My best friend since my high school days is at this very moment getting his stomach removed. As I type this he is getting surgery — surgery which is technically not gastric bypass surgery, but I’m too dumb to understand the difference. All I know is he’s getting his stomach removed. He’s doing this because he’s been between 370 and 400 pounds for the past 15 years and he feels this is the only way he’s ever going to lose weight. Maybe it is. From this point on he won’t be able to eat more than 4 ounces of food before feeling full.

This seems so fucking insane to me. Here’s the thing, weight-loss surgery doesn’t make you lose weight. It’s not like they open you up and turn a crank that boosts your metabolism. It just makes you eat less, and that in turn makes you lose weight. But you can eat less all on your own, without this surgery. This seems like such a drastic and somewhat prehistoric way of tackling the problem. It’s almost like they asked a five-year-old how they could get someone to lose weight. “Remove his stomach!” And instead of saying, “Haha, that’s adorable.” Everyone says, “Let’s give it a shot.” I mean, couldn’t we just put a brick in his stomach like people do with their toilet tanks so it uses less water? I feel like almost any idea is better than getting rid of the stomach.

I realize that this is supposed to be a measure of last resort — but are all options on the table because something is a last resort? “The door on my shed is squeaking. I’ve tried everything to get it to stop. I know what will fix it. I’ll blow up the shed.” Hey, it was my last resort. And technically the problem is solved.

If your brain doesn’t function right we don’t remove your brain. Speaking of that, I wouldn’t be surprised if 50 years from now we don’t look back on these stomach surgeries the way we look back now on lobotomies.

I guess what gets me most worked up about it is that it plays into the idea that you can be powerless to food or anything else you choose to do. There is nothing that says that has to be so. I am a great believer in the power of the will. Yes, it can be hard to lose weight. But… so what?

I should look on the bright side. My friend should end up living longer and being healthier in the long run, unless he follows the Carnie Wilson path (hosting the Newlywed Game) and gains it all back, which would be particularly sad. But at the very least it will be interesting for me to follow his progress given that I am trying to accomplish the same goal in the exact opposite manner. I hope he recovers soon I can go eat a plate of nachos in front of him. (I’m a horrible friend.)

I sometimes think the people who successfully lose weight don’t tell us how they do it. They probably like the rest of the world being fat just fine. I say this because we see the same diet tips coming out all the time and they’re all equally obvious/useless.

There’s one tip that I find tremendously helpful and I don’t see it mentioned that often, so while I think I’ve written about it before I’d like to mention it again.

You need to learn to reframe hunger in your mind. You need to welcome that feeling. Instead of feeling it and thinking “This means I want food,” you need to tell yourself, “This means I’m losing weight.” Because that’s what true hunger is (I’m talking hunger here, not starvation), it’s a symptom of a calorie deficiency. It’s the feeling of losing weight.  And when you think of it that way you will come to appreciate the feeling. I realize that sounds like bullshit but I’m speaking from experience. I still get hungry, and I still want to eat, but by reframing hunger as a positive thing rather than a negative thing, I’ve been able to let my brain — not my stomach — dictate when I eat.

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!

Christmas

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.

I don’t have time for a proper write-up, but for the sake of completion I wanted to make a post.  It was make-over week! But then again every week is make-over week on The Biggest Loser one would think. It was an okay episode. Nothing too exciting. At one point Tim Gunn from Project Runway (who was assisting with the make-overs) said to Rebecca, “You look like a movie star!” I was hoping and praying he would follow that up with, “The girl from Precious.” But no luck.

It was a double-elimination week this week on The Biggest Loser. And given some of the big numbers people were putting up, it looks like the contestants were doing some double-eliminating of their own –laxative style– if you know what I mean.

Also:

• It being a double-elimination week, the trainers were plotting ways to keep Shay in the game because she “needs to be here.” (I’m looking forward to them getting the news she got booted next week.) I was kind of hoping they would go out of their way to sabotage some of the other players. I was expecting some bizzarro-world versions of their typical product placement to screw with the others, i.e., “You know what’s a great substitute for Extra Sugar-Free Gum? Fudge.”
• Speaking of product placement. This week Bob told them all about how great and nutritious Lara Bars. But if they’re so great, why did he wait until week 9 to mention them?
• If I was ever going to go on this show I would drink a gallon of uranium before the first weigh in. A gallon of liquid uranium weighs around 144 pounds. Then you pee it out a little later and just like that you’ve lost almost 150 pounds in your first week on the ranch. And as far as I know, science has never said you shouldn’t consume uranium. Wait… let me wiki that… okay — check that — apparently it will kill you. Never mind.

For a couple weeks now I’ve  been wondering what the hell is going on with all the outbursts in the gym. Not just people breaking down physically, but people having these personal breakthroughs that have little to do with working out. Last week, Daniel discovered  that yes, he does really love his mother (or something like that) while walking on the treadmill nd he starts bawling.  Then this week, in the middle of a sit-up or something, Jillian asks Abby (whose entire family died in a car accident), “So, what’s it like to lose everything you love?” That’s a quote. That’s not me paraphrasing. A little while later she asked another contestant, “What’s it like to be the daughter of a heroin user?” This all seemed unusually manipulative for a show that is already pretty manipulative. Then I read yesterday that Jillian is getting her own show on NBC where she moves in with people and gets them in shape, so I guess what’s going on is they’re trying to make her seem like the thin, white Oprah in preparation for her new show. It all seems very awkward to me. I mean, if I’m bench-pressing and you’re spotting me, I don’t want you saying,  ”So, your dad molested you?” Can’t we just stick to, “You can do it!” or “Feel the burn!”

Also:

• “It’s our special guest, Derek Jeter!!!” Everyone freaks out. “On the jumbo-tron.” Cue sad trombone sound.
• I’m not sure I like when people finish challenges after they’ve already lost them. It doesn’t seem brave and courageous to me. It’s seems kind of sad and pathetic. I feel the same way I would feel if the Yankees –after their loss to the Phillies last night– decided to stay on the field and toss the ball to themselves and try and hit enough homers to “win” the game.
• The “special” guest who was actually there in person… celebrity chef Curtis Stone again! “Who?” again. Let me tell you, if you’ve been looking for a Gordon Ramsay without the personality, you’ve found it in Curtis Stone. He made a turkey burger between two big mushroom caps. You know, because it looks kind of like a hamburger. And really, when you’re trying to lose weight, that’s all that really matters. When choosing something to eat, first ask yourself, “Does this taste like S, but look like something I would like to eat if I was squinting at it through gauze?”

Any entrepreneurs out there looking for a business idea? Well, I’ve got one you can get in on the ground floor of. No, it’s not my idea to pour ranch dressing into the soil of a lettuce patch to see if we can grow salad-dressing-flavored lettuce. It’s something different entirely.

I don’t go to a gym. I get all my exercise at home or playing sports or walking around the city. But while watching The Biggest Loser last week I realized there are a lot of overweight people who want to use the gym but are intimidated by all the skinny people there. So I feel like someone should open a gym that you have to be 50 pounds overweight to join. You don’t get kicked out when you go under that 50 pound mark, you just need to be there to sign-up in the first place. That way any overweight person that goes into the gym knows that everyone else there is in the same situation or has been in the same situation. Why doesn’t such a place exist? Or does such a place exist? I realize the argument would be that fat people don’t go to the gym, so a gym just for fat people wouldn’t be profitable. But I think the problem is a lot of overweight people, especially women, are very self-conscious and don’t want to exercise in front of people who haven’t been in their position. At least that’s my theory.

It’s a billion dollar idea people! Someone swipe it.

This episode of The Biggest Loser was definitely missing something. And that something is some crazy Tracey antics. The majority of this episode focused on the other team’s trip home so Tracey was in the background for most of the show. So it was kind of like a Family Matters episode with no Urkel.

• The episode started off with a challenge for an unknown prize. The contestants had to dig treasure chests out of the beach. I was waiting for the obvious “booty” joke to be made, but it never came (for fat people the majority of the contestants on The Biggest Loser have little to no sense of humor). The winning team got to decide if they wanted to go home for the week or if they wanted to send the other team home. This was a pretty good prize, but I had kind of hoped after 45 minutes of killing themselves shoveling deep into the sand that the prize would have turned out to be something like “the satisfaction of doing a good job” or “the joy of victory.” They need to toy with these people a little more than they do.
• So one team went home for the week and their families greeted them with barbecues and trips to Mexican restaurants that specialize in bowls of melted cheese. Way to be supportive! I don’t know if the producers encourage the families to go out of their way to tempt their returning family member, but they must right? Or are people just naturally that oblivious?
• The in-show ad this week was for Subway. Did you know that their seven worst-tasting sandwiches are very low in fat and calories? It’s true. And if you ask them to “scoop out the bread” they are even lower in calories. If you think that’s a clever tip for lowering calories when you’re eating out, you may like these others:

1. When you order french-fries at McDonald’s, ask for them frozen. You save a lot of calories if they’re not deep-fried.
2. Bring your own romaine lettuce to taco-bell and ask them to use that instead of tortillas for your tacos and burritos.
3. Instead of ordering a meal at Kentucky Fried Chicken, ask if you can just suck on some of the bones from the trash-can. Better yet, just lick the menu.

I spent the last week in Las Vegas.

There are certainly other cities in the world that are better known for their food, but I don’t know if any city in the world is more devoted to the act of gorging oneself to sickness. It’s a city of buffets the way Venice is a city of canals.

Now, I guess this is just common sense, but the food at a buffet isn’t very good. And that would be fine if the buffet costs 10 bucks, but these were 30 and 40 dollar buffets. And if it’s not good food, what exactly are you paying for? Well, you’re paying for variety. So you have to end up making up for the fact that the food isn’t very good by eating a lot of it which is kind of ridiculous.

But I certainly fell into that trap. I went to four buffets over the course of the week, and each time I felt excited by all the possibilities, but then just left feeling sick and ashamed. Like a pedophile at a boy scout jamboree.

Some of the people you see at these buffets will really turn you off towards eating. At least it did me. My last day there I went to the seafood buffet at the Rio hotel. It was 40 dollars for all the shrimp cocktail, crab legs, and mini-lobster tails you could eat. One mother-daughter combo was sitting across from me and they were easily in the 300-400 pound range each. They continually went to the buffet and came back with piles of food and proceeded to glumly stuff their faces. Certainly I’m no one to judge someone for being overweight, but these two with their mullet-y perms and elastic-waisted pants were getting on my nerves. I don’t know if it was a situation where I saw some of myself in their unbounded gluttony or if I was just feeling particularly misanthropic that day. I just remember going to take a bite of crab-leg and freezing half-way as the mom returned from the buffet with a plate that was literally stacked a foot high with food. I sat there glowering and muttering under my breath. The joke was on me though as I eventually looked down to see that drawn butter was dripping all over my shirt.

I encourage everyone on a diet to go to Vegas. There is no better place to see the status of your relationship with food is. It’s kind of like going to a nude beach in Brazil to test your relationship with your wife.

I went primarily to visit friends and didn’t do much gambling — essentially just breaking even over the course of the week. I came home to find I had broken even on the scale as well, and after eating out every meal for the past week in Vegas, I will consider that a success.