The Low-Carb Curmudgeon

You should lose the fat in your head too

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:32:54 +0000

Can someone out there please explain to me what the hell it is with low-carb bloggers and global warming? I’ve been seeing this all over the place for the past year or so. Apparently, because The Establishment is wrong about healthy diets, it is also wrong about climate change, and furthermore anyone in government who panics about global warming is a dirty, dirty fascist out to destroy the Western way of life.

I guess, to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Too bad we’re all getting screwed.

One of the more prominent LC global warming denialists is Dr. Barry Groves, of Second Opinion in the UK. I’m not trying to pick on him, I actually love reading his dietary stuff, but I don’t feel like going round hunting down a bunch of anti-GW (global warming, not George W.–oh, if only! once more a classic case of misplaced ire!) statements from LC bloggers at 3 in the morning when I’m already in sleep deficit. I’ve been carbin’ again and OMFG does my body hate me. So, easy it is.

I don’t have a lot of time to get into his stuff right now and I probably shouldn’t get too far into it in the first place because it’s off-topic here. I just wanted to touch on a few things briefly. The section on his site about “the man-made global warming scam” is here if you want to read it.

Before I begin let me state that I am not a climate scientist. The extent of my knowledge comes from random reading over the years and an earth science class when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. It was then that I learned about the carbon cycle, something I don’t often hear mentioned by climate change denialists. And that’s being kind. I actually don’t think I’ve heard anything about it at all from them, but it’s possible I did and have forgotten.

Ignore the carbon cycle and as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have much else to tell me because you’re full of shit.

Be that as it may.

First off, Groves trumpets this part of his site as though it proves without a doubt that the idea of human-caused global warming is a scam. Then you get into the introductory paragraphs and find this gem:

I say ’scam’ because that is exactly what it appears to be to me.

Dude, if you’re going to call something a scam, you better have something more substantial to go on than what you think you’re seeing.

He links to a video of a documentary about scientists–I guess, anyway, as unlike with U.S. television documentaries they don’t apply an introductory caption with the person’s name and title–who do not agree that the science on climate change is settled. I didn’t have three-quarters of an hour to get into the video. I might later, I might not. I hate watching videos on my laptop because then my daughter whines to watch cartoons on YouTube. And, as previously stated, I’ve stayed up three hours too late.

Be that as it may, I got enough of the video to catch some “expert”(?) stating that the science on climate change is, in his words, “not complete.”

That pretty much did it for me right there. I admit I am not a scientist by trade, but anyone who tells you that ANY scientific discipline has “complete” data and has completely figured out everything that that discipline is supposed to study, should go into a one-person home-based business as a manure dispenser. They’re so full of it I fear they will burst at any second. At least this way they can do an end run around the bad economy, what with so many taking up gardening now…

Then you had the random arguments about how all this shit that the IPCC wants us to do is going to be “expensive” and might not even do any good. Oh my GOD, we might have to do something that costs MONEY if this global warming thing is real, y’all! Then again, these people tend to be upheld as heroes by folks who expect us all to take a similar position with health care. If it’s too expensive then you don’t get any, and if you die, too fucking bad. Just so long as you don’t dip into their bank account.

Then they’ll tell you, all outraged-like, that life sucks today because people have gotten too selfish and only care about their own desires, not about the good of society. (For instance, this mentality is frequently on display when conservatives speak out against gay marriage.) Laws-a-mussy. Fo’ shame.

That’s the best they can do?

They don’t have every single little bit of data yet?

Somebody got a (relative) few bits of information wrong?

It might (gasp!) cost money to fix the problem?

Oh, and we don’t know this is all a scam, we’re just guessing?

Wow.

Tell me something, Groves… and all the rest of you, too. How the fuck is anyone supposed to trust us about what constitutes a proper human diet (adjusted for regional and cultural differences, of course) if it comes out you guys are wrong about this one?

I mean, if you don’t care and this is your idea of how to solve the overpopulation problem… well, knock yourselves out, I guess.

But if you actually do care about people, and are horrified at my suggestion… well? What the hell am I supposed to think?

At minimum I don’t understand why the implication always is that we don’t have global warming so we can do whatever we want. That’s not working. Time to get back to the drawing board. At MINIMUM it makes no damn sense to burn up all our resources so there aren’t any for future generations. Surely you understand this concept; I hear people like you bitch all. the. time. about how Obama is Satan because he’s running up the deficit. You grasp the concept with money. It’s time to expand your intellectual reach to encompass other resources too.

Whether or not there’s global warming, we’re in a hell of a pickle. The sooner people like you get your heads out of your asses and start engaging in political discourse like you have a goddamn brain cell or two to rub together, the better off we all might be.

Just saying. Enjoy your steak. Which, by the way, I don’t believe it causes global warming either. But never mind.

postponed weigh-in

Dana Seilhan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:55:15 +0000

My child is becoming quite the photographer. Amazing what you can get with those kid-resistant* Fisher-Price digicams.

It even comes with a special-effect Ugly Momma distortion setting.

No, seriously, I realized after eating on Wednesday that I’d forgotten to weigh in. I meant to do it today, but forgot again. So I am just not going to bother for the week. Check back next week and I might have something for ya. Might. Dunno.

—–
*There is no such damn thing as kid-proof. No matter what Dr. Phil might think.

can’t blink, even for a second

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:47:42 +0000

The good part of my weekend... knitting these little dudes

I wrote this blog entry at my SparkPeople blog (link to my page is in the sidebar to your right):

I wonder when I am going to get it through my thick head that I can’t ever rest with this effort? There are no breaks. There is no laying down the baton and lounging under a tree for five minutes. There is no “gee I will get around to meal planning/cooking/cleaning the kitchen later.”

If I don’t stay on top of food planning and prep I will not get through this.

There’s another adult in the house, but he is the throw-it-together-and-see-what-sticks type of cook. I need to know what I’m eating for right now. I need to get the macronutrient ratios I’m aiming for, I need to see if I can get all my nutrition from my food and I need to make sure my carb count doesn’t go too high. (And I don’t have much wiggle room there. If I want my fat stores to continue to mobilize I *have* to stay below 100g and probably more like 30g to 40g. The years of soda and grains have taken their toll on me.)

He just about never cleans anything in the kitchen but he makes just as much mess as I do, and frequently more. That dishwasher could be *empty* and he wouldn’t put anything in it unless he was feeling magnanimous. On top of that he’s a much messier cook than I am, which just exacerbates the problem.

To be fair he works 8 hours a day. This here at home is my job. We’re not married, not even involved, but the economy is in the crapper, I don’t have that great of a job history, and this way we can both parent without the usual back-and-forth of split-up parents who are being reasonable about contact with their child. So we’re sort of in a “traditional” setup here–and that’s fine.

My grievance is that this is a much larger residence than I’m used to dealing with. There is more of EVERYTHING that I have to keep up with. He, however, has not seen a more than threefold increase in *his* work duties since we moved in together. So a little more help from him than I’m currently getting would be very welcome. Apparently, though, it is also too much to ask.

And me being mad about it isn’t going to help anything. Me getting depressed and giving up on cooking even for a few days isn’t doing me a favor. He’s not going to suddenly remember that it is helpful for him to clean up after himself, or that even taking his dishes from the living room to the kitchen after a meal (yes, we often eat in there–something else I want to change), would be helpful to me. He just doesn’t care. So I have to care.

And I can’t blink. I can’t stop. I can’t drop anything. Because otherwise I give up and order pizza.

OK, it was *one* pizza. But even one’s too much, if I don’t make the pizza here. Wheat crust vs. cauliflower/mozz crust… no contest, as far as what it does to me.

Back on track today… and I tell ya, I could feel a lot worse than I do. Not a total loss. Probably not a loss of *weight* either… but what can you do.

Not quit, that’s what I can do.

That was pretty much my weekend in a nutshell. I’m up early today, so it’s time to hit the kitchen. You don’t wanna know how bad it is.

Wednesday weigh-in: 242

Dana Seilhan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:11:01 +0000

248.5 | 242 | 140

Sorry for the blurry focus. It’s hard to tell in the LCD panel and I’m not gonna shoot it again.

Wow, I’m actually close to the 100-pound-overweight line now. Cool. This is still going way slow, but along with the not eating enough, I suspect I didn’t actually have that much water weight to lose the first week, in contrast with my previous experiences, so this is the actual fat loss now and I was way worse off than I had thought.

Or hell, I can come up with hypotheses all damn day. It gets boring. The number’s going down and as long as I’m healthy that’s all I really care about.

A paradoxical problem

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:22:31 +0000

I suspect the scale’s gonna show very little progress tomorrow. I’m aggravated. In the past, I’ve dumped water weight pretty fast and then kept on losing. Now it’s maybe a pound a week. It’s not That Time Of The Month–I just had that, and my cycle seems to have settled in at around 32 days or so, after years of being highly irregular. (Ah, the wonders of retinol.)

The only diet change I’ve deliberately adopted for the specific purpose of weight loss is low-carbing. I remember using Slim-Fast shakes when I was married, back in the mid-90s, but I can’t say I was following a program per se. (And DAMN I would love to be at that weight again, even if it was still forty to fifty pounds over “normal.”) This is it, and I’ve tried LCing a few times, quitting each time. Conventional wisdom says if you keep yo-yoing like that, your body holds on to the weight more stubbornly with subsequent weight-loss attempts.

Well, conventional wisdom also says you have to starve and run yourself to death to lose weight, and we know what bullshit that is. Or, at least, I do. So I’m not exactly convinced.

My hypothesis is that I’m simply not eating enough. What a bizarre problem to have on a weight-loss program, right? We’re supposed to eat less, not more, right? Well, other than drinking liquid calories, one hallmark of my life as an obese person is I haven’t been much of an eater. I’d go most of the day with next to nothing and then eat a big dinner, and still (by my estimate) not get 2000 calories a day unless it was in the soda. And there’s no nutrition in soda. Just sugar*.

I’m not much better about it now, especially in the past couple of weeks. When I first start LCing I’m going like gangbusters, trying to get at least two squares a day and recording everything I eat. After a while I get bored and go back to my bad habits. I know intermittent fasting is supposed to be healthy, but a part of IF is eating that huge meal during your permitted eating time. Even Muslims who observe Ramadan go gangbusters on the iftar meal at sunset. I don’t do that. I just grab a regular-sized meal and as soon as my body isn’t going “HelLO I need FOOD here” anymore, I quit eating.

The end result is that on days I bother tracking, I’m lucky to break 2000, and most days it’s more like the 1500-1800 calorie range, and more like 1200 if I’m feeling particularly unambitious.

It’s not like it makes a difference. I’m still in ketosis, which means my body is still getting calories even if I am not eating them. (Realizing that made me understand just how stupid conventional calorie theory is. It never takes calories from burned fat into account, among other flaws.) Eating 1500 calories a day doesn’t mean I’m only getting 1500 calories a day. It just means I’m only counting 1500 calories a day. What calories my body might be getting from fatty acids and ketones is anyone’s guess.

But as I’m skipping grain foods for the most part, the foods I get are nutritionally dense. Calorie-burning is all well and good but if I’m not eating enough of the nutritionally dense stuff, that means I’m not getting the nutrients in that food. Calories are not nutrients, after all. Vitamins and minerals, on the other hand, are.

I drink an Emergen-C packet in a glass of water most days to satisfy my desire for sweet drinks. But that only covers some water-solubles for the most part. (Since I started doing this I no longer crave sushi; Emergen-C has 500% of the daily requirement for vitamin B6, of which salmon is an important source. Guess which raw fish is my favorite?) I need the whole gamut, not just a few vitamins, and there are undoubtedly other nutritional factors in whole food that science hasn’t isolated or understood yet. If I don’t eat the food I don’t get those either.

So I have a sneaking suspicion I might know what’s going on here. I think my weight loss will go much better if I eat more regularly, and eat enough. The trick is getting to that point. My lazy eating habits have been going on for most of my life. That’s a lot of inertia to work against. It remains to be seen whether I’m up to the task.

—–
*I appreciate that the source of sugar has some importance, but if you look at the actual proportions of fructose to glucose in both high-fructose corn syrup and cane sugar (beet sugar is something else again and can potentially come from GMO sources, as HFCS also can), they’re virtually the same. Anyone who tells you sugar is “healthier” for you than corn syrup is fucking lazy and hasn’t bothered to do what little research is needed to know otherwise.

Saturday Snark, Sunday edition

Dana Seilhan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 03:59:59 +0000

I have skipped this probably two weeks in a row and I’m sick of it. I’m so sick of it that although I’m writing this at 13 minutes past midnight, let’s pretend I’m actually writing it on Sunday, so I’m totally lying with the datestamp. Yes, I’m that OCD. Fuck it. Let’s roll.

I was going to take a photo of a lacto-paleo cheesecake I made “tonight” in honor of my child’s sperm donor’s recent birthday, but he cut into it before I could yell HangOnASecLemmeGetTheFuckinCamera. So you get kitties again instead, because I like pictures to go with my LinkWithin plugin. This is my cat Lundi getting mommy hugs. She likes to get up on the bathroom sink and then prop her paws on my chest and purr like crazy while I pet her.

OK, there’s the cute part, on with the bitching.

—–

First up tonight, I had been looking for some info about the Paul Campos book The Obesity Myth, which I checked out of the library some time ago. He had shared a story about a little girl who’d been diagnosed with obesity at the age of three, and I was looking up particulars, including her name. I know her first name is AnneMarie or Anne-Marie or Ann-Marie or some variation thereof and that was the best I could do. Anyway, in the process, I ran across this interview with him from last year.

Paul, Paul, Paul. I fucking hate you. Do you want to know why I fucking hate you? Because you drive me certifiable. You really do.

First off, there’s so much you say about obesity that just makes too much damn sense. I totally agree with you that a large component of the obesity debate is moral in nature. People really do believe fatties get fat on purpose. (I am a fattie, in case you’re late to the party, so I am using the term ironically.) And boy do they hate us for it. I want to call up all sorts of metaphors to illustrate this, like clubbing baby seals and hijacking Santa’s sleigh and canceling Halloween but I just can’t get up that level of snark-fu this fine evening. I’m kind of in a hurry. Anyway. They hate us. Just because we’re fat. I think that’s fucking stupid, and I applaud Campos for pointing up its absurdity.

I also think he may be onto something when he says there’s more difference in health status between men and women, and the young and the old, than there is between overweight people and slender people. Of course, he’s probably counting everyone who’s the least little dab over the upper limit for normal BMI, so the argument isn’t entirely honest. And I don’t know where to begin to follow up all these grand sweeping declarations of his about how actually harmless obesity is and therefore we should all stop worrying about it unless the fattie in question is so huge they have to move him or her with a tow truck. So I’ll leave it alone for now and simply applaud him for saying that there are much more serious health problems to worry about than how much energy we’re storing.

That said, as I stated up there somewhere, I have read The Obesity Myth. And unlike the legions of fattiebloggers who scanned, like, the first chapter and went “OMFG see it’s NOT our faults we’re fat and it’s NOT gonna kill us and this guy is AWESOME!!!1!!!one!!!”, I read large portions of it, if not the whole thing. I have this bad habit of skipping around in books and reading them in non-chronological chunks, so I can’t say for sure, but I got quite a bit of territory covered.

And… This guy is a whackjob. A few examples of said whackjobbery:

1. He claims feminists, particularly NOW and their ilk, have never cared about body image issues. More accurately, he wonders why they are so mysteriously silent on the issue. Typical fucking man, you could get in his face and scream at him that his skid-mark-encrusted underwear is all over the floor again for the third time this week and he’d push you out of the way ’cause you’re blocking his football game, then five minutes from now dig through his dresser and wonder aloud why he has no clean shorts. They don’t listen. Ever. I’m sick of it.

2. Actually, he seems to have quite the hard-on for knocking feminists, because next he blames them for the destruction of marriage, which means women spend a lot more time on the meat market, which means we can’t afford to let ourselves go. Unlike, of course, say, Italian women who sit at home cheerfully packing on the pudge while their hubbies go around boinking every nubile young teenager in the village. He seriously uses this as an example of proper womanhood, y’all. I’m not making this up. Because feminists suggest we don’t have to put up with this shit, it’s their fault we can’t be fatties anymore.

3. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere that I read in his book did Campos even come close to addressing the fact that obesity is often a symptom of chronic disease even if it is not the cause. I actually agree with him that it’s likely to not be a cause of illness. Cool with me. I’m hip, dude. But somehow he cannot wrap his brain around the idea that maybe if I suddenly gain fifty pounds in a year connected with childbearing even though I am exclusively breastfeeding, maybe that means there is something wrong. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, for example, frequently occurs in postpartum women–and it causes weight gain, and thyroid dysfunction is nothing to fuck around with. If Campos had his way, millions more hypothyroid women would go undiagnosed, ’cause being fat ain’t nuttin’ but a thang.

Idiot. Naturally, because being so chunky you can’t tie your own shoes or walk faster than fifty yards an hour is just a normal genetic variation and can’t be avoided, the fat acceptance crowd embraces him wholeheartedly and even says he’s a good feminist. Yeah. Because ignoring and dismissing entire fields of feminist work is totally a feminist thing to do.

One of many reasons I avoid the fat-acceptance movement like the fucking plague it is even as I acknowledge the importance of (1) treating fatties as human beings and (2) not making fatness into any more of a moral issue than a runny nose or a bad rash.

And Paul? Do me a favor? Quit sacrificing fat women on the altar of your lack of marital success. I’m pretty sure you’ve been dumped on your ass by a feminist woman at least once in your life. You don’t come out and say so, but it’s not difficult to read between the lines. If I want your help, I’ll tell you how to give it. Til then, pick something else to write about. No love, Me.

—–

Second up tonight is something I have been meaning to bitch about for a few weeks now. It isn’t a major thing, just another symptom of the ridiculous lengths people will go to in order to make fatties out to be subhuman and dysfunctional.

New Theory: Messy Apartments Can Lead To Obesity

I think there should be a law against using the word theory unless you’re going to use it correctly. Creationists use it to discredit evolution, the implication being that “theory” means “guess.” The same usage is going on here. If you’re accustomed to reading headlines about the latest research studies in some field or another, you might be misled into thinking there’s some new study out about a link between messiness and fatness.

You would be wrong.

The article quotes a Glamour writer and no, she’s not aware of any studies either. She hasn’t even talked to anyone else about this subject matter. It’s just something she came up with one day and wants to put out to a wider audience.

If you look at her story as she tells it, though, all you can really discern is that she gained eleven pounds and let her apartment go to shit at the same time. She seems to think the messy apartment led to the weight gain. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that the weight gain led to the apartment getting messy. Why in the world would it do that? Aren’t I blaming a mess on fatness anyway? No, not really. Just as I think obesity is a symptom of diseases like diabetes (type 2, anyway), I also think weight gain can be a sign of depression–and who the fuck cleans house when they’re depressed? Mutants, maybe, but for most of us, housekeeping is the LAST thing on our minds.

But let us not pass up an opportunity to diss the fatties. Why, that wouldn’t be any fun.

‘K, got to go. By the way, if y’all see any snark-worthy material out there on the internets, I’d love to have it. I find plenty on my own, but I’m sure I miss a lot of stuff. Later.

Wednesday weigh-in: 243

Dana Seilhan — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:15:05 +0000

248.5 | 243 | 140

I am fresh outta double-A batteries and my camera’s starving so you get kitty yoga instead.

Actually, thanks to the aforementioned camera issues (my cat Tabby up there is a pic from about a week or so ago), I wound up weighing three times. The first time I got 243.5, the second time with camera in hand at start of weighing it was 244 (who knew that little fucker weighed half a pound?), and the third time with nothing in hand, but wearing the same undies and socks as when I started, I got 243. I need all the encouragement I can get, so I’m taking the smallest number.

Plainly I don’t have half the carb tolerance I think I do. It’s back to strict for me; I’ll just have to figure out how this works in practice, and record my food intake more thoroughly, no matter how much I fucking hate doing it.

Sigh.

Checking in

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:14:04 +0000

When my little girl’s dad and I moved in together last year, we combined two cast-iron cookware collections along with two households. He has this piece that’s basically a flat skillet with no sides and no skillet handle, just this metal loop thing for hanging it over a campfire. I can’t imagine who would camp with this thing. Anything cooking on it would tip into the fire if you looked at it cross-eyed. I can’t drain fat from this thing very easily, either, when I’ve been frying bacon or whatever. So I couldn’t think of a use for it, so I pretty much ignored it.

Until now.

Yes indeedy kids: you can have pizza on a low-carb diet. The crust for this is from Miss Jamie’s blog, and you should go there if you’re running on empty for LC recipes you can stand to eat*. I won’t go so far as to say her cauliflower crust is exactly like wheat, but it does the trick. Even my daughter likes this stuff–and getting a five-year-old to like cauliflower is something on the order of a minor miracle.

Part of successful LCing, or any successful lifestyle change, is to stop thinking in terms of objects and start thinking in terms of function. You don’t need the wheat-crust object, you need a food that serves the function of holding pizza toppings. Voilà. Pizza. Practically no carbs, compared with its wheatier cousin. Chock-full of goodness, too.

I’m getting along. Weigh-in’s tomorrow. I haven’t tried the socks-and-underwear-before-breakfast method in between, only checked in passing while fully clothed, so I have no idea whether I have gained, lost, or held steady. Well, OK, if I’ve gained it hasn’t been much. I still check in at under 250 even in a sweatshirt and two layers of pants.

I haven’t been tracking food real well though. And I’ve cut corners a bit. Like last night, we needed to use up some beef in the fridge and I had had teriyaki chicken scheduled for that Monday, but I didn’t have the chicken thawed, so I used the beef instead. And I didn’t want to fuss with sweetening the stupid sauce after cooking everything according to the recipe, because as I understand it stevia doesn’t hold up to heat very well, yet it’s the only non-nutritive sweetener Matt can stand to eat. Every other one gives him killer headaches, even sugar alcohols. So I broke out the sweetened soy sauce instead and used that, and did a half-assed stir-fry. I figured it wouldn’t be that big a deal.

I also have been noshin’ on commercial beef jerky but you have to watch that one. They think salt will kill us, so they preserve the stuff with sugar instead. Oy vey. I don’t know about you, but my BP only gets wonky when I’ve been going crazy on the sugar. Now if I had kidney damage, then maybe I could see excess salt causing a problem–but define excess. So many people are walking around with fucked-up thyroids now and you can’t tell me it’s a genetic change. Where’s their iodine if they’re going low-salt? How many of them eat fish guts or seaweed? Not many, I bet. I eat seaweed, but not often enough so I’m perfectly happy to resort to iodized salt. It doesn’t faze me. And my dad’s on BP meds. I don’t get it.

So I have to watch my jerky intake even though the meat itself is not a problem because these idiots want to turn my beef into candy. I can see it now, we’ll be making homemade jerky again soon. Then, of course, we won’t be able to keep it in the house, because it tastes much better than that MSG-laden, sugar-saturated crap from the store. Turns out cheaper per ounce, too.

er… I had a point. Anyway, yeah, bad Dana, I want to track my intake as much as possible to keep myself honest and to be aware of nutrient balance, but sometimes you just want to take a break, I guess. But I have not taken a break from LCing.

In fact–oh yeah, that’s right. Wanted to share. So, about a week ago I guess, maybe a week and a half, Matt brought home some Wendy’s for me because I didn’t want to deal with cooking and because he was taking our daughter to another fast-food place for its indoor playground. In case you’ve missed it, we’ve been having crappy weather for most of the time since the beginning of the year. She needs to get her wiggle out from time to time and a fast-food place is the cheapest place to do it. So he brought me food before they went. I sat there and looked at that Baconator and thought, “I could eat the bun just this once and it wouldn’t hurt anything, I’ve done it before and stayed in ketosis. Besides, that thing’s messy.”

Well, I took one bite of it with the bun on, enough to get tiny nibbles off the bun. Then I came to my senses. Put the bun aside, ate the burger one patty at a time (complete with bacon on each one… MMM), had my salad and called it good.

This last Sunday, Valentine’s Day, we went to the discount theater to see The Princess and the Frog. I was tempted to just have the popcorn and call it good. Then I realized I still had most of a bag of pork rinds at my desk. I usually take my knitting with me to do in the car, and in the theater while the lights are still up during the previews, so I stuffed the pork rind bag in the bottom of my knitting bag and covered it up with my project and our scarves and hats. Pork rinds kinda dry your mouth out, but they had diet Coke at the theater. Presto. I had a snack and didn’t have to regret it later.

I appreciate that some theaters have slightly healthier offerings, like bottled water and salads, and I’ve even seen prepackaged bags of “gourmet” popcorn that’s got, like, I dunno, real butter on it and cheese and stuff. Cool. But dammit… Dear movie theater people, you have scads and scads of bags of sugar and junk all over the snack counter. Is it too much to ask for some more low-carb offerings even if you think they’re horrible for people? Really. You have NO damn room to talk, so spare me the bullshit and fork it over. I shouldn’t have to risk getting kicked out just to stick to my diet. Thanks in advance.

But anyway, there you go. I don’t know what the difference is, but every other time I’ve tried this I have succumbed to temptation, and this time I’m not, for some reason. There have been a couple of times I’ve snuck one rice cracker when getting some out of the cabinet for my daughter, but that’s one rice cracker in a day, pretty much negligible. I’m doing pretty damn well. I hope it lasts.

—–
*Low-carb foods–and here I mean whole foods, not those abominations they sell to poor suckers who are jonesing for candy and bread–are actually pretty tasty, but if you want to eat foods similar to what everyone else is eating, that leaves you on a bit of a learning curve most of the time.

Wednesday weigh-in: 244

Dana Seilhan — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:59:43 +0000

248.5 | 244 | 140

Weigh-in 10 February 2010: 244 lbs.

Now keep in mind I started this latest attempt last Monday, not Wednesday, so this is a four-pound loss over a week and two days, not a week per se.

Also, I had had a cup of coffee, half a Diet Hansen’s (we’ve had sickness in the house again and there was diet ginger ale in ample supply–was), and a bite of bacon when I remembered what day it was. I doubt any of that put on more than half a pound but I am shooting for full disclosure here.

Still, I bet I’m in the 230s by this time next week. I had too many days with intake under 2000 calories and one of those days was under 1000. O_O Sometimes I just forget to eat. At least now when I’m eating I’m getting nutritional bang for my buck, not just empty crap that will make me fatter later.

I missed Saturday Snark this week…

Dana Seilhan — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:11:21 +0000

…and I’m too goddamn happy to snark right now.

Epic. Win. Super Bowl 44, 7 February 2010

I no longer have any excuses for not seeing this weight loss through.