eat a lot of protein, it helps muscle growth which limits fat storage.  Also, it uses more energy to digest it so by eating it you spend more calories.  Follow the food pyramid, but add some extra protein.

2. Eat small portions every 2-3 hours and always eat first thing in the morning–to jump start your metabolism.   

3. Don’t use the scale as a measurement tool for success, use measuring tape around gut or body fat percentage.  You could be losing muscle and not fat and be falsely excited or gain muscle and feel discouraged because you didn’t lose any weight.  

4.  Work smart not hard.  Rather than focusing on “losing weight” focusing on changing body composition  ratio of muscle to fat.  Building an infrastructure of muscle by weight training that gets your body to work for you.  Muscle takes priority over fat, so the calories will always go to muscle first.  More muscle=more calories burned up and fewer left to store. 

5. Though both weights and cardio are important, weight lifting is more important especially as you age.  Two major changes as we get older we get stiffer and lose bone density.  Weight training puts your muscles through a range of motion that keeps them flexible and increases bone density. Some people feel that cardio is better than weights for losing weight because you burn more calories durng the exercise. While that is true, it is the number of calories burned in the next 24-48 hours that matters.  Weight training increases metabolism burning calories for up to 48 hours rather than just while you are exercising as with cardio. So if you only had time for one, go with weight training.  Also, weight training decreases high blood pressure and high colesterol.

6. Don’t do low carb diets like Atkins, South beach.  They set you up for failure.  They are very effective as far as quick weight loss, but it is so quick that some of the weight lost is muscle and less muscle means future fat.  Once a person goes off the diet there is not as much muscle to eat up the calories.  So the relapse and often even worse since there is less muscle there to take the intitial calorie absorption.  

        

Three Pronged Attack

Like my dad I am somewhat of a health junkie as far as reading lots of books about health and loosing weight. I would like to provide cliffnotes of some of the most important things i have learned. Everything I have read agrees on three top points that I wanted to share with cyberspace. The top three things to do to lose weight in order are:

1. Manage blood sugar level: bottom line feed your body every two 2 -3 hours small portions.  Your brain tells your body to stop storing the fat for future because it is getting what it needs. 

2. Increase metabolism- by doing 3 things 1.  interval cardio workouts (30 seconds intense, 1 minute normal repeat 6-10 times)–increases metabolism for up to 24 hrs so you are burning a higher number of calories while you rest. 2. Weight lifting increases metabolism for up to 48 hrs. 3. Eating first thing in the morning jump starts metabolism for the day as it switches your body in the burning mode rather than storng mode–as it has been starving all night and is storing calories as fat to protect itself.  

3. The greatest combatant to fat is muscle.  Gain muscle through weight training because calories go to muscle first before being stored. For every pound of muscle 50 calroies more burned each day maintaining that muscle.  (5 pounds of muscle more =250 calories more burned a day) 

There are some other thoughts that I would like to share in the upcomming days.  These three strategies if used in concert are extremely effective.    

     

                                             

The Top 5 Coolest Things

Here are the top 5 coolest things in my opinion. 

Best books

Kira and I are on our 3 time around reading them together.  They are so good.  We have dressed up, waited in the lines, and stayed up all night reading when they first come out.  The 7th book arrival will be no different we are HUGE FANS.    

Best restaurant

CAFE RIO.  We can never get enough.  I could eat there everyday.  We love their food so much that we have it down to a science when to go to miss the long lines.  We have probably gotten 15 free meals since we have been married—(free meal with after 10 meals).  

Best TV show

By far the best TV show I have ever seen.  I can’t put my finger on what exactly makes it so good, but it has the “it” factor and is riveting.  We have seen every episode every made and can’t wait to find out what will happen. 

Best Sport/Team—Cougar Football

     Unlike many guys I really don’t care about most of the sports.  I couldn’t care less about baseball, basketball, golf, but come football season I am a fanatic.  I can’t get enough of college football.  BYU cougar football has been my favorite pastime since I was 10.  I love to read all the stats and do my own analysis.  Kira and I have season tickets this year we even forked out the dough for our two year old, so Cougars you better awesome again this year! 

     Coach Mendenhal has become one of my heros.  He runs the football program like a mission.  He pairs them up in companionships, he has them write him a weekly letter, they do a certain number of service hours each week as a team, and they do a fireside where they all sing and some star players give talks and bear thier testimonies.  The team has gone from 3 returned missionaries to 71 out of 100 team members.  He has raised the bar and his players are rising to the challenge.        

Best music groups

   Il divo is a group of 4 classical singers singing familiar pop songs in 4 part harmony.  I love the classical sound and the harmony–so when I heard about them I was immediately interested.  I am a big fan now.  My favorite genre is probably pop-opera                                                               

 

Then there is Coldplay that was the favorite group of most of my seminary students.  To avoid looking out-dated I listened to them and actually really like them–either that or I am just saying that because I still desperately want to be cool.:)  To me Coldplay is to the teenagers today what U2 was to my graduating class.    

This week’s deep thoughts

I’ll never forget the time we were at the beach and we buried uncle Joe in the sand.  Boy did we get in trouble!It turns out you can’t bury people at the beach—just at the cemetery. 

I think the most beautiful sunset I ever saw…..was on page 4&5 in the sunset book.

Life is funny, one minute you are a little kid running through a medow and the next you are an old man walking  thorugh a medow with dogs chasing you. 

When you are ten years old and a car drives by and splashesyou, it is hard to decide whether you should go to school thatway or go home and change, so while he was trying to decide….I drove by and splashed him again.  

When I die I don’t mind if wild animals eat me, but while I am still alive…… just licks please.   

Joe knew that no one had ever crossed the desert on foot and lived to tell about it, so he got back in his car and kept driving

Father’s Day Thoughts

Father’s day has a very literal meaning to me.  The day Kira took the positive pregnancy test fell on Father’s day for both kids.  No news this Father’s Day though.  Maybe next year?!  How about it Kira!  🙂    

     

I love my two kids so much.  I don’t know how I ever lived with out them.  I can barely make it through a whole day without seeing them.  

In honor of my amazing father who is now living in the Spirit World I wrote this poem

At 4:30 am in his office space, always having to have a front parking space

The fastidious Kent Lambert

 On the front row of Church with a tear in his eye, out doing his home teaching each month he would try

The devoted Kent Lambert

Reading new jokes and telling them too, even when some of us didn’t have a clue.

The hilarious Kent Lambert

Up until 12:00 watching political news, bashing the democrats hoping they’d lose

The republican Kent Lambert

Eating 3-week-old left overs and saying “they’re great, making us finish everything on our plate.  

The unwasteful Kent Lambert

Telling us to kiss him on the cheek then turning his face, tickling us up the stairs creating a chase

The playful Kent Lambert

Pulling us from bed for scriptures at quarter to six, trying a dozen diet plans his weight problem to fix.

The ambitious kent Lambert

Always being a Christ-like friend, faithful and true he endured to the end.

The disciple Kent Lambert

I love you Dad! 

Thoughts about blogs

     Have you ever heard an acronym several times but really don’t know what it means, yet you are way past the point of asking someone and it’s not like you can look it up in a dictionary.  It happens with names all the time.  Someone at work: “hey Aaron” and I am like “hey!” (lots of entusiasm so they don’t catch on.)    Then you try to be clever and sneaky so you say “let see, how do you spell you name again?”  They respond with a weird look “D…A…N.”  then to cover your stupidity you lie “yeah, I know a Dan who spells it with two Ns — just wanted to make sure. ”  At that point you just want to gag yourself.  

When people ask me how do you spell Aaron,  I either say “e..r..r..a..n..d” in jest or say “just like it is spelled in the Book of Mormon.” It is a great opener for talking about the gospel.  🙂  

Anyway, I had heard the word “blog” a lot, but I never knew exactly what it was.  Then my brother Matt emailed telling us that his wife Elizabeth had started one.  Being an English major, he defined the word: “a blog is a contraction between the word web and log.”  Thanks Matt for disabusing me of my long held notion that a blog was some sort of spherical substance that ate everything in it’s path.  If that were the case,  I would have forbid Kira from starting a blog, at lease not with our kids around.           

 (Note: Large vocabulary words used above to overshadow my ignorance)

Well, Kira and I decided that we don’t need to spend time talking anymore–we can just read each other’s blogs.  I’ll get home and ask “how was you day?” In response she will just point to the computer so all I have to do is walk over to the computer, turn it on, pull up the internet, log on to her page, find the most recent blog, and read the words “I had a good day.” It is so much easier then traditional communication.  🙂

 But seriously it is fun to read my wife’s blog I learn new things about her.

    

It is funny how our blog stats look like an economic market chart.  I can’t help but feel that somehow I am losing money when my blog stats are in a “bear market.” ( falling).  Its funny I always mix up the bull and bear markets.  They both seem formidable.  When I see a rising market, I think “oh that is a bull market” and then I think “no wait,  bulls are bad(they impale people) so that can’t be it.” They just need to change it.  I think they should change it to a Dove market and a Voldemort market.  That way there is no question which is good and which is bad.  How about it economists?  Harry Potter is big enough you could probably get a way with it.  Unless of coarse Voldemort has a change of heart, turns over a new leaf in book 7, and becomes the hero.         

                                           

And now more deep thoughts

If you are a prisoner on death row, a good idea is to clean up your cell really nice and then when they come to take you away, say “injection! I thought you said inspection!” and maybe they will laugh and let you out of it. 

Ill bet the most annoying job in the middle ages was a catapult operator because kings and rulers would always ask “can’t you get that to fling stuff farther?”  I am sorry, your majesty that is as far as it shoots! 

  

If you are ever traveling in time with corn on the cob, I really don’t think it will affect the corn on the cob very much at all.  I guess the point I wanted to make is that corn on the cob is pretty good isn’t it? 

 

One lesson vampire children need to learn early on is never to run with wooden stakes also regular children.      

The latest as of June

Well, yesterday I discovered that Big Bird is actually a guy.  It kind of freaked me out.  After a lifetime of believing Big Bird was a female it kind of shocked my very core. 

 

Amist sesame street watching I also realized that Elmo and I have something in common, and no it is not hairiness.  If there is a melody we can’t sit still, we both have to harmonize.  After I heard him harmonizing correctly he won my respect and got my vote as the main character to entertain Lanette.   I used to be a huge Cookie Monster fan, but I have found that I am irritated by his misuse of the first person  and his one dimensional thought process ie “me want cookies”        

 

In other news there is a great book that I have been reading, so far I have enjoyed it.  It is now in paperback, so half price.  Lanette just saw this picture on here and shouted “Daddy’s book” which is pretty accurate unfortunately Kira will read 10 -20 books in the time it takes me to finish the one, so my book becomes very familiar to her since it is out for months.     

Speaking of books I don’t know if I should be worried, but Kira is now reading a book entitled “Finding Mr. Right”  I’m not sure if she wanted to confirm that she had actually found him (or if she should still be looking ha ha).  It is kind of ironic and comical to see a married woman reading a book with that title.  She assured me that it was a fiction novel not and not a self-help book.   We had a good laugh.      

     The other day I authorized benefits for a woman who had 4 children from 4 different men and has a new boyfriend.  At what point does a person figure it out?  It was sickening to see this precious gift so throroughly abused and conversely see amazing LDS couples who would give anythng and have paid thousands of dollars to have kids into their wonderful gospel-centered homes yet are not given that opportunity in this life.  

     Personally I would love to bring as many spirits to our home as we possibly can.  We can offer them so much since we have the restored gospel and a safe, stable home with parents who love each other and the Lord.  Children are the greatest source of happiness.  I made a paper airplane for Lanette this morning and a couple minutes later she came up to me and gave me a little kiss on the cheek and said thank you.   It is so worth it!  

Well I got to go make breakfast!