What I wanted to talk about...

We, P and I, are on a serious nutrition kick. What I mean is, we're on a diet. It's our new year's resolution. He's lost 31 pounds! I'm so excited for him and proud of him. I was starting to get scared that he would have a heart attack any second, or come down with the diabetes any second. Or die when he's fifty. Or sixty. Or seventy. See, I am in LOVE with my husband and don't see that changing any time in the next century. I hope he never dies. Also, I had outgrown almost every pair of pants in America. And we wanted to start trying to get pregnant. And I have a high school reunion in July. And I didn't want us to be that fat couple. I mean, there were a million reasons; it seems insane to list them--I don't have to justify getting healthy, you know?
So I've lost twenty pounds. That is good, but I'm still exactly eight pounds overweight. That means, eight pounds from a BMI that counts as "normal." I'm twenty pounds heavier than I want to be, and probably 25 over my hottest weight ever. That's discouraging, but I like to think I've come to terms, at age 32, with the fact that my hottest days are over. I need to lose 15 pounds to be comfortable with getting pregnant. I would like to lose 20. Twenty-five is a pipe dream that would require a permanent commitment to daily hour-long elliptical sessions or giving up pasta forever--maybe even both, as I'm aging by the day. I've been in this boat before, enough times to have learned a certain amount about my personal limits--my hottest weight ever is simply not going to come again, not for any long period of time, anyway. It is not sustainable. Alas. Alack.
Right. I'm obsessing, which is the only way I know to lose weight. I have to hyperverbally analyze every aspect of the process, every pound I have lost and hope to lose. I have to count every calorie and in order to make the puzzle all the more complex, I have to consider whether I'm meeting daily reccomended allowances of fiber, vegetables, fruits, whole grains--am I exceeding reccommended levels of saturated fats? Am I overdoing it on meats and other proteins? AND WHAT ABOUT FOLATE? Will someone please think of the children. Everyone knows the children--be they extant or otherwise--the children need their folate.*
And I am not the most consistent person you've ever met, so I really only have a certain amount of time to get that weight lost before my obsessive eye turns to other pursuits, like sewing or job-hunting or cooking.** Ha--if only I could turn the old obsessing eye to job-hunting for longer than a few hours. But that is a story for another time.
But wait--what I wanted to say today is this: why do you have to buy a book to get serious weight-loss recipes for more than one person?!? We started out on South Beach, with the book, and slowly gave up most of the tenets of that crazy regimen. It was good to start there, though, because in those tense early weeks of his first-diet-ever, P would have taken a mile if he'd been given so much as an inch (proverbially speaking). He could not have dealt with something like "you may eat that ice cream, but you may only have 1/2 cup and you must then sprint for 47 minutes to work it off and, really, don't worry just make sure you're getting enough whole grains and you'll be fine!" The barrage of advice and it's-okay-if-you-...-but-just-be-careful-not-to-...'s is really only appropriate for seasoned dieters like me. And even I find that a resolution is usually best if it starts out like a no-sugar no-fat no-booze gulag and then slowly morphs into something like a minimum-security joint that takes a sort of a don't-ask-don't-tell approach to such things as spaghetti and potatoes.
But this morning over breakfast (perhaps my very favorite side-effect of the diet: we eat together every morning in our little dining nook) P said he wants to start to re-focus on the diet, starting Monday. That means all our eating energy goes into doing it right. I need us to do this, too. We had reubens for dinner last night, for chrissake. That is not something people do when they are on a diet! I worked out a ton and had cottage cheese and cucumbers for lunch in anticipation of said dinner, but still. We need to be eating dinners that are designed to lead to weight loss, not dinners whose calories are taken into account only by over-compensation in other areas. My goal requires the hour-long workout and the cucumber lunch and a low-calorie dinner, not to make up for a high-calorie (and -everything else) dinner.
Of course, it's OK to treat ourselves sometimes. But we've been slowly creeping into a place where we are treating ourselves more often than we're being conscientious. And that's on me. P counts calories religiously, and he eats a healthy breakfast and he passes on cookies at work. These efforts, coming from him, are nothing short of Herculean. He came into this knowing absolutely nothing about calories or fat or carbs or what he should have been eating. That is not rhetorical fluorish, either. He was shocked to discover he'd gained about 80 pounds since college. (He is 6'5" and was freakishly skinny in college, but still.) He used to be able to eat anything and everything he wanted; that is no longer the case. The progress he has made is such a huge relief to me and such a burden off my fatty fat shoulders, the least I can do is find some frigging food options that will keep us on track. P just can't do that yet. He suggests turkey hot dogs and reduced-fat potato chips when I'm having trouble coming up with dinner ideas. That is definitely progress from "we just won't get sausage on the extra-large pizza and that will be healthy," but not exactly nutritionally sound. And not exactly an idea that will accelerate weight loss.
So I went searching for recipes that would speed up the pound-dropping process. I thought I would check Men's Health magazine's web site. Their recipes are for dudes who are big and who lift weights a lot. Their recipes have like 600 calories per serving! Women's Health was no better--too often, they have you cooking one serving only, and P would shrivel up and die if he had to eat something so skimpy as 300 calories at dinner. And no, I have not mastered portion control. Nor do I expect to any time soon. Maybe that's defeatist or something, but I love to eat and I hate to see a tiny plate of food and know that's all I get. Doesn't matter if it's the world's richest macaroni and cheese or a pile of steamed broccoli. I want to be allowed to eat lots of it.
Jeez. Even I'm bored. What I'm saying is I want to cook real food for us, I want it to contribute to speedy weight loss, I want to be able to eat more than a quarter cup of it, and I want it to provide nutrition in addition to freaking skinniness.
But I couldn't find that so I started a new blog in order to be able to compose a diatribe about the whole sordid affair. Goodbye. Maybe next time I'll tell you about my plan for a school-wide "critical thinking retreat." I've been building that plan for months now, and I think I'll want to write it down soon. Of course, I might just whine about not losing weight.

*In all seriousness, they really do, you guys. My doctor said the folic acid in prenatal vitamins is really only helpful if it's present in the mom's body when she conceives. You can't make up for it after the fact. And we're talking birth defects and stuff. So...excuse me while I go swallow a One-A-Day®.
**That's why I created this blog in the first place, see. I created that sewing blog during my last obsessive spell, when I thought for all the world that the only thing I'd ever want to write about was fabric, glorious fabric! I strayed from that topic, then felt badly about straying, then got distracted from sewing for quite a long time, then started mentally composing entire blog posts about all kinds of things, ranging from (ahem, duh) diets to No Child Left Behind to the jaw-dropping, misogynistic audacity of beer commercials. Clearly, I needed a forum. Even if it was a private, secret, only-for-me forum thereby ceasing to qualify as a forum altogether. Blah blah blah!

One

Because I felt it was unfair to the zero people who read my other blog and expected it to be about sewing, I started this one a second ago so I could write about all the other things in the world and not feel guilty that I wasn't living up to the "sews" part of that other site.