One of the unfortunate side effects of the Christmas holiday is weight gain. There is always so much good food to eat (and bad food too), that it’s almost impossible to escape the holiday season without gaining some weight. This year’s menu included rib roast, Italian style steak, Chinese food, pizza, banana bread, rum cake, assorted chocolates and many other dishes too numerous to mention. No, I didn’t eat these all at one meal. They were spread out throughout the holiday week so at any one time it didn’t seem like I was eating that much. But each item added up and when I stepped on the scale this weekend I found that they added up big time.

How come it takes forever to lose a pound, but you can gain a whole bunch of them in a week?

Anyway, it was time to pay the piper and I was determined that I would get the weight off fast. I decided to try something different this year. Years ago I tried out a diet that included meal replacement shakes. I bought a six pack of these pre-mixed things with the best of intentions, but after sampling the first one I decided it was not for me. It was pretty awful. The mixture kind of resembled a shake but was chalky and had a strange after taste that’s best described as a cross between …

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I’ve been seeing a lot of advertisements for the new McDonald’s Fruit & Walnut Salad so today I thought I would give it a try.

The fruit in the salad consist of a number of apple slices with a handful of grapes thrown in for good measure. For some reason I expected more then this. It’s probably because they bill it as a Fruit & Walnut Salad so I expected it to have multiple types of fruit. I guess technically two type of fruit constitutes “fruit” but I must say I was a bit disappointed.

The quality of the apple slices were decent, nothing spectacular here; just average quality apple slices. The grapes were a bit on the tart side and did not have a lot of flavor, but this could vary from salad to salad so your experience may be different.

The walnut portion of the salad is a small bag (0.75oz) of Diamond Candied Walnuts. These were tasty, but again nothing to kill for. I’ve had better nuts on plane flights. They also add significantly to the caloric content of the salad, the small bag coming in at 140 calories.

As a dipping sauce for the fruit, McDonald’s includes a small container of their low fat yogurt. Since I really love McDonald’s yogurt, this was the high point of the salad for me.

With tax included, the Fruit & Walnut Salad …

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Some time ago, I purchased a 40GB Apple IPod. My original plan was to take it to work with me during the day so that I could listen to music and then use it at night to play audio books during my hour workout on the threadmill.

This never really worked out.

The IPod was heavy and a bit bulky for carrying around during the day and the built in battery would be pretty much discharged by the time that I arrived home, requiring me to recharge the unit before using it during my workout. I also worried that the jostling that occurred during day-to-day use might damage the hard drive. Given these factors I decided that the IPod would be retired from daytime use and only be used at night during my time on the treadmill. I lived with this arrangement for over a year, but recently decided it would be nice to have a second MP3 player to use during the day.

The first step was to decide which features were important to me. Here’s what I came up with :

1. Must be able to play MP3 and WMA files. Audio book format would be a plus but would not be a requirement because the primary use for this device was going to be music.

2. Light weight and small. I wanted something that I could carry with me at all …

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