That’s not to suggest that the end is near, it just means it’s in sight. Your plane can crash into the ocean and you can be floating in the water with an island in sight and still sink to the ocean floor or get swallowed by a shark before you get there.
But last night I took a calendar and marked out when I’ll reach my goal weight (assuming I meet my interim goals) and that date is September 1st. Yes, that’s right, Gloria Estefan’s birthday.
I realize it’s a bit of a stretch to set a date almost 6 months in the future as my goal date. But I’ve been taking my time with this process and I don’t think I’ll have trouble meeting that deadline. I have a pretty simple system. I have daily goals and if I don’t meet them I just try a little harder. Of course when I do something like go on one of these ridiculous fad diets it can cause dramatic weight gains and losses, but I just tend to ignore that.
So that’s the goal. I’ll weigh 187 pounds on September 1st. From upwards of 300 pounds to 187. I’ve been taking pictures of the whole process so you’ll see the progression then.
Why 187 pounds? Because that falls into the healthy range according the height and weight charts MetLife came out with in 1943. Yes, I’m using the 1943 standard. You should too. (If you’re going to pay attention to any charts at all — and there’s really no reason to. It’s all arbitrary.) At least those charts take build into account, unlike the current BMI charts which seem to think that all 6 footers have identical builds.
There you have it. September 1st. The rhythm is going to get you. Then I’ll get you. The we’ll go get a 6 foot sub to celebrate my weight loss.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. No, I’m just kidding, I’m not. I just think it’s funny when people say that. That’s the big benefit of not being concerned about web-traffic or anything like that, you can post when you feel like it. That being said, I have a number of posts to make in the coming weeks. So put on your blog trunks, because there’s going to be a tidal wave. What?
QDW stands for Questionable Diet Wisdom and it’s where I make fun of something I’ve read in the diet literature for being nonsense. I recently read Food Rules by Michael Pollan, or as I like to call it, “Wait, So You’re Saying I Shouldn’t Be Eating Twinkies?” Seriously, he deserves an award for being able to say the same thing in so many different ways. The Reiteratey. (That’s what the award would be called. That would be its name. When people referred to the award, that’s what they’d call it.) That being said, it’s a short read and I think there is something to be gained by reading it. There will be some piece of information that resonates with you.
One thing I thought was unintentionally funny that he wrote was, “Humans are one of the very few mammals that obtain calories from liquids after weaning.” This was meant to keep us from drinking juice and soda and things like that. Is anyone swayed by this argument? Or is anyone surprised to hear it? Other mammals don’t get calories from liquids? You don’t say. Wait…I could have sworn I saw some raccoons running a root beer factory on one of my walks recently. Of course animals only drink water once they’re past their mother’s milk stage. What is their other option? A ferret can’t even get the straw in the Capri-Sun bag, much less manufacture the stuff. And really, is that the logic you use to decide if you’re going to do something? Whether you’ve seen other mammals manage it? You know what I’ve never seen? A bear working an oven. I guess I won’t be firing that thing up soon. I’ll just stand in the river biting trout in half. This is the same logic vegans use when they argue against drinking milk. “You know… we’re the only animal that drinks another animals milk.” No shit, that’s because we’re smart and we figured it out. We’re the only animals with a space program too, should we abandon that because the llamas aren’t working on one? Oh, and given the chance, other animals will do it too.
Well, the Israeli Army Diet is finally over. These truly were our salad days. No, I don’t mean that in the idiomatic sense of a time of youthful enthusiasm. I mean it quite literally in the sense that I spent the last couple days eating salad. This was not as bad as I was expecting it to be. In fact, it was easily the most painless of the days.
You see, I went to the dictionary to get the definition of “salad.” If the Israeli Army Diet wasn’t going to define the term then the dictionary was.
Salad: a usually cold dish consisting of vegetables, as lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, covered with a dressing and sometimes containing seafood, meat, or eggs.
Dressing and meat. Okay, I can do that. I was afraid I was going to have to eat straight lettuce for two days, which would have been rough. But by that definition I could have chicken caesar salad (sans croutons) which is something that I find perfectly satisfying. So that’s what I did
So does it work? Has the Israeli Army vanquished fat in a way they never could the Palestinians. Well, as is true with most of these types of diets, yes and no. I finished this diet a couple days ago and over the course of the 8 days I lost 11 pounds. Those are great numbers. But when I went back to eating a “normal” diet (2000 calories a day of a variety of foods) I gained back 6 pounds over the course of two days. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I put on another pound after today is over. I want to stress the point that it’s not because I’m overeating now, it’s because the weight that’s lost on these types of diets is not real. The way all of these types of diets work is that they try to come up with different combinations that will make you shit and piss as much as possible over the course of the length of the diet (two days of apple, remember?). So when you weigh yourself at the end, you’re weighing yourself at a very artificial state.
So why bother? Well, I certainly don’t do the most moronic diets to lose weight. The first site I wrote, Revival of the Faddist, was about using fad diets to lose weight. And what I realized is that while it’s possible to do so, that is not the best thing to be gained from fad diets. I call this “stunt eating” not because it’s incredibly dangerous, but because it’s pointless and semi-difficult. Eating only apples for two days is going to have a minor effect on your weight, but the larger effect is that you’re training yourself to follow your mind’s directive on what to eat. And that is essentially the only lifetime skill you need to gain to control your weight in the long-term.
I don’t know where the Israeli Army Diet originated. Unsurprisingly, this diet has nothing to do with The Israeli Army, that was just the name that was slapped on it in the 70s to give it some credibility. (Much like the Mayo Clinic Diet, the Sacred Heart Diet (named after a hospital in Canada that had nothing to do with it), and others.) How dumb are we as a species? If we saw this diet:
Breakfast: A meatball
Lunch: Huckleberry cobbler
Dinner: A rock
We’d be like, “That’s absurd.” But if we saw this diet:
The Salvation Army Marching Band Diet
Breakfast: A meatball
Lunch: Huckleberry cobbler
Dinner: A rock
We’d be like, “Well, that seems worth a shot.”
But since I don’t know the origin of the diet, I don’t really know what it means when it says that for the fifth and sixth day I can have “chicken.” Can I fry it? Can I stuff it with swiss cheese and ham? Can I bread it and parm it and put it in a sandwich? I’m guessing no. I know how these types of diets work, so I know it means chicken cooked in only the most boring, undelicious ways possible. Well, I picked up a roast chicken at the grocery store yesterday and have been living off that for these two days. To be honest, it’s not that bad. It’s a significant step up from the apples and cheese days, at least. I think I’m going to be overwhelmed when I go back to having more than a single option as far as what to eat each day. But I’m looking forward to it.
So, I just ate Cheese for two days. I love cheese. It makes everything better, as far as I’m concerned. When I worked in a restaurant during college, the other line-cooks and I would take some shredded cheddar and jack cheese, roll it into a ball the size of a large marble, dip it in beer batter, then deep fry it, and then dip the finished product in ranch dressing. That’s some serious cheese love, or at the very least a distinct disdain for your arteries. But that’s the thing, you need to have cheese in addition to other things. At least I do. Give me some bread, or a cracker, or a hunk of meat, or even a “doodle” and some cheese and I’m all set. But by itself, that’s just not my style.
The only cheese I ever had by itself is string cheese. And that was when I was eight. But I loaded up on some the other day and it’s all I ate for a full 48 hours. I feel ashamed eating this stuff. Peeling of these fibrous lengths of low-grade mozzarella. It’s fun when you’re a kid, but no adults eat string cheese. No one’s ever like, “This year’s profits have increased by 75% over the last fiscal year,” then rips off a big strand of string cheese.
Overall it hasn’t been that bad. But that’s how these long-term super-restrictive diets are. If you can get past the first few days it becomes kind of easy.
I have to admit though that I haven’t found the pizzerias of New York City as accommodating when I try to pull this maneuver:
So, I’ve been eating apples for two days now. Fuji apples, to be specific. I had considered going to Whole Foods or something and getting a variety of apples, but then I thought that the slight variety would end up being more depressing than no variety at all. So I just went to the fruit and vegetable store near my apartment and loaded up on fuji apples.
If you’ve never subsisted on one thing for a couple days, here is the general pattern it takes. Before you start, you’re kind of excited. The novelty of the thing seems interesting. On the beginning of the first day you have your first apple and — if you like apples like I do — you think, this is going to be easy. Then, a little after lunch on that first day the novelty has worn off. By dinner you’re thinking, What else can be done with these things? So you’re baking them in the oven and stuff.
Now, by the time day two rolls around, there is no enthusiasm left and you’ll eat them just to have something in your stomach. On day one I had 10 apples. On day two I had two. That’s how it works. People often fall into the trap of looking at a diet and getting excited — “I can only eat pita bread, but I can have as much of it as I want!” Well, guess what, 8 hours into eat you’re like, “man, fuck pita bread.” People seem to think there is something magic about the food that causes you to lose weight. But really it’s just human nature to not eat much of one particular thing days on end.
The effect an all-apple diet has on your physiology is about what you’d expect. The best part is the spectacular noises your stomach makes. Combine semi-starvation with your stomach working through that fibrous pulp and you get some of the loudest stomach noises ever. Rumbles, gurgles, and squeals. I had to inform my co-workers, “That’s just my stomach.” Lest they think I suddenly decided it was socially acceptable to audibly fart at work (but what a utopia that would be).
It’s time again to dip into the Every Diet site to see what bad ideas they have to offer the dieting community. For the next 8 days I will be taking on the Israeli Army, or at least their diet. When I first saw the name of this I thought it sounded pretty great. The Israeli Army? What do they eat? Like matzoh-ball soup, bagels, and those chocolate coins? Look, I ‘m not a cultured man, I don’t know much about the Jewish faith. But I’ll eat potato latkes for a week, no problem.
Sadly, the Israeli Army Diet is nothing of the sort (and, unsurprisingly, has nothing to do with the Israeli Army). It’s an 8-day diet where you can eat one type of food every two days. Every Diet calls it “one of most nutritionally unbalanced diets around.” Sounds right up my alley.
Here it is:
Days 1 – 2: Apples
Days 3 – 4: Cheese
Days 5 – 6: Chicken
Days 7 – 8: Salad
I guess the theory is that nothing prepares you more for battle with the Palestinians than the apple-shits.
I’ve started today and will provide updates along the way.
Happy New Year, my loves. I trust you all had a good holiday. It’s been a while, almost a month since we last met. As I mentioned, I wasn’t giving weight loss much thought over the course of the holidays, so there wasn’t much to write about. And that’s kind of the beauty of having a blog that you don’t publicize: only a handful of people will notice when you go missing.
On a site like this it’s only natural to talk about New Year’s resolutions, but I don’t really make any. It’s odd, but tagging a goal with the word “resolution” seems to make it more unlikely that it’s going to happen. If your friend came up to you and said, “I’m going to take a cooking class this spring.” You’d think, That sounds like fun. But if they said, “My New Year’s resolution is to take a cooking class this spring.” You’d think, Yeah, we’ll see about that.
The other problem I have with New Year’s resolutions is that it promotes this kind of magical thinking about there being a special day to start stuff. We do this throughout the year when we say, “I’ll start on Monday.” I think when you decide you want to do something you should just go ahead and start at that moment. Not because “you might not live to see tomorrow” but because you want to get in the habit of your mind –and your choices– being what puts you in action, not some quirk of the calendar.
So this year I’m going to lose the rest of the weight that I want to. I’ve toyed around with my weight for a few years now, but I think this year will see an end of that. Weight-loss is definitely an intriguing subject for me, and there is probably no better subject for anyone who is into self-experimentation, but I think I’ve played with it as long as I can. I met a girl last year who has become very important to me, she’s someone I could see myself spending a long time with, and it’s not really fair to her (or anyone else) to say, “Hey, I’m going to gain 100 pounds to see if I can then lose it by just eating pre-packaged, processed foods that must contain white flour, processed sugar, and salt (although I think that would be a fun experiment). So I’m going to finish up this year and then I’ll find something else to experiment with. Hello heroin!
Congratulations to Danny on winning the whole thing.
Congratulations to Amanda for winning America’s vote for a 2nd time.
Congratulations to Antoine and Alexandra for getting engaged on TV during the Biggest Loser finale. Just like every little girl’s dream! And congratulations to Antoine on resisting the pressure from NBC to insert a little product placement and say, “You know, Alexandra, they say every kiss begins with Kay. Will you accept my proposal by accepting this ring from Kay Jeweler’s? Since 1916 America’s #1 jewelry store, Kay Jewelers.”
Congratulations to Rebecca for winning the at-home competition and proving me eerily prescient when I said in the first post on this series that she was going to be the hot one come finale time. Although the blond hair is a mis-step.
Congratulations to Tracey for still seeming disturbing and crazy despite her success losing the weight.
Congratulations to Sean on the birth of his daughter who he named after Jillian. Much better choice than naming her Dr. Huizenga.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! That’s because it’s the time of year where I don’t actively think much about trying to lose weight. That area between Halloween and New Year’s is the time when I think you shouldn’t worry too much about that kind of stuff. I realize that amounts to taking 2 months off every year, but ideally you want to someday take all your time off from actively dieting without gaining the weight back, so this two months is good practice.
I took this picture outside of Macy’s last night. We haven’t really had any snow in New York City yet, but it’s still a great time of year to be in the city.
Raw Food
I heard an interview this morning with somebody who was promoting the raw food vegan lifestyle. Which — if it’s not self-evident — means not only eating vegan, but not cooking anything. The argument is that our body wasn’t meant to digest cooked food and therefore it requires too much energy. That’s why you get tired in the middle of the day, they said. I don’t think I buy that. If eating cooked food made people sluggish and worn out, wouldn’t our ancestors have noticed it the first time they started eating cooked food? And wouldn’t they all have died out because all the slow, cooked-food eaters would be getting pounced on by mountain lions while the raw foodies would be sprinting through the plains.
Can any raw food proponents send me an email and answer that question? I’m not trying to be combative, I’m just curious. If we’re not supposed to eat cooked food, then why did we, as a species, almost universally start doing so?
Biggest Loser
Season Finale tonight. Get your bowl full of Extra Sugar-Free Gum and Jennie-O turkey meat and enjoy the show.
