I got up early and ran through the neighborhood where I grew up. It is a 3/4 mile loop around the playground and school where I spent my K - 6th grade years. I ran the loop 3 times. I wish I could exercise first thing every morning. It certainly gets the day off to a good start.

In my extended family there are 7 Os and 3 As. There is a lot of variety among the Os. My Dad and my sister are artistic and slightly melancholy. My Mom is a classic sanguine. My son and I tend to be phlegmatic. Our body types are different as well. My Dad is compact and wiry. My son is tall with lots of lower body strength. My nephew is tall with very broad shoulders. My Mom and my sister are apples. I am a pear. But we all have one thing in common - we like beef!

I did better with food choices today. Pizza for lunch was the big avoid for the day. I took a little pizza and a lot of fresh fruit. Dinner was a seafood feast with beneficial and neutral vegetables. Dessert was too sugary to be healthy, but no major avoids except the crust.

My Dad is an avid reader, and National Geographic is one of the periodicals he reads monthly. The cover story for the August issue is on fat. Some of the research is fascinating and should have pointed the writer directly to the Blood Type Diet, but she chose to do pros and cons about Adkins instead. Here were some of my favorite quotes.

"The food pyramid guidelines told Americans to avoid fat and eat grains, so we loaded up on pasta and bread. The low-fat message backfired." "We're eating more vegetables...the only problem: almost a third of these vegetables were iceberg lettuce, French fries, and potato chips." "Americans enjoy one of the most luxurious lifestyles on Earth: Our food is plentiful. Our work is automated. Our leisure is effortless. And it's killing us." "The grains we're eating are flour based items like pasta, tortillas, and hamburger buns which have little more nutritional value than table sugar."