My health, my weight, cooking vegetables, and recipes online

Let's go with "cooking vegetables" first. Here's an article. (the gist: cooking food can be better for some foods, like tomatoes, because they gain more lycopene, vitamins, etc.) My counterargument is that it's not all about the vitamins. How can we say something is healthier just because it has more vitamin C or something? Maybe it also loses some vitamin X that is actually ten times as important as vitamin C. At any rate, it does raise my eyebrow again at the Raw Food movement. (I still fully intend to participate for a while, though...)

Okay, my health and my weight: I'm still addicted to cereal, and I just weighed myself today, and came in at 153.

OMG DISCLAIMER: I know weight is not a good measure of health. If you go by BMI, Lebron James is 27.5, which is "overweight." In fact, if you look at two people who look the same, and one is heavier, he's probably healthier, because more of his body is muscle (muscle is denser than fat). SO, maybe your waist size and how good you look in the mirror is a better measure. BUT, weight is the only number I have to track my health, and I am easily swayed by numbers, so I probably put too much stock in it.

OMG DISCLAIMER PART TWO: I know I'm healthy! Skinny even! But I am (probably unnaturally) concerned with staying skinny. I find obesity, or even overweightness, really pretty disgusting, because it's the only outward sign of American-rich-white gluttony that I can see, so if I were overweight, I'd feel like a big slob. At the same time, I realize that many overweight people are that way because of genetics (or some other factor they can't control), and that many overweight people lead healthier lives than I, even. Not really a fair judgment, is it? Well, my conscious mind knows that, and I just have to keep telling my subconscious.

I feel like about 160 is healthy for me (based on what? I dunno... BMI?), and I've gone between 153 and 167 over the last few years. I used to lift weights, which would explain things perfectly: I put on some muscle mass, then I lost it again. Fine. I now eat pretty healthy (except for the cereal thing) and I exercise every day, maybe not enough, but it's a good 20 minutes of hilly biking that I actually do every day, and sometimes more. (occasionally less, like when I'm home in Westlake...) Also, I lost a notch on my belt, and my pants are getting baggier, even. Usually I have a pretty good (although not great) body self-image. So if I can continue the same way for the rest of my life and hold steady in the 150's (plus more if I ever start lifting again), I'm pretty happy with that.

I guess, in summary: fuck you Hollywood for my warped perception of healthy and prejudice against large folks, fuck you Hollywood + the media + society for making me take too much stock in one number, but thank you random chance + genetics for giving me a healthy body so it doesn't really matter.

Last: recipe storage. I found a cool notepad site, Helipad, that lets me write notes plus arbitrary tags, and search through them and sort by tags. It's almost exactly what I asked for. There's also Google Base, which is (uncharacteristically) a little clumsy to create a new document. You can submit a feed, but to have a feed, the items have to already be hosted somewhere. Also, it makes everything public, while Helipad keeps them private. But now I'm thinking the best thing would just be to create a recipe blog! Put each recipe on one post, and you can add tags and search just like on Helipad. Plus you get a free RSS feed, and you can search by date added to see how your tastes change. I guess it makes it public, though, too, but my recipes are no huge secrets. Also, I like the idea of putting them on something Google-hosted, because it's not going anywhere. I'm not sure what Helipad's reliability is like. I'll keep you posted.