In which the internet is stupid. But it’s also awesome!
Made the mistake today of looking the house up on Zillow, and that bastard of a site had the nerve to estimate the value under what we paid for it only eleven months ago!
Well, I looked at recent sales of similar houses in the area, and they’re going for, like, $313k, so prices are still high and people are still paying them, which means their estimate is garbage. So screw you, Zillow!
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Everybody at work thinks I’m some sort of diva for being afraid I can’t pass a test with no official text books, practice tests, or sanctioned goddamned course of study, and which features a pass rate of under 50%, but I know I can’t know what I don’t know I don’t know.
So I went online and asked r/cheese about study groups, and through the kindness of a stranger and a circuitous route of emails, I got admitted to an official STUDY GROUP for the Certified Cheese Professional test!!!
It starts a week from tomorrow, is conducted over Zoom, and is free. And now I think I have an actual chance to pass the test.
It turns out I’ve already read, or own and have begun to read, all the books the teacher recommends in the welcome email. So that’s a relief!
I did no studying at all this weekend. A mini-break before class starts!
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I just can’t keep my nails done now that I’m menopausal.
I don’t know if it’s lack of collagen or what, but whenever I try to wear press-on, or even gel, nails, any moisture whatsoever that sits anywhere near the nail plate (which always happens at work, primarily because I have to wear gloves all the time) makes my nails lift. They just separate from the nail beds! It’s gross! And it takes months to grow them out and it sucks. I love the occasional manicure! And now I just… can’t have them anymore?
It’s bullshit.
And they’re far too thin for old school acrylics. If anybody took a Dremel to my nail plates it would go right through and hurt like hell.
Plus I’m terrified of what would happen if I smacked an acrylic nail against a cheese rack or something real hard. What if the entire nail came off instead of just the acrylic overlay?! How gross would that be?!
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The Pendleton blanket — well, throw, really; it’s not a whole blanket — has arrived, and it’s glorious and beautiful and I love it. Here it is at the foot of the guest room bed.
I also got a Pendleton wool scarf, and it too is fantastic.
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The diet is tedious and a pain in the ass, and I ate 2,607 calories on my cheat day because I was fucking starving and just wanted to be able to eat freely.
I managed to give up cocaine overnight but not eating food is a whole ‘nother level.
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I suck at anniversaries, but I do have a basic understanding of the passage of time and it occurs that the Yeti and I have known one another for a decade now.
And we’ll have been living together for nine years on April 16th. Really doesn’t seem that long at all, but time contracts more and more the older I get. Still, I begin to suspect that he’s a keeper!
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I’m having the kitchen painted semi-gloss white on Friday.
Life is too short to hate your kitchen walls just because you chose a stupid matte color last April.
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It’s heartbreaking to see you struggle like that with dieting when it can be so much easier. The key to successful weight loss is satiety, and the key to satiety is protein. We quantify food in calories, but only two of the three macros are used primarily for their caloric value: fat and carbohydrate. Protein has caloric value, but burning protein for energy is inefficient, and the body would rather break protein down into amino acids. Typically, less than 25% of protein is burned for energy. To use a car analogy, fat and carbohydrate are fuel. Protein, vitamins, and minerals are spare parts. Fuel has only two pathways in the body: burned for energy or stored as body fat. The key to weight loss is meeting the body’s need for protein, vitamins, and minerals without consuming excess energy as fat and carbohydrate. If the body’s need for structural nutrition is utterly satisfied, the body will happily burn off all that stored fat for energy as long as you maintain a dietary energy deficit.
Trying to lose weight on a diet that is heavily based on grains and beans will be difficult because with the exception of soybeans, the protein in those foods is already diluted with a lot of carbohydrate energy, and any added butter, olive oil, etc. only dilutes it further. The ultimate trigger for satiety is protein, not energy. So, to achieve hours of no hunger between meals you need to eat plenty of protein. Concentrated vegetarian protein sources are going to be your best friend: low-fat cheese, pure whey protein, eggs, tofu, tempeh, seitan, TVP, vegan protein powders, etc. There’s a vegan doctor on Twitter, Anna Borek, who is fighting hard against anti-protein bias in the vegan/vegetarian community, and she recommends 30 grams of protein at every meal. In my own experience with a beef/egg/dairy based diet, my serious weight loss didn’t happen until my protein intake increased from 50-60 grams a day to around 90 grams a day.
As for permanence of weight loss, it will only last as long as you keep eating only the energy calories needed to maintain the desired weight. As you reach your desired weight, you will need to add back enough energy in the diet to run on since you will no longer be burning fat stores. But, if you do go back to eating the way you were when you were heavier, you will put the weight back on. I kept 25 pounds off for 15 years by cutting out most starch and eating one 6-8oz meat meal per day instead of only eating a little Chinese buffet chicken a few times a week on an otherwise largely grain and bean based diet. In 2018, when poor gut health reduced my diet to beef, eggs, dairy and a little rice, I lost another 25 pounds, and now I have visible abs after being skinny-fat since childhood. My feet are still just as arthritic, but now there’s only slight discomfort on a daily basis because there is zero extra weight bearing down on them.
With my gut largely healed, I’ve been able to reintroduce some fruits and vegetables, and I eat a big bowl of raspberries and blueberries every day. I mostly eat frozen berries, and I mix them, thawed, with a big scoop of pure whey protein powder, a few drops of monkfruit sweetener, and a little sprinkle of water, if needed, to help dissolve the whey. 12oz of berries with a heaping 70cc scoop of whey protein isolate is my lunch most days, and it is 30 grams of protein plus a few hundred calories and lots of micronutrients. It’s really delicious, very satisfying, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Pure whey protein is so innocuous that it can be slipped in almost anywhere. Whey isolate and concentrate are both fine; isolate has had the little remaining lactose and fat filtered out.
The protein to energy ratio approach to dieting is agnostic on the issue of fat vs carbohydrate as the best fuel source. One thing to keep in mind is that fat and carbohydrate eaten together are highly palatable and ping the reward center of the brain; for that reason, some people do better picking either fat or carbohydrate to run on, not both. It’s also protein agnostic; just be sure it’s protein of sufficient quality that you personally can digest and assimilate it. Eggs and whey are the highest quality proteins and ones you can eat. This approach can even be done as a vegan, albeit with a bit more difficulty. I hope this helps.
If you were to scroll back here on the blog, oh, ten or fifteen years or so, you’ll see I’ve already done something similar (I’d just read Taubes), and while the high protein approach does work for weight loss, it’s still a diet, and it works like any other diet: by ultimately limiting calories.
And being on a calorie-restricted diet sucks. Which is why you need a thousand words to explain it, and another thousand to convince yourself you enjoy it: “It’s really delicious, very satisfying, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
Well, nah, I’m not buying it. It’s not delicious and satisfying, it’s whey protein isolate and berries. It’s dismal and unnatural, and you’d rather eat something else.
But it’s what you must do to keep the weight off, and I applaud your discipline! Genuinely. Because it requires vigilance and discipline to stay on any diet, and to lose weight and keep it off one must remain on a diet forever.
(Honestly, I’m just complaining because I don’t want to be old and fat, I want to have the metabolism I had when I was twenty, and no whey powder or Chinese fruit sugar substitute will provide that. SIGH.)