20200360 Daily report, now with free retort!

My improved heat resistance continues to surprise me.  I used to break out into a sweat just going outside in the hot summer weather.  That was when I weighed a lot more.  Now, I have a whole week (and maybe a whole summer) of very hot weather ahead, including days in the 90s.  What will it be like once I weigh 40 pounds less?

That brings up the whole business of fitness.  Being thin and having your weight under control is one thing.  But you can’t stop there.  Some level of physical fitness is important also. 

Lunch meat sandwich with pickles and mustard - watch out for the bread!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 60g toast (140); hummus (100); olive tapenade (50);

  • 290 calories

Lunch – 120g bread (280); ham (100); cheese (70); salami (130);

  • 580 calories 

Dinner – 6 ounces cooked spaghetti (300); 

  • 300 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); pretzels (150); chocolate (130);

  • 360 calories

Total for the day: 1530 calories (limit 1850)

Wizards and wonders

Terry Pratchett once wrote that if you were the kind of person who keeps adding pickles and chutneys and condiments to your sandwich and don’t even notice when the meat slips out and falls on the floor, you might be of the wizardly kind of mind.  He knew a lot about wizards, since he invented so many of them and filled his books with them.  That’s not me though, as you can see from the picture above.  Anyway, I’ve noticed that the most calories on your sandwich can easily come from your bread.  I do like some pickles and condiments, though.  In my mind those things are “free” even though they do have calories at some level and those can add up. 

For example, my BLT wrap has a fair amount of lettuce and a few tomatoes, and a bit of horseradish sauce.  I don’t normally count them with the bacon and the wrap, or just put 10-20 calories in my record without really measuring or counting.  There are limits to how far I will go for weight control!  And my sandwich today had pickles, mustard, and horseradish sauce.  When I make hamburgers or pork burgers it is the same – I don’t count the lettuce, onion, tomato, or horseradish mayo.  I do count it when it seems like a lot.  When I make Spanish tortilla (eggs onions and potatoes cooked in olive oil) I count the tablespoon of mayo I put on the side.  That’s 110 calories!  At least, if you use good mayo.  

So far this has not stopped me losing weight.  I have guessed that as you get thinner and thinner, it gets to be more and more effort to maintain your weight.  I wonder if there will come a point when I am counting olives and salsa and marinara sauce and ketchup on a sandwich.  I kind of hope not. 

My pressure cooker has arrived!  I have plans for it.  Keep watching!

-The Doctor. 

20200629 Daily report – hot weather edition

Well!  According to my website’s software, my blog’s readability is low.  This is because the writing is too complex.  I apologize to my reader.  I won’t make that mistake again!  Until tomorrow, when I forget.  

I made chili for dinner.  Usually I do the all the big cooking on the weekends, but yesterday I decided I had cooked enough with the vegetable curry.  I was feeling a bit lazy.  Actually, I only tasted the chili.  It didn’t seem appealing to me.  My guess is I have picked up an intestinal bug – other members of the Doctor family have been complaining also.  And I had that unusual weighing on Saturday.  But it didn’t keep them from eating it!  Just me.

They ate it as fast as I made it!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2x servings of raisin bran crunch with milk  (250)

  • 500 calories

Lunch – tea (80); 2x toast (100) 3T hummus (35); 2T olive tapenade (25);

  • 430 calories 

Dinner – bread (150); pancakes (150); chili (50);

  • 350 calories

Snacking – pretzels (150); chocolate (110); ice cream (350);

  • 610 calories

Total for the day: 1890 calories (limit 1850)

Sunday weighing, hot weather

Saturday my weight loss was minimal.  I wondered if it was a fluke.  On Sunday I weighed myself again.  I was just making sure that my Saturday weight was real.  Apparently it isn’t!  I weighed 237.6 on Sunday.  That’s a swing of more than two pounds in one day.  So I am pretty sure my stomach is out of order.  

In the last year, whenever I got sick I just indulged myself and ate pretty much as much as I wanted to feel happy.  Then I went back to my weight control discipline once I got better.  Maybe that way, I got the idea that dieting while sick didn’t do much for my weight.  Now, I am trying more to get away from eating for reasons other than physical hunger/need.  So this weekend and today I tried to keep my reasons for eating simple and direct.  I did change the kinds of foods I was eating.  Some things just seemed more appealing.  And I pretty much have been keeping to my calorie count.  

It was another hot-ish day (88, humid) and I had to go out in the afternoon – the hottest part.  When I weighed a lot more, it was very uncomfortable to be in the hot weather and I felt hot all the time.  Even indoors, it took a long time to get cool.  Since I have gotten more disciplined, even though I am 40+ pounds away from my goal, the heat bothers me less.  I wonder what it will be like once I am even thinner!  It will take until next summer to find out.  Even if I lose 2 pounds per week, it will take 20 weeks to get there.  There is no guarantee I can keep that pace up.  That means it might take even longer.  

Something to look forward to!  Make sure you have something you are looking forward to.

-The Doctor

20200628 Daily report – late night

It’s pretty late in the day for me to be starting a post, but it was a busy day.  Part of that busyness was preparing for the week to come.  I cook on the weekend, mostly dinners for the rest of the week.  I also have a menu of things I can cook quickly, to fill in any gaps.  Today, I made a vegetable curry.  It takes a lot of time to prep and cook it well, but it is a family favorite.  Look at all the prep work!  And there’s more: you can’t see the potatoes because they are hidden under the onions, and I didn’t bring the garlic cloves over, either.  The ginger was all finely grated, and the spices dry-toasted in a skillet.  These ingredients are just for the flavor building – more goes into the final dish: peas, and cream.

And then the resulting dish takes a fair amount of technique to build flavor – vegetable-only dishes need that extra work.  

Prep work for the first few steps
Worth it. Family favorites are.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Pancakes (200); pizza (300);

  • 500 calories

Lunch – 2x Kirkland bratwurst (280); half whole wheat wrap (55);

  • 615 calories 

Dinner – 5oz white rice (160); 12oz vegetable curry (330);

  • 490 calories

Snacking – kale and beans (50); pretzels (200)

  • 250 calories

Total for the day: 1855 calories (limit 1850)

Preparing and planning for control

My lifestyle is an attempt to control my food intake and my body’s weight.  The bargain I have made with myself, and have been able to keep, is that the food has to be worthwhile.  If I am going to be saving my calories for mealtimes, then I have to do the work to make sure the meal is worth the wait and worth looking forward to.  It’s much better than trying to force myself to eat less or to avoid certain foods, which feels like deprivation to me.  And nobody reacts that well to force over the medium and long term.  This way, it feels like I am taking care of myself, by doing a lot of work to make sure I will be happy with the food.  

It is late.  I’m going to bed, but I am going to bed well satisfied with my plan for the week and the cooking I did today.

-The Doctor

20200627 Saturday weighing – just barely edition

Well, I had a surprise!  First, for the non surprise part, I had a good week for weight control, with no day over my calorie limit and several days under it.  My average daily calorie intake for the week – 1793.  Second, I did have a big drop in weight during the last two weeks, from 239.6 to 235.4.  This leads me to a puzzle, because when I got on the scale today, I was at a new low – just barely:

Technically, less than last week...

Still, we commemorate victories on this blog, even little ones that I can’t explain.  Since starting my weight control approach in 2019, I have lost: 

Pounds!!
0

Chicken and egg

Why did I lost four pounds in one week, recorded last week, and only 0.2 pounds this week, recorded today?  If anything, my calorie intake was less this week than last week!  I have had this happen before, and it usually straightens itself out in a week or two, at the most.  My guess is that the 4-pound loss was a fluke, and this week’s weight is real.  But we will find out next week.  

This is strange, though, because my weight does fluctuate.  And you hear stories about people, like Mr. Rogers, who weighed himself daily and apparently weighed the same amount every day.  I wonder if truly thin people don’t fluctuate much (he weighed something like 143 pounds).  Maybe it just means “most of the time”.   I plan to find out, but I recognize it will take some time.  No, I am not trying to achieve 143 pounds!  More like 180-190.  Even that will take time.  

Looking at the diet news stories, I see that one woman attributed her loss of 80 pounds to low calorie foods and 0 calorie soda.  We’ve talked about zero calorie drinks before, so I’m glad to see that it doesn’t keep people from losing weight!  The important part of her story, though, is what she said: “food became my refuge.”  Apparently she had a rough year or two and she started gaining weight around that time.  I have been looking for quotes involving this insight.  If you are completely honest, and examine your reasons for eating, you may find, like me, that your reasons are not always physical, but emotional.  You can get to a place where you eat until you feel completely full, for every meal, and do that as a kind of emotional fulfillment.  Then you might lose the connection to physical hunger entirely.  Once that happens, you are eating because it’s mealtime and because you are not completely full.  

A person who stays thin and keeps control over their body’s weight keeps that connection simple.  You eat because you are empty, and eat just enough so you are no longer physically hungry.  To a person who stays thin, that is their whole reason for eating – to stay thin.  

For a person who is gaining weight (out of control), the point of eating is to feel full, for comfort, or for “refuge” as the lady above put it.  With that mindset, stopping eating before you are completely full feels like abuse!  Think about it, you are basically denying yourself comfort and refuge by stopping.  

Once you have your mind straight, eating less doesn’t feel like deprivation.  Then, you can do it.

-The Doctor

 

20200626 Daily report with meats and sweets

I was looking at my food journal for 2020, and I don’t eat as much meat as I thought.  There’s a fair amount of vegetable dishes, rice, noodles, pizza, and some stews and soups flavored with meat.  But it’s rare for me to have meat as the main part of the meal.  My BLT is as much, or more, LETTUCE and TOMATO than bacon.  The Big Greek Cafe gyro does have a fair amount of meat.  But look at Wednesday.  I had the gyro, and I had a ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast, and for dinner I had a vegetable taco salad with beans and cheese, sour cream, tomato, salsa, on a tortilla. 

I noticed my meat pattern because when I woke up today, I did get hungry at all until 11AM.  When I looked in my journal – yes, Thursday I had brats for lunch and meat mania platter for dinner.  The calories were under control but it was a lot of meat in one day!  I am not used to it.

Meat for dinner! Spare ribs.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – tea (80)

  • 80 calories

Lunch – Leftover meat mania platter from yesterday with meatball (80); sausage (150); and chicken (100); plus some chicken pieces from Costco (100);

  • 430 calories 

Dinner – 250 grams baby back rib meat, not counting the bones (500); 

  • 500 calories

Snacking – pretzels (120) and cheese (80); 2x Reese’s PBCs (80); Snickers ice cream bar (180); 

  • 540 calories

Total for the day: 1570 calories (limit 1850)

Am I done?

1570 calories for the day is not a lot, and I have to be careful that I don’t start feeling deprived or resentful, by eating too little and not meeting my physical needs.  That’s not good for the weight control mindset.  To fix that, I may have more tea later.  I had some for breakfast, and I count the half and half I put in my tea: 80 calories.  So it may end up as 1650 calories for the day.  Still, not a lot of calories.  Either way, my average calories per day this week will be under 1800.  Oh, I didn’t try to count the barbecue sauce that came on the ribs I had tonight – that would add a few calories.  

Anyway, with all this meat in my system I also feel the need for sweets afterward.  I keep all kinds in the house, so I that don’t feel like I am punishing myself.  Many people say that when you are trying to lose weight you should remove temptation from the house.  But I have ice cream, bar chocolate, peanut butter cups, other candy bars, etc., lying around.  It doesn’t bother me, since I have managed to convince myself that I am not deprived.  So there is not much temptation there.  A lot of temptation is born of resentment.

What I do find difficult is the slow pace of weight loss.  You can practice weight control all week and not look any different at the end of it.  I had lost almost 70 pounds before any of my friends or acquaintances noticed or mentioned it.  I shouldn’t complain, since it clearly took a long time for my weight to increase all that way.  

I just bought a cookbook for pressure cooker meals.  You’ll be seeing a few of those recipes soon!

-The Doctor

20200625 Daily report restaurantation

Weight control is a worthwhile goal and like all good things, it takes some effort to get there.  And you have to maintain it – it is a lifestyle.  Remember that every person you see who has maintained a thin weight has to work to get there.  There is no naturally thin person…excepting people with medical conditions.  This isn’t to say there aren’t people in the world who don’t get enough to eat.  But let’s keep the focus on us, and our common problem: a lack of weight control and chronic overweight.  Being in control of your weight doesn’t make you a better person.  But it does mean you are paying attention to your body and you are in control of its weight.  So far as you have a reputation in the world, some of it is how you appear to others.   Yes, you can choose how you are going to appear.  It takes some control, but not in the way you think.

My lunch has the appearance of sausages

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Costco half cheese pizza slice (380)

  • 380 calories

Lunch – 2x Kirkland bratwurst (280); half a whole wheat wrap (55)

  • 615 calories 

Dinner – Meat Mania platter at Mama Lucia’s restaurant (600); garlic bread (100);

  • 700 calories

Snacking – pretzels (120); 

  • 120 calories

Total for the day: 1815 calories (limit 1850)

Can't force it

You can’t make yourself do things.  Everybody knows this.  You can’t stop smoking, or drinking.  You can’t make yourself go to the gym, or lose weight.  OK, you can stop procrastinating (tomorrow).  Yet people do manage to lose weight, sometimes a lot of weight.  Some manage to keep control afterwards.  I have thought a lot about the differences between thin people (in control) and overweight people (out of control).  You can see differences in behavior.  But you can’t easily make yourself act like a thin person, at least, not without understanding their thinking and being able to adopt it for yourself.

Part of it is the deprivation.  Someone like me who was out of control, was unable to successfully diet because I used willpower to force myself to eat less food.  Part of me felt deprived and unhappy, even though I was doing exactly as I said I wanted!  I could never diet for more than a few weeks, using force.

Today, I had pizza, bratwurst sausages, and an Italian meat platter (meatballs, sausages, chicken, roasted vegetables) for dinner.  And I didn’t feel even a little deprived, and my calorie intake was under control, and when I get on the scale Saturday I will be amazed if I haven’t lost 1-2 pounds from last week.  The point is: I didn’t need to use any force because I didn’t feel deprived.  I ate exactly what I wanted AND I stayed within a calorie budget.  

Part of a secret is that the thin person’s goal for eating is to stay thin and in control of their body.  They are always watching to make sure they don’t eat too much.  They know their body and they know how it feels when they have had to much, and their goal is to make sure that doesn’t happen.  You will find that satisfying physical hunger only takes a few bites of food.  Everything after that is inertia – keeping on eating because the first bites were nice and it’s on your plate.  An overweight or out of control eater, like I used to be, is much more concerned that they feel full.  You can train yourself to eat quite a lot before you get a full feeling.  If you do that for every meal, the consequences are obvious.  

How is this miracle achieved, of changing your goal for eating, and taking deprivation out of the equation?  Ah, keep reading.

-The Doctor

20200624 Daily report, Greek style

It is possible to have three really good meals in a day while eating to a calorie limit.  By good, I mean impressive, satisfying, and filling/fulfilling.  It’s my preferred method – making it easy to eat controlled amounts of food.  Part of me doesn’t like being ordered to eat less and won’t do it.  That’s a place of deprivation, and why would I want that?  But that same part of me is just thrilled to eat what I really want, three times a day, plus dessert.  Here’s what I had for lunch!

The Big Greek Cafe rides again!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – ham, cheese, and olive tapenade sandwich with toasted bread (100), tapenade (50), cheese (100); ham (100);

  • 350 calories

Lunch – Big Greek Cafe Famous $5 Gyro Wednesdays!!!!! (600)

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – taco salad with beans (190); cheese (100); tortilla (100); sour cream (50); salsa and tomatoes

  • 450 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 95g ice cream (220); cone (80);

  • 380 calories

Total for the day: 1780 calories (limit 1850)

All my troubles melt away

Melt away like ice cream!  Yesterday and today, I had so few calories for meals that I had space left over for a serving of ice cream each time!  Yes, welcome to my diet, where you get three wonderful meals and ice cream and will still lose weight.  You do have to pay attention to how much you are portioning, but you have seen my pictures – I am not suffering.  

I am very interested in this idea that you can re-learn the good habit of eating only when you are physically hungry.  Part of it comes when you have something to occupy yourself, like a project at work.  You are determined to get it done, so you only tear yourself away when you are physically called by hunger.   It all comes down to asking yourself: Why am I eating this?  Maybe you can answer: it’s mealtime, or I’m hungry (and are you really?), I’m tired, I need to relax, this food needs to be eaten before it goes bad, I need my favorite food right now….

Sticking to “I am physically hungry, and I can tell” is hard to do.  I mostly do it by counting calories and being careful with portions.  I have a whole spreadsheet of different foods I can make.  For each of them I calculate the total weight and total calories.  Then I know how much I can have for a meal, just by weighing.  The good part is, I don’t have to do any guessing of how much I have eaten, or remembering (did I eat that today?).  I write it all down as soon as I have eaten it.  Maybe that’s a bit too much work for you.  A lot of people have had success by creating a food routine – eating pretty much the same amounts of the same kinds of foods most of the time.  It can be effective and it’s less work.  But the good side of my method is it’s not dieting.  It’s control.  I will have this control even after I have found a weight range I like.  And I will be happy to keep doing this for a long time.  

Create a world you want to live in.  Then live there!

-The Doctor

20200623 Daily report – hot stuff

A few days into summer, and we are getting a taste of the heat.  Why does that matter to a dieter?  Well there are a couple of reasons.  The first is that, as I am noticing, hot weather doesn’t feel as bad if your body is thinner.  When I weighed over 300 pounds, hot weather was really unpleasant and doing anything at all got me sweating.  Cooling down took a long time.  Now, even though I am still heavier than I want (235 pounds, thank you), there is a difference and I have a bit more tolerance for heat.   This is yet more support for the idea that you should put yourself in control of your body.  

The second reason is that if it’s hot outside, you don’t want to heat up your house with lots of cooking inside.  Yet, one of the ways I keep myself happy while in calorie deficit is to cook a lot of my favorite foods.  So a dieter such as myself has to have a summer menu and a winter menu.  This does mean there is less bacon in the summer.  But there is more grilling, more slow cooker, more toaster oven, and more outdoor cooking.  So you can make it work for you.  

Another trick is to let someone else’s kitchen take the heat!

Costco strikes again! 380 calories.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – BLT wraps with bacon (280); whole wheat wrap (110); tomato and lettuce (round up to 400)

  • 400 calories

Lunch – 100g Mexican pulled pork (156); 2x corn tortillas (80); sour cream (30);

  • 280 calories 

Dinner – Costco cheese pizza slices (760); 

  • 760 calories

Snacking – chicken wrap with deli chicken breast (90), half a whole wheat wrap (55), lettuce and tomato

  • 145 calories

Total for the day SO FAR: 1585 calories (limit 1850)

More hot thoughts

Generally my standard drink during the day is diet soda.  Now, many people have noticed that only overweight or out of control people tend to drink diet cola.  Some even think that diet soda might cause some overweight through a mechanism we don’t understand.  I wondered about that, but it didn’t seem reasonable.  So, I wondered for quite a while if drinking diet soda was just a sign that you were out of control in your food.  That idea comes from the theory that many of us overweight people eat and drink for emotional reasons rather than phyiscal.  

Now, with the experience I have gained, I don’t believe that’s necessarily true.  I have given a lot of money to Coca Cola over the last year and a half since I started losing weight consistently, and it hasn’t been holding me back.  I don’t track how much diet soda I drink, but it’s daily, and for long periods I have happily been losing up to 2 pounds a week, while drinking all the 0 calorie diet soda I can drink.  But still, it’s true that drinking diet soda comes with an image problem.  Only overweight people drink that, you know!  Plus, it is starting to feel out of control.  So I have a new policy: drink a glass of water before having a diet soda.

Since I am trying to limit my calorie intake, diet soda was a good place to start.  It has no calories!  Once I have lost all the weight I want to lose, I wonder if I will switch only to regular soda and have one once in a while, like ice cream, if I have calories left in my daily allowance.  Or, will I keep diet soda as an indulgence?  There may be that social price to pay, though.  

-The Doctor

20200622 Daily report with pie

What do you do with 4 pounds of strawberries?  Make pie!  That’s one of the choices.  Generally, I prefer a strawberry shortcake roll, but I admit it won’t use up pounds of strawberries.  So pie they became.  While it is nice, it’s not nearly as nice as blueberry pie.  Apple pie.  Cherry pie.  Those are all very, very nice pies.  My grandmother was fond of making pineapple pie.  So while strawberry pie was nice to try, the others are not in danger.  Did I mention pecan pie?

This is 240 calories of pie.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 3x slices cold Aldi pizza (100)

  • 300 calories

Lunch – Bratwurst wrap (280); 2x corn tortillas (40); 100g Mexican shredded pork (156)

  • 516 calories 

Dinner – 13oz kale and beans (300)

  • 300 calories

Snacking – chicken (100); 1/8 strawberry pie (240); cool whip (75); 

  • 415 calories

Total for the day: 1531 calories (limit 1850)

Shortcut and shortcrust

For this pie, I cheated a bit and bought the crust from the store.  But I have never gotten the premade crusts to work properly.  The crust always shrinks and any fluting I put in always goes limp.  The advice on the internet is to make your crust and briefly freeze it before baking.  Maybe I’ll try that, but the store bought crust was kind of disappointing.  The dough seems very thin and not substantial.  When you are restricting your calories as much as I am, you have to find your rewards where you can, and for me that means food disappointments are very disappointing.  

I am finding that concentrating on my office work is really making this easier for me.  I am working from home on the computer, and you would think food temptation would always be a problem.  But keeping my focus on the work means I am less inclined to indulge my emotional needs with food.  Eating for non-physical reasons is what got me into this mess, and it never ends.  Physical hunger can be satisfied pretty easily, but emotional needs can eat you up if you let them.  

I am thinking about my body goals.  At the highest level, my goal is and ought to be weight control, and not any particular weight or look.  But in the course of losing weight, I will find a weight range that works for me, and while that range is not a goal, keeping in that range does mean my body is under control.  And that is the goal, to be in charge of my body’s weight.  What is that range?  I don’t know, but probably 180-190 is a good range for my height and shape.  I will see how that looks.  Maybe this kind of talk is overconfident.  After all, I just came off a 6 month pause in which I neither gained or lost anything!  (That does not count as under control, in my terms.  But at least it was not a disaster.)  

-The Doctor

20200621 Daily Report and Father’s Day

Happy Father’s Day to all fathers!  One reason to start controlling your body’s weight (and other things about how your body looks and works) is so tha you can teach your children how to do that.  You can also teach them by example.  For example, a BLT is a good example for sons (bacon) and for daughters (lettuce and tomato).  Everybody wins, especially Dad, who gets a bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwich of 400 calories (when paired with a whole wheat wrap).  

There is some extra bacon. You can eat it later.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – BLT wraps with 4 slices bacon (70 each); 1 wrap (110); tomatoes and lettuce (round it up to 400).  

  • 400 calories

Lunch – 1/8 Strawberry pie (240); cool whip (75);

  • 315 calories 

Dinner – Costco cheese pizza (760); 

  • 760 calories

Snacking – Strawberry pie part II (240); cool whip (100)

  • 340 calories

Total for the day: 1765 calories (limit 1850)

Changed the details, kept the overall

I have experimented with eating the same number of calories per day, and with having a couple of “cheat” days where I can eat more.  Both seem to work, but as my exercising is not what it used to be in the time of Corona, there is less incentive to reward myself extra on exercise days.  So I am currently aiming for 1850 calories per day.  Even without the exercise, I am still losing about the same amount as before – 2 pound a week, sometimes a bit more or less.  

Paying attention to why I am eating has been very useful to me during my weight control lifestyle.  I want to be eating for only physical reasons (hunger) and not emotional or mental reasons (comfort, support, coping, etc.).  For most of the last 6 months I was having tea every day, and I think that’s an example of having food for comfort reasons rather than physical ones like: hunger, waking up, clearing your throat, illness, etc.  So I have cut back on that, really without trying very hard.  I am also paying a lot more attention to my work, which is good for everyone.  

This means I have picked a set of life goals: weight control and vocation (work).  I am making myself into the kind of person who can lose 120 pounds, do his job well, and then go from there.  Anyway, focusing on doing my job better has changed how I am looking at food and eating.  I am amazed at how little food I physically need and still don’t feel hungry.  Some days this last week or two weeks I have had less than 1600 calories and gone to bed without hunger.  Most days I only want or take a little breakfast.  For the last two weeks I have had ice cream several times a week because I had lots of calories in my daily allowance left over by the end of the day.  

So much of all this is how you look at it!  You will sacrifice your old self and how you used to do things.  But that old self had his problems.  You can build a new self that will do better.

-The Doctor

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