Note to self:

Hey, Sisyphus!  Busting your ass in the gym every morning, and then lying in bed at night while you eat things like crackers spread with cream cheese, or a family size bag of Fritos with a tub of cheese dip is not the fastest way to a slimmer, leaner, trimmer you.

I hope when you get home tonight and remove the size 2 pants that you have absolutely no business wearing, you enjoy the red lines engraved on your tummy from your well-deserved pant tightness.

How about engaging in a Sisyphean task that's slightly more worthwhile tonight, like oh say, folding the laundry.

Now put down the Cheez Doodles. Thanks.

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To the woman in her underwear in the gym locker room who invaded my personal space while you dried your hair for an inordinate amount of time before and after I toweled off and got dressed:

You had a lot of space over there, yet you crowded me into a corner with your thong and its contents.

Also, I had a hard workout, and you were blowing hot air from your hair dryer at me on account of your unnatural proximity, which caused me to continue to sweat while I was attempting to get dressed. Do you have any idea how annoying that is?

Once I thought I had escaped you and your infernal peach thong and black bra by fleeing to another part of the locker room, I was nothing short of alarmed when you followed me and popped up in the mirror right next to me.

Please. Just go stand over there. Thank you.

While I’m training for this 10-mile race and feel it’s within my right to eat the Eastern Seaboard, I bring you:

1. Tostitos Hint of Lime. Sour cream and onion chips and Doritos also fall under this category; I don’t have as much unbridled hysteria when around them, although it’s close. I will occasionally find myself examining individual chips to determine the spot with the highest concentration of powdered flavoring for optimal tongue placement when I put the chip in my mouth. Please tell me somebody else does this.

2. Fritos with jalapeno cheddar dip. Inexplicably delicious. Gooey cheese with salty, crunchy chips. On second thought, entirely explainable.

3. Ice cream of any kind, but specifically Edy’s Take the Cake. Yellow cake flavored ice cream with frosting swirl and multicolored sprinkles. Like a child’s third birthday party in my mouth. I don’t even like your standard bakery birthday cake, but mix it in with ice cream, and it becomes my holy grail.

4. Pizza. This was a tough one for me, moving down to the DC area from New York. Ah, New York. Where pizzerias put shavings of authentic sweet Italian sausage onto pizza as your sausage topping. Someone please explain to me how, once you leave New York, warmed-up frozen breakfast sausage is acceptable as a pizza topping. (I’m talking to you, Papa John. Better ingredients my ass.) I’ll admit though, my standards have lowered, and I’ve pretty much given up my quest for awesome pizza, and I would eat Papa John’s any day of the week. Just not with that crap they put on it that masquerades as sausage.

 

Sometimes you just need to satisfy the need to eat like a five-year-old. Today's breakfast consisted of waffles, butter, syrup -- and here's the departure from the adult portion of our program -- coconut, bananas, whipped cream and M&M's. Damn it was good.

 

Naturally, I feel slightly ill now.

We're going to The Palm for dinner, and we have reservations at 9 p.m. The web site promises, "...there's more to The Palm - there's that certain something special. The Palm Restaurant has it, and once you get it, you just can't get enough. It's a hearty handshake, a sea of conversation and laughter, a panorama of caricatures and character. It's your favorite table, your favorite drink and the best of everything."

The best of  everything??? Wow! Who wouldn't want that. Also, it must be pointed out that they say it's a "place to be seen." So it seems that tonight, I will be seen gnawing on a steak.

I am loving the Eat to Live diet (by Dr. Fuhrman).

I had the book for a few weeks and I hadn't really been looking at it, because it just seemed so Spartan and to require so much time and effort (that was my impression anyway). So I was spending more time reading Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food, which has the tagline: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.

Then luckily, (ha ha) Steve and I got hit with the flu and I have hardly left the house since Friday, and with all that time lying around feeling like crap, I didn't have anything I could do but read in bed, and even that was too much at times and I would fall asleep for hours on end. At one point I picked up a Tony Robbins book, and it said, "Let's take action now." And you do a little exercise where you write down what you would gain by taking some action, and so I went through that and decided I would start to get healthy on account of this cholesterol business, and so I put down Tony and I picked up Dr. Fuhrman.

As it turns out, ‘Eat to Live’ and ‘In Defense of Food’ have exactly the same philosophy, and they are a wonderful compliment to each other, so I recommend reading both to really hammer it home.

What they tell you in a nutshell is that all that processed crap in the grocery store (even if – especially if) it has health claims, is really, really freaking bad for you. Your basic foods, like many of your breads and cereals and some harmless looking crackers should really just be left in the grocery store to rot. Did you realize they put high fructose corn syrup in most breads? For real. Go look. I’ll wait.

‘In Defense of Food’ explains why you don’t want to be eating high fructose corn syrup at every turn (*cough*diabetes), and why food manufacturers do such insidious things to something you’re supposed to put in your body(*cough*$$) but I won’t get into that here.

What I did manage to do on Sunday before I got really, really sick (I thought I would just be Steve's nursemaid and I had opted out of having the flu. But the flu told me otherwise by Sunday night) and so Sunday afternoon before I was struck down, I went shopping for a ton of vegetables, which is another lucky thing, because our appetites were totally shot, and so when we felt anything resembling hunger, which wasn't often, we would eat an orange or a grapefruit or a banana and then faint from the exertion. And other times, when I felt less like death, I'd have a bowl of oatmeal, some bean soup, or a giant-ass salad with some nuts and strawberries. For having the flu, I definitely ate way, way way more food than I would have were I attempting to subsist on meat and cheese, because there's no way I could have eaten any of that formerly-delicious-sounding garbage.

So of course this is totally the flu's fault, but since Saturday, I've dropped four pounds. But I'm excited today, because while I'm still at home suffering from Imminent Death Syndrome (IDS) I will look through my giant vegetarian cookbook and formulate a doable 2-week meal plan while I have nothing else to do but die.

So I want to thank my awesome buddies Christy and Bloggergirl for suggesting the Eat to Live book; I can feel my cholesterol being lowered already. And I think it will be easy(ish) to follow, and I think it will become a lot easier for me to maintain my weight now. It was such a freakin' struggle before, but I can tell it will be a lot simpler now that I've been blessed with some wholesome nutritional wisdom and I feel like I finally know what I'm doing.

Amen. Now go eat your veggies.

I remember those carefree days when the early bird special was something to be laughed at, but never eaten. But today, for the first time in my life, the early bird special makes perfect sense to me. Naturally, I find this disturbing on many levels. But first, let me back up a second here and explain how I’ve come to my newest conclusion about the worth of the early bird.

Since I’ve started my new job, I work much longer hours than was formerly habitual. This means that these days, we finish dinner close to 9 and we get ready for bed soon after that. Sometimes we even bring dessert to bed, which is a really terrible idea. If you’re lying in bed, this should signal that you don’t need anymore fueling up for the day and you need to retire the moon pie for when you really need it, although I’m not sure when that would be. But I know it’s definitely not when you’re getting ready to go to sleep.

This reminds me of a story that I heard years ago about Jack Nicholson. Apparently, he would bring peanut butter sandwiches to bed to fuel his lovemaking. Sorry for forcing that visual upon you, but I shouldn’t be the only one to suffer. Okay, tangent over.

The last several nights, my body has decided that this whole late night full-on dinner routine does not suit us. Not one bit. And my surly body, blessed with the attitude of a ‘tween, is letting its feelings be known by disrupting my sleep so that I can experience a tummy full of last night’s dinner in the wee hours of the morning. This, as you can guess, is not my favorite pastime.

This morning, I was sick of lying there by 5 a.m., although I tried some more with feeling until about 5:15 when I realized that there were better things I could do with my time than lie there and feel bitter about my lot in life as an insomniac. So I got up, threw on ye olde gym clothes and grabbed “In Defense of Food” (yes, bloggergirl, it IS awesome) and then I did an hour on the elliptical while I read my book and digested some chicken.

As I was getting ready for work, I realized that my fooded-up-fouled-up system wasn’t even ready for breakfast after my hour of cardio, and so I threw my packet of oatmeal in my bag so I could eat it at work. I had to pass on the chicken sausages, since they require a skillet and stove for preparation, instead opting for a frozen soy ‘sausage’ patty.

When I got to work, I nuked my oatmeal and sausage and sat down to breakfast. I tried to stir the oatmeal, which resembled a vat of glue. I took a bite of the ‘sausage’ and cringed at a taste that resembled nothing out of nature. When I’m at home, I boil water in my electric kettle and then pour it over my oatmeal, which results in all-natural, oaty tasting goodness. But the nuking turned my darling oatmeal into a gelatinous, bland paste. And don’t get me started on this ‘sausage’ crap. I’ve had some that taste good, and these, my friend, these are not those.

So not only did my dinner ruin my night’s sleep, it even went so far as to ruin my breakfast. This morning, I’ve been trying to figure out how to solve the problem. Since going for the early bird special isn’t possible, I will instead have to concentrate on eating a mini-dinner. I’ll have to do a little experimenting to see if I’ll need to have a bigger lunch or not to make up for it.

I’ll also have to come to terms with why I find this all so disturbing: 1) I’ll need to learn how to enjoy eating a lot less at night, which is a (formerly) beloved diversion from all my cares and worries. 2) Dinner is my favorite meal. You can cook and eat wonderful things. Lunch kind of sucks, as it usually involves a freezer and a microwave. And 3) this whole eating late / sleep disturbance thing means I’m officially, um, not getting any younger.