Wall O' Water

I don't want to go out there to go to my gym. I will, eventually. I just don't want to right now.

What I have been doing is reading all of the books I got in from Amazon recently, almost all of which have to do with eating and nutrition. (Given that I've reached the Extreme Boredom phase of the diet, Nutrition is my favorite topic.) The best of the bunch was The Fat Of The Land by Michael Fumento--

(There are, in fact, only 10 people on the planet: many moons ago, I pointed this book out to Ceej and she read it. Rob re-pointed it out to me, as I had never gotten around to reading it. Now I need only find out if Ceej pointed it out to Rob to complete the circle.)

--which, to put it simply, says there's one equation for losing weight: you have to eat less and exercise more. There are no magic formulas, no magic eating plans, no magic ways to eat everything you want and still lose weight. It's fully documented and it does a job on a number of the "maxims" that everyone repeats and no one can justify, such as "95% of all dieters fail"--false! Fumento gives studies and on-the-record interviews to back up his conclusions. Most diet/weight books just cite the conventional wisdom and move on. (I read another one, Feeding On Dreams, right before I read The Fat Of The Land, and it was like night and day in terms of documentation.)

I was especially interested in The Fat Of The Land because I have gotten quite a bit of mail about this diet, most of it saying, basically, that I am doomed to fail. While I am quite the pessimist, I don't believe I am doomed to anything, except possibly kinky, frizzy hair for the rest of the my life. If you believe you are doomed to something, you are a quitter. I admit to being a quitter in several areas...but at least I acknowledge that I and I alone am to blame.

Most of the mail, I have to say, had more to do with the writer than with anything I have been doing. Several said that they tried to lose weight and now are fatter than ever, proving that you can't lose weight and you're doomed if you try. That if you lose weight by lowering calories, all you're doing in slowing down your metabolism and that when you eat any more calories, you'll immediately put them on as fat.

Quick: define "metabolism¹."

Yes, you will put on weight if you eat more calories than your body is currently used to. That's why you have to do it gradually and in moderation (two words that ain't in our lexicon any more). When I get off this diet, I enter a period of "realimentation," in which I eat small amounts of real food, building up to a normal caloric intake.

That's "normal," not "the current American diet."

Here's a handy guideline:

You cannot eat everything you want and expect to lose weight.

And a corollary:

However, there is no food you cannot have--you just can't have as much of it as often as you like.

Which reminds me: must get Darin and me to cook more at home. He actually has started doing so a little, because I'm not terribly fond of visiting restaurants when I can't have anything. We need more staples around the house.

In other news: the rewrite class is up in the air. Events unfold hourly. Evidently we're going to get a new teacher and everything starts all over again--but that's just the current rumor. Worse rumors abound about the ex-teacher's behavior upon learning that students were dissatisfied.

Thesis: I got some help yesterday on the scene I've been wrestling with in my thesis screenplay. I say "some" because it was all of the theoretical variety: you know, make this 45% funnier. Well, okay then.

¹ Metabolism is the rate at which your body burns calories. The less muscle you have, the lower your metabolic rate.