5:21 p.m. - Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2003
No time for descriptions. It's time to eat!
Oh I �do� love a puzzle.
There�ve been times in my life when I got caught up in crossword puzzles. I was always fast and accurate with them and arrogantly did them always in ink rather than pencil. I�d rather put a snail in my mouth than erase a word. Like the French. I guess the French must have a LOT of erasing to do, and they must hate it terribly. Because they stuff their mouths full of snails on every corner. But.. I digress.
Logic puzzles too; I love those things. If you haven�t seen one, it�s a little hard to explain. Basically, you get some information that seems useless, like, �If a hen and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, then how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick the seeds out of a dill pickle?� Then, through the use of logic and logical thinking, you deduce other information until the question is answered.
The greatest puzzle of my life, it seems, is how and why I insist on trying to grow two or three of me in the space where only one of me belongs. Oh, you haven�t been drinking Capt. Morgan�s this early? Then to simplify; I can�t figure out why I stay so fat. Even more interesting, I am learning, is HOW I stay so fat. I�ll never understand why, maybe, but I�m finding out how I do it, and it�s plumb surprising.
I went to the website for Fitness magazine the other day. There I found a little feature that calculates how many calories a person needs to maintain their current weight. Well, not that I was especially interested in maintaining my current weight, but I got curious to see how many calories I must be eating to stay this fat. So I put in my age and weight, and I fudged on the activity level. I chose the lightest level, even though I�ve been working out lately. And then, having clicked on the button, I reeled as I looked at the number it returned.
In order to stay this fat, I have to eat more than four thousand calories each and every day of my life! And that�s if I DON�T exercise. If I exercise, it takes even more calories.
Do you know how much work it is to consume that much food?
According to the CalorieKing, a slice of Dominos medium hand-tossed America�s Feast Pizza is 257 calories. To stay at my current weight, I have to eat the equivalent of sixteen slices every day. GGGBOF, it�s no wonder I gravitate towards the cheeses and other fats. Heck, I would have to eat almost two pounds of Melba Toast, that old dieter�s favorite, to get four thousand calories. And let�s not even talk about lettuce, OK?
I found myself with a kind of renewed respect for me. Clearly, I have been up to the challenge for many years of keeping all this weight on. I�ve managed to meet all the other requirements of daily life and still find the time, money and stamina to consume double the calories of lesser, normal people.
But wait! I don�t WANT to be this fat! I want to be thin so I can wear the clothes I want to wear. I want to be able to make a short flight and be able to fit in the itsy little seat on the airplane. And, OK, let�s be honest�. When I have sex� rare as it may be� I want to be left breathless from passion, not from having the breath squeezed out of me by the almost impossible position. So I must be working this hard to be something I truly don�t want to be because of some faulty logic somewhere. My wooden-legged monkey has lost his direction. My hen and a half is laying an egg and a half for no reason, or a reason so arcane it�s been forgotten.
Alright� I needed more information for this puzzle, so I went to several websites where I learned about the marvelous food pyramid the government has constructed using your money. Actually, I knew about the food pyramid from a skinny little chicky hired by the VA to shove plastic examples of food under my nose and tell me how she was once a �food abuser� like me. I hated that chick. I hated that plastic food too. It smelled funny and had no taste at all.
On my own, I studied the pyramid long enough to see that I did have a few misperceptions about the kinds of food I might consider substituting for all that pizza, and it also occurred to me like a digital flash going off right behind my eyeballs that the concept of three meals a day was invented. Who ever told us we have to eat three times a day?
So here�s what I did:
I invented my own magic number of meals. Actually, I think I really just purloined it from the Europeans. I made a plan to eat Breakfast at or around 0600, Brunch at or around 0900, Lunch at or around 1200, �tea� at 1500, supper and 1800, and a little snack at 2100. That�s six meals a day, but I remembered the old saying about eating like a king in the morning, a merchant at lunch and a pauper at night.. or something like that. Keeping that in mind, I used the pyramid to make a plan toi eat most of my calories by noon. In the evening, I eat much less and at 2100, just a little bit of cracker and some water.
This is day three of my new plan. I�m going nuts here. I can barely eat all the stuff I have planned, yet my totals for each day are between fifteen hundred and two thousand calories. I can never stay this fat on that, yet I feel stuffed all the time, except for a couple of hours in the early morning. And hey, I can always drink some of the dieter�s tea that Barbara gave me and I forgot about.
I�ve lost four pounds in three days. Don�t help me look for them. I hope I never see them again. But if you want to help, then do this:
Don�t live your life like I have, thinking that you have to starve to be healthy� or even thin. Don�t listen to anyone without listening to YOURSELF first. Then if those others have something you can use, use it. If they don�t, then forget about �em.
And ask yourself why that monkey�s kicking the seeds out of a dill pickle in the first place.
Happy Thoughts, Deep Breaths,
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