Saturday, August 19, 2006

Diet is Just Die with the Letter "t" at the End

Stacy and I started a diet this week. Stacy wants to get rid of the few ounces left from being pregnant. She’s almost back down to the same weight she was when we got married. This is mostly due to hours of hard work as she’s gone to the gym 6 out of 7 days a week for the past few months. Me, I’ve spent hours of hard work building my gut to massive proportions over the years. It’s about time I take care of that. I want to be around for a long time and bordering on morbid obesity may put a crimp in that plan. I could easily stand to loose 150 pounds and still be healthy. Stacy’s sister-in-law lost quite a bit of weight on this diet, so we’re giving it a go.

This is after an aborted attempt at another diet from a leading heart clinic that they use to get patients’ weight down before surgery. That diet consisted of eating nothing but a particular vegetable soup and assorted fruit on the first day, nothing but the soup and vegetables on the second day, a mix of soup, fruit, and vegetables on the third day, the addition of meat on the fourth day, and the addition of legumes, nuts, corn, etc. throughout the last three days of the diet. We were supposed to loose 10 to 17 pounds by the end of the week, not to mention have extra energy and feel great by day three. We made it to day two before we realized how prohibitively expensive the diet was going to be. Stacy spent $80+ on groceries for the first day, we spent about $50 for the second day and decided that we’d break the bank by the time day seven rolled around.

That brought us to the current diet. In this one we have to eat something every two hours. The theory is that waiting longer between meals and snacks causes your body to shift into starvation mode. Anything you eat after two hours is stored for fat instead of energy. We’re trying to keep it relatively healthy, but I still have something sugary once or twice in a day. There is a bit more to the diet, but that is the main thrust. The first day I weighed in at 240. I’ll check again in a couple of weeks to see if I’ve lost anything. If not, I’ll have to get more strict on myself.

I’ll be joining Stacy at the gym soon, too. I will probably just stick to Nautilus and Ellipse machines for the beginning. I’m too body-conscious to work out in a group like Stacy does every time.

On a different note, I get into all sorts of interesting conversations in some of my online classes at University of Phoenix. Since I’m required to post substantive comments four out of seven days, I try to stay up on all of the conversation threads. I had a classmate in my last class that worked in the airport industry. I do not remember how we got on the topic, but one conversation was about the levels of service as affected by security measures in airports. He was very vocal about his feeling that flying was a privilege and not a right. If we (meaning those upset by the lack of good service) didn’t like the way things were, we shouldn’t fly. He went on to state that we should be grateful for all of the things that TSA is doing to make us more secure and that if TSA didn’t continue to take similar steps, we’d all get into trouble. My point is that we as consumers should expect a certain level of service that we do not get at airports. Jon sent me a link this week that expounds upon that subject by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. He writes much more eloquently than I can cuz he talk gooder than me. Here’s a preview, check the link for more.


It's not enough that the Transportation Security Administration wastes
hours upon endless hours of time. It's not enough that they confiscate our
Chapstick and toothpaste and claim that it is for our own protection. It's not
enough that we must fork over our ID at five different checkpoints before
boarding a plane, and have strangers paid with our tax dollars rifle and snoop
through our bags again and again.

No, that's not enough to keep us secure on our airline flights. Now we
must be careful not to wrinkle our noses, press our lips together, raise our
upper eyelids, or – Heaven forbid – thrust forward our jaws.

Here is a graphic from the New York Times that illustrates what the TSA
will now regard as suspicious behavior:


2 comments:

Jon Maki said...

Some more questionable practices of the TSA:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=6676

Merlin T Wizard said...

"These secret directives, issued by the Transportation Security Administration, are revised as often as weekly, and are transmitted orally rather than in writing. To make things even more confusing, these orally transmitted secret rules change depending on the airport."

Holy crap. That is some scary stuff right there. They can change the rules on that short of a notice AND there is no accountability! It makes me sick just thinking about this stuff.