Bear here...   
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I'm betting you are wondering what weight control has to do with homesteading. I'm thinking that if you are in better shape and comfortable in your body it will be easier for you to go outside and do things homesteaders do. I also think that after a hard day's work you want to be able to move around the next few days with little to no pain. Am I right? Hope so...

So... I am going to get a page on OTH and blog about my successes AND failures with weight control. (Nobody wins all the time.) It will help me stay focused and hopefully it will have the tools to inspire you to take control of weight issues you may have. The page will be a one stop spot with lots of info and stories. It will be updated many times this year. I am hoping to have it "done" within a year. The blogs will be my progress and small chunks of the big picture. It will be a mixture of many types of books I have read and programs I have been through. No weight control program or diet works for everyone. Those who say one plan fits all are full of crap, just sayen. I'm going to give you a wide variety of tools and you can choose and experiment and see what works best for you. I'm hoping it will help and inspire at least one person.

Why am I calling it weight CONTROL instead of weight loss?  In short, here is my story...

In 2000, when I moved to Wisconsin I weighed around 416 lbs (I am 6' 4" tall). In 2012 I was at my lowest weight of 298 lbs. My weight has gone up and down. I now weigh around 340. By my "Bear math" in the last 20 years I have lost around 950 then gained back around 900 of them there pounds.  

My main short term goal is to get down close to 280 lbs. by the end of April or May. (Partially, so I can button my cooking vest, below.) My long term goal is, once I get there I will NEVER be above 290 lbs again. If I can do that I am in CONTROL of my weight and most of my health. If I can inspire people to do the same and feel better about themselves, even better...

(By the way, I curse in real life to highlight and to get my point across sometimes, not to offend. I am a blunt guy and there will be a little cursing in the weight control page and blogs. We don't swear on our other OTH pages, at least I'm not remembering any at the moment. I hope this alerts you without causing offense.)

Let's get started with the first three basics...

1.  ATTITUDE:  YOU NEED TO LIKE YOURSELF!  No one feels the need to help someone if they feel that person is an a--hole. PAY ATTENTION & ENJOY THE PROCESS! It is easier to do a thing you want to do instead of have to do. FIND WHAT WORKS! There are a lot of resources out there. Give what seems right an honest chance. Keep doing what works and discard what doesn't. Don't be afraid of change.
   
2. INPUT:  This means calories and commercials. Commercials make you want what you don't  need or something that may be bad for you, that's their job. Calories are countable energy markers that we take in and burn off. If you eat too many calories your weight goes up. If you reduce the calorie intake your weight will slowly go down. If you starve yourself your body will go into emergency mode, meaning it eats itself to survive. Over time that can f-ck you up. Just sayen...
   
3. OUTPUT: Energy (calories) you burn getting through life. You don't burn enough, you become a fat person. You burn too many, you become a stick person. Most athletes who are very active, possibly too active, burn out their bodies. They are amazing in their prime but are in a lot of joint pain by middle age (late 30s) instead of old age (mid 70s). 
   

Tools to help:

The best tools you can use are HONESTY and a JOURNAL. If you lie to yourself you are screwing yourself over. End of that discussion. The mind can play tricks on your memory. A journal will keep an accurate history, as it happens, that you can go back to, of what works and what doesn't. If you experience and write it down you are paying more attention to what is going on in your health and life. Honest journaling can be as good as mental therapy. You are not alone- good journaling can be a partner in discovering issues about weight control. If you discover you need help, someone to talk to, journaling gives you a head start on the issues after you learn to trust your therapist. Win, win...

...And Homework. In the journal write about...​

1. ATTITUDE: Start with current health issues and weight, then a reasonable weight goal three months from now. Here are some questions to get you to know yourself. If you come up with more or better questions for yourself write them down and answer them. Why do you want to lose or gain weight? What are your goals? How do you feel about yourself? How do you want to feel about yourself? How do you feel about what others think of you? What has worked before? How do you feel about food, and exercise? What motivates you to be better? Do you self-sabotage? Why? What does being happy/content feel like to you? YOU... DESERVE... TO ... BE ... HEALTHY... AND... HAVE ... A ... GOOD ... LIFE!    Just sayen...
2. INPUT:  If you remember, log all you consumed last week. This week and next week, keep track of what you eat, how much by volume and/or calories. (A good calorie counter book helps with this, get one.) Keep track of what you drink and their calories. Keep track of how much water you drink. You don't need to change, just write it down. Learn and pay attention to what you consume. Pick one day a week to weigh yourself in the morning and journal it.
3. OUTPUT: (On an example scale of 1-5: 1 = almost no movement, 2 = 20% of time moving not rushed, 3 = up to moving 50% of time and sometimes rushed, 4 = some high speed movement or lot of time rushed 40% to 60% of time, 5 = very active most of time and rushed or high speed.) How active are you?  How active is your job? How active are your hobbies?  How active do you want to be? What do you want to be able to do?

AND... Small steps for feeling and being better...

1. ATTITUDE: As needed, or every day, look yourself in the eyes in the mirror and say "I like you. We deserve to be healthy, happy, and have a good life." If you come up with something better for yourself that's positive, even better...
2. INPUT: Are you keeping track of what you eat? Good... If you are dropping a pound or two between weigh-ins, GOOD F-CKING JOB! WELL DONE!!  If not at least 1 pound every other week that's OK. You are keeping track of it. Good job. Here are a few helpful hints: Be a little hungry and your stomach will shrink, reduce portions, and leave some food on the plate. (EXAMPLES: Be aware if you start feeling full and stop eating. IT IS OK TO LEAVE A LITTLE FOOD UNEATEN ON YOUR PLATE. Someone tells you you have to eat it all, tell them politely to piss off. You are trying to lose weight. Use smaller plates, bowls, and glasses, which makes less food look like more food. I used to eat a large pizza with a 2-liter of soda. A medium pizza with a liter of soda is less calories and when your stomach shrinks and that feels like a lot you can cut back further. Watch your liquids, most bottles hold more than one serving, read the labels, lots of calories can go down quick if you aren't paying attention. Water is your friend. A doctor told me we should drink 1/2 our body weight in ounces of water a day (if I weigh 300 lbs I should drink 150 oz of water) to stay hydrated, more in the summer. A simple test is: If your piss is darker than light yellow you are not hydrated, you need more water, not diet soda or milk.)
3. OUTPUT: If you can, be more active. Create more movement in your life. Working out is advanced movement. (An example of each: Theresa and I walk a 1/4 mile, take breaks, if needed, and enjoy our time together- that's more movement. We go 1/4 mile at a decent pace with no stops, still have a good time- that's a workout. BOTH WAYS WILL HELP YOU BUILD STAMINA AND LOSE WEIGHT. Take 5 minutes when you wake up to stretch and walk in place, even in the shower if you need to. Create ways to walk more. (Theresa has the van she carpools in drop her off further away from her office building so she can walk.) Park further away from the store when you go to shop. Lay on the floor, get to standing position and back down quick as you can 5 times. When that is easy go up to 10 times. Dance or do martial arts forms for 10 or more minutes. Sweep all your floors with a broom. Find a hobby that requires you to move more. Get creative with activity and journal about it. You and I know you can do it.

That's enough for now. It's a good start. Send me questions or comments if you want to. Do what you can until next time, I will too.
​
Type at ya later...

Bear here...

We think it is fun to challenge ourselves to find new, and sometimes weird (Theresa prefers to call it unconventional), things and ways to cook. I call it the Cook of Anarchy school of cooking. If it saves us money, even better! (See our Buy Nothing Challenge pages.)

This cooking challenge is to choose one pantry item and make many different dishes from it until we are tired of using that item. Hopefully, each item will hold our interest for two or more weeks. 

First Challenge...   OATS

 What we have learned so far...

• Oat bran is the fine skin covering the oat groats. It is highly nutritious and helps reduce cholesterol. 
• There are six types of oats, but each type has many names, so it can get confusing:

1. Whole Groats: The least processed of all the oats. The indigestible outer hull has been taken off and that's it. Ready to go. Takes the longest to cook but has the most nutritional value.
2. Steel Cut Oats (also known as Groats, Irish Oats, and Pinhead Oats): These are whole groats cut into three or four chunks to cook faster.
3. Scottish Oatmeal (or just Oatmeal): Whole groats that have been ground to a medium oatmeal. Its largest grains are around 1-2 millimeters. It still has the bran in it. Fine oatmeal is much smaller. It is ground so fine it resembles oat flour but it still has the bran in it. Bran has been sifted out of oat flour.
4. Old Fashioned Oats (in UK they are called Jumbo Oats): The whole groats are steamed and flattened into large flakes.
5. Rolled Oats (known as Quick, Flaked, or Porridge Oats): Steel cut oats that are cut, steamed, and rolled flat. They are smaller than the Old Fashioned/Jumbo Oats and still have the bran.   
6. Instant Oats: (I know it's judgmental but I call them crap.) Highly processed oats that have the bran and most of the nutrition stripped out of them so they can cook faster.

Theresa is interested in making main dishes that will have leftovers for us to eat throughout the week. I'm looking to push boundaries and see what we find. In the Oats Bible there are breakfasts, snacks, dinners, desserts, and even drinks.

So far Theresa made the peanut butter oat bars she liked when she was at Girl Scout camp. (Only crumbs left, didn't think ya wanted to have a picture of that.) We tried, and liked, the savory oatmeal pictured below.
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Here is how we made it:

Fry some bacon in a skillet. Use strong beef or chicken broth to cook the groats or oatmeal with 1/2 a chopped onion. The bacon will be done before the oatmeal, set it aside, then crumble it while waiting. When the oatmeal is done, add the bacon and as much chopped raw onion as you want. It's also good to grate some Parmesan cheese over it. We served it with a side of broiled (yes, I said broiled) cabbage (because Theresa insisted on adding a vegetable).
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Hoping to have lots of ideas to share with ya.

​Type at ya later...

Bear here...
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Ever go out in the rain, in October, and replace the sugar water in the hummingbird feeder because the wife thought it needed changing?  I have... This year we had Some hummingbirds that were a frequent addition to our feeder area and we hope to have some back next year...

Heh, with great bird feeders comes great responsibility...

Just to let you know we are going to try to blog more and get some new pages up for our website. for those who still follow us and for the new likes (on face book)  thank you.

Type at ya later...

Bear here...

We realized we are behind in adding pages to our Buy Nothing Challenge (BNC) section, so we wanted to belatedly announce that thanks in large part to the BNC, our house was paid off in November of 2018! Yep, it's all ours, more than 5 years earlier than we were scheduled to pay off the mortgage.

What are we doing with the extra money now that we don't need to make that huge monthly payment? For us, the most basic choice is- do we want more money (which means more stuff) or more of a life? Theresa and I choose more life. So this year, we have been seeing if we can survive working part-time.

It's been tight, so we are are revamping the Buy Nothing Challenge for 2020. (Here is the link to our BNC we started in 2014 if you would like some background.) We hope to be adding more details in the near future, but here is a preview of the things we have been talking about doing:

• My allowance for food at work is up to $10 a week. It used to be $5 because I brought my own lunch, but I have a new job where I can eat a good meal really cheap. Sadly, I can no longer get morning coffee cheap. I have been buying the Starbucks bottled frapachinos, two for five bucks and have been spending over $20 a week on those alone (which does not fit in our budget).
• Beer fund: I get one six-pack a week. If I want more I have to save up from the work food allowance. (Oh yeah, what I drink is about $10 a 6-pack.)
• The big one is groceries. We spend at least $200 when we go to the grocery store and around $40 at our local gas station for junk / comfort food (Theresa protests that she seldom goes to the local gas station, whereas I go nearly every day, so she denies that it's her fault we spend so much money there. She totally admits to being part of the large grocery bills). We are thinking of a $100 limit and only going twice a month. 
  
• That means an EAT FROM THE PANTRY Challenge. It's time to use what we have on hand, time to see what we can do with 25 lbs bags of grains and beans (Theresa points out she's been cooking with them for years- see her page on Cooking from the Pantry), and cook more staples from scratch. We might make a cooking page to share recipes from this challenge too.
  

Why do we continue to challenge ourselves?  We both want to stay working part time and we want to  to go to California to see the giant redwoods and swim in the ocean. Good reasons don't ya think?  Gotta plan what we think will help us accomplish this.

​Type at ya later...

Bear here... 

Ever want to visit us, in Wisconsin, and see the yarden? Now you can!!!

Yup... 

We are doing a tour on Sat., August 10th, from 11:00 am to 1 pm. (If you need directions contact us through our website contact form.)  We're planning to have a potluck afterwards. (We will have hot dogs and hamburgers. The grill will be open to anyone who wants to grill with Bear. Do you want to grill some plants? We can do that! ) Bring chairs and a dish if you want to hang out by the bonfire and eat after the tour....

For the outside... We will be discussing permaculture, gardening for wildlife, catios, etc...

Inside... cooking methods, being debt free (and our buy nothing challenge), wood stove cooking and more...

If it rains, we will probably cancel or postpone. 

Hope to see you!
Bear & Theresa...
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Bear celebrated in a more traditional guy way- sleeping with the cats in our catio:

Soon we will go inside for a while to make our amazing World's Best Honey Vanilla Ice Cream:

If you feel like a few laughs, you can watch the video of Bear making ice cream
we did a couple years ago.

Here's our Solstice flame (a little bit of the Sun), our abundance charm (with a citrine geode on the left), and our hope for how we can live the rest of our Summer (and our lives):

For more ideas about how to spend the day, see our Celebrate Summer Solstice page.

Bear here...

We like to garden for wildlife and one of our favorite forms of wildlife is birds- all kinds of birds. It is cool to sit at the window and see all the different types that come to our yard: ground feeder birds, small feeder birds, pretty much any birds, we like all of them. We have noticed there is a lot more bird song in our yard than most places in our town, even more than in the nearby state natural area.

 You get the Idea. Lots of life and diversity in a small yarden area. To see more about what Theresa has done to create wildlife habit in our tiny yard, see her Gardening for Wildlife page.

​Type at ya later...

Bear here...

Ever get tired of the websites where everything is perfect the first time? I call bull crap!

Want to hear some secrets? Not everything works out the way people planned it. Some ideas that sound good really are bad ideas, and sometimes the good ideas need tweaking (repair work) a few years later. People learn from mistakes (usually). Here at Our Tiny Homestead we are not afraid to talk about our mistakes. It's one way we learn and sometimes laugh. Here is an example...

In our Youtube video about catio 2, I boasted about how I thought a straw couch would be a good idea, and save us a lot of money. At the time Frost looked comfortable (left below) so it should work for humans, Right? As you can see in the other photo he is checking to see how I was doing. Not too bad. Sure it was lumpy but a thick blanket under me could fix that. Right? I figured the bales wouldn't sink in the mud like chair legs do. We usually get more straw bales every spring so it wouldn't be a big deal to replace the straw couch... 

... Some things I found out after dealing with the couch was:

1. Thick blankets didn't work, I'm too heavy and still felt the separate bales under me.
   
2. Straw stays wet a long time after it rains. A lot of the time I would need plastic under the blanket if I wanted to be dry when I got up.
3. Mushrooms tend to grow in straw bales, and not the good, edible ones. The shrooms left black marks on the blankets and if the cats ate the shrooms they could get sick or die. 
4. The bales became mushy over the summer. They didn't sink, they were crushed. The couch was lower and harder to get up from.
5. The word ICKY comes to mind when I had to move the large glops of straw with mold and critter droppings inside. The middle of the bales never really dried that summer.

We have learned and we have improved. As you can see (below) we have built a patio in the catio. There is now a space that has no chance of mud. We also found an inexpensive double lounger by Outsunny  ($200 instead of the usual $1000). I can nap on it while the cats nap on me.

Live and learn.

​Type at ya later...

Bear here... 

Just another reminder why "weeds" are your friends. We wanted salad without going to the store, so we went to our yarden instead. We found Turkish rocket, chickweed, and lambs quarter...  and...
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Wha-la... Weeds Salad...

Fun facts: 

• People spray weed killer to get rid of chickweed and lambs quarters. We let them grow. Theresa has a stock tank in our garden just for growing lambs quarters because she loves it in soups and salads.
• Chickweed has lots of vitamins. 
• 2/3 of this salad was provided for us by Mother Nature .
• With homemade vinaigrette dressing this Yarden salad brightens up any breakfast (see below)...

Time to get outside and see what else we can harvest.

Except I almost forgot- our shameless plug- there are more chickweed (and other "weed") recipes in our book:
Eat Your Wild Yard.

​Type at ya later...

Bear here...

Ever been surprised by a power outage and thought " Oh CRAP... now what do we do?" We had that experience today. We were also ready for it. We couldn't go on line to see our prepare for power outage  page but we did have a list of what to do when the power goes out. Luckily the power was out for only 2 hours. Being prepared made those 2 hours a lot less stressful. Today is a windy day and the power could get knocked out again. It can look ugly out there (see below), and panic may set in. You don't have to panic if you are prepared. Here are a few basics.

What you need is heat, water and food.  We have a wood burning stove so we are set. If you have a backup generator make sure sure it works before you need it. Run it for an hour a month during the cold season so you KNOW it will run when you need it. If you have neither, find a heater that runs on batteries and have plenty of batteries. If you have no heat source put everyone in one room dress in layers and put blankets around doors and windows so cold air cant get in. Below is a picture of our winter Safety net.

We need Water and food to survive. If you don't have a lot of bottled water around fill as many containers as you can with water from the tap. One gallon of water per person for 7 days may seem like overkill but it's not, it's better than running out. Remember you will also needing water to wash things and water for your pets.  You want food that you can and will want to eat without opening a refrigerator. Having a full pantry of canned food, peanut butter and the like. I also suggest powdered milk is good to have on hand.

Those are the basics, here are a few "tricks"

• A full freezer will stay frozen for about 48 hours if unopened. A refrigerator will stay cold for 4 to 6 hours. Old school iceboxes were kept cold with large blocks of ice. Get 2 to 4 gallon milk jugs or 2 medium buckets and fill them with water and set outside to freeze. When frozen put 1/2 in refrigerator and swap every 8 to 10 hours. 
• If something needs chilled but not frozen after opening put some snow in a large pan or cooler and cover to keep chilled.
• keep nonelectric entertainment around. (books, puzzles, games, ect. ) Makes time go faster.
• Plan a menu for a week that doesn't need electricity and always keep those items in pantry. Remember to keep supplies for your pets.
• Learn to cook with your wood burning stove.
  
• Have some no electricity weekends for fun and practice for emergencies, take notes on what would make them better.

Hope is helps,

​Type at ya later...