Week 11: Ketogenic Diet Experiment/moderate carb

My husband lost another pound and a half!

Seriously he is doing so well. Crushing it.

I’m not doing so well at keto. I’m still maintaining the habit of three keto meals a day as a family which I love and I’m sure is still drastically decreasing my simple carbs over all. However, other than that not so much.

I am finding success in excercise. I’m really enjoying my walks. I get them in at least twice a week and try for more.

I practiced restorative yoga this Tuesday and was amazed to find that the beginning of my fitloop bodyweight fitness routine has a lot in common with restorative yoga.

I need to commit myself to that routine. I know it would be so good for me and strength gains. I’m just all over the place right now trying to keep things together. As everyone is from time to time.

I know school will help calm things down some. Also time will help. Some things just need time.

I’m living the dream though. Loving life. In a few months I’m excited to work on more remodels and I will have some good before and afters hopefully. This time from my side of the house.

I plan to mud the walls and paint so it should be exciting. I will start with just the dining room and living room. I want to do them together because they are really just one big room. I’m excited to see how it looks with the beautiful blue from the apartment. Hopefully it isn’t too dark.

Until next week. I may be late again as we have a family reunion to attend.

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Movie Review: The Magic Pill

I watched The Magic Pill last night on Netflix. It was very interesting. I was most curious in comparing it to the vegan movie What the Health.

The tone was so different.

I loved that they didn’t just have people practicing and anecdotal evidence. Although they did have that they also had research teams who are looking into keto for autism and cancer etc.

So cool!!! Also it wasn’t fear mongering or attacking it was calm and legit.

Without further ado, I will list the pros and cons and let you decide for yourself. If you go watch come back and let me know what you thought in the comments.

Pros:

• Research authorities rather than practicing people who have a paid interest
• Fairly open and simply saying need more research
• Not shoving it down your throat
• Laid back and relaxed feel
• Not fear based tactics

Cons:

• Said to avoid dairy. In my opinion that isn’t necessary for most people
• Not a lot of concrete studies mostly anecdotal evidence

Week 10: Ketogenic Diet Experiment

Progress!!!

The Hubby lost 4 lbs and is finally sleeping better! He is also working out more. He is now down to 222.6.

I maintained at 120 which isn’t bad at all. I’m still eating three meals a day very low carb and not restricting when I have cravings. I figure it’s way less sugar than I would have otherwise and we are all eating healthier.

Strangely fruit is the thing I want to eat more of the most. I’m not going to complain about that.

I have had bugs killing plants in my garden lately. Saturday they tore through and destroyed many plants. So I replanted yet again. I also sprayed for bugs.

I really want some greens and squash from our garden this year. I’m determined. The garden is coming along beautifully other than that.

 

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Amazon Mechanical Turk Review, Plus Guide to Get Started

I talk about this thing called MTurk, or Amazon Mechanical Turk in my book Balancing Your Bipolar. It has been a lifesaver to help us make ends meet working from home. It is hard to have it cover all your bills, but I did make $800 one month and like I said it saved us at one point.

I now use it mainly for a little boost. I tend to make about $100 a month or so at it. This is done fairly easily with a goal of about $5 a day and doing a few surveys to get there.

I enjoy the work and at one point used it as a therapy essentially. It really helped me feel productive when I was depressed. I would do mindless tasks while watching Netflix and make a few dollars an hour instead of wasting all my time on Sudoku or some other such thing to get my mind off being depressed. It worked well to shut off the negative noise in my mind.

So as far as a review I’m just going to do a simple pro and con list.

Pros:

1. Make money from home
2. work as much or as little as you want, no min, and the max is so high you probably won’t ever reach it.
3. get paid relatively quickly
4. pay straight to bank with no fee
5. interesting work that furthers research
6. varied work

Cons:

1. hard to make good income
2. takes time to learn
3. lots of crap on there like receipts, NEVER do receipts
4. some pay is horrible. It’s always a good idea to keep a running calculation of your time and keep it above $6 an hour. I shoot for more like $10
5. sometimes the good work is mind numbing
6. It’s not a get rich quick, sorry

It also worked well when I was hypomanic and needed something to keep me busy.

So without further ado, here is my guide to getting started with MTurk:

The first step is to apply to join MTurk Get Started. Then click “Create a Worker Account”.

Once your account has been accepted, which could be a long time, short, or never. Here are two really good guides. One is included within the other as a link, but I included it first here: Your First 1000 Hits

It helps with information on how to sign up. I would recommend signing up now just in case it takes a while to be accepted. Then once you get the account you could start with 10-30 minutes a day working on the basics of that initial guide getting your account out of probation.

Then when you are ready you could move on here:

Beef up Your Game

Update March 2019:

I use a number of scripts to make my job easier. Recently I found one that combines a number of others. It is called Mturk Engine.

• It makes it easy to see a total of how much you earned for the day. How much is pending and totals ready to be transferred.
• It also allows you to set up watchers to grab hits that you have missed or that you want in your queue.
• The other feature I like is searching fro new hits and showing you ratings from Turk opticon the site that combines reviews.

Let me know if you have any questions. I don’t want to overload anyone with info which is why I gave you the guides you can take one step at a time.

 

Update July 2019:

We are now working together my husband and I to make $1200 a month. We use Mturk engine and we make $40 6 days a week together. So each $20 is the goal. We are usually done in 3-4 hours and have the rest of the day with our family.

Week 9: Ketogenic Diet Experiment for Mental Health

This week has been crap! But seriously, I have had 4 cheat meals, and none of them were really planned. Most of them were related to my church calling. I volunteer with young women ages 16-18. They are so much fun and I love the calling. However, our church culture is centered around food. So many times we have treats. It is a bonding thing that extends to our entire American culture.

I, however, have gained a couple pounds this week. I broke 120! I know that is many people’s goal to get down to or goal to lose, but I’m still going to go at least to 125 maybe even 135. It is a healthy weight for me. Also, I can tell that my tummy is more toned. This tells me that hopefully I have lost fat and gained muscle.

My hubby didn’t lose this week but basically maintained. He isn’t sleeping well. He is in a lot of pain as he has kidney stones. Hopefully, they can pass and he can start getting better sleep again. He loses a lot more when he sleeps the full amount and regular hours.

Keto is going well, but we could both do better. Him with sleep, and me with staying on plan a little better.

On another note, I have been writing up a storm. I finished my first romance novel, and I started on my second one. I am editing the first and working with my incredible cover designer. She is also helping me with a couple other projects including getting my cover done for my first book for print.

I’m going to include a few reviews on the back cover as well as a short synopsis. Then it will be available for print. I know some people want that option as it is easier to share and give as a gift as well as reference and take notes in for the future.

I’m also considering creating a companion workbook but it’s not exciting me right now. I’m trying to ride my energy and put it in the most productive places.

Unfortunately, that is something you learn to do with the hypomania as a bipolar person.

I’m working hard though to work during the depression as well. I watched a YouTube video on just that. A family member shared it with me. I love that she was kind enough to read my book and knows what to recommend to me. I loved it.

Until next week, remember to follow me on Instagram @balancingmybipolar for recipes and to follow my keto journey daily.