Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Dieting
Diet update
Two months into the diet, I’m down about five pounds from my max weight. I’d like to lose another 14, so if I keep it up, I’ll be there by the year’s end.
My smart phone’s diet/fitness app (“My Fitness Pal”) charts my weight, adding a data point whenever I care to weigh in and enter my weight. It looks like a sawtooth mountain range, but the trend is generally downward.
What I think has been most helpful: bran cereals and bananas. Both are very filling, and for whatever reason, I don’t seem to tire of them. Apples work well too, but I get sick of apples after about two days.
Also important is sticking to the calorie limit (1700 per day). My Fitness Pal gives me the option to record the calories burned in aerobics (e.g. when I spend an hour on the elliptical trainer), and when I do, it essentially erases that number of calories from my daily total. Thus, if I were permitted another 800 calories for the day and burned 500 calories on the elliptical trainer, My Fitness Pal tells me that I can eat another 1300 calories. Um, no. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work that way, but for my body, it doesn’t. I see much better progress when I stick to my totals, exercise or not. I suspect the elliptical machine greatly overestimates calories burned.
I know a lot of people put great stock in drinking lots of water, but I find it doesn’t help with hunger. (Go figure!) On the other hand, I need to avoid salty snacks, because my weight almost always pops up a pound or more when I so indulge.
D.
Personal growth
Shaving* naked in front of the mirror last night, looking at the new roundishness of my abdomen — a pregnant muchness that wasn’t there three months ago, back before my gym closed — I thought of personal growth, the kind of growth that derives its substance from too many bags of microwave popcorn and too many Christmas cookies and too many pieces of Belgian chocolate (oh thank you very much, my beloved patients, but don’t you realize that if you kill me, I won’t be here to take care of you?)
Turning this way and that, trying to find some angle where I didn’t look like Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, only, you know, hairy, suppressing the urge to take a scalpel to my flesh because what the hell good is it being a surgeon anyway if I can’t even fix blubber belly, I reflected (in the mirror, get it?) that this was why I loved writing.
Think about it. Friends drift away, love affairs fly apart, bodies go to hell, and yet our writing chugs on, barring hard drive crashes, fire, floods, and fiction-hating dogs, of course. Every bit of writing we do improves us as writers. Well, that one month foray into screenwriting put me into an extended writer’s block, but I still learned from that, didn’t I? (Yeah. You learned not to fuck with me, sailor. — Doug’s muse.) And I may have spent my first two years and 100K words of ‘serious’ writing on a project that went nowhere fast, but if I hadn’t done that, could I have written a 300K word novel that actually went somewhere? I don’t think so.
What’s my problem with scale, anyway? I’ve sold flash fiction and stories in the 4K to 6K range, and I’ve written a humongous novel, but I can’t manage to turn out a modest 90K novel. But I digress.
Writing is the one compartment of my life where I feel like things are getting better**. I may be getting poorer thanks to this money pit of a house, and I may be getting older and fatter and balder, but at least with writing, if I put out the effort, I have something to show for it: not just the words on the page, but also an internal maturation which makes it possible to do that much more the next time my fingers hit the keyboard.
So I’m shaving, looking at that 4-month-preggers so-not-a-six-pack of mine, and I’m thinking, Maybe there is something growing in there. Maybe I could take that 2001-2002 project of mine, Karakoram, and turn it into something 90K-ish, tight, interesting, funny, poignant — in short, everything I wanted it to be when I first got started. Maybe I can do that now.
Yeah.
D.
*My face. Detail added for Maureen’s benefit.
**Before you ask: no, there’s nothing wrong with my marriage. Knockingonwood knockingonwood knockingonwood.
28,000-year old multi-tasker
Thanks to Scott for pointing me towards this BBC News story about a 28,000 year old phallus:
Ah, the British. So in love with their puns; so proud of their wit. He said tool. Heh heh. Heh heh.
The author goes on to say that the “tool” may have been used as a sex aid, but “was also at times used for knapping flints,” according to Professor Nicholas Conard, who knows a thing or two about knapping flints. Or sex aids. I figure they must have talked to an expert, for God’s sake.
I’d never heard of “knapping flints,” but could figure it out from context. I pictured some Ice Age proto-person diddling herself/himself with it, getting bored, then turning it over to bang out a few flint arrowheads. Hell, it’s not like you can do that with the real thing.
I must have a tapeworm, or maybe I’m pregnant. So far tonight, I’ve had a buffalo burger (no bun), slice of red onion grilled on the barbie, and a romaine salad. That was my Atkins dinner. Still hungry, I had more than a few pretzels, a bowl of Tasty Bites Madras Lentils (Tasty Bites sounds like cat food, no?) garnished with red onion and Swiss cheese, a Girl Scout cookie, a few of my son’s Kit Kat bites (more cat food), and 9 Kalamata olives.
Did I mention the chili anchovies (from the Chinese market) and sardines for lunch?
If you haven’t figured it out yet, my muse has her head up her ass this evening. She pulled it out briefly this morning, allowing me to write this entry for the ‘Worst First Sentence’ contest at Writers BBS:
P— was a dashing sailor, strong of biceps and large of groin, keen for his spinach, a fellow of few words and fewer letters.
Okay, I’m pushing my luck.
D.
The Hunger
No, not Tony Scott’s moody Deneuve-Bowie-Sarandon vampire flick, but rather, the pit-of-the-soul carb craving only two years of Atkins Diet induction can spawn. That’s right, I’ve never made it out of induction. Oh, would I love to make it out of induction.
Six months ago I overcame 20+ years of lassitude and joined a local gym. I reasoned that if I increased my activity level, I’d be able to eat more carbs. But then something interesting happened: I discovered that I’m a mesomorph trapped in an endomorph’s body. Or, as I learned this evening on bodybuilderpro.com, I am Sylvester Stallone trapped in Roseanne Barr’s body. Yo.
I began trimming off inches, replacing fat with muscle. This was all well and good — I have a nice, hard tukhas now — but it galls me that I can’t get my weight below 160. Indeed, as of this writing, I’m having a devil of a time cracking 165. I think I could tolerate this number if my stomach would flatten . . . but it won’t! Damn me, I can feel that washboard lurking in there, that six-pack yearning to be free, but I’m told by the gym jocks I’ll have to starve and dehydrate to really get that definition.
I’ve been shooting for a Body-Mass Index of 25. That’s 155 lbs for me. It ain’t gonna happen. The few times I’ve made it to 159 (thanks to food poisoning, stomach flu, that sort of thing), I’ve binged my way back to 163. I caught a recent news item that the Feds are going to loosen these guidelines, thereby creating far fewer obese people in the United States, but I can’t seem to find the exact stats. What BMI do I shoot for now? If they raise the bar to 27, I’M LEAN!
This is the stuff I think about as I do my 45 minutes on the elliptical trainer, trying not to look at the 90 lb woman next to me who could kick my ass in two seconds. (Her boyfriend was working out, too. “Hey, Ron! This guy’s bugging me. Horm* him for me, will ya?” Well, maybe three seconds.) Because I’m not assertive around guys who could bench press me, I never gripe about the music (Jurassic rock today . . . AC/DC, Aerosmith, etc.) or change the TV (Seinfeld of all things). On the drive home, I put on an old Cowboy Junkies CD and let Margo Timmins’ satin voice mellow me out. I’m okay now.
Atkins dinner for me tonight: a four-egg omelet, five strips of bacon, and two pieces of low carb toast. Handful of dried cranberries and a stinkyfart bar (love those sugar alcohols) for dessert. I made pesto for Karen and Jake, so I can’t eat that, and I’m sick of salads. But I’m not complaining. (What, you thought I was complaining?)
I’m keeping the weight off.
I can see my wiener when I go pee.
Some things are important.
D.
*Hormed: a verb cherished by all of us old enough to remember Rogue:
. . . . I @ .
. . . . . I I .
. . . . . . . .
Translation: you are about to get hormed by a quartet of Intellect Devourers. “Your mind reels from the Intellect Devourer’s ego whip.” Ah, the good old days: when it took imagination to enjoy a computer game.