Diet Scams

Mr. Athletic
I have screwed up my lower back a number of times through acting like a body builder or professional athlete. I used to be able to carry *hundreds* of dollars worth of groceries up the stairs. But then one time I had a small tick in my back and a pop. Thinking nothing of it I continued on my way. On my way to work the next morning my back started hurting more and more along the way until I was laying on the frozen concrete crying. I was in the military back then and they assumed that when I went home with pain killers that day that I would show up for work bright and early the next morning. But I actually found it hard to get out of the bed and go to the bathroom or grab a water. I couldn’t really walk…I could only lean on stuff and/or crawl.

I started getting in shape a few months before I first was in contact with my wife. I had a personal trainer that stacked me to the moon with weights right off the start. I had a pop in my back and the trainer said “pain is weakness leaving the body.” I kept lifting and yet again I had another magical week of broken back.

When I met my wife she was beating me at tennis, so I started serving like a professional tennis player. And that lead to the same outcome…I needed about a week of laying in bed before I could walk again. She was impressed by that serve until I was mr. sleep and totally immobile!

Broken Chairs
About a year after we met my back started hurting again. She was flying out to the Philippines about a week before, and I actually had to push around a luggage rack so I could lean on it. When she was gone and I was home alone the pain was still immense. I switched out my Aeron chair for her chair and within a day my back was better. The Aeron chair had worked for years, but the cross member back support broke and with it gone my back had no support until I changed chairs.

Just recently my back started hurting up a bit again. My computer got a blue screen of death, and while I was changing out the computer I saw one of the chair’s 5 small wheels fell off. After I fixed that my back started doing well again. My wife, being an eternal sweetheart, bought this wedge thing that is supposed to support your back by encouraging proper posture, but after about a day of using it when I woke up the next morning and went for a walk I found it hard to stand up straight (leaning forward quite a bit). I got rid of the wedge and all was well once again.

Lots of Travel
I try to catch up on everything before we travel. This often means a couple trips down to the recycle bins and/or garbage coupled with a few trips of bringing stuff down to the car. I still have that pig-headed mindset of trying to take everything at once and a couple times while traveling my back went out. Once it was in the Denver airport on our way to NYC. We were supposed to do fun stuff in New York City and I let my wife down because it was excruciatingly painful to walk for the first week there. Luckily my back healed on our anniversary day. After losing my back 2 or 3 times on travel I now know to slow down a bit.

Being Overweight
I still am ***way*** overweight, but my back hurts surprisingly little for how much I have been sitting down and how little I have exercised. As long as I don’t try to be too athletic and don’t sit in a broken chair I do well enough most of the time 🙂

Last week my wife and I went to an Asian buffet in Oakland, CA called Buffett Fortuna. And they were impressed with how low priced the food was for a buffet…whereas that just made me all the more suspicious of the establishment. These people are serving sea food and fried shrimp and desert with drink at under $10 a head in California after taxes? hmm

Throughout the meal the family said stuff back and forth, often in Tagalog…their native tongue. The most frequent word was something like uneyen (sp)…which was them asking each other “what is that” … must have been asked 30 times in a one hour period. Ask that once or twice – no problem. Ask 30 times? Yet another signal of questionable food quality.

The chicken was not delicious, with some of the sauces seeming like they came out of a ragu can. The shrimp was cooked in oil that was at too low of a temperature, causing the breading to absorb a ton of nasty tasting oil. The mustard that I dipped the shrimp in was the single hottest mustard of my life…it was almost as if it was Wasabi brand.

The food was too exotic and nasty for me that even the corn and mac and cheese started looking appealing.

I ate way less than at any other buffet I have ever been to. Looking for a bit of salvation I tried desert. First was a delicious looking cookie that had coconut in it. That grossed me out. So then I tried to grab my mini Crème Brûlée, but it was not Crème Brûlée … it was some other coconut dish, one with more coconut which almost made me puke. My wife felt a bit sorry for me an grabbed me a couple bite-sized mini flans/egg tarts. The first one tasted a bit plain, but unlike the prior 4 or 5 dishes, it was not offensive. I then bit into the second one and it was raw…with this gewwy raw egg stuff seeping into my mouth.

It was probably one of the worst meals I have ever had, and some people on Yelp agree. My favorite review was:

Stay away from this place!

I sat down with my full plate, and about 5 bites in, I have to stop to pull something weird out of my mouth. It was a big wad of plastic, what looked like the wrapper on the little peppermints you get after your meal at a lot of restaurants. I called for the manager, who was extremely apologetic, and said he would replace that batch of chicken. He quickly gave me my money back, but only after I requested it. They tried to tell me that I could stay and eat still, but I was out of there quick, and I had no stomach to eat any of that food anymore.

Even if you don’t find foreign objects in your food, I still think it’s a waste of your $8.99.

It used to be called Continental Buffet, until they closed down in June or July. They remodeled the place, and proceeded to remove their Mongolian BBQ station, the sushi station with sushi chefs preparing the piles of nigiri, and even the dim sum. Any hint of freshness to their food was replaced with steam trays and additional seating. The only addition was a fountain drink stand and a soft serve machine. The food looked worse, tasted just as boring, there was a noticeably smaller selection, and the price was the same as before they closed. They just made more room to cram in as many hungry people as they could.

I will only go there again if I feel an extreme need for dieting!