A Question From My Mother

As you can see by looking over to your right my mother is following this blog keenly and has written about her own views on dieting. The post talks about my own exploits and concludes with the question of what motivated me.

I guess the question comes in two parts. What makes someone who's always eaten heartily draw the line, and what makes them want to blog about the process of losing the fat.

The first part is quite easy. My own weight may have had flutters but the trend has been upwards. My waistline has never significantly decreased, only significantly increased. So I must have been doing something wrong to add all the excess poundage in such a sneaky ninja-like fashion. I've never ballooned, always just got a little bigger and then a little bigger again. 40 inch waist, 42 inch waist, 48 inch waist, 50inch waist... am I just waiting on 52? I can't buy trousers in the supermarket any more I have to order them on line. It's a depressing state of affairs. One that I saw no reason not to stop.

In addition Mrs Monkey has similarly decided to take action against her own expanding waistline and it's better to diet together than apart.

As to why I'm blogging it...

Well, one of the problems I've always had with dieting is that I didn't see how it would work for me, I enjoy food and if I wanted to lose weight surely I could exercise... exercise seemed, somehow, more manly than a diet. Then I stumbled upon The Hacker's Diet. This book by John Walker details one hacker's notes from his own quest for weight losage and was my original inspiration for dieting. His explanation of how to control calories is the simplest and rawest I've encountered and definitely made me curious about what I would find if I did something similar.

So here I am doing something similar. One of the massive advantages I have over Mr. Walker is that time has moved on and now with the aid of my faithful CRON-O-Meter I can monitor what it is I am eating and what it is I need to eat far more easily.

I am a naturally resistant dieter for several reasons:

• Dieting is presented as virtuous when it is a process of shedding unnecessary poundage, thin people who flaunt their thinness really get on my wick.
• I like greasy foods.
• I don't like to be told what to do and far too easily give up on self-imposed restrictions that appear to have no meaning.
• Over the course of the past half decade it has become apparent that I am slightly hypoglycemic and I felt that to accomodate my need for blood sugar level maintenance with a low calorific intake would be "too fiddly".
• I'm just a git

For all these reasons I felt that if I were to diet I would have to do it, in some way, remarkably i.e. some remarkable things would necessarily come out of it. So far I have been proven right. Many of my reasons for not dieting are, in retrospect, a bit silly... but only because I have access to a tool that tells me how much of what is in all my foods. That helps me control calorific intake but ensure I get my daily nutrients.

The fact that the fat quota is by far the most difficult to meet even when ramming foods that are liberally sprinkled with red traffic lights down my gob hole just goes to show that your diet expert doesn't always know what's best for you. The revelation of how easy it is to inhale carbs is also something I hadn't expected. More fat, less carbs, sounds like Atkins, except Atkins is more fat, NO carbs. which is a crucial and dangerous difference.

My mother has labelled my approach "low carb" and that's not exactly true. I am eschewing as many carbs as possible after meeting my daily requirements. So it's really more "adequate carb" it is a diet lower in carbs than that of most people in this society but that's because most of us are eating ridiculous amounts of unnecessary carbs.

My mother also kindly imagines that I have "abandon[ed] Big Mac bliss". Au Contraire, mother I snacked down on just that very burger last night, and it was blissful and also within my calorific allowance. This is a diet like no other... one with, er, remarkable properties.