Chewing the Fat

Let's be frank: I'm getting fatter.

I've stepped up my exercise routing enormously over the last 2 months, but my weight keeps going up...up...up... It's like the numbers of the scale are filled with helium and I am filled with lead. I am, congratulations to me, now 20-25 lbs overweight, depending on the time of day and level of bloat.

There are several factors at work here. An obvious one is the aforementioned sweet tooth. Oh, it's a bugger. Another--no surprise to Float readers--is job dissatisfaction: eating out of boredom or stress, depending on the day. (I'm more social than my job allows me to be. Holed away in my cubicle checking page proofs I get bored and, because we're all too busy to socialize, I meet with my friends M and M. Or, we have a terribly stressful meeting where everyone's mean and/or passive-aggressive and I turn to my surrogate mother, Snickers.) Also a factor is busy-ness. Proper nutrition--shopping and preparing meals--often falls by the wayside.

But I've been varying degrees of chubby my whole life, and when I've lost or gained weight, it's been quite by surprise. I realized, then, that the root problem is that I have no idea what constitutes a proper calorie intake, nor how many calories foods contain. Really, Atkins, South Beach, and even macrobiotics help people lose weight because they're cutting the kcals. Many people find calorie counting to be too much math, in addition to their checkbook balancing and all else, so those diets get people to cut calories in a sneaky way. Weight Watchers is a system to count calories more easily, without saying you're counting calories. It also, I believe, involves support and meetings and such, but have neither the time nor the money to invest in Florene's system.

So: armed with the weight loss advice on So You Wanna, the latest issue of Cooking Light, a pen, a pad of paper, and determination, I embark upon my quest to slay the Dragon of Pudge who fiercely guards Princess Abdomen from the beautiful outside world. I've also ordered a book of calorie counts, which even includes adzuki beans, so I know we'll get along, and a nicely bound food journal, to make it more official than my pad of paper.

Note: This will not become a weight-loss blog. I'm just sharing what's current in my life. You'll get updates, yes, but weight loss won't take over Float. I'm not interested in the politics of fat; I'm interested in health.