patrickrhett

Today is the 45th day of our diet. I started at 192 pounds and am, as of today, down to 176. I don’t really want to lose any more weight (just redistribute some of it) so we added the gym to our routine last week and have been 4 times in the last 8 days.

At some point the diet (a special course of food to which one restricts oneself to lose weight) became our diet (the kinds of food that a person habitually eats). It’s getting easier to make smarter choices, and we are learning to make better meals. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes have been replaced by grilled grass fed beef and ginger sauteed cabbage. That’s not a bad trade.

I have to give The Lovely Wife full credit for all of these changes. She came up with the diet, organized the menus, made shopping lists, cooked most of the food, got us to join the YMCA, dragged me to the gym for the first time in my life, and showed me how to use it. I have grilled what I was told to grill, eaten what I was told to eat, pedaled when I was told to pedal, and tried not to complain too much.

Once again, in a pattern that has been repeating itself for 10 years now, my wife has demonstrated that she is both smarter and way more ambitious than I am. God help me if she ever turns on me.

I created some random header images from my thousands of pictures and installed them above. If you don’t like the header image, hit refresh and something new should pop up. (Except that it’s random, which means the same picture could pop up a few times in a row. If only you could make things more random than random. By which I mean slightly less random. But that is much harder, so just hit refresh an extra couple of times if you have to. Something new will eventually appear.)

so tired
there is no sugar left in my body
it has all been replaced by lettuce
wherever it is that lettuce grows
i hate that place

Well, the food got better. Yesterday for lunch I got a salad, which is a perfectly serviceable lunch and something I would have eaten before. Granted, I would have had an ice cream bar when I was done, but still, it was an improvement over breakfast. For dinner we had grilled beef filet, sauteed mushrooms and garlic ginger cabbage. It was delicious, and I could eat that any day. Or every day. I would have normally had a beer or red wine with dinner, or a whisky after, but all in all it hardly felt like deprivation.

Then we come to this morning’s breakfast. It was a frittata, made with onion, sun-dried tomatoes, broccoli, and salmon. It was better than yesterday, and almost good, but I still seem to have a problem eating such a large meal so early in the morning. At least one that’s not full of bread and covered with cheese. I hear tomorrow we’re ditching the salmon for canadian bacon, so we’ll see how that goes.

Breakfast was a learning experience. Coffee without sugar is not so bad and I could totally get used to it. V8 tastes like a Bloody Mary, and who wouldn’t like that? The main course was lettuce wraps filled with no fat cream cheese, roasted red peppers, capers, cucumber and smoked salmon. This, in theory, sounds really tasty. However, when I imagine this dish, it is evening, I am having a glass of red wine, and the wrap is an hors d’oeuvre slightly smaller than a ping-pong ball. About half a bite. I had two wraps, each roughly the size of a burrito. It was way too rich for breakfast, and I could barely finish them. I think the aim is to turn you off of food for the rest of the day. The dogs, on the other hand, love, love, love salmon for breakfast.

Tomorrow we will try some kind of frittata.

Elaine has created a diet for us, and tomorrow we begin. I’m down with it, and it is totally necessary (I’m pushing 200), but, for the next two weeks I will have no starch, no sugar, and… no alcohol. Pray for me.

Here you go.

Isabella Rossellini acting out the mating rituals of bugs.

This is possibly one of the best things I have ever seen on the internet.

You’re welcome.

It’s at Flickr.

My last attempt to jump start this blog was derailed by illness, then killed by all the same factors that necessitated the jump start in the first place – that is, a combination of being too busy in life and too bored with my blog to generate the required activation energy.

I’m sure I’ll come back, but in the meantime, go check out my Flickr page. I’m still updating that.

I dropped the ball on this already, but in my defense I am sick. Fever, chills, sore throat, headache, congestion, burning eyes, aches, etc. After a miserable day yesterday I even tried to take a lame pic of my medicines all lined up, and then when I tried to upload it my internet connection was down. So I’m taking a break. I’ll resume this challenge to myself in a day or two, whenever the fever breaks.

Thums Up soda, purchased with lunch at Curry in Hurry. It’s a cola, and I thought it had a hint of ginger, but Wikipedia says betel nut. I’ll have to take their word for it. It was good, as was the curry.