Coming to a blog near you… (Anddd it’ll actually look a lot like this.)

General Ingredients:
1.) Kefir
2.) EFAs
3.) Coconut Oil
4.) Lecithin
5.) Calcium & Magnesium
6.) Antioxidant Extracts
7.) Stevia
8.) Honey
9.) Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries
10.) Ice cubes

Equipment:
1.) Blender
2.) Plastic Spoon

Okay, I figure the easiest way to do this (for now) is to tell you guys all about what I eat on a daily basis. Eventually I’m going to remove this post and replace it with a video version of me walking around the kitchen and showing you all what I do but for now, this’ll have to do.

Let’s just say I wake up at 10:00 AM;

10 AM: Two to three 8 oz. glasses of water with a tablespoon of psyllium husk fiber supplement
(Wait until the water leaves my system = I use the restroom)

10:45 AM: 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup of Kefir mixed with EFAs, Lecithin, Fish Oil, Calcium & Magnesium Powder, Organic Coconut Oil, half my vitamins
(I’ll give you the amounts I take in a later section but for now just follow the recommended amounts on the back)

That’s pretty much it. I have water and fiber in the morning. Sometimes it’s just water and with Probiotic tablet from Garden of Life Primal Defense when I’m feeling like I’m not getting enough sleep or I might be getting sick if I keep abusing my body.

Then, around 11ish, I eat a brunch kind of thing (Kefir with other stuff) and around 12-1 PM I have lunch like anybody else. If I wake up earlier, say 8-9 AM, I’d just drink the water and fiber, then when I’m hungry, eat my kefir. The kefir usually keeps me satiated for a about 3 hours. By the time I’m hungry, it’s usually lunch. If I get hungry before that I’ll just drink some ProGreens (or Pro Greens) green powdered drink.

Eating a large breakfast is actually a huge misconception. The reason being that your body is still in a cleansing state and is not acclimated to handle heavy foods yet. Wait, what? You mean all these years, we’ve been eating eggs, sausage, pancakes, with coffee, syrup, milk and cereal, and orange juice, we’ve been throwing our stomachs under the bus? Yes.

Well, let’s “break” breakfast down (no pun intended). Break-Fast, you’re breaking your fast. Why do people fast? Wait, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, in case you don’t know what a fast is let me explain it first. There are different kind of fasts… man… I’m just gonna do this as a video… this is gonna get wayyy too long.

So… I’ll post more about this later as a youtube video. For now, just know that it’s no mistake that it’s usually right after you eat solid foods in the morning you have to go number 2 in the bathroom a little later, it’s because you “break” the “fast” when you eat heavy foods. So if I wake up and eat right away, I’ll have to #2 right after, or I can wake up and eat 3 hours later, and suddenly have to go #2… if you still don’t get it I’ll make more sense of it later on a video. And I don’t mean I’m going to take you into the depths of my toilet (for those you if dirty minded snickering people =)

Sorry guys, recently I’ve just graduated electrical engineering with an emphasis in 3 fields: Communication Signals, Radio Frequency Systems, and Instrumention with a GPA of 3.36 (which is considered damn good considering the average of engineering is 3.0 GPA, you’d have to be an engineer to understand lol).

The original plan was to not worry about a job and just relax a bit till I leave for Shanghai, China in about 3 weeks (May 24th, 2008) and then worry about a career when I got back. But recently, after talking to my friends who have all just been recently hired or have found work already and receiving starting pay in the $60K range, I’m getting a little concerned about how relaxed “I am” about my own future.

So, my point is, most of my time these days, is dedicated towards finding a job, working out, and studying for the GMATs (I want to go to USC for an MBA). It’s kind of odd that before my acne problem, I thought life would take a huge turn around for the better (it kind of has), now that I’ve solved it, it’s like the other life issues tackle you right away.

But don’t be discouraged though, I’ll definitely keep posting when I have the time, not only that, but the video tutorials will be easier for me to post (as soon as I figure out how to post on youtube.com).

First off, depending on what kind of scars you have, there are different treatments. If they’re permanent scars, they have to be removed through cosmetic surgery. What do I mean by permanent scars? Well, I have permanent scars because I used to be impatient with my acne and decided to handle it myself with my own bare hands. The only problem was that I didn’t know how to correctly pop a pimple. This resulted in, sometimes, permanently scarring my skin (picture on the right is me up close). As you can, I don’t have acne anymore, but I have a lot of scarring because I used to get irritated and attack every pimple on my face in junior high and high school.

And don’t peel scabs, even if you think they’re just about to fall off, it’s better to be safe or you might really hurt your skin. As you can see from the picture, up close I have some permanent scarring from my younger days before I really understood how to handle my acne. Eventually, these scars will shrink little by little, but that’s going to take a really long time. We’re talking “years” here. You can simply do a “google” search online for “acne scar removal” and all sorts of stuff will come up.

Just remember, if you’re still getting pimples, laser surgery or whatever is not the solution. Trust me, regardless of whether it’s destroying the extra blood vessels, or killing the bacteria, or shrinking whatever glands (I’ve heard it all) your acne is not going to go away with external treatment. If you’re still getting pimples, even if you fix the outside, eventually another pimple will come back and another and another, then you’ll be back at square one and be short a couple grand (like me). FIX THE INSIDE FIRST, then after you stop having acne, go ahead and do whatever you want, be it cosmetic surgery or botox or whatever =)

If we’re just talking about scars like dark spots, there are easier solutions. Acid peels, exfoliating creams, and natural whitening methods are possible solutions. Don’t forget regular maintenance of your skin with the use of masks though because, if you have acne, you might already have problematic skin that you need to be extra cautious with.

I use two products right now, both from different companies, one is an exfoliating cream and the other is a natural whitening product. The exfoliating cream is from a company called CHENG E, one tube contains 200 grams of the cream, it’s about $9.00. I can’t read Chinese that well so I can’t translate the name of this item. You don’t have to use the same exact product as I do, just make sure that you exfoliate once every 3-4 days or even once a week depending on your skin.

The other item that I use is also made by CHENG E, I don’t think they actually even allow the sale of such an item here in the U.S. As a matter of fact, I’m not even quite sure how we have these in our house, well… just know that I use a Chinese product called Artbutin 6%. There’s a bunch of other Chinese writing on the bottle, I guess I’m going to have to do some translating… I just put about a nickel size amount of liquid onto my hands and then gently pat it onto my face in an upward motion (on my cheeks) and towards the center (on my forehead). I keep patting till it’s completely absorbed or dried.

I don’t really do the acid peels anymore because they’re kind of hard to do yourself and a little bit more of a hassle (being that it’s ACID and all). These two products seem to work pretty well for me and speeding of up darks spots, etc… I find it usually takes about a week at the most for a scab to fall off (if I do have to pop the occasional pimple) and usually about another 1-2 weeks before the dark spot is completely gone where the scab used to be.

The best solution is actually prevention (omg, I sound like a doctor) so eat right, sleep right, and if you do feel a big one coming on, get it before it becomes infected (more on that later). And I’ll definitely throw in some pictures and video about how I do this once I get my digital camera back from my 17 year old sister =). By the way, if any of this is unclear, feel free to email me and I edit this post for clarification.

Well, for now I’m just throwing on this article as some “on the side” information. I sort of went through a frozen yogurt phase being that I couldn’t touch ice cream due to the fact that it had too much fat and sugar. I turned to frozen yogurt because I “thought” it was a healthier alternative.

The key word there is “thought,”I finally did some more research and this is the article I found and it looks like I better start rounding up the gang for the search of a new dessert which is “actually” healthy, sighing…

…from wisegeek.com…

Frozen yogurt is a dessert similar to ice cream, but made with yogurt rather than cream. It tends to be healthier than ice cream, so many people choose it as an alternative. It is important to realize, however, that frozen yogurt, while richer in many minerals and nutrients than ice cream, is still not as healthy as regular yogurt – a fact many people overlook.

Yogurt is a fermented food, made by adding live bacterial cultures to milk. These bacteria provoke fermentation in the milk, releasing lactic acid; the acid in turn thickens the milk proteins and causes them to form a mass, while guarding against non-beneficial bacteria. Yogurt is usually only considered true yogurt if live bacteria remain at the end of the creation process. When a person consumes true yogurt, these live bacteria enter the body and assist other beneficial bacteria.

Yogurt, and by extension frozen yogurt, has a number of benefits over other dairy products. Perhaps most importantly, yogurt contains enzymes that assist in breaking down dairy, allowing many people with lactose intolerance to ingest yogurt and frozen yogurt with little or no ill effects. Yogurt also tends to have high levels of protein and many important minerals.

Frozen yogurt is perhaps best viewed health-wise as being somewhere between real yogurt and ice cream. While it contains protein, the protein found in frozen yogurt is often as little as a third the amount found in regular yogurt, and roughly equivalent to that found in ice cream. While ice cream is quite high in fat – between 10 and 18% fat by weight – frozen yogurt varies more widely. It usually has less fat than a comparable ice cream, but higher amounts of fat and substantially more calories than a comparable yogurt. Fat-free frozen yogurts exist, but they often have even more added sugar than other varieties.

Frozen yogurt is made in much the same way as ice cream, and it can be made at home in an ice cream maker. Yogurt replaces the cream content of ice cream, but otherwise, similar ingredients are used. A great deal of sugar is usually added, as in ice cream, which is a major reason why frozen yogurt is not nearly as healthy as regular yogurt. Yogurt, because of its changed structure, freezes and melts at much higher temperatures than milk, making frozen yogurt stay frozen much longer than ice cream when subjected to room temperatures.

All in all, frozen yogurt can be safely viewed as a healthy alternative to ice cream – on a par perhaps with frozen milk or some sorbets. The enzymatic benefits can aid digestion, and some of the additional health benefits of yogurt remain in its sweetened and frozen form. It should not, however, be viewed as a “healthy” food, as it still contains relatively high levels of fat and may have extremely high amounts of sugar.