The Hollando Diet

The pallete expander (or “pawitt ethpandah” as Mr. Hughes suggested I was pronouncing it) has come and gone, but my mouth remains a rest stop for ceaseless convoys of food. Originally I theorized that weight loss was sure to follow having a giant metal box extending below the interior upper jaw in the center of my mouth. Where there is a glutonous will, there is a way. This device did not result in a thinner waste line, despite being the closest non-lethal alternative to a complete obstruction of the path food takes to my stomach.

Hence I remain pleasantly plump. The chick-a-dees around town no doubt would take notice, were I to grace them with my voluminous presence. Yet I have hesitated to jump into the deep end of the Dallas dating pool, based in part on the largely discredited theory of my short-term weight loss. Ah, but now I will convert theory into reality!

I have begun anew. The most important goal is to slim down to where I started one year ago, at 174 lbs, and admit that the last year has not been a final defeat. The current regimen: I arise at 5:30 am (or slightly thereafter…), jog to the YMCA, workout, and jog back home. While I cook myself four eggs, I warm up Oatmeal mixed with organic no-fat milk. I add copious quantities of blueberries so as to minimize the impact of the Oatmeal. I capitalize Oatmeal due to association with that smart-alec Quaker bastard staring at me snidely from the exterior of the Oatmeal cannister. It’s like staring at a fiber warhead.

Lunch and dinner are works in progress. I have some ideas about all this new dieting at a blog I joined in anticipation for… yes, a triathelon. A friend from Baylor introduced me to his friend, who happens to work at the best gym in town (I think), and together we are targeting an October race. This approach may a bit aggressive, but that’s the only way to pressure myself into achieving anything.

The key is to wake up at 5:00am on the nose, and to get this out of the way by 6:00am. My real due date is August 15, for reasons I will explain in a later post. I can hear my mother’s voice gently wafting across the apartment as she leaves a message on my answering service… I must cut this post short. Or long. Whatever–I need to catch that call…

Matthew has, really, been too modest. Those of us who have seen him recently know that he’s allowed his hair to grow well beyond its previous bounds, and so he has lost sufficient weight to drop to the low 150s even with this new baggage. Looks good, though.

While I wish I could report my own foray into the 150s, I can’t. 160 has proven a particularly persistent barrier, to the point where I even did a little side check to ensure that my scale was, in fact, capable of registering lower weights. Much to my disappointment, it can. This morning I checked in at 161, which certainly isn’t bad in the grand scheme of things. And yesterday I bought pants with a 31 inch waist, and that felt pretty good too. I’ve also donated most of my old belts, along with an assortment of pants and shirts to a Red Cross clothing drive. Alia iacta est.

Actually, I’m surprised I’ve managed to stay in the low 160s, since the last month has featured several weddings, a college graduation and lots of dining out at various conferences, fundraisers, birthdays and general celebrations.

I should probably correct Matthew’s math, however. According to this site, a standard large single-person package of M&Ms has 253 calories. Based on my cardio workout yesterday, I can burn that off in 18 minutes of torture. Of course, the real benefit is to skip the cupcake and hit the gym.

I still maintain that the workout bottleneck for most people is not the workout itself, but all the accompanying logistics. The workout is fun. The wasted half hour getting to and from the gym is not.

Memorial Day has come, and with it the annual health-club advertising blitz tied to summer beach season. For those inclined to such torment, it sounds like there are some good membership deals to be had. Personally, I’d rather just forego the cupcake than torture myself for an hour to work off the caloric equivalent of a handful of M&Ms. But to each his own.

And as America, far and wide, casts an anxious glance towards its collective midsection, perhaps it would be a good time for updates from our intrepid crew of guinea pigs, er, Hollando Dieters. After all, our first anniversary is nearly upon us, is it not?

I’ll go first: this morning, my scale read 153 pounds. That’s up slightly from the recent low of 152, due no doubt to a weekend of extravagant debauchery.

Well, the blogging over here has been relatively quiet as of late. An indication of successful weight-gain avoidance, comrades? Or a symptom of that laziness which leads to lard?

In any event, the title of this post does not refer to pounds lost or gained by yours truly. (Far be it from me to discuss anything quite so unseemly.) Rather, it refers to an article I had bookmarked several weeks ago with the intention of posting when thinks calmed down a bit. I refer, of course, to Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, which has created a fifteen-pound hamburger. See photographs here and here. Needless to say, it is a beautiful sight to behold.

Field trip, fellas?

I returned from Southeast Asia a few days ago, so it’s time to check on the effectiveness of the Southeast Asia Diet. This time I didn’t get sick, which, on balance, is a good thing, but not from the specific perspective of encouraging weight loss. Still, the general Vietnamese diet and the lack of large quantities of particularly fattening foods contributed to some forward progress. This morning I checked in at a shade over 161, which is about as low as I’ve been in the last five years–and over the 20 pound “Hollando Diet” success threshold, too. Plenty of time to knock off another two or three pounds in the next three weeks.

The one (potential!) problem is that I stopped exercising formally for three weeks, although I spent a lot of time walking around, climbing temples in the jungle, and so forth. Just spending a few days in rural Cambodia at the hottest time of the year probably sweated off a pound or two. But yesterday I couldn’t match my pre-trip elliptical settings, so I may have lost some (heavier) muscle as well as fat. Of course, jet-lag may have played a part, too. But if end up at the same weight in three weeks–but in better shape–I won’t complain. But I still want to get far enough below 160 that normal fluctuations won’t take me back over it.

Rejoice! Sunday was Easter, and thus ended the fast of Lent. This year I gave up drinking — and meant it this time — which doubtless contributed to my continued weight loss. (The implications of this for the rest of the year are rather unfortunate, and I prefer not to dwell on them.)

On Holy Saturday morning — in the final hours of the fast, which concluded with the Easter Vigil — I weighed an unprecedented (in a long time, anyway) 155 pounds. But this is a season for feasting, not fasting, and I have done my share. Surely this has had its effect. Most likely, I’m now nearer to 157. Even so, this equals my lowest weight since 2002.

To all our readers, Happy Easter!

Matthew might be enjoying himself down there in the 150s, but I’m still hanging around eight or nine pounds up. Sure, I’ve dipped as low as 162 in the last few months, but the stable weight seems to be between 165 and 168. This isn’t a biological limit by any stretch of the imagination - it’s just the point at which my willingness to make further downward progress fell by the wayside. February, filled with graduate school interviews and various extended projects was, it turned out, the coldest month.

Still, I’m back in the saddle, more or less. I’ve managed a half-hour workout on the elliptical machine daily for the last five days, and should continue through tomorrow. Wednesday’s probably a write-off since I’m travelling on business all day, but I’m going skiing on Thursday (which, as a consultant, I get to do now and again).

So, new day, new goal. Some friends are getting married in about two months, and as it happens all four of us, including Silent David, are going to be in the same city again–the first time since this all began. So my personal goal is to bring my stable weight down eight pounds, to the 159-160 range. That brings me in a little below the original 20 pound goal. Eight pounds in eight weeks should be pretty easy, even going by standard guidelines for achievable weight loss.

One challene, though: roughly 18 of those days will be spent in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, this will be my fourth trip to the region, and, well, let’s just say I’ve never actually gained weight on any of them. Despite, I should hasten to add, the particularly good food available to those who know people who know where to look.

As a reward to myself for passing the Series 7 test, I have purchased a small blue i-Pod Mini with a cozy four gigabytes of space for my songs. Since my hundreds of CDs convert to about 85.43 GB of music on my home server’s hard drive, I cannot fit all of my collection onto an i-Pod, let alone an i-Pod mini. I do feel a bit frustrated that one week after I purchased the Mini, I saw an I-Pod 10 GB model available for the same price, $199, at Microcomputer Center, the ultimate toy store for technophiles. Grrr…

But now that I have the i-Pod, a dock, and a nifty armband carrying case… I have to start exercising. That one condition seemed to be self-justified when I made the purchase. With spring returning this weekend, I am ready to hit the local track. I doubt I can work out in the mornings, though. I just hate awaking to the prospect of a long run… especially when I haven’t slept sufficiently. So nightly jogging appears to be in my future.

The client associates at our office have a betting pool about who will lose the most weight, and I have joined in the competition. The deadline has been extended to May 11, although one lady has lost twelve pounds! My work is cut out for me. Of course, since this blog started, I have gained about twelve pounds (and as many as seventeen.) With the big Series 7 test having past, I can focus on this project.

Coming soon… a post about the effect of orthodontic work on one’s appetite.

Yesterday I received preliminary evidence of a dieting breakthrough, but desirous of supporting data from a second day, I held off posting the news. This morning the corroboration came: 159 pounds. And just in time for Hawai’i this weekend. We’ll see on Tuesday whether my dip below 160 can outlast an island vacation. Stay tuned …

“Sir, I had Commander Heatherly in my sight…I wasn’t below the hard deck more than a few seconds…I had the shot. There was no danger so I took it.”

Accursed illness strikes again! Yea, and verily do I say unto ye’all: avoid the flu this season. It’s working backwards, from the lungs upward to the throat and last of all the nose. For me, the pattern is usually the reverse.

This past week, I have been participating in a week-long review course for the Series 7. That test is the entry-level licensing test for registered representatives, a.k.a. associates of a broker/dealer firm, a.k.a. brokers. So I found myself in an unfamiliar environment with two dining options: (a) eat at the in-building deli, or (b) eat at the not-so-nearby restaurants and risk returning late. So five gyros and five nacho plates later, I am settling in at a cozy 185 pounds. A reform is overdue.

These sniffles impede my efforts… I must wake at 5:15am, drive to the YMCA, exercise, return by 6:30am, finish eating my roast beef breakfast by 6:45 am, shower and dress by 7:15 am, and enter my office by 7:30am. The schedule is ridiculously tight and quite unforgiving. Yet if I can make it to bed by 9pm, then all of it becomes possible.

A new goal: I shall lose 30 pounds by May 1. That’s just ten pounds per month. That’s 2.5 pounds per week. I can lose less than a pound every other day and achieve this goal.

True, I have been optomistic before… time after time… again and again and again. But this time I will stick to my plans. William’s sister, Faith, has suggested the following: “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, and dinner like a pauper.” So I’ll have roast beef for breakfast, salad for lunch, and then some frozen fish fillets for dinner. That ought to be the general template.

So, when I read this post in three months, what will I be saying? History speaks clearly enough, but then again, I managed to drop to 157 pounds (or so) in law school at the end of year one. Can I do it again?