In which there’s dieting! Whee! Aren’t you glad you’re reading this crap?!
The little bastards over at Cocky & Rude are having another diet competition. The prize for the winner is probably a stinky old shoe and some gravel, but eighteen people signed up to compete anyway.
Including me. Because I’m fat. Fat, fat, fat.
My life of sedentary sedentary-ness wants very much to make me perfectly round, but due to my natural contrariness I just don’t want to be perfectly round! Pudgy’s okay, sure, fine, I can handle being pudgy, but in the past year I have totally moved past pudgy.
I saw a picture of myself from a recent gig, and, well, there was seriously NO GOOD REASON for me to be wearing that tight tunic. Oh no there wasn’t.
Um. As a matter of actual, cold, hard fact, I’m 5’4″ and I weigh 160 pounds. Yeah, I said it: 160 pounds. (Damn you, vodka! And damn you, delicious Mexican food! And damn YOU, fascinating Internet, in front of which I have been sitting for the past decade!)
Dieting means a freakish obsession with food called ‘counting calories.’ It means you spend much, much more time thinking about food than you ever do when you’re not dieting. It’s fun and slightly disturbing. I’ve decided to take pictures of every single thing I eat.
When dieting, I use Sparkpeople.com, a bewildering and nifty website that lets you record all your food and exercise. The food tracker has a fairly easy data entry interface, and combines all your intake into a nice page (like this one) with running totals at the bottom that, when refreshed obsessively throughout the day, gives you a strange and probably unhealthy sense of accomplishment.
To aid in portion control, I only eat food out of bento boxes. My meals all now look like this (for scale, note the size of the celery slices; bento boxes are petite):
Meals of the tiny and cute variety, emphasis on tiny (where ‘tiny’ = ‘under 500 calories’), R us! I’m trying to do four meals a day to keep from feeling hungry, and for frying I’ve dropped olive oil in favor of that stupid spray stuff in a can and Teflon pans. I bought a bunch of groceries so I have no excuse to go out and eat Mexican food.
I also bought these Crystal Light things you add to water. The flavor is called ‘raspberry green tea,’ and it was created in a lab. I hate diet beverages, and fake sweeteners freak me out, and I expected to feel stupid for making the purchase during my pre-diet shopping zeal… but I don’t. Turns out: I love the stuff. Even watered down, it’s so sweet it makes my body think I’m feeding it sugar, which I’m not! It’s a mere twenty calories per pitcherful! And it really does sorta taste like tea! Sorta. Well, it tastes like the idea of tea.
Better living dieting through chemistry? Maybe. Am I ashamed that I like the stuff? Absolutely!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you’re supposed to exercise too. I’ve been riding my bike more. I think I might do the 200 Situps program again. If the weekend walking group I read about on Facebook gets organized, I intend to join. I’m trying to start going to yoga again, although the studio has mirrors freakin’ everywhere.
Blah blah blah, I’m on a diet which is interesting to no one but myself, blah, blah: long story short, my goal is to lose 20 pounds by the end of the contest in three months. If that happens, I’ll be safely back in pudgy territory, a land in which I can eat Mexican food and drink vodka without earning it first. Yay!
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“In Defense of Food” – seriously. And “The Shangri-La Diet”. (Especially the appendices in that one.)
You’re eating great just by making the majority of the food you eat, yourself. 🙂
…except I fail to ‘eat local’ by buying lots of imports. I mean, my veggies are local, but I buy stuff like wakame, hing, Basmati rice, fava beans. I live on rice and beans, and I’d have to move to, what, Florida to get them locally?
Getting down to 160 is my goal this time. I want to be skinny for running, goddamnit. Also, it is so totally your fault that I’m now looking at spending money on bento boxes.
Get a bento box! Get one! For portion control! AND CUTENESS.
Your meals are so damn attractive! Wish there was a bento shop here. Oh, wait, there might be. But from those I’ve seen over the years, you’re always look better. Could you send some up here?
you’re=yours, damnit.
You want some bento boxes? Buy them online. Try Amazon.com or VeryAsia.com!
No, I don’t want the boxes unless they’re filled with the great food you put in them! Btw, interesting you’re gaining and I’m loosing. I’ve lost 40 lbs since April of last year. You must have found it. Sorry it’s just floating around out there.
Good luck!!! Your bentos look totally cuuuute!! Wish I had a long enough attention span to make something as pretty as that! HAve you been taking inspiration from http://www.justbento.com by chance? ^^ They have tons of recipes and tips! (And my brother’s going to kill me for this one, but try having a gander at http://www.marksdailyapple.com – they have tons of recipes, and an…alternative look at what’s good food and what’s not. ^^)
Thanks, they’re fun to make. Yes, I love Maki and justbento.com! Who is your brother? I thought it was Carl, for some reason, but now I don’t know!
I’ve seen sites like that before. I’m an everything-in-moderation person, and I avoid fad diets because, well, the body is a weak medium and it absolutely will fail, and there’s ultimately no point in wasting cycles on some cult-of-the-body thing. Vegan, paleo, whatever: they’re all crap. Seeking “perfect health” benefits no one but the seeker’s ego. Research shows that eating high protein, high fat diets are more likely to cause disease than not doing so. Of course that can be overturned and/or refined, but it seems counter-intuitive (read: totally unlikely) to me that red meat and fat will ever be proved to be an ideal, healthy diet for the majority of humans.
I love your bentos – they are so cute! I don’t think I would have the patience to make them – I’d end up eating the whole thing as I went along (which is why I’m doing BCRL).
It helps me to not think of it as a diet (which will end at some point), but just as living a healthy life. But I sure would like my metabolism back – because exercising and cutting down on my favorite foods sucks. Ah well, good luck! See you in the trenches.
Old age ain’t for the weak, that’s for sure. Bentos aren’t that tedious to make, really. I mean, essentially you’re filling a bowl and decorating it. I love bentoing! – m