Supplements and food purchases (Maker's Diet "style")

After reading Magnolia Brook's Natural Health Detective article and
speaking w/ her on the phone, which was very helpful, I bought these products from livesuperfoods.com - Richard - 800-481-5074:

• Grainfields Super Greens 150 grams


• fulvic acid - quart (didn't buy: Humate - quart)


• EM Concentrate 1 liter 33.8 oz


• Kefir Starter Culture 6 packets

The first 3 items are similar to what wd be in the supplements from Garden of Life (i.e., The Maker's Diet). The kefir is a good source of fermented probiotics.

Then today I went to Sprout's and got some other items:

• Food for Life - Ezekiel 4:9 (original) cereal


• Kashi - Good Friends (High Fiber) cereal


• Simply Fiber - All Natural Crunchy O's Cereal


• Back to Nature - Classic granola


• Rice Dream - Original Classic (rice milk)


• North Dallas Pure Honey


• Desert Essence - Organics Hair Care - Italian Red Grape Shampoo


• Desert Essence - Organics Hair Care - Italian Red Grape Conditioner

I didn't bother taking the time to find links to the above. I'm sure they are easy enough to Google.

I'm mostly doing this to document when, where and what I got to keep an account of how things go.

Generally I prefer to make our own granola for cereal, but I wanted to try these and also have backups for when we don't have our own.

Adding Closed Captions to a DVD

There's a few steps and it's not super easy, but it's also not
that difficult...

BTW, this is meant to be a solution to adding closed captions to your own created DVD as opposed to an existing movie or something. I just had a hard time finding out how to do this so I wanted to make sure I made notes.

You'll need a few tools:

• SubCreator
  
• SCC Tools (including subrip2scc.exe) from McPoodle (download)
  
• Adobe Encore 2.0 (at least the trial version)
  

The short explination is this:

1. Use SubCreator to create subtitles for your project (output: text file(s))
   
2. Use subrip2scc.exe (SCC tool) to convert to .scc file.
   
3. Use Adobe Encore to load project and add .scc file above.
   
4. Render and burn.
   

The long explination is this:



1. Still basically the same. Nothing too big or complicated. Load your .avi (or whatever) into SubCreator, load your script into the lower screen, hit CTRL+A on each line as it sd appear while previewing the video.

Use the 'export' feature to convert the subtitles to .srt format (click the srt option in the list and click convert) and save to a file.

2. Open a dos prompt and run subrip2scc.exe w/ the -u parameter and feed it the .srt file (run subrip2scc.exe alone to see the options).

3. Open Adobe Encore and creat your project like you'd expect. Here's a step-by-step:

1. Drag the avi into Encore.
   
2. Right click and create a timeline.
   
3. In the timeline panel, click (or double-click) on the video.
   
4. The properties panel sd appear for the video.
   
5. On the lower part, there is options for 'field 1' and 'field 2'.
   
6. Click 'browse' by 'field 1' and select your .scc file created above.
   

4. Hit F2, check the project and burn (you may need a menu and some other
settings, but if it finds problems usually you can click on the problem and
it bring up the offender).

Bonus: You can use the subtitles you created in SubCreator in Encore. However,
I needed to change the format of the file slightly:

From this:
00:00:16.3:Everytime I try to do something to tell people

To this:
00;00;16;3 00;00;18;7 Everytime I try to do something to tell people

(colon and dot in times to semi-colons, remove colon after time and add
an end time).

I just created a macro in TextPad to do this using the start time of the
next line as the end time of the current line. Then in Adobe, on the timeline,
you can right-click and select 'import subtitles' w/ the text file option.

I hope this helps someone - I certainly wish this were available when I
was trying to figure it out! :)

The Maker's Diet broken down a bit

After reading The Maker's Diet and then some articles online (in particular The Natural Health Detective) I'm just starting to get a grasp on the fundamentals of the plan's supplements.

There's a lot involved w/ your health including exercise, diet, lifestyle, etc. The diet is basically a couple things: eating organic, clean foods and some supplements. The diet itself is, to me, basically a good, organic diet.

The big mystery seems to be the supplements - what are they?

The Natural Health Detective breaks it down really well. Here's what I did...

Not being well versed in the topics she talks about, I went to my local health food store to talk to the best supplement source I know: Pablo. He knows it all. I went thru w/ him what I learned and he recommended a few things.

From my understanding, the Garden of Life's Primal Defense is 3 things: detox, EM/probiotic and fermented grasses. These can be humate (or fulvic acid) for detox, EM Concentrate for EM/probiotic and Grainfields fermented grasses.

I haven't seen an online source for humate/fulvic acid. My best guess is that the Grainfields Wholegrain Liquid is the fermented grasses.

My 'consultant' at the store wasn't convinced humate/fulvic acid is a proven source though I'm sure others are. So concentrating on the other areas, I got a few things...

For my probiotic, I got DAILY DOPHILUS™ AM/PM Complete Probiotic System. Instead of fermented grasses, I got some 'super greens': Just Barley · Cereal Grasses and Hawaiian Spirulina · Nutrient Dense.

There are a lot of options out there and it's pretty overwhelming trying to navigate it all. As in many cases, I feel like unless you start buying books to study it all yourself or read a TON of web pages, there really isn't too much to break it down to the basics.

My understanding, in a nutshell, is...

The EM/probiotic is helpful bacteria for your GI tract: it gets your system more efficient in breaking down food, processing it, etc. It's the same type of thing as eating yogurt w/ acidophilus but moreso. I choose the Daily-Dophilus b/c it seemed to have the most varieties of bacteria and b/c of their MAKTrek Bypass and ProBioFlax delivery systems.

The 'greens' are 'super foods' which are just really, really good for you. I asked Pablo about JuicePlus and he said that's more 'table' greens and fruits as opposed to 'super greens.' From the Pure Planet website about the barley:

Among nature’s most potent leafy green vegetables are the cereal grasses, unique plants that are so packed with a broad spectrum of nutrition that they are sometimes referred to as nature¹s multivitamin.

About the spirulina:

...today Hawaiian Spirulina is considered one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. ...An excellent source of the rare but important fatty acid GLA, Hawaiian Spirulina is also superabundant in antioxidants.

I chose my 2 products mostly based on Pablo's information and recommendation.

I hope to observe overtime the benefits/effects of these supplments and maybe make changes to my plan. I'll try to post the updates here.

Resources

• The links above to products and such - click on the various links w/in them.
  
• The Natural Health Detective
  
• Live Superfoods
  
• Vinny Pinto