I am continuing to keep up my excercise routine of almost an hour a day 5 days a week and heavy duty home improvement work on the weekends. The weekend work is definately harder than the weekly work out regime as I am sore every Monday morning which always makes the Monday 5:00 AM work out a bit more difficult. As for the diet portion, I must confess, I was not very good over the last week as I was definately on the "see food" diet. If I saw it I ate it, but fortunatley I didn't add any weight with my binge last week. I am now back to eating better and limiting my intake of bad foods such as sugar.

As the manufacturing guy for the company, I routinely have the pleasure of traveling for business to our factories where our heart healthy snacks are born.

It may be surprising to you, but food manufacturing plants are typically in low-rent districts. I wouldn't say it is the wrong side of the tracks, but our neighbors are sometimes institutionalized, wearing jumpsuits, and go by numbers and not names. If you are one of these people reading this blog... no offense.

That being said, I have been lucky to see some beautiful spots on my travels and have had the opportunity to stop and smell the roses or more accurately snap a few pictures as I was driving by on my way to the next factory.

Some of my favorite spots are in the Northwest. The Columbia River Gorge is spectacular as well as the Cascade range. The Yakima valley is the produce hot-spot growing apples, hops, and wine grapes among other things. The Tri Cities area is drier and is also an agricultural breadbasket and grows great melons, wine grapes and of course potatoes- wonderful, glorious potatoes. If you haven't experienced the Northwest, it is worth a trip.

Even with all of its natural bounty, I am not quite ready to move away from SoCal just yet (I have gotten spoiled with perfect weather), but it is good to get away ocassionally and see what makes other places unique. I always try to soak in the local culture (within reason) and understand what makes a place tick.

My advice: You gotta stop and smell the hops along the way. And maybe with a few more Alaska Airlines points, I can stop and smell the hibiscus (in Hawaii) as well!

GREG

I have been eating my Corazonas chips and exercising regularly! My favorite is the Baja Bean Dip tortilla chips! My husband and I will be walking with our daughter this weekend to continue my exercise regimen.

I am jumping in to the Cholesterol Challenge to hit my goal of dropping my LDL under 100. This might be a mighty goal since high cholesterol runs in my family, but I am determined to get there through exercise, trying to eat healthier, and eating my Corazonas Chips. Since starting with the company, I was successful in significantly dropping my LDL cholesterol by 28%, but I gave a little of it back with my latest cholesterol check. I crept up a bit to 148, but significantly below the 182 I was at prior to starting with Corazonas. However, I was bale to get my HDL up 8 points which is great news since it is lower that it should be.

I do have to confess though that I have been participating in a lot of product development work with our R&D team tasting new products, flavors and concepts and not keeping up with the normal regiment of the plant sterol chips. When we do R&D development, we don't add the plant sterols until we have developed a product that meets our new product requirements, thus I eat a lot of chips that don't offer the cholesterol lowering benefits of our current product line. However, I will say the new products are awesome and can't wait to begin rolling out the new line of tortilla chips in early October with the plant sterol benefits.

Since my cholesterol ticked up a bit since my last check up in March, I am excited to see how much I can lower my cholesterol when I stick to the regiment with the chips.

I started eating the Corazonas chips last weekend as part of the Corazonas Challenge. My favorite so far is the Baja Bean Dip! High cholesterol runs in my family along with high blood pressure. I am excited to participate in this program and see how eating Corazonas can help me in the future. - posted by Tony Da Costa

I am very excited about participating in the Corazonas Challenge! Since having my daughter a year ago my cholesterol (and weight) has been higher than ever before in my life! I am ready to change some of my eating and exercise habits for good and can't wait to see how Corazonas chips will affect my final results at the end of the month!