The Battle of the Bulge

Last year, on a low-carb diet, I managed to lose just over thirty pounds. I had more energy, much less stomach irritation, and just all around felt better.
So why'd it all come back?
Several reasons, really. Although I had found low-carb foods I enjoyed, there was the not-so-insignificant matter of all those other high-carb foods I enjoyed. Because I wasn't having them, I convinced myself I enjoyed those high-carb foods more. Didn't take much convincing, either.
Then there's the matter of price. I've discovered that no matter what road to healthy eating you may take, your wallet is forced to diet right along with you. It's perhaps understandable in the case of a low-carb diet, which goes against most prevailing dietary wisdom (eat steak, cheese, eggs, and cream...and lose weight? Yeah, right!) There's no denying it worked for me...until the money situation tightened a few notches. Then my belt loosened a few notches.
But never mind low-carb: even a diet infused with plenty of yucky vegetables (healthy, for sure, but yucky, for surer) gets pricey. If you want to eat cheap, go for the bread, rice, and potatoes...but for the sake of your waistline you'd better be prepared to walk everywhere. Or better yet, run. Backwards.
Is it any wonder that, statistically speaking, the poorer you are, the more likely you're obese?
But the biggest problem, for me, at least, has nothing to do with what I eat and everything to do with how much I eat. Simply put, I'm a pig. By the standard serving sizes printed right on the box, bag, or can of whatever the hell it is we're scarfing, I suspect most of us are. Hands up all of you who eat eleven potato chips and stop eating.

Okay, hands down, all you bullshitters.

Or take those Lipton Sidekick side dishes. Those are supposed to be split four ways. Try that next time you prepare one: you'll find a serving constitutes about three mouthfuls. Barely a taste.
Ditto Kraft Dinner. I mean, I knew a box was too much, but half a box is also too much. Here's a question, and I'm only half joking: if you abide by all these serving sizes, how do you not gnaw your own arm off out of sheer ravenousness?

To make matters worse, I was sabotaging myself with plates the size of monster truck tires and bowls like rain barrels. We bought these things because we liked them, but even the oversized portions I'm used to consuming looked relatively puny; correct serving sizes make your supper look like it came out of one of those nouveau cuisine places where they give you three carrot sticks and charge you a hundred bucks for the honour. Oversized flatware is getting more and more common these days, have you noticed? It's frustrating.
"Hey, I like this pattern!"
"Yeah, but you'd have to saw it in half. Oh, wait a second, that's supposed to be a saucer. Can you break in in quarters?"
"Okay, what about this one? It's a reasonable size."
"Yeah, and it looks like gangrene. Put it back."

And, of course, there's the matter of exorcism...I mean, excercise. I don't get enough. I'm actually pretty certain that all this foofarow about low-fat, low-carb, low-cal, high-fibre is pretty much a moot point. You can eat whatever the hell you want so long as you're willing to exercise it off. Consider the Amish. Their food is rich and tasty and spectacularly unhealthy by the standards of the modern dietician. But they work thirty-nine hours a day. You'd be skinny too.
Face it: the only diet absotively GUARANTEED to work is to eat fewer calories than you burn. I admit, I'm pretty partial to the Ken-diet, to wit: eat whatever you want, and just don't swallow anything...

So: life changes. I'm trying very hard to regard food as fuel, not fun. That's a bitch of an attitude adjustment when my whole diet has always been planned around what I like to eat. We're gradually, as money permits, introducing more organic stuff into the diet (and there's another wallet-killer! Organic eggs range between 1.5 and almost three times the price of regular eggs, and I'll bet you most people can't taste a difference. And eggs are among the cheapest organic items, relative to their non-organic counterparts.

We'll get serious about this when we return from southern climes. Cue the Premier Fitness jingle:

I don't wanna be a fat guy
Rubbery flubbery blubbery out-of-shape dude.