 Hi, this is Mitch Mitchell. I'm coming to you today from home, as you can tell, the different background, sitting in a chair that I kind of busted yesterday. You know, I'm not necessarily a small guy, but I've actually lost some weight, but it's hard to find chairs that you kind of call them office chairs or whatever, where everything is sturdy enough to kind of hold all of me, and I don't mean that I'm so heavy I can't sit in a chair, but I have other things like the arms. In this case, I busted the left arm. You know, sometimes you just don't know your own strength, so I busted it, and it's irritating because every once in a while I keep leaning down like this because it's way down there. It's still sitting there, but I had to replace the chair. So I wanna talk quickly about what happened yesterday, and then in a weird way, it's gonna lead to something else. You know, I have done some videos on the Fitbit, the black thing here, which tracks your steps and it tracks your sleep, and I've related that to my fitness pal thing. And so I've still been cognizant. It's a little harder when I come home and my wife is here because even though she's trying to do the same types of things, you know, we both are kind of traveling a lot, so we don't have much food in the house, so we have to eat out a lot. I know someone's wondering how come you don't have food? Well, because I'm only home for a couple of days, I leave again tomorrow. My wife just left and won't be back for many, many weeks, so there's no sense in having a lot of food here, and we have not done processed foods in a very long time, so we don't have cans of food just sitting here. We have some cans of sauce, but not cans of food, so we don't have soups. And because we're gone so often, we can't just buy a lot of bread and keep it in the fridge because it spoils, you can't buy milk because it spoils. You can buy eggs and you can buy butter, but who wants to eat that all the time? So, we eat out a lot. Anyway, my wife left yesterday to go out of town for work and she'll be gone for a while. So, I had a nice breakfast with her and then I pretty much missed lunch, which I shouldn't do, I'm diabetic, I mention that all the time. And so, when it was coming time for dinner because I was starting to get hungry, the first thing I decided to do was, I think I'm gonna go for a walk around the neighborhood because when I'm out of town, I can walk around the hotel complex, but it's not the same thing and I can actually go inside and walk on a treadmill, but once again, it's not the same thing. I live in a beautiful neighborhood and the houses are beautiful, it's fall or it's almost fall, a couple of days, or is it today? I don't really know, but the leaves are changing and it's just beautiful. I love Central New York, yes I do. Anyway, so I went for a walk and I decided to take the long walk. So a long walk around the neighborhood is about 45 minutes, but I decided to take the walk. I've been feeling good, my back feels good, my feet feel good, so I do the 45 minute walk and I come back to the house and I'm feeling pretty good. 10 minutes, I'm in the house and my friend Kelvin sends me a message saying, did you walk? And I didn't tell him I had walked, what I said is, do you wanna go for a walk? And he said, yes, let's go to the lake. Well, my goodness, Anadaga Lake, which is about a mile and a half from the house, I love to walk at the lake. And it was cooling down some and I figured, sure, why not? Now, one of the things I did before I left the house was I checked my glucose and it was at 160 and because I had eaten during the day, so I said, well, you know what, 160, I should be fine. So I go to the lake and we walked probably at least 50 minutes, 25 minutes up, we found a certain spot and said, okay, let's turn around there and come back because it was starting to get dark and when it starts to get dark, that's when all the little beasties come out, even though it's cooler, it's not too cool for them. So it gets a little irritating. So anyway, we take this walk, I get to the car and now I'm like, whew, goodness, because basically I've walked, what, an hour and a half or so and I've got a ton of steps in. As a matter of fact, I hit 15,000 steps yesterday. Now the thing with the Fitbit is that it adds calories back onto what you can have for the day to the MyFitnessPal thing, which I love. Anyhow, we get done with that, I sit in the car, I kind of chill for a bit before I drive back home and I get in the house and I sit down in my chair and I feel a little shaky and I know what this feeling is. It basically means I'm probably in crash mode, which means my glucose is dropping and it's gotten pretty low and it may be dropping fast. That's the part I don't necessarily always know. Now I did a video some months ago, a couple of months ago where I talked about actually coming back after walking around a lot at this botanical garden and falling asleep, taking a nap and I woke up. I was in crash mode. This time I think I was lucky because I was already awake. So I was sitting down, I checked glucose, it was 65. And then I thought about it and I said, well goodness, when I hit 160 after checking before I left, I was just coming off of a 45 minute walk. So it was already declining and then going further, it had nowhere to go. It had to keep declining and I was adding to it. So I probably should have eaten something, but like I said, it didn't occur to me. Now because I was awake and I knew what was coming, I knew that I could get some hard candies. Now in the hotel room, I had no idea where they were, but my wife keeps hard candies around the house. So I went and got a few hard candies and I went and sat in what we call the big pop of a chair and I had some water and I ate some of this candy just to bring me up a little bit. And then once I did that, I said, okay, I now actually feel good enough where I can actually cook something. When I was down south, I think I must have been much lower and I just remained shaky. But this time, since I was still awake, the hard candies helped me a little bit. The water helped to cool me down so I was a little overheated. So then I had some food. I had some shrimp and I had half of something called barbecued baked beans from Dinosaur. Local people would know what that is and people in certain locations will, but this was from the store. So not quite the same thing. So it did pretty well, you know, but it, you know, by the number of calories it added, I'm supposed to have 2,100 calories a day per my fitness based on goals that I told it. Well, even what I had eaten because of all the walking, I was back up to 2,000 calories that I could have for the day again. And so I ate this bit of food and when you calculate, shrimp doesn't take that many calories. It just doesn't, especially when it's, you can call it boiled shrimp. What I do is I put it in a steamer. So it's steamed shrimp and the beans were only 240 calories. So I said, well, you know what? I'm feeling a little better. I've got room for dessert. I decided I'm going up to Cold Stone Creamery where I hadn't been in like six, seven months. So I go up and I get a love at size. Now, one of the things that you start to find out when you're tracking nutrition is that most of the bigger chains, even some of the smaller chains, have nutritional values of their stuff online. So it turned out that just for the ice cream, love at size, it comes to 480 calories because I got French Vanilla. I said, wow, really? And then the toppings that I have, it turns out there's a reason they only give you so many because it fits their nutritional chart. So I always wondered, you know, how do they, you know, why are they so skimpy on that? That's why. You can ask for extra and you'll pay extra, but in general they keep it there because it fits nutritional guidelines. So I got to have a love at size, French Vanilla with what I have in it, which is yellow cake, one yellow cake, some peanut butter and some of the chocolate fudge sauce. So I had all that, I had this other food and I still had 500 calories to kill. So later on in the evening, I had some potato chips and that, you know, increased a little bit more because you're just supposed to get somewhat close to the number of calories for the day and 500 probably would have been too many. So I got down to 250 and that was fine. But I, you know, basically I'm talking about this because one of the things the Fitbit thing does and my fitness pal thing does is it helps you to really know what's going on with your eating along with the glucometer and all that kind of stuff. So I was able to recover and figure out the right things to do for myself to feel good again. This, my goodness, you know what? These two things together are such an invaluable tool. I recommend them wholeheartedly. I get no money for this. No one's, you know, no one's given me anything. But just so you know, the Fitbit costs around $100 but my fitness pal thing is free. There you go. Now, where am I going to from there? I'm gonna talk about activism, just really briefly because most of you know I'm a blogger. I have my, I'm just sharing blog which you see the name and the link to down below and I have Mitch's blog which is my business blog. And for years, I've participated in something once a year that's called Blog Action Day. And basically what it is, it's, well, it's a way to talk about a certain subject. People all around the world will get together and they will talk about these certain subjects on this day. And then through Twitter, you know, they were promoting them all day long. If you happen to be on the website for these people you can see where, you know, everyone else is putting these things out there and it's really, you know, kind of cool thing. And in previous years, we've talked about things like human rights, the power of we, food and poverty. And I've written mainly on, I'm just sharing. I started out writing on my business blog but then once I had, I'm just sharing, I put most of them on there. And I think it's pretty cool. Now, unfortunately last year, since I was out of town and this year, since I'm out of town, I'm not gonna be around during the day to see what everyone is doing. So I have to catch up pretty much when I get back from the hotel. But I'm mentioning it because it would be cool if some of you who are bloggers would like to participate this year. It's October 16th and what you can do is you go to blogactionday.org and register with them and then they will, you know, list your blog. You have the choice not to do it. You know, have it listed if you want to. And then they'll tell you the hashtag and they'll give you access to an image that you can put on your blog. And, you know, you join a community. I mean, I think last year it was somewhere around 2,500 people. I love it to really be a lot bigger. I, you know, I know it's sometimes hard to write on a topic that's not a topic that you talk about all the time. But I think it's kind of important. I think that, you know, we have seen how people can help to make changes in this world by getting together and talking about a certain subject. And you talk about the subject based on however you perceive it. So I find it interesting how you can read other people's blogs on that day or whenever and just see how their perspectives are so much different than yours sometimes. Actually, sometimes they're the same but they come at it differently. Like when I talked about poverty and I'm gonna have links to my older blogs below if anyone wants to go look at them. But on one of the blogs I talked about poverty, I talked about the year I spent in Kansas City when I lived kind of in the ghetto and what I saw. You know, that's my experience. So again, I'll know a little bit about that. This year, the topic is inequality. And I'm thinking, you know, that's a pretty big topic. Every year, as a matter of fact, it seems to be a pretty big topic. So I have an idea of what I'm going to be writing about and like I said, I'm only gonna be writing it out. I'm just sharing. But I'd love more people to participate in this on this day. So I'm putting it out there and we'll see, you know, if anyone wants to. And maybe we can find our own way to connect with each other and share with each other and comment on each other's blogs on that day. You know, it's all about helping the world sometimes, isn't it? That's how I see things. So anyway, that's all I have. My name is Mitch Mitchell and I hope y'all have a wonderful day and I hope you have a wonderful week. Take care.