I write this book as a reader and a movie goer, and while I won’t spoil the movie, I can’t really discuss the characters without getting into some plot points, so if you haven’t at least read the books stop before the fold. I hope this post helps you enjoy the movie as much as my kids and I did.

The story of The Hunger Games is told through the eyes of Katniss Everdeen and her experiences after growing up in the severely impoverished District 12 of Panem. Panem is set in a future North America where all the power and riches have been consolidated in the Capitol, which were victors in a savage battle for power. To keep it’s boot on the neck of the Districts, the Captiol requires an annual reaping, the selection of one boy and one girl from each of twelve Districts to enter a game where there is only one survivor. That is the setup of for the story of Katniss Everdeen, the older of two sisters, whose father died in a mining accident. Katniss is forced to provide for her family after his death in part because her mother checked out emotionally when her husband was killed. Katniss learned to hunt at her father’s knee, and her skill with a bow has been the only thing that has put food on their table. I think knowing how disparately hungry the Everdeen’s are is key to understanding the story, and something that I think wasn’t played up enough in the first few scenes of the movie. With that let’s get to the characters. Caution ahead if you haven’t seen the movie.

Like I’d said before the story of The Hunger Games is the story of Katniss, and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance was stellar. There is so much of Katniss’ story that is told in her head, that it’s really hard to pull that into the screen, fortunately Lawrence has the range to pull of different emotions than a pouting scowl (I’m looking at you Kristin Stewart). Playing a range of emotions from disgust at the decadence of the Capitol, to severe sadness and from comfortable friendship to a tenuous pull at romance, Jennifer Lawrence was more than equal to the task. It’s helpful to remember that part of Katniss’ characters arc is playing to the camera to gain support from the watchers of the games, to a kind of self-loathing that she has to play to the cameras to survive. If Katniss doesn’t work, the whole film doesn’t work, regardless of the rest of the cast. Luckily, Katniss is awesome and so is the rest of the cast.

Katniss tribute pairing from District 12 is Peeta Mellark, a 16 year old son of a baker. He has a bit of a past with Katniss, and Josh Hutcherson is excellent in playing the part. The same duplicity of gaining support from the rich people in the Capitol while trying to figure a way to survive the games adds a layer for the character that Hutcherson executes very well. Peeta is supposed to be a likable person, social and easy at making friends, while Katniss is supposed to be mostly the opposite. Lawrence and Hutcherson execute this dynamic well on screen. Katniss’ other boy friend (not boyfriend) is Gale Hawthorne her hunting partner, and while Liam Hemsworth doesn’t get much screen time in this film, he fills the role well.

After the three teens we get to the wonderful supporting cast, probably the most important character to nail is that of Haymitch Abernathy. Haymitch won the Games 24 years early, the last person from District 12 to survive the games, and the status of champion makes him rich and famous, but the guilt of surviving the games has driven Haymitch to the bottle. Woody Harrelson’s characterization wasn’t what I’d imagined in the book, I was thinking of a more Hagrid-like character, but I think Harrelson really nailed Haymitch beyond my expectations. As Peeta and Katniss’ mentor his job is to prepare them for the games, and to help win them sponsors from the rich citizen’s of the Capitol. Haymitch is worn down from 23 years of watching his fellow citizens be killed in the games, and having to watch their demise in a front row seat, often helplessly. Harrelson pulls of the battle-weary nonchalance with ease. I look forward to seeing more of the character’s progression in the sequels.

Haymitch’s colleague in the preparation of the reaped contestants is Effie Trinket. Elizabeth Bank executes Effie’s naive allegiance to the Capitol and it’s dystopian system well, as is her reflexive coping strategy of seeing the doomed tributes as being blessed to experience the riches of the Capitol in the days preceding the actual games.

Katniss’ styler Cinna was superlatively underplayed by Lenny Kravitz. Cinna’s calm, almost sad, resolve to give his chosen charges the best advantage they can get by making their pre-games appearances as memorable as possible to the rich, out-of-touch, citizenry of the Capitol is an important facet to the story, and Kravitz’s performance was pitch perfect, from his mannerisms to his costume and makeup, true to the words on the page.

A few other characters round out the odd-mix of American Idol like celebrity with the savage iron boot of political control that carries The Hunger Games story. Stanly Tucci’s portrayal of the Host of the Games Caesar Flickerman is effortless. The odd mix of likability, showmanship, and hucksterish glee with which Flickerman’s hosts the opening build-up then savage play-by-play of the games is flawless. The maniacal laugh that Tucci brings out is picture perfect, both joyful and dreadful at the same time.

The demon behind the games is President Snow also wonderfully acted by Donald Sutherland. In my mind, Snow was more of a Terrance Stamp (General Zod – Superman 2) or Malcom McDowell type. But Sutherland is another awesome choice (who also has the requisite north american accent). His portrayal of the duplicitous President Snow is at once menacing and grandfatherly gentle.

The rest of the 26 tributes are great to watch, from the rich district’s highly trained and confident volunteers to the impoverished districts sacrificial youngsters. Amandla Stenberg’s Rue is wonderful, as is her fellow District 11 tribute Thresh (Daniel Okeniyi).

Altogether, the film version breathes a fresh air into the dark tale, making the premise all the more frightening. The Hunger Games isn’t a feel good tale, but a morality play that underscores the primal inhumanity that is ever present in a world where power corrupts, and ultimate power corrupts ultimately. I’m ready for Catching Fire and Mocking Jay to hit the big screens.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

I run because I am happy… I run because I am … la la la la la laaaaa.

I don’t think a year ago that I would be celebrating National Running Day by getting up early and getting in 2.64 miles in 34 minutes. But I did. These next couple of week will be fun, as I have a 5k run on Saturday night (June 4th Firefly Run) and then the following weekend a 10k run Sunday Morning (Wounded Warrior). So the training continues, as does the diet (after a 1 week hiatus where I needed to go up to maintenance because things just weren’t working, and I was stressing about it too much.)

What I learned on maintenance, is that really bad food choices while staying at maintenance calories don’t have a horrible effect on the scale. Which is a good lesson to learn. A better lesson to learn is to make better food choices and still eat at maintenance (where the higher calorie budget made me think, “Hey, cheeseburgers are really yummy!”). Still it was good to put a week of “I don’t really care” under my belt, and still not have 20 kazillion pounds to burn back off. The last half of May was just a train wreck, so I’m looking forward to starting a new month with a new happier attitude.

But this post is about running, and to complement my running training, I invested in a road bike ($159 at Walmart – BOOYA!) and have put in a few longish rides and it feels great to be back in a saddle (though I’m a bit sore in the saddle area). I used to bike quite a bit in high school and college, and it’s true what they say about riding a bike, you just don’t forget how to do it. I’ll like it more when my belly is smaller, but for now it’s gonna work well as a recovery day exercise that will give me a good lower-intensity aerobic workout without a lot of stress on my joints.

How are YOU going to celebrate National Running Day?

Why am I’m posting a song about Zero? Because if you look at my daily weigh-in numbers, and records the starting weight on February 1st, and then the weigh-in from February 28th, that is how much weight I lost the whole entire month.

Yet, I’m counting it on one of my most successful months since I started. Why? Because I’m tracking so much more than just the scale, and all those numbers (even the apparently non-budging scale) is going in the right direction.

Some examples from February:

• Average pounds lost per week: 1.15
• Ran 26.8 miles in February and Walked 11.3
• Shaved 30 seconds off my average jogging pace
• Hit my water goals 99% of the time
• My trend line decreased by 3.8 pounds.
• BMI and BF% both decreased a half a point

My energy is up, I’m doing things with my kids, my wife, and the people I love. I’m engaged and productive at work.

So why, if I’m doing everything right, does the scale say I stayed even? Because the scale LIES! It is a lying liar that lies about lying too!

Here are my daily weigh-ins for the last 4 weeks:

The purple circles are the beginning and end of the month, and they both are 290. What happened? Superbowl party, Stressful week at work, Valentine’s Day. That week was rough, and I tried doing it with less calories than my allotted budget. In other words, I got greedy.

I changed my calorie goal the last week of January to subtract another 250 calories a day from my budget. I was thinking that’s what I’m usually under, so why not make that match. First week, great success, the next few were a struggle very spikey ups and downs, and my hunger was much more evident. I readjusted to what LoseIt! calculated on February 15th and I think the results speak for themselves.

On February 25th, I met my intermediate goal of losing 8 pounds, and set a new goal of losing 15 more pounds. But I’ve adjusted my plan, instead of trying to lose 2 pounds a week, I’ve adjusted that up to 1.5 pounds per week. I’m gonna let that ride until I’ve met the 15 pound goal, and then see what to change for the next goal after that (16, then 23, then 42 then i’ll be at goal weight).

Don’t let that Zero mean so much to you, count all the other things you are doing right in your journey, and pay it forward.

I’d put Glee as part in the Junk Food/Good Fats category.  It’s very much like that irresistible Hostess Fruit pie, I know the “real fruit” advertising on the packaging is stretching the truth, and the pie crust isn’t, but one I have a bite I omnomnom the whole thing with a smile on my face.  Such is Glee.

Why do I watch it?  1) It’s a show my whole family enjoys, the songs we play on our iPods, sing in the car, connect with the characters, so if I didn’t watch it, I’d be missing some great relational times with my kids. 2) It’s funny quirky, a life without Brittany S. Pierce wry observations or without Sue Sylvester’s put downs or unique takes on American history.  3) It’s just plain fun to watch.

So given that, I enjoyed last nights Britney/Brittany episode.  The intertoobs are taking Glee to task for a lame plot last night.  It’s not that I disagree, it’s just I don’t flip on Glee and open my notebook filled with character sketches and plot arcs and expect a full night of note taking.  Glee can bring the drama, and the plots, when it wants too (see Kurt’s arc last season with his Dad) but it can often stumble in deftly handling the awkward teenage plot lines as well.  Does that make it less of a television show?

People, people, … please ( ripped out of the Amanda Show)

1) the ensemble cast and creative characters all have roles to play, and the plots of their characters have to mesh.

2) they have to bring the sing-a-long music that makes the kids happy, and the parent’s remember the first time they heard Don’t Stop Believing

3) they MUST bring the one-liners and comedy.

That is something that Glee does consistently, and to keep those three plates spinning means sometimes one of the three wobble from time and again.  Some of the characters I don’t connect with, I want to see more Tina and Brittany than Quinn and Emma.  More Puck and Arnie than Finn and will… I cheer for underdogs (see my twitstream for my regrets to Lone Star’s cancellation).

That said, it’s good that people have some strong emotions about Glee (both good and bad) because it’s a show that fun to talk about, whether you hate it or enjoy it.  Kind of like that Hostess Fruit Pie.

I started using WeightWatchers and had great initial success, at my start weight I maxed out the daily points at 42 points, with 35 weekly points to use or not use through the week.  The online WW program, adds calories to your Weekly Points and the program will only tap into those points if you go over your daily points.  The first three months I tried to ‘bank’ as many weekly points as I could while still eating reasonably, and not feeling hungry.  What I remember from reading the online WW articles, it was important to eat your daily points to keep your metabolism going.  In the three months using weightwatchers.com I lost 25 pounds.

I also started walking regularly in April, and using the same sort of in the cloud recording of my activity to track my progress.   Is use two sites to track my runs, the first Runkeeper.com is an application I use on my iPhone that tracks my outdoor activities using GPS to give an accurate account of distance traveled.  Runkeeper also lets you enter manual entries, that lets me put all my midsummer treadmill work into my profile.  The other site I use to track exercise is DailyMile.com, where I pretty much duplicate the same information. Why? because DailyMile is more social networking friendly, had nifty reports and graphics.  So it’s worth it to me to double track my activity.

In June, I let my WeightWatchers account lapse and started tracking my calories in the iPhone LoseIt! application, which also has a great website (for people without an iPhone, all the features can now be done on the web). With LoseIt.com I daily track my calories. With the ease of using my phone, I try to enter my food in before I eat each meal, the discipline has kept me aware of my intake, as well as how expensive my old habits of drinking soda and candy because I was hungry in the middle of the day were.  LoseIt! has some great reporting views, with the ability to download my data of calories consumed and exercise calories into spreadsheets.

I switched to LoseIt! in June, and since that time I’ve lost a total of 6 pounds.  So the problem I’m trying to number crunch through is why has my progress slowed, or is it just one of the natural plateau’s that happens during the normal course of life.  The slow down also happened in the middle of the summer, is there a seasonality to it?  I started traveling (3 trips in 3 weeks in August), did that effect my habits?

One other thing is just the difference between WeightWatchers and LoseIt programs.  WeightWatchers is about points, with 50 calories being approximately 1 point, with high fat foods increasing to two points, or high fiber foods reducing to a half point.  LoseIt is just calories.  WeightWatchers, as noted above, has a weekly bank of points and activities.  LoseIt add calories burned in activities to the daily balance, so when I exercise it appears I can consume more calories to hit my daily calorie goal.

With WeightWatchers I tried to bank my weekly and activity points, which if I banked 35 points a week, means I should bank about 1750 calories per week on LoseIt (since it appears to spread the 35 weekly points across all 7 days caloric goals).  Because of the way LoseIt adds exercise to each day, my exercise points get lost in the shuffle.  So I think I’ve been eating more while exercising more since switching to LoseIt.

I’m looking at the numbers, which are highly available thanks to obsessive record keeping these last 6 months, and have come to this conclusion.  I need to exercise to burn around 1500 calories each week, while trying to bank ~1500 calories consumed each week.  Using that as a benchmark for the next 3 months.

On the exercise front, I finished my first 5k when I ran the Corporate Challenge 5k.  My plan was to run 5 minutes then walk 3 minutes until I finished, and I mostly kept to that plan.  My time of 42:10 was almost 3 minutes faster than my off the top of my head goal of 45 minutes (which is my 15 min per mile workout average,) which pleased me abundantly.  I’m continuing my training, but going to shift my training C25k sessions and catalog those as runs, and try to get outside for a mile each off day and count that as a walk.  Which means nothing really, just shifting to a different category in runkeeper and dailymile as my performance improves.

So there you go, what things do you use to track your goals?

Watching last night’s preamble and cast selection show was revealing because I realized that they have some pretty consistent principles for the contestants to get them on the road to a healthier lifestyle right out of the gate, principles that I unconsciously applied when I started down my path in April.

1. Own your weight.  Every contestant has to do the first weigh-in. At the beginning I needed to own a number.  We have a futzy scale at home that I never used, and so one of the first steps in my journey was to find a scale and use it consistently to measure progress.  I went to the gym, and found a good consistent scale (actually two at two different gyms).  The identification of a starting point and owning up to the weight you are was an important first step on my way.
2. Understand your why. All people that are trying to change the way they live have to understand WHY they are making a change.  For the contestants they all have intriguing stories to tell, that’s why they are on TV, that’s why they get selected to be on TV.  But each of us have a story too. You can share it publicly, you can start a blog, or you can, like me journal it, share it with my support group at Celebrate Recovery.  I know that if I didn’t understand my why, week x would be hard to find the reason why I don’t drink Coke Classic any more.
3. Have a support team. Last night, each person that was featured were surrounded by supporters.  Some might be #teamBiggestLoser volunteers to help with that first challenge, 500 steps, or 1 mile run, but they also had family and friends that supported the life change decision.  The rest of the season their support group becomes each other, fellow competitors, and is one of the things that ‘irks’ me about the competition is that the support team are also adversaries.  My support team is my family, as well as the larger group of people I social network with.  Twitter and Facebook friends, as well as my church family, and my Celebrate Recovery friends.  Also growing niche networks on dailymile.com and runkeeper.com help keeps my exercise regular.  I know I can’t do this alone, and a large support group keeps me going, when alone I would be drifting.

So take these three principles and start your own journey.

I run because, frankly, I love to eat food.

Which is probably as good as a reason as anything else.   In the past 42 years, I’ve eaten a lot, and if I was honest, I recognize that I’ve avoided pretty much anything that would balance the scales to make my lifestyle anywhere close to healthy.

If you’ve followed my social media streams, you may have noticed that I’ve made a turn this past May and started incorporating regular exercise in my weekly routine, for one reason to help in my goal to lose weight, and the other is because, frankly, I love to eat food.

This morning at church, our pastor (interim) encouraged us again to study the bible.  I’m a sunday school teacher, so I do that, each week.  But if I’m honest with myself, it’s not really studying.  It’s more like saying, I walk from the car to the elevator, and calling that exercise.  The phrase about running, because he loves food echoed in my thoughts, and I had an epiphany.

I love television, perhaps too much, perhaps in the same way I love food.  Loving food isn’t wrong per se, but when my love of food is out of balance it becomes unhealthy.  Same with consuming popular culture, out of balance and it becomes spiritually unhealthy.  I need to give myself some balance.

Sort of like my weight loss plans, I cut down on the intake, making better food choices, and incorporated exercise that allows me to still enjoy eating food, and also delivers the exertion that my physical body needs.  So in my spiritual diet, I need to cut back on my popular culture intake, make better choices as to how I consume television, and have something spiritual to offset the dose of popular culture and provide my spirit a connection with the Almighty that is needs.

So in that endeavor, I’m going to get back in to a regular bible reading plan.  As a way of using the social media that has been helpful in my physical life style improvement, I plan on blogging about what I read. I don’t promise a daily epiphany, or even any words of wisdom, more just a bit of my thoughts and the scriptures I peruse.  Again the purpose here is accountability to myself, not preaching to you, my readership.  If these posts don’t satisfy, just skip them, just like you might my exercise and weigh-in updates.

I try to take a baby asprin morning and night, to ward off the big D (diabetes) and HD (heart disease) given family history, so take that into account with the below results.  The glucose was a fasting screening hadn’t had anything except water since midnight.

Mundane details below the fold:

Height: 73 (they robbed me of a half an inch!)

Weight: 314.2 pounds (my official scale at the gym is gypping me!)

Waist: 52 inches (at belly button)

BMI: 42 % (roughly what the scale at the gym says)

Blood Pressuse: 115/86 mmHg with a semi-resting pulse of 93 bpm

Total Cholesterol: 159 mg/dl (normal)

HDL Cholesterol: 35 mg/dl (slightly below normal)

Risk Ratio: 4.5 (Men should be under 5… so \o/)

Glucose (fasting) 95 mg/dl (should be under 100)

So operation be healthy can continue as normal.

Namaste