Dietribe

New! Weight Loss Plan! Explained! In this video!

Cartoon: Life

Thanksgiving: An Ode to Overeating

Now we sit to eat some bird

I have second helpings, then a third,

For forty-five minutes not a word is heard

As we all eat as much as we can.

There’s relish quivering on a plate

And tons of meat to masticate

And gravy for the mashed potat-

oes (man oh man oh man).

There’s spinach casserole in a dish

Next to the dressing (that’s just delish)

And then mashed potatoes, as much as you’d wish

For, the spread goes on and on.

There’s beans and there’s stuffing (both cornbread and herb)

And some pasta thing that’s simply superb,

The tables of food extend way out to the curb,

From the kitchen right out to the lawn.

Nuts in a bowl go mostly uneaten;

The candies beside have them easily beaten,

Healthy consumption always feels like cheatin’

At the annual Thanksgiving meal.

The turkey was cooked all wrapped with bacon

(If you think our meal’s kosher, you’re quite mistaken)

Anyone’s diet was quite forsaken,

Eating badly is, frankly, the deal.

I’m eating and eating and getting quite stuffed

But of dressing and gravy, I can’t get enough!

So I swallow some more, which is very tough,

But that’s what Thanksgiving’s for!

When I can’t fit more in, I loosen my jeans;

I have to find room, no matter the means,

I must have more meat! more gravy! more greens!

I’ll eat till I can’t any more!

Standing up frees some space for one more bite,

But forcing another takes all of my might,

Continuing eating just doesn’t seem right,

So I just stuff the rest in my mouth.

Mm-mm-rrf sn-ggrrr-fn, r-r-n g-ckn,

Fr gn-gn s shn-gr fn gr n-m-n,

Ck-sn dn-mn frr-gn, d-srn dn-drn-dn,

P frgn dr srn grndy brouf.

TODOs

I got progressive lens glasses yesterday. Let's see how I'm doing on life's checklist:

Yep, nearly done.

Fat

My jeans are much tighter than this time last year.

Maybe I’ve been drinking far too much beer.

And too much dessert didn’t help, it seems clear:

I’m think that I’m getting fat.

The problem is that I just like food too much.

I can’t stand just looking; I have to then touch.

Then touch leads to eating, my emotional crutch.

I feel really bad about that.

My shirts don’t even button all the way down

They stop about half-way, right around

My stomach, expanding, without any bound.

Like it’s trying to break itself free.

I can’t see my feet past the rise in my middle.

The view past my chins is also quite little

And the fat in my cheeks blocks the view from my spittle.

I really can’t see much of me.

I tried eating pebbles and twigs and dirt

But rocks made me nauseous, and sticks made me hurt.

I lived like a hermit, in a cave and a yurt,

But nothing helped me a bit.

I tried throwing up everything that I ate

(So desperate was I to lose all this weight)

But getting rotunder just must be my fate

Though I wish my clothes would just fit.

I tried drinking less than a keg every day

And cases of wine are not good, so they say,

I’d like to keep guzzling scotch, if I may,

But it all settles down on my gut.

Then birthdays happen, with piles of cake,

And holiday feasts drag me into their wake,

And I end up stuffing all I can take,

Till I can’t even get off my butt.

So nothing is helping to knock down the pounds,

Not the diets, or puking, or teetotalling, sounds

Like I’d better get used to my big, doughy mounds;

I just can’t seem to beat it.

So bring on the cake and the ice cream and frosting,

And give me the steak and the gravy. It’s costing

My health and it’s emotionally exhausting,

But if you can’t fight it, eat it.

When I am King: Operation: Diet

When I am King...

Losing weight will be an easy operation.

I had surgery recently and lost ten pounds in the following week. This is not even including the weight of the appendix that the surgeons removed. So we’ll round it off and call it an even 50 pounds.

All I had to do to lose the weight was sleep peacefully while surgeons gave my insides a manicure with a buzz saw. Then I took some prescription drugs for a few days.

Meanwhile, traditional dieting is difficult. Who wants to eat fiber when there’s ice cream in the fridge? Why wouldn’t you have a beer if all you need to do is open the fridge, see there’s none left, get in the car, drive around to find a store that’s still open, realize they don’t sell beer, drive around some more, finally buy a 6 pack, drive home and open up a bottle? And who in their right mind orders a salad with light dressing at a restaurant that also serves anything else?

But give someone drugs with instructions like, “Do not drink alcohol while taking this drug or YOU WILL DIE” and, “Consumption of dairy products or anything similarly tasty will inhibit the effects of this drug and YOU WILL DIE” and a diet becomes somehow easier and more palatable. Add to that the fact that, for reasons I don’t fully understand and are probably highly complicated and explained by Latin words, you really have no appetite after surgeries like this. Apparently your insides feel rather petulant and sulky after someone has been in there exploring with a camera and a swiss army knife. So even when you find a food that won’t kill you but that you think you can muscle down past your taste buds, you realize that you’re not really hungry after all.

When I am King, diets will become much easier. Instead of depending on complicated and completely undependable factors like motivation and willpower, dieters will have an operation and drug regimen to help enforce the rules. Having problems controlling the sugar intake? Maybe a procedure that messes with your blood-sugar ratio will help. Can’t resist the double-fudge sundaes? Try an operation and antibiotics that prohibit dairy. Too difficult to keep your hand from picking up another bottle of beer? Try amputating the hand.

This approach has the added benefit of immediately removing items from your body, freeing you from the weight they take up immediately. An appendix is small potatoes, but consider what you could lose overnight through removing larger organs, or whole limbs. A hand may not be worth the trouble for its weight, but consider the 10-20 pounds an arm would bring. Or double that for a leg. The head is quite dense and gives great immediate results, although you should consider this option carefully while you still have a brain because you won’t live long enough to enjoy the benefits.

So next time you want to lose weight, consider surgery ... if you have the guts.

The Appendix

It was a quiet day at the office. A cup of coffee, a little coding, a little snack, some more coding, more coffee, then into a meeting. At which point my appendix decided that 46 years cooped up inside my body was more than enough.

I don't know if it was a coffee overdose or the tedium of another meeting, but the organ had had it; it wanted out. And it was going to get out, one way or the other. I believe its strategy was based on the plan used in Alien - find the quickest way out of the body. I decided to give it another route and had it forcibly removed instead.

The process of getting to the removal stage was, of course, not quite so easy. First we had to figure out what the problem was. All I knew was that I had severe nausea and pain in that whole gut area. I've seen enough movies to know what the problem was: I was about to go into labor. As I told my wife on the way to the hospital, "The contractions are about 10 seconds apart."

My second thought was that it might be appendicitis. This came from my general approach to medical problems, where I just assume the worst possible scenario. A reasonable diagnosis would instead be that I simply had some kind of flu, and that I should go to bed and sleep it off. And in fact that's what the first doctor came up with. He gave me some really nice drugs, including a shot that took me about five minutes to go from pain-wracked to happy, drunken stupor and then knocked me out for 16 hours.

This was great, of course. I haven't had that much sleep in one session since, well, since ever. I should have life-threatening organ failures more often. Unfortunately, the drugs and flu diagnosis didn't change what was going on inside. When they finally saw the results of the blood tests, they sent me in for a CT scan to make sure nothing was wrong. I waited patiently (the painkillers were still swimming in a happy narcotic haze around my system) to hear that everything was normal. Instead, they came and told me that I needed to go to the Emergency Room. Stat. Apparently, they saw the little bugger trying to execute its cunning plan for exit. If only they'd had a CT scanner on the Alien ship. But then we wouldn't have gotten to see Sigourney Weaver blasting alien carcass in the sequel. Life is a tradeoff.

So off to the ER we go. First, I get to sit through triage, going through the same questions that I've answered many times before so that the nurse can decide whether to admit me. Apparently the hospital doesn't trust the word of the clinics. Perhaps I should have groaned louder. Or threw up on her desk.

I finally get admitted, get put in a bed in ER and … wait. Here's this organic time bomb in my gut, just waiting to explode, and I'm sitting there for four hours while a long parade of nurses, technicians, administrators, and surgeons come trooping through my room, most of them asking the same questions, like "When was the last time you ate?" I must have said, "One Saltine cracker at 8:30 this morning" about 15 times. I think they didn't believe me. I mean, who eats Saltines anymore?

Most of the visitors also drew blood. I think this is what medical professionals do when they don't know what else to do. I wasn't on the operating table, so they couldn't actually cut me open. So they drew blood. Over and over and over. Now I'm not a medical professional, so I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that they only need a little tiny bit of blood for each of those many tests they ran on my blood. So why did they need so many different vials of it? Were they trying to starve the appendix into submission? Or is it easier to cut me open if I'm not going to be spraying the docs and the room with gallons of blood? Maybe if they can just whittle it down to a trickle, it makes everything that much more pleasant.

Whatever the reason, by the time they were done I'd been stuck at least 10 different times, between the blood draws, the IV drip, and the several "Oh, that vein doesn't seem to want to cooperate" mishaps. In the end, I felt like my arms had lost several games of mumblety-peg. Though it still wasn't as bad as five minutes outside with the mosquitos on an early Minnesota evening in July. I miss Minnesota.

Finally, everyone seemed satisfied; I had informed the entire hospital staff about the single Saltine I'd had that day, and there was nothing more they needed to know. So they moved me into the Operating Room wing. Not into an actual Operating Room, because those rooms were still occupied. Maybe they didn't bleed those patients enough and were still scrubbing down the results.

No, they moved me into a corridor in the OR wing. There I was, sitting next to shelves piled high with plastic medical devices (the one closest to me held "intubation tubes", which I recall from early seasons on House is the main device used by every doctor for every patient). And there I lay, on my gurney. Just me in the corridor, next to the shelves. I was afraid they'd find me there years hence, when someone went looking for another stash of intubation tubes. "Hey, there's a guy here!," he'd call out. They'd answer quickly, "Ask him whether he ate anything this morning. And draw some blood!

But after a half hour of me observing the complete lack of anything interesting, someone new came by, hooked up the good drugs, wheeled me into the operating room and … I woke up two hours later.

So here I am "recovering" this week. It's a weird thing, recovering from this kind of surgery. If I'd had an amputation, I could see the evidence. If I were on serious mind-altering drugs, then I wouldn't feel like doing anything. But after this kind of operation, you feel nearly normal. The main thing you're supposed to do to recover is not actually act normal. Don't exercise, don't lift anything bigger than a fruitcake, and definitely don't go skydiving, or you'll find yourself back in the OR corridor. I think they just want to bore you to health.

I'm not sure why I wrote about this, except that it was something different I did recently, so it seemed worth recording. Like winning the Nobel prize, or traveling to Portugal; it's not something you do every day. Well, unless your Portuguese. And maybe I wanted to pass along this advice to anyone that has a similar experience: always assume the worst outcome from anything you feel. Then you won't be surprised when it comes true, plus you'll have the added benefit of feeling good about yourself because you were right. And if it's not true (which it generally isn't), you'll feel better about whatever the real problem actually is.

Oh, and don't eat that Saltine in the morning before your surgery. They just won't shut up about it.

When I am King: Filling You In

When I am King...

We won't need dentists.

I went to the dentist recently and was told I’d need fillings. That’s pretty normal - my teeth attract cavities like nerds attract bullies. It’s just the natural order of things.

The annoying part was that I needed fillings … to replace my fillings. The dentist said, “You have some older silver fillings. We have to replace those because you can get cavities under them.”

Hold on - they want to fill teeth that have already been filled? Why is that fair? I’m pretty sure the dentist manual says that they’re supposed to fill cavities. Moreover, once those cavities are filled they’re supposed to go rooting around to find more cavities to fill. They are definitely not allowed to go looking back at filled teeth to see about re-filling them. They’ve been there, done that - my filled teeth have done their part and sacrificed themselves for the greater good of my mouth. Now get the hell away from them and go find something real to charge me for.

The problem could be that there’s not much enamel left in my mouth for them to poke and prod. My set of teeth simply don’t provide a fertile soil upon which the dentist can plant future profits. So she’s looking for other ways to ply her trade. If your only tool is a little metal pointy thing, everything looks like a cavity. Even a filling.

When I am King, everyone will have artificial teeth. I’m pretty sure it’s the only way to keep the dentists and their sadistic ways away from our mouths. People think that Jaws, the James Bond villain, had those metal teeth for some nefarious purpose. Not true; he just hated dentists. And if they tried to fill his teeth anyway, he’d bite them.

When I am King: Warning: Smoking is Gross

When I am King...

Anti-smoking campaigns will be more effective.

Once again, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me alerted me to the critical news of the week. I rely on the podcast of that show for all of my information about current events, this time about

the new warning labels required on cigarette cartons. Apparently, the government, not satisfied with pithy quips like, “Can cause birth defects” and, “Has been known to cause cancer in just about every living organism” decided that it was time to make the message clearer, going for a more folksy, “You Will Die” message in the new labels.

I applaud their intent: every smoker is obviously so happy with their life choices that they need these little reminders of their impending doom. In fact, I’m jealous of the fun they get to have with every new pack, wondering what the picture and caption will be. The prizes and games on our cereal boxes pale in comparison.

But I disagree with their approach to the problem. It simply won’t work for this reason: everyone that would quit the habit because it can kill them already has (either by choice or by death). Everyone that’s left is either not getting the obvious message or just doesn’t give a damn. Making the labels more graphic will just stiffen their resolve like a toddler being asked to please not throw a tantrum in front of the nice lady from Child Protective Services.

Now you not only have a society full of smokers, but one full of grossed-out, pissed-off smokers.

The problem has always been in the messaging. Telling people that they might die eventually because of it, or that others have died from it doesn’t hold a smoking candle to the allure of teenage rebellion. And it doesn’t do much for the person weighing that risk against the difficulties of quitting an addiction.

When I am King, there will be a more effective marketing campaign to get smokers to quit. The ads will just point out other people in your chosen community. Parents who smoke will be shown that their kids are smoking, and teenagers will learn that their parents smoke. Both groups, horrified by the prospect of being lumped in with the other, will finally have some real motivation to quit.

One other approach the FDA could try is to make the labels as frank as possible, like “This cigarette will kill you,” and then backing up the threat by lacing it with poison. Not only will this be truth in advertising and an excellent disincentive to others that see the warning, but it will also reduce the smoking population, one by one. I’m not actually arguing for that approach, just saying that it would work better than the ones taken so far. But perhaps killing the target demographic is not what the marketing folks had in mind.