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Happy almost Easter everyone. For me Easter, while not only important for religious reasons, also signifies the end of winter and the beginning of spring. And what does spring bring, you ask? Spring cleaning of course. This year I am going to do some spring cleaning all right, to my body.

For the past few years my wife and I have been playing around with juice fasts/cleanses every 6 months or so. You know, a day here, two days. Nothing real structured and with no real plan other than to drink juice (usually lemon water with cayenne) for as long as we can. Three days is my record with most lasting only 24 - 36 hours. The last time I "juiced" a friend of mine turned me on to a site that changed the way I looked at these fasts/cleanses and upped my level understanding and in turn, my commitment to do a real spring cleaning of my body this year. (website will be at the bottom of this post)

There's really not much to these fasts/cleanses. Make some fresh juice each morning and drink it throughout the day. Don't ingest any solid food, caffeine, or alcohol. Also, drink a lot of water and either cut back your exercise to a moderate level or increase your exercise to a moderate level. (this depends on if you fall into the exercise fanatic or couch tater category) Pick your target number of days, usually between 3 and 15 days, and begin your fast/cleanse. It is easier on your body, and your mind, if you cut back on animal protein, caffeine, and alcohol a day or two before you start.

There are three main reasons I've found for doing a program such as this -- religious, cleanse/detox, and weight loss. I really don't have any religious purpose for doing this and I would certainly not recommend this for weight loss. I believe that if you want to loose weight, eat fewer calories than you expend and that any sort of extreme diet is, at best, a short term fix that will ultimately fail. (more on this in some future post) For me, I'm doing this simply to spring clean my body and get it back running on all cylinders. I know from past experience that the first couple of days are really, really, really hard. The good news is that, other than feeling really hungry, your body does feel very good.

Instead of going into all of the theories, benefits and other info about "juicing", I'm going to point you to a website that does a much better job than I could ever do. Please, watch this movie because it has some great information and also..... the dude is really funny. My program starts Monday 4/1/2013 and I'm shooting for 15 days. I'll post some recipes tomorrow and detail my plan in a little more detail.

Here's the site to check out:

In a follow up to my previous post, I'd like to delve further into the privacy we are giving up when we carry around our cell phones. We stand in line to buy the latest and greatest technology when it comes to cell phones, but do we really realize what we are consenting to when we activate them?

My iPhone 4s comes with a cool GPS feature, much like all of the newer model smart phones do. I can get in my truck, plug an address into my phone and off I go with my iPhone leading the way. This is such a handy tool. No more wrong turns or getting lost in a section of town I've never been to before. Along with this convenience, however, is the reality that I may not be the only one using the GPS tracking on my phone.

Many of the apps we utilize every day, the very apps that we have willingly downloaded onto our smartphones, use this GPS data to track a variety of things. I have a maps app, a tellnav app, a cinemark app, a tom thumb app, an around me app and a gas buddy app, just to name a few. All of these apps use my phones GPS data to locate the nearest "whatever" close to me and guide me to that place.

Research scientists from MIT (and elsewhere) have published an article in the journal of Scientific Reports how easy it is for this information to be used to track our everyday lives. They go on to say: "Mobility data is among the most sensitive data currently being collected. Mobility data contains the approximate whereabouts of individuals and can be used to reconstruct individuals' movements across space and time."

I can see you shaking your head now, saying that all of this data is not accessible by the every day Joe Blow on the streets and that you have nothing to be worried about. Think again. Think about all of the apps that you download to your phone that you don't really know where they are coming from. (probably 90% of the apps people download) Just consider if someone created a really cool game app that just caught fire on the net that you just had to have. You download it and now you're playing this really cool game all the time. Did you ever think that this app may have, behind the scenes, hooked into your GPS on your phone and started transmitting your location to some unseen server in the cloud somewhere? Think about it, you could be telling everybody and their brother who has the money to access this data where you are at all times.

We all tell our kids about the dangers of giving up too much information on line because we fear for their safety. What about our safety. Are we giving up too much?

Just something to think about.

I remember a long time ago reading Midnight by Dean Koontz and thinking to myself, how stupid would it be for people to let a corporation, or the government for that matter, implant something in our body, for any purpose, let alone tracking our every move. It seemed to be an absurd premise for a book, but then, so was 50,000 Leagues Under the Sea at the time it was released. (Both were outstanding reads BTW)

Fast forward to present day and I still stand by my initial argument that implanting something in us by the government or a corporation would cross a line and create huge public retaliation. But, what if they could create something that we could carry around, only if we wanted to, or used daily, again only if we wanted to, that would monitor all of our daily activity? I can't stress this enough, this would be strictly voluntary and only those people who wanted to be tracked would participate. Twenty years ago I would have bet the people in line to sign up for that program you could count on one hand -- then Steve Jobs and Google created something that monitors our every move, AND, we often stand in line for hours to get the latest version when they come out.

I've read several articles in the past week or so detailing how much information about us is available to anyone or any thing (Government or Corporation) that wishes to purchase it. The iPhone tracks our movements by GPS, Google (and the other search engines) track everything we do on-line, and we ourselves, often post numerous updates on Twitter and Facebook detailing our daily activities.

I'll let everyone think about this for a while. Not only did the Government and Corporations find a way to get more private information about us than they ever thought possible, but we stand in line to pay for the privilege to provide it to them.

Go figure.

Thanks to all of you who signed up for my Oliver and Harriet and the Dark Forest giveaway. They books have gone out to the winners and, if that is you, I hope you enjoy.Oliver and Harriet and the Dark Forest