Do you want to hear about my diet?

One of you wrote me an email and said you would read anything I wrote. For which I reward you with a post about my diet.

To the rest of you…see you in 18 months.

We spent the weekend on the cape with my mom. After talking about kids baseball, camps, school, family friends, Steve’s work, brewing, Istanbul, the new kitten, new fabric for vintage furniture, and how beautiful it was there she asked about me. How about you? How are you? What are you up to?

What am I up to?

Well I am very busy not eating.

I’m pretty sure that isn’t actually the point of my 18 month weight loss study. But that is my experience of it.

It takes quite a bit of time and headspace not to eat. Obviously I do eat. But rarely with pleasure now. It is with weights, measures, apps, and records. Always a data geek I am in fact in love with the iPhone app Loseit. It my be my favorite app I didn’t make. ( Downside: Its barcode scanner makes me buy MORE processed food.) Having the app auto populate with the chickpeas was wicked cool. Until I learned that they have more calories than air. Which seems to be common.

Camp started today so I am in town post pitch meetings ( 2/2 if you are keeping score at home ) waiting to pick up the boys before I take them to Bread and Butter burger night where I will not be eating where tons of people are eating happy cow. That will suck. (Recently learned that was a bad word when I said it in Kindergarten.) So I am killing time not eating at Maglianero. Then I will not eat in the car. Then I won’t eat at burger night.

Then I will go water the garden and I will eat. But it will be plants directly from the garden.

Then I will not scan the plant barcodes, but instead estimate their weight, then quintuple my estimate because it turns out that plants have pretty much the same calories as air.  Then I will eat some lean protein. Probably 1/4 of a chicken breast. Or a single slice of turkey. I know there are more satisfying things, but there are not EASIER things and that matters.

Then I will take all of the data that I joyfully entered into the Loseit app and I will transfer it to the UVM ireach study website. Circa 1990. The weight loss experts all sing the praises of Paul their tech “genius” who in my opinion is either a sadist or a fool. or both. There are so many many things I can complain about with this site. But here is one. You cannot input calories. You are forced to use the API from the government which estimates calories for you. If you know because of food labels  or common sense that your ham and cheese croissant has MORE than 70 calories in it you need to add in tablespoons of olive oil, or something else to bring the calorie count up higher. Which of course also brings up your fat grams.

Blah bah.

I am trying to lose a lot of weight. I have never succeeded at this before. At least I have Loseit. And the fact that vodka has the lowest calorie count of any beverage. So there are some things on my side.

And for those of you who see me in real life…how about a walking date instead of a lunch date? It is much easier to not eat while walking then while having lunch.