All my life I’ve had weird things happen to me.  I don’t know how to describe them any other way.  Some of it has been good, some of it has been bad, some neutral and just odd so I don’t know what to make of it.  I’ll just stick with weird.  Today has been one of those days.

So as I wrote briefly in my last post, I recently switched from a vegan diet to one higher in saturated fats and lower in carbohydrates.  I’ve been very interested in the subject lately and from all my reading and research have started to lean on the side that excessive carbs are not that great for you.  One of the people I’ve been following, Mark Sisson, has been very influential in my beliefs.  He talks about limiting carb intake to 100-150 g a day, and anything below 50 g will take you into a state called ketosis which will help burn fat faster.  Today, I stumbled across an article written by Malcolm Gladwell written in 1998 titled ‘The Pima Paradox’.  I was ready to skip it but for some reason decided to give it a read.  Usually I give an article an a paragraph or two, and if it doesn’t catch my attention, I skip it.  Since I’m a fan of Gladwell, I gave it three and was glad I did, because it was actually an article on diet and obesity.  In it, he pretty much bashes the carb idea and the idea that ketosis has anything to do with weight loss and provides ‘science’ to back it up.  Now Gladwell isn’t a health and nutrition expert by any means, but he is a highly intelligent, very interesting thinker.  Which is exactly why I started his book ‘Outliers’ this morning on a whim even though I have a ton of other ones to go through.  Weird that I would stumble across this article about a subject I’ve been highly interested in contradictory to what I’ve started believing written in 1998 by the very author’s book in which I just randomly started reading today.

I also have been highly interested in flu prevention and have had some interesting discussions with some people about it.  Last week, AF sent me some notes on an info session he attended regarding fighting flu using natural remedies given by a Chinese herbal medicinal practitioner thingamabob.  One of the herbs she suggests is Astragalus, which is the main ingredient found in a product called ‘Deep Immune’.  Today I started to get a scratchy throat so I went to the natural food store and picked up a bottle of it, came back and popped a pill.  As I was eating dinner, I was looking through some shows I have sitting on my computer and randomly decided to pick Derren Brown’s The System (for those of you who don’t know DB, check him out, he’s absolutely amazing).  In this show, Derren Brown claims he has an unbeatable system for horse racing.  He guarantees a win EVERY single time, the odds which are about 1 in 1.45 billion or something close to that.  Its an amazing show and I don’t want to spoil it, but before telling you exactly how its done he says the secret is this…grabs a bottle of…yup you guessed it. Astragalus.  I’m like WTF.  Prior to today I didn’t even know what Astragalus was.  He then goes on to talk about the medicinal benefits of it and how its actually a placebo. This is the secret to an unbeatable horse racing system?  Yup, believe it or not, he says the secret is your beliefs… Awesome, just dropped $40 on a bottle of placebo.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t know it was a placebo.  Now I have to convince my mind that DB is WRONG for the bottle to be more effective…Not going to be an easy task.  But that’s the wicked thing, first contradictory beliefs on ketosis and carbs, then contradictory beliefs on Astragalus.  Another cool thing DB demonstrates is flipping a coin randomly and getting 10 heads in a row.  I’m like tripping out, because I just read about that the other day and before he reveals the secret I’m already yelling it out.  Benford’s Law (I even shared it on my friendfeed)!! Weirddddddddddd.

Steve Pavlina talks about the time 11:11.  He even wrote an interesting blog post on it.  Pavlina is as crazy as they get, but I like him.  Basically what he says is if you see the time 11:11, or some weird repeating number like that, the universe is trying to tell you something.  All I can say is I’ve seen 11:11 no less than five freaking times today.  I’ve lost track.  First was this morning while doing my Upper Body workout (starting my second week of P90X+).  I RARELY look at the time remaining while I’m working out and today I only did it twice.  The first time was during the Upper Body Plus workout, the second time was after I came home from work and started Abs Core Plus.  Guess what the time remaining each time was?  11:11.  I also looked down at the clock at exactly 11:11 AM, looked at some logs that had timestamps of 11:11 AM, as well as emails and chat conversations with the same.  Honestly though, who looks at the timestamp of an email?  I never do and yet today I did and sure enough, 11:11 AM.  The number just kept showing up, wherever I frigging looked it was there.  I’m sure because I believed it was weird, my subconscious started to seek out the number hence why I saw it so many times today.  Or maybe not.  Who cares.  Its still weird.

I don’t know what’s going on, but its cool just observing it happen.  Strange things like this happen to me quite a bit.  I wonder if anybody else has had these experiences??  Its kind of like deja vu, when it happens to you you are like woah.  And maybe its my belief that weird things happen to me which causes weird things to happen to me?  Hmmmmmmmmmm.