Somebody said, "Have you been working out?" today.

Then he said I was "cut." Sounds so violent.

Meanwhile the clueless personal trainers running the weightloss contest are harrassing everyone about keeping a "food journal" and attending the group rock-climbing jaunt. This weekend they are taking us to the grocery store for a good old fashioned label-readin' sesh. They are going to lead my hapless competitors direct to the Kashi and rolled oats aisle. We are going to learn about Splenda and stevia!!! I hope there's time for an independent study jaunt. I'll come back with my cart full of pomegranite juice and get all kind of extra credit. Everyone will copy me, drink the stuff and gain five pounds. Meanwhile, I'll use it to brighten up my fishtank and dye my socks. My numbers will continue, inexorable, to fall.

I'm going on vacation again, but here's a diet tip: the reason we don't eat oysters in the summer is not that they will give us the listeria but that they spawn in the summer. Do you like to suck cold undiluted mushroom soup direct from the can? Then you will love oyster spawn.

Diet Challenge

I consumed a gigantic bottle of beer at a pub that prides itself on stocking beers of all nations and that has the kind of proud and knowledgeable waitstaff I've come to fear, all wielding the right kind of glass for each beer and serving them at the right temperature and bla bla bla. The menu had six or eight closely printed columns of beers to choose from and I went for a Bock beer from the oldest still-beer-brewing monastery in the world (extant since 1050 and just brewing their hearts out the whole time: I learned all this later, from the label the monks had chiseled into the pre-cambrian stone bottle). I also learned that Bock is the Manwich of beers. You see, it is specifically formulated to provide the calories to fuel all the pre-dawn ablutions, prayer and self-flagellation performed by monks during Lent. Monks who, in that holy season of deliberate deprivation, would otherwise starve to death since they consume nothing but Bock beer the whole time. So fantastic: I chose the sweetest, densest beer on the entire thousand-beer menu. It was good, too, but a little on the Aunt Jemima side. When you get down toward the bottom of the bottle it starts to cloy a little if you haven't just spent a long day a-flaggelatin' of your hindside.

The Porkalogical Congress

According to a highly reputable source, I am in second place, with an 8 pound loss in one week.

It was not my intent to show my hand this early: this is a marathon, not a sprint. I can only hope that my (apparent) jackrabbit start will cause some sensible turtle contestants to panic and try to become hares. A slim chance: they seem an unflappable bunch.

So I'm worried. On the other hand, at the weigh-in I heard some very encouraging talk about "free days."

"This is my free day! I'm going to Moe's!"

HEY, GOOD IDEA!

Now, today I ate at the poly-Latin place. I had the awesome pork chunks and vapid salad, of which I ate the tomatoes. There is no point in eating that stuff they call lettuce. There's no point ordering salad at the poly-Latin place in the first place: you need to get yucca or plantains or beans. But I'm not tryna lose my edge over no plate of fried Spanish bananas, I tell you what.

Fourth of July I had ribs and ribs plus ribs.

I'm going to make pork stock out of the bones and out of that I'm making kale soup. It's my own recipe that I wrote last night. I may share it if it turns out not to be pizen.

(I frikking hate Moe's.)

Hooraaaay!

It worked!

The contest people calipered my various flab, and they told me I'm 33.8% lipids. Wikipedia assures me that's solidly obese.

I thought I would have a lot to say, but I'm still so overwhelmed. I want to run and jump and put my arms around the whole world. $750, you are mine!

Upshift!

Operation Sirloin

Back in the saddle after my day of rest.

I began Operation Sirloin with a can of salmon last night at around 11:30. (Eating when you should be sleeping is a great way to gain!) I made the salmon into a simple "salad" by adding delicious, versatile mayonnaise, the condiment of champions. Some people think that this kind of salad needs things like relish or celery or capers or chopped walnuts or whatever other horror-nubbins they can scrape off the fridge floor or their back teeth. Those people are what I call nutjobs. Tuna salad is tuna and mayonnaise. Chicken salad is chicken and mayonnaise. Salmon salad is salmon and mayonnaise. Ham salad is ham and mayonnaise. Egg salad is egg and mayonnaise. What makes a wad of animal byproduct into what the human community has agreed to call a "salad" is the addition of mayonnaise; lipsticking the pig with your little bit of pickle is just nothing but sad.

Hey, check it out: you can get good canned fish at your small independent grocery store where they sell the Dr. Bronner's and the green algae toothpaste--see if they have it. That salmon was seriously good for canned fish, and according to the blab on the can it was sustainably caught wild Alaskan salmon. The tuna from the same people was good, too, and just as bleedyheart. We ought all to be eating sardines, of course, and that's what I aim to do as soon as I can find some that haven't been drowned in mustard.

This morning thanks to the decent food of yesterday I managed to get out of bed in the morning and do what I have been trying to get up and do all week: I brought my beloved mechanic a box of brownies from the yuppie bakery. I also dumped the leftover Mexicolas on him--he's got three sons and they're at the shop on their feet all day playing monkey in the middle with spent car batteries: I figure they can handle six Coca-Colas between 'em with no lasting ill effects.

I had breakfast at Steak 'n Shake: two flavor-free eggs; four sad, limp bacon strips; two wagon wheels of insipid sausage. A modest effort, but I'm just starting out. I did manage to shake about a tsp of salt on the eggs, which should help with my endgame effort to retain water. Steak 'n Shake is perfectly calibrated to appeal to my demographic. The air conditioning is freezing cold; it's all diner-ey inside--black and red and white and steel and tile and glass; and they play, like, "Roxanne" and "Karma Chameleon" and stuff. So it's like the fifties as imagined by the eighties! Which is great: Steak 'n Shake can make even the dreadful, inexorable passage of time all warm and bite-sized and batter-fried.

Downshift!

I am eating oranges and drinking black coffee, and I am happy again.

I was going to do this gradually by trending off swill onto "healthy whole grains," but when I looked at the maniacally grinning multiracial yuptastic couple on the Kashi box this morning, I Just. Could. Not. Go there. "Good Friends" my fat, raddled ass. Tonight the brown rice, the whole wheat bagels, the bread, the rotini, they go. They all go. Out, you bastard Kashi. Out! I'm glad I managed to finish the challah. But the storebought sourdough is untouched and I don't care: it's going. It's all going, probably to the home of a certain underweight lad I know. I dumped what was left of the carton of OJ down the sink, though. I couldn't inflict that stuff on any lad, no matter how underweight. Nasty weird opaque boiled tasting swill. Down the drain and straight to hell with you! Away! Away from me and mine.

Coca-Cola epilogue and fry rant

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I think I drank five today. My head is kindof killing me a little bit, and I have a backache that I think is related to a the sudden development of a new counterweight situation in the frontal zone. I need to invest in some guywires.

Meanwhile I am completely falling down on the calorie intake front. I ran out of hershey's kisses yesterday and all I had today was a few cups of pasta with butter and a Snickers bar. I meant to hit Krispy Kreme for lunch, but I couldn't get it together; maybe I will do that for a pre-dinner snack. Dinner will be some tubs of movie popcorn. Of course. Like you needed me to spell that out.

Yesterday I had some Sonic meal items. The annoying thing about Sonic is, they play loud rock music so you can't listen to bonehead NPR unless you roll up the windows. Then it's really hot. Are they trying to get me to run the car so I can have the AC on while I await the rollernymph with my burger, fries and shake? Is corporate America not run by money-hongry Connecticut honkies as we've all always expected but in fact run by life forms of Pluto who wish to create an all CO2 atmosphere Earth so that they can raise their CO2-breathing, 50-foot space snails here? Think about it.

Furthermore, here's something: there is one thing these burger places do right and that's fries. Given that they do fries so right and everything else so very very wrong, is it too much to ask that the one fargin' time in like six years I go into one of these hellmouths and order fries they fry them in oil from, like, maybe this month? Instead of oil from before Christmas? Could that happen? No. No, Sonic cannot make that happen.