Welcome to Mark Gstohl’s Blog

I’m headed to San Francisco with Carol. Don’t worry, my home is being guarded by three vicious dogs, my neighborhood patrol, and my two strong boys. I’m a bit concerned that I might gain weight during my trip. The good news is that we will be traveling with my best vegan friends the Homans.They should keep me in line and make sure we have lots of fun. I’m really looking forward to it.  I’ll be presenting the paper, “What Would Jesus Drink? How the Temperance Movement and Thomas Welch Changed Communion” at ASOR.

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For the month of October, I tried a plant-based diet to see if it would help my diabetes. It’s been pretty amazing. I’ve dropped down to the mid 270 lb range and I’ve not done any significant exercise. Now that my knees are feeling better I will change that.

Since my blood sugar has been 100 or less over the last three days I decided to eliminate my last medication. My sugar was 135 this morning. I’m hoping that with exercise I will be able to bring it down even more and end my need for medication. For me this is huge. I’ve gone from four pills a day to none. The last time I met with my doctor my sugar was out of control. He said the next step was injections. I simply couldn’t deal with that.

I feel a lot better on this diet. I eat fish about once a week and I’ve had a couple of Halloween (small) candy bars and one night I ate two pieces of chicken strips once. Otherwise I’ve been pretty good.

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During the month of October, my friend Bart Everson and I switched identities on Facebook. I was slightly concerned about the ethical issues, but I was about ready to close my FB account due to some unpleasant exchanges with “friends” of “friends” and was tired of some folks posting negative comments on my links.

Bart suggested we make the exchange in order to see if his friends reacted differently to my posts and, of course, vice versa. I learned a lot about Bart, myself, and Facebook and I’ll be posting more blog entries about the experience as I reflect on the last month. You may have not noticed that in this post I referred to this experiment without elaborating.

One funny story: My friend Adrastos posted a question on my FB wall. He asked who I would be pulling for that weekend. Bart had no idea. He didn’t even know what game Adrastos was referring to. Bart looked it up and chose unwisely. He said that Florida was going to beat LSU! That is not the choice I would have made! Unfortunately, Adrastos sent me texts throughout the game as Florida was getting destroyed!

More later.

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