LiveJournal from 2/11/2003

Dull meetings abound, but alas, they are done. I’ve started my weight loss regimen in order to ultimately lose “1 small child” from my overall weight. I’ve decided on replacing two meals with Slim-Fast (which doesn’t have such a horrible aftertaste if you get it very cold and then chase it with water just afterwards) and two snacks in the middle of the day. The first snack is a D’anjou Pear cut into sections and 1 yogurt, then the afternoon is 1 Navel Orange cut into sections (ripped), and 1 yogurt. 

I’ve got a theory that no dietician is actually correct, that they are very much like blind men wandering around an elephant, each one noticing small bits but nobody really understanding the whole. I suppose what is supremely disturbing is that human beings don’t completely understand how human beings digest food and metabolize energy, each “dietician” has their own little gimmick and each one preaches something different. If you were to follow the food pyramid on the back of a loaf of bread, according to present conventional wisdom, you’d expand like a zodiac dinghy because of all the carbohydrates. Others seem to value one kind of energy over others, the all fat camp, the all protein camp, and the all onion-soup-and-cabbage camp. 🙂 I’ve decided to give up Soda-Pop mostly because after I started to read the analysis on the back of the canisters I discovered what I pretty much knew but chose to ignore – that soda is very much liquid candy. I’ve turned to fruits and vegetables to provide the small boosts in bloodsugar that help me stay awake and functioning at work and trying to pare down the amount I eat without really worrying about *what* it is that I eat. I figure as long as I’m not snarfing down logs of lard soaked in bacon fat and butter with a rod of pure cane sugar running thru the middle I think I’ll be ok. My problem with diets that many people are on is in the overall stress they have at having nearly zero selections other than this one type of foodstuff that isn’t as popular as your average American Fast Food Item and then railing at some idea that if you were just faithful to the diet it would work, you can’t injure an idea no matter how angry one gets. While on my diet I haven’t lost any weight however I am getting smaller, so I have this fanciful notion that all my working out (carido, 10.8 miles of biking) combined with the shift and regularity of my food intake may mean that I am gaining muscle mass and losing fat mass, then again, maybe not. I must also consider that I am a slave to my setpoint, that I can try to lose weight but my system will just reject it and preserve where I am for as long as it can, and there in lies the awfulness of diets – how to break thru so you see progress. Doctors have told me that an adult human male who is 6’3” must consume 2500 calories to remain alive, however I consider that I’m doing quite well on 800-1200 calories a day and nothing seems to happen. One other thought along with this is some kind of overall spooling effect, that indeed I’m changing my body chemistry and raising my metabolism and there will be a day when my body decides, “Fine, to hell with this…” and starts shrinking.

I suppose in the end short-term results are always going to lead to some type of heartache because for me a diet isn’t something I have to try, it’s got to be a radical shift in how I perceive food, a long-haul approach. The biggest hurdle deep down in my mind is the ability to let food go, to either box it up for later or leave some behind – perhaps for many of us there is a karmic pressure to never leave a plate without it being cleaned because at one point we died starving and vowed we’d rather die of being too fat than being too thin. Now we get to my question for those that are still with me and reading, I’m faced with a small decision, here it is:

I have a membership to a “Health Club” (used only in the most tangential of definitions) that will run until August of 2003. This place is 1/2 ok, 1/2 abhorrent, they have proven themselves to be a pack of liars and lazy dullards and their management is knitted together by an ever changing pile of “kids” trying to make something work that really isn’t. Would it be wiser to purchase a membership with the University Student Recreation Center (SRC) for $75 and simply let the other place go to expiry and forget it, or would it make more sense to use what already exists in the University to my advantage. The benefits of the SRC is that it’s CLEAN and managed by people who at least are bound to the rules of the university. If I do choose the university would it be better to pay outright or trade Sick Leave for access, even tho trading Sick Leave alters my W-2 withholding slightly? I’m leaning on going to the SRC but since I have this new journal I thought perhaps input from my readers would be a valuable source of opinions.