Raam Dev’s Weblog

I just finished the longest fast I have ever completed. It’s not really fair to call it a “fast”, since I did eat brown rice twice during the 48 hours, but it was a detox fast. The experience was more eye-opening than I had imagined and although I felt a bit “out of it” for most of the weekend, I did end up with a much higher appreciation for food.

I’m considering starting a monthly weekend-detox to regularly clean my system. Since I’m vegan, you may wonder what toxins I could be cleaning out. Well, there are a lot more toxins in our bodies than you might imagine — even toxins unrelated to food! An article titled “How Toxins Affect Your Energy Health” has a nice explanation:

It is nearly impossible to free your body of toxins because they are everywhere. Toxins can be found in the air you breathe, the food you eat, and your body can even create toxins from too much stress. Even if you can not get rid of all the toxins in your body, it is still important to reduce the level of toxins so your health and energy will not suffer. Your body is designed to handle small level of toxins on a regular basis; when there are too much toxins in your body at once, your body will start to breakdown and you may suffer from health problems, such as headaches, fatigue, nausea, sickness and chronic diseases.

Fasting is one of the many ways we can clean toxins out of our body. A detoxification fast usually consists of eating a single simple food that is easy to digest, such as brown or white basmati rice, and nothing else for several days at a time (of course you must drink water to stay hydrated!).

Calorie restriction has been shown to improve overall health and slow the aging process. The low-calorie Okinawa diet, for example, is thought to be a direct reason why a high proportion of Okinawans live to over 110 years of age.

Insert the CD you want to create an ISO image from into your CDROM/DVD drive and then launch Disk Utility (Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility). Select the CD underneath the drive listed on the left and then click New Image in the tool bar at the top.

On the Save As dialog, enter a name for your ISO image and choose the location where you want to save the file. Change the Image Format from compressed to DVD/CD master (compressed will save the file as a DMG image). In the example below, I use example as the filename.

Disk Utility will create the disk image with the .cdr extension, even though the image itself is identical to a .iso image¹.

When Disk Utility is finished, you can browse to the file with Finder and rename the file from example.cdr to example.iso.

The ISO image can then be distributed and burned on any system (I tested this by burning the resulting ISO on a Windows XP machine using the free DeepBurner application).

Not a true ISO image?

I have read that the resulting ISO image is not a “true” ISO-9660 filesystem and that you can use the following command to convert DMG images (leave the Image Format as compressed to create a DMG image in Disk Utility) into *real* ISO images using the following command:

hdiutil makehybrid -o example example.dmg

This will convert example.dmg into example.iso. However, after burning the resulting ISO image on a Windows machine the CD was not bootable. Using the renaming method I described above, the CD was bootable and Windows was able to see the contents of the CD without any problems.

I looked over the man page for hdiutil and even tried some of the examples to convert a DMG to a *true* ISO file:

hdiutil makehybrid -o example.iso example.dmg -iso -joliet

But after burning the resulting ISO to a CD, I discovered the CD was again not bootable. Maybe I’m missing something and someone can enlighten me. Until then, I will continue creating a .cdr image and renaming it to .iso.

After a long break, I’m back to bodybuilding. In addition to lots of stretching and yoga I’m concentrating on full-body exercises like chin-ups, push-ups, and leg raises. Cardio always seems to die off during the colder winter months, but now that the warm weather is slowly returning I need to pick it up again. I’ve also started waking up earlier and my goal is to eventually start waking up before sunrise.

Even more difficult than maintaining a good diet and exercise routine is maintaining a good diet and exercise routine for very long periods of time — I’m talking in years, not months. The past 9 years of my bodybuilding career, although mostly beneficial to my health, have been a roller coaster of workout routines and diets. Dedication, commitment, and sheer will-power made me the fittest I’ve ever been, but maintaining that physique indefinitely while being in a career that requires me to sit down will be quite the challenge.

Ever since I started working out regularly, I have been trying to eat more protein while maintaining a vegan diet. I’ve tried making soy, hemp, and rice protein shakes, eating more tempeh and tofu, and even eating more beans (though I must admit that the time required to cook beans and grains definitely prevents me from eating them as regularly as I would like). I don’t know if I have a protein sensitivity or if I’m just not combining foods properly, but every time I increase my protein intake my body seems to reject it and digestion becomes very difficult.

I have thought about how much easier things would be if I could have EAS Myoplex shakes, cottage cheese, yogurt, non-fat chocolate milk, and other foods that I learned how to use to help with keeping protein high and carbohydrates low. Now that I have been maintaining a vegan diet, I feel like I’m starting back at square one; I feel like I don’t know anything about diet and fitness because everything changes when you remove all dairy from your diet.

Earlier today I was actually contemplating switching back to a lacto-vegetarian diet, but then I remembered the promise I made to myself several months ago:

I was born a Vegetarian, but I will die a Vegan.

So to push these dangerous thoughts out of my head, that has become my new mantra. If maintaining a vegan diet means I need to spend more time preparing food and learning how to cook complete meals, then so be it. I was thinking, I should probably tattoo the word VEGAN on my body somewhere so I can simply look at it whenever I’m doubting my commitment to a vegan lifestyle.

As I was cutting these red bell peppers this morning, I was surprised when an open cut on my hand started stinging really bad — as if I had been cutting onions or hot peppers! I knew it wasn’t the water on the peppers because I just took a shower and I had washed my hands without feeling any pain at all. I’m guessing the pain was caused by the trace amounts of capsaicin found inside the bell peppers.

Red bell peppers, like their close relatives the hot peppers, contain capsaicin. Capsaicin is what makes peppers hot, however the bell peppers have a recessive gene that eliminates the capsaicin and allows us to eat an entire pepper without our mouth catching on fire.

Red bell peppers are an amazing food and contain a huge array of vitamins and minerals. They are very high in vitamin C (higher than oranges!), contain high levels of antioxidants, and have more beta-carotene than green or yellow peppers.

This morning I woke up to the worst pain I have ever experienced in my lats. I was unable to raise my elbows any higher than my chest without feeling extreme pain. It literally feels like someone is hammering nails into my lats every time I raise my arms. Here is the muscle in pain, the Latissimus Dorsi:

Then I realized that yesterday was my arm workout day — a workout that I haven’t done in almost a year. I did a total of 47 pull-ups and several other arm exercises, including the dumbbell decline triceps extension which also hits the lats. The pain is excruciating, but it tells me that my muscles are now in the recovery phase and that they will come back even stronger!

I decided to skip todays workout because I think at this point it will do more harm than good. You know I’m really in pain when I decide to cancel a workout.

My new workout regiment, and the changes I’ve made to my diet this week, are really having a draining effect. I used to get tired around one or two in the morning but now I find myself ready to collapse at eleven PM! It’s now midnight and I’m still at the office–I just finished a 4 hour team discussion at work. I’m really looking forward to getting home and laying down on the hardwood floor of my new apartment.

So far this week I’ve been really good with sticking to my workout plan. I randomly picked one of the many workout routines I have saved in the memo list on my BlackBerry. I’ll see if I can post it tomorrow. This week is mostly a warm-up to next week, which is when I plan to really get my workouts revved up.

I woke up last Monday unable to move my right ankle. It wasn’t just stiff, it hurt. It was a very familiar feeling — something I’ve had happen several times over the past few years. I’m not exactly sure what is happening inside the ankle, but it feels as if a bone has moved out of place, creating the same type of pain I have experienced after dislocating my ankle (of which has happened several times to both of my ankles).

Whenever this “micro-dislocation” has happened in the past, I was simply sitting down in a chair with my feet relaxed. Suddenly I would feel extreme pain in my ankle, as if it was slipping out. The pain wouldn’t stop right away but would continue, even after I take pressure off the foot. I would quickly “push” it back into position disregarding the extreme pain, and after hearing a few clicks the pain would instantly subside. I tried this same technique after waking up last week, but it didn’t work.

For the first few days, I had to limp around. It was too painful to walk normally. Climbing stairs felt awkward. After moving around for a few days with a dysfunctional ankle, my knee and hip started to suffer as well, since those joints were not being used properly. By Thursday, my ankle had become quite swollen. So, I iced it every morning after that and by Saturday the swelling was gone.

I forced myself to try and walk normally, but the pain was hard to ignore. I stretched it several times a day, but it felt as if there was something more than stiffness causing the pain. By Sunday evening, I was starting to wonder if I should have a doctor look at it.

This Monday morning I woke up and to my amazement, my ankle had returned to normal. I tried stretching it in several different directions which had caused extreme pain all week and I wasn’t able to recreate any pain! Exactly one week: I woke up last Monday morning with extreme pain, one week went by, and then I woke up yesterday to discover the pain gone. I don’t know how else to describe this other than a “micro-dislocation”.

The whole week I was telling myself how I will start, and stick to, a regular exercise routine as soon as my ankle gets better. I didn’t realize how fortunate I was until I lost the functionality of what I took for granted. What better wake up message than to be crippled for one week and then just as quickly be given another chance.