The Four Seasons of Snow

Well, I must say that the response to the article last week has been overwhelming.  Middle-aged, dieting men from all across the country are providing me with insights and stories of their own.  Some are absolutely unbelievable, and because truth is stranger than fiction, I’m sure they’re all true.  Before sharing some of them, let me give you an update on our progress. 

Wayne has reached exhaustion.  I scored ten points against him in racquetball, and that never happens.  I beat him when he played left-handed, and as a result, I was able to actually reclaim some of my male competitive pride.  I told you how he beat me left-handed one time, so I fired him.

I am doing well.  I feel good, and on this low-carb diet I’m able to eat many things that I have not been able to eat for a long, long time. For the first time in 15 years, I pulled into a McDonalds and ordered a giant double quarter pounder….Of course I didn’t eat the bread, so it was a bit messy. Bacon, cheese, peanuts, high-fat dressing, etc., are all part of my new dietary existence. 

Overall, Wayne and I are about tied at around 8 lbs lost so far.  I’m in at 211.5, and all my pants fit better.  Wayne may have lost one more pound than I, but he’s paying the price with headaches, delirious walkabouts around town in the middle of the night, the still-lingering side effects of the beatdown that the meter maid put on him last week, and of course his deteriorating racquetball game.  And I heard that this weekend he ate an entire cherry/raspberry pie.  His wife, Cathy, brought it home from someplace.  She must be absolutely sadistic to do such a thing to a dieting man.

Anyway, I want to share some stories from all over the US, as people, both known to me and unknown to me, have offered their suggestions. 

First, John from Vermont wants me to try his “Rapid-Intestinal-Flush” (or something like that) procedure.  I really have to tell you that anything with the words “flush” and “intestinal” in it just scares the bejeepers out of me. I did a “Celery Flush” in college once.  The school had a picnic, and they had a 55-gallon trash bag full of celery left over.  We were 20 years old and ALWAYS hungry.  We ate the whole bag.  About nine hours later the flushing began.  It was a grueling experience, one that my roomates and I will never forget. We were learning a hard biological lesson about fiber.  Unfortunately, our learning experience was not from a book, but an outright field trip to the bathroom.  But John’s flush procedure doesn’t use celery.  It uses something on the order of Drano.  I don’t know about this one.

Daryl, from Wisconsin, offered his solution of some other kind of “Turbo Flush”, along with “Negative calorie food”.  Now, I have not done the research on this yet, but he tells me that such food actually takes more calories to digest it than what it has in it. I figure it’s something like limestone gravel, tree bark, flax rinds (whatever flax is..supposedly it is really healthy), ground up pavement that they take off the roads when they repair them, or dog hair.  If the negative calorie food turns out to be Twinkies, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and/or milkshakes, I have to tell you that I’m abandoning this low-carb thing in a heartbeat. yes, I love bacon, but chocolate chip cookies and milkshakes are a bit higher on the food value chain for me.

Another John from California says that his mother told him that if he eats raw squid after every meal, it will reduce weight in short order.  He didn’t provide an explanation, but think that eating raw squid after you eat a meal will actually make you throw up. This is, in essence, a bylemic strategy.  It may be that such a dessert will give you a good case of salmonella, which is also an effective weight loss technique used by those who have absolutely no will power to control what they eat or are too lazy to exercise.

Denise from South Carolina suggests that I can eat sweets if I coat my stomach with grease first.  Supposedly this keeps the carbs from being absorbed into your system.  As for my opinion on this tactic, I believe that it’s essentially an alternative to some sort of flush, except with a little sweeter taste. I’m pretty sure they used to use Castor Oil as a flushing mechanism back in the old days. Besides drinking grease, which is about the most disgusting thing I can imagine, how does one coat his stomach?

For now, I’m sticking with the non-flush version of the low-carb diet augmented with exercise.  I travel a lot, and I can’t afford to be worrying about when the flushing will take place, what to do when the raw squid reoccurs on me, or developing kidney stones from eating limestone gravel.  Speaking of travel, my wife, Gloria, is “home” seeing her family.  Before she left, she cooked up a storm….sausage, bacon, big plates of cheese, giant bags of vegetables, a case of salad dressing, and who knows what else.  I’m happy as a clam.  Clams….Hmmm…..that actually sounds pretty good.

See you next week.