Blog Archives
My Advice About Losing Weight: Secondly, Calories
Eat salads if you like them. I don’t. So I don’t eat them.
This is a series of posts about losing weight. I broke them up so that I don’t produce an 8,000 word post you won’t read. Instead, it’ll be three or so posts that you most likely won’t read. I’m OK with that.
The first one had the intro and dealt with the basics. Read it first for a better feel for the context.
Calories Eaten
I was going to label this section “Diet”, as in the overall picture of the food we eat, but that word is banned. See, the key to long-term weight loss isn’t a diet. It’s not about detoxing or juicing or eating a grapefruit for breakfast every day (ahh, the 1980’s) or some “paleo” bullshit or low-carb or Nutrisystem or meal plans or any of that utter bullshit.
But they work!
OK, sure. Short-term, a diet works just fine. I know. I used to jump on the Atkins diet and lose 20 pounds in a month or two. I loved that diet. I ate that way for over a year at one point. So look at me, contradicting myself! OK, not really. The reason why diets and meal plans and all that shit don’t work is because they don’t simulate real life. Sure, you can starve yourself on the Water and Salt Tablet Diet to lose 15 pounds for your wedding, but I guarantee that during your honeymoon you’ll gain it all right back, plus 5 pounds more. Then you’ll look back at your wedding pictures and see yourself 20 pounds lighter, feel fat, and eat a quart of ice cream. Unless you plan to change your life after you finish the diet, you will gain the weight back. It’s what happens. Plus your significant other will get to makes cracks about how much weight you gained after the wedding and make you want to shiv them. You might want to avoid life in prison.
And Now, A Rant About Cupcakes
This is a cupcake.
I love me some cake. I mean, I love it like a fat kid loves redundancy. My whole life is littered with the cakes I’ve seen and tasted, from my grandmother’s Red Velvet cake (with vanilla frosting. Seriously, people, cream cheese frosting? Are we in Communist Russia? Am I to begin standing in line for beets next? Cream cheese frosting is ONLY acceptable on carrot cake. Nothing else. UPDATED: I let my rage get the best of me. Cream cheese frosting is delicious on pumpkin or other spiced-cake product. I stand corrected.) to the cherry cake pops my wonderful wife made a couple months ago. I fucking love cake, just to be clear. Love it.
This includes cupcakes. Ahhh, the sweet, glorious cupcake. It’s a mini-cake all its own, a piece of heaven made for one hand, allowing a cake lover like me to eat a cake without having to use a fork and plate. From EZ-Bake ovens to school bake sales to after-game treats to something to make a bunch of goddamn kids shut the fuck up for 5 minutes, the cupcake has a well-deserved legacy as a beloved American treasure. Like so much of our precious heritage, however, this glorious symbol of utter deliciousness is being denigrated and desecrated before our very eyes. If we don’t act soon, the cupcake as we know it will be gone, tossed carelessly in the compost heap of forgotten culinary treasures like so many crumb-lined paper wrappers.
For fuck sake, people, LIVES ARE AT STAKE. Possibly.
Adventures in Cooking
I am not a foodie in the food snob sense, but I do love food, no question. I’ll try anything at least once – and this after a childhood so picky that my name might as well have been “No Potatoes and No Beans”, my response whenever I was asked what I wanted for dinner – and I’ve experimented a lot more in last 6 months, making hummus and homemade mayo and stuff like that. This past week, though, I did some pretty cool stuff that I ended up really happy with. Read the rest of this entry
Tracing My Bongo Burgers: A Day on the Farm, Part 6
This series of posts describes my recent trip to Bobolink Dairy Farm. I decided to break it into chunks because I apparently have a lot to say about it. Today’s entry finishes up the visit.
With our cheese in its molds, it was time to turn our minds to lunch. We were having pizza, cooked in Bobolink’s brick-oven (which you can monitor the temperature of and watch a webcam of from their website – which is pretty cool, and reminds me of a friend that used to have one installed in his Coke machine). In the episode of No Reservations that visited the farm, Jonathan and Nina made an amazing-looking pizza with veal and other toppings. He tells that ever since, people have come in asking for pizza. They don’t make them to sell; the cost would have to be too high, he tells us. The only way to get one is to bring a camera crew, he jokes – but luckily for us, if you take the cheese-making class, you get one as well. Read the rest of this entry
Tracing My Bongo Burgers: A Day on the Farm, Part 4
This series of posts describes my recent trip to Bobolink Dairy Farm. I decided to break it into chunks because I apparently have a lot to say about it. Today’s entry chronicles the finer points of milk and cheese.
While Lady Aravan is gleefully milking cows and scratching cow heads and hearing stories, I begin my education in cheesecrafting. I have my little cheesemaking hat on (see yesterday’s picture) and don an apron. There’s all kinds of stuff all over this little room, but the important things are a table in the center, and a rack next to it. On the rack are several round smaller cheese wheels, a handful of cheese pyramids, and a larger wheel. Later on we’ll learn the names (the small wheels are Amram, the pyramids are something I can’t remember, and the larger wheel is Baudolino), but for now we learn that those cheeses were made two days ago, and they are headed to The Cave. Lulu takes them away while Jonathan promises we’ll see them later. Read the rest of this entry
It’s Just One Day
How many times have we told that to ourselves, just before we completely overindulge in high-calorie, low-health food? It’s one of those things that we tell ourselves to rationalize away the self-sabotaging stories. Others, like “there are no calories at a party” or “no calories if the food comes from someone else’s plate” are meant as little jokes, something everyone can chuckle over since they know it isn’t true, and yet at its core, it’s still rationalization. Read the rest of this entry
A Month After Hitting My Weight Goal
It’s been about a month since I hit my weight goal. I say “about” because I can’t remember exactly when I did and am WAY too lazy to actually do, you know, research. I’ll call it a month, since it’s a great way to shorthand it. I think it’s close. Well anyway, it’s been a month since I hit my goal weight. I wondered what would happen when I did. Would things change? Would I go back to old habits?
Turns out, no, everything seems to be the same. That’s it! Thanks for reading. Read the rest of this entry
Why Am I Doing This to Myself?
I think most people ask themselves that while they are exercising at some point. For me, it’s usually when it’s 4:30 am and I am tying my shoes, getting ready to do an hour or so of cardio before work, or when I realize that I need to do 53 consecutive pushups to finish my pushup workout. Those moments are the hardest, when it is so easy to just walk away, or lie back down, and say: Tomorrow. I can do it tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry
Where I’ve Been
Like Jim Anchower, it’s been a while since I rapped at ya. There are various reasons for this, not least being the attempt to pull off a NaNoWriMo in July. Several friends joined me, which was cool, although attrition is beginning to take its toll. I’m working on the sequel to The Curse of Troius right now, and I’m over 23k words into it. I’m having fun and liking it, and 50k written (or more) in July will go a long way towards getting me to finish. It’s tentatively entitled The Siege of Anticus, although I’ve been toying with Northreach Besieged lately. We’ll see. I hate trying to make titles for things.
Winter in Derenemyn 