I’ve Seen The Enemy. And He Is Delicious. Cherry. Pie. Scone. I Can’t Even Pretend I’m Eating Well.

So I’m Working Out Now. Which Sucks.

I don’t want to say I failed at eating well. Not wholly, anyway. A lot of the basics in my diet have changed for the better. There’s wheat in place of white, I eat fruit every now and again, and Coke Zero is on tap in my living room. Whether I am eating as well as Richard Simmons or not I have now been forced to face the other side of the “healthy lifestyle” coin. I’ve been working out.

I have been to the YMCA each of the last three days, the only three consecutive days I have worked out in my entire life. I have had more consecutive days watching Quigley Down Under.

I’ve said it before but it is not something I feel I can overstate. I hate working out. I hate it. Every gym I have ever been in makes me feel like a hamster on a wheel. Where you going? I don’t know, but my legs sure are moving a lot! My dog would have had the sense not to run in place for a half hour. Of course, there are the free weights. I get these, in principle, but I hate them, too. I think it is because I hate moving. Lugging my boxes and crap from one place to a truck and then from a truck into another place. Lifting weights seems like moving someone else’s stuff but never finishing. I suspect there is a punishment in Hell that works the same way (your Hitlers and Stalins and Maos eternally moving a hide-a-bed upstairs through a doorway, your pederasts and drug dealers maybe lugging boxes of books…. Had Dante known about the Y the gym would be somewhere between Sisyphus and that three headed doberman).

Then there are the machines. The resistance machines, the stair-master!, the elliptical machine, the rack, the bike, the iron maiden…. In general I like machines. They make so many things easier. Cranes lift stuff, bulldozers push stuff, go-karts go in circles, stereo systems play Metallica. All of these things are made easier by machines. Stuff moving, head banging, going in circles – where would we be without mighty machines? Thus I am very comfortable with the idea that I may be crushed by an iron girder, accidentally ground into sirloin by a runaway bulldozer, or made def my listening to Master of Puppets a little too loudly. No matter what I do I can’t wrap my head around the senseless death offered by the machines at the gym.

Ever run on a treadmill and accidentally half-step off the conveyor and on to the rigid plastic? If you have you are lucky you weren’t sling-shot across the floor into the bulky beefcakes preening in front of the mirrors. Ever been on one of those recumbent bike when the seat slides back or forward on you? My LCL almost snapped which would have killed the woman next to me. And the elliptical… this looks like a machine from the future envisioned by hack sci-fi film makers in the sixties. Heaven help you if you fall into those spiraling death footbeds. To me the elliptical machine looks like a high-wire above a threshing machine.

And the sweat. I thought I produced a lot of sweat, but the guy before me always appears to have been melting. Left for my convenience on the seat, the handles, in pools along the base of the control panel…. If I am going to slip on a liquid and fall breaking my pelvis I hope the liquid is from a melting fudgicle and not runoff from a sopping gorilla.

But I’ve been going to the gym for two reasons, one more inspiring than the other.

One, it balances out my inability to eat well all the time.

(One-point-five, I kind of have to. I could re-title this blog “my wife makes me work out.”)

And two, and this is the big one, they have cable TV on the machines. Something like seventy channels. In the last three days I have watched SportsCenter, part of a Yankees game, the exciting fourth quarter of a college football game, and more than my annual quotient of Dog The Bounty Hunter. I am checking the listings for Knight Rider. I’m a Hasselhoff marathon away from conditioning for an Iron Man.

We don’t have cable in our house but the treadmills at the Y have it. Even though it makes me feel like a little fish that follows the light only to realize too late that the light is dangling before the jaws of some prehistoric predator, I find this enticing and cool. I may end up mutilated in some freak elliptical machine incident, but my last glimpse of the world will be Monday Night RAW (which is probably better programming than you get before the iron girder pounds you into the sidewalk).

On the recommendation of a friend I will soon try watching TV at the gym while snacking and not working out. I see myself in bunny slippers (note to self – buy bunny slippers), robe open, bag of Bugles in one hand, Dr. Pepper in the other.

Maybe I could get into working out after all.

Good Eater, Bad Blogger or Bad Eater, Bad Blogger?

Apparently I suck at blogging as much as I suck at eating well.

If I blogged as well as I ate I’d have thousands of witty, insightful pages of blog to put up every day. Unless by eating well you mean eating healthy, in which case blogging as I eat means I don’t do either well. But if by blogging well you were to mean not cluttering up the internet with mindless self-centered drivel, well, I am good at that, but I am not sure what the trans-fat consumption equivalent would be to that. I eat badly or I eat well. I blog badly or I blog well. My mistake may have been attempting to link the two.

If you were to say eating well meaning eating a lot of fried foods , banana flavored Twinkies, and washing it all down with Slurpees than, yes, I am a great eater. I am, in fact, (sorry Mom) a fan-fucking-tastic eating machine. I defy you to find a shark, a Dom Deluise, or a CGI dinosaur that eats like I do. Saturate it with fat, fill it with cream (or even better, creme), pour chocolate over it, make it sit up and bark, I don’t care, I will eat it. If you see a sign that says “all you can eat” come in and say hello. If you are walking your cat and you see me carrying a bottle of barbecue sauce, head the other direction. If you drop your ice cream on the street, don’t worry, I’ll get it.

I don’t have a point other than that I eat well. Or terribly. Depends on whether you own stock in Carl’s Junior, home of the jalapeno cheese burger (which is so awesome it hurts).

But enough of the semantics. “I eat well or good or bad or badly…” blah blah blah blah. I set out to write a blog documenting the process of my learning to eat well, changing my habits, and getting in shape. That was two months ago. But here’s where I am today. Kind of a progress report, of sorts. My findings:

I now weigh 423.7 pounds.

They know me by name at the nearby 24 hour Mexican restaurant.

Eating well makes you feel good, but eating poorly makes you smile and burp and want to eat more.

Exercise is for the mentally unstable.

The KFC Biscuit Bowl represents more than a pants-shattering conclusion to the digestive process. It is, in fact, a delightful way to spend 20 minutes and as good a way as any to moisturize with white gravy.

Fruits and vegetables, though purchased with the best of intentions, go bad if they sit on your counter untouched for more than a few days. This does not happen with Twinkies.

So, clearly, I am going to have to start over. But first, a quick snack….

The Fat Get Fatter

I started this blog as an attempt to instill some accountability and focus into my effort to eat better than I have historically. A recent theme in my postings appear to be my failings / gluttony / inability to say no to a hollow calorie or anything deep fried. But it’s what I got. If you don’t enjoy watching me fail miserably and grow ever larger than the waistline of my pants please feel free to download naked pictures of the Little Mermaid or something because I got some confessin’ to do.

Events kill me. I know a lot of it is a cultural thing. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we Americans like to add to the celebration with food. And by food we Americans rarely mean spinach salads with a light dousing of vinegar and oil.

The photos below are a fair representation of several days of dietary failure and stomach discomfort the extent of which would have felled Roseanne.

The events were the Caldwell Night Rodeo and the Western Idaho State Fair. At the rodeo we had steak fingers and gems, corn dogs, and more gems. For those not in the know, gems are tater tots. Steak fingers are basically beef McNuggets or chicken fried steak balls (whichever you most enjoy saying). At the fair we had MORE steak fingers, some sweet potato fries, chorizo, and a fried Snickers bar. I know. A fried Snickers bar. What a great country this is.

The photos include the baskets of steak fingers and the fried Snickers.

Did you realize “fried” is one letter away from “friend”?

To try to convince you that we didn’t just lie face down in grease all night I have included a photo of a young man being shaken (not stirred) by a bronco and a picture of Trevor Hattabaugh, a twelve year-old stand-up comic who played the fair. The kid was more than a welcome break in the eating and he was also pretty funny. “What’s the deal with Winnie the Pooh?”

I’d write more but my eating hand is cramping and I need to get to KFC.

Yours,

Tubby

The Damaging Events & Foods

I’m Not Bendy

No matter how badly I wish it to go away there is just no escaping the fact that the other side of the eating well coin is working out. I hate working out. I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it. I hate sweating, I hate the smells of the gym, I hate the machines, I hate jogging, I hate locker rooms, I hate people in tight clothes, I hate stretching, I hate people who talk about working out, I hate magazines about working out, I hate exercise videos, I hate bicycles, I hate trainers, I hate the Y… I. Hate. Working. Out.

I kind of like Richard Simmons, though. Is that weird?

Fact is there is only so much your diet is going to do for you all on its own. You can eat heart healthy, but that does not mean your heart is getting stronger. You can lose weight, but that doesn’t mean you are going to be able to run up a flight of stairs without getting winded. You can be thin, but not fit. This sucks. Changing your diet is hard enough. Adding a regular exercise routine really adds to the pain of healthy living. Plus, is it just me or does a good work out make you want a cheeseburger?

Even though I am not very good at it I have always enjoyed playing basketball. I also always believed that if I played once in a while it was enough to keep me fit, kind of like turning your car over after a week of non-use. Just keeping the motor warm and moving the fluids around periodically ought to be enough. When I was actively playing basketball several times a week I might have been able to keep myself in shape, maybe, but the weekend warrior scene is one ripe for torn tendons and sore muscles.

So I hate working out, I can’t play a game I enjoy enough to do anything but cripple myself, and eating more tofu does not make me physically stronger (you’d think overcoming a gag reflex would strengthen your core, but it doesn’t). This means my options for getting tuned-up are living a more outdoorsy lifestyle, which I am trying, or the hamster wheel machines at the gym. In an act of desperation this morning I tried a third option, which may, in a perfect physical fitness regimen, simply be a supplement to the other activities. This morning I went to my first yoga class. It was free and my wife made me do it, so shut up.

A few hours ago I thought yoga was an excuse to lie on the floor with Buddha’s blessing. I regret to report that Buddha and the yoga instructor are somewhat more demanding than that. For the uninitiated yoga is hardcore stretching. You find quickly that there are muscles, muscle groups, and even whole sections of your person you almost never use in daily life. I also learned that I am really, really, really, inflexible. At one point I thought my hamstrings were going to spring loose and decapitate someone. Yoga, and we did not do one of those goofy, torturous bikram yoga things where they stretch and strain you inside an oven-temperature setting, is far more intense that I expected. It doesn’t take a lot to make me sweat (reaching for the remote, opening a bag of licorice, paying for a milkshake…), but a few minutes of trying to touch my toes and I was red-faced and looked like someone had doused me with a pail of water.

A key to yoga is breathing. You inhale and exhale consistently in tune to the motions of your body. I found this very difficult and, had grades been handed out, I’d have failed breathing. That’s how pathetically out of shape I am. I can’t breath properly even when I concentrate on it. Straining to hit certain positions I would hold my breath, fighting the movements, and then blow like a whale cresting above the water line. This amused no one.

After an hour of being asked to do the impossible (like touching my toes AND breathing – I could do neither, let alone both at once) the class concluded with a few minutes of lying flat on the mat with the lights turned off. They call this the “corpse” position and it is designed to relax and re-center you after your workout. At this I am a master. Lying on the floor, mind numbed to the world, I excel at. Before I was married I did this for hours on end. I was once so good at this that I was able to watch hour after hour of The A-Team without it disturbing my peace and tranquility. That is mental toughness. I may start my own yoga discipline designed to make my students the most relaxed and centered people in the world. Lazy Corpse Yoga.

Right now, an hour after having left class, I feel pretty good. I am aware of some muscles I was oblivious to when I woke this morning and I feel halfway between having had a massage and having engaged in an actual workout. I am not ready to call it a win-win activity, but I feel good and nobody got rat-holed by my exploding ligaments. Now for my cheeseburger….

Talk About Your Fresh Fish

We took a little vacation recently, which for us always amounts to heavy-duty eating with intermittent bouts of shopping and, maybe, sight-seeing. We live in a place where “fresh seafood” is not likely to be affordable or, well, fresh, and as we were in Seattle for this particular vacation we tried to hit the seafood pretty hard. This is delightful for a few reasons, not the least of which is that seafood without deeply fried batter is not terrible for you. Tasty, healthy, and a treat to boot… win-win-win.

One of the culinary delights we most miss from our previous region of residence is sushi and we spared no time in seeking some raw dead fish. Our first stab was at a place called ‘Ohana, a “Japanese Polynesian grill,” which was okay but not a place we’d likely return. Maybe those seeking sushi would be wise to look at places that specialize in sushi and not a place attempting to fuse two cuisines (no matter how attractive the fusing may sound). Our next attempt hit the mark and then some.

A few blocks from ‘Ohana we found Shiro’s Sushi. I don’t know who this Shiro guy is, but his raw dead fish beats the bejeezus out of just about every other raw dead fish we’ve eaten (with all due respect to the delectable sushi we gobbled down one morning near the fish market in Tokyo). The prices were a bit stiff, but these days we are thrilled to get our money’s worth whatever the price point. We ordered our standard favorites and a few others and, caught up in a flurry of ordering excitement, we bit when the waitress suggested that the jumping shrimp were fresh. Four glassy shrimp tails and two severed shrimp heads arrived a few minutes later, our first ever order of raw shrimp. We were a bit nervous about the meal and stared at it for a minute. The hostess at the restaurant noticed our staring and stopped by to remind us not to eat the heads because they would be lightly fried for us to eat in a few minutes (duh – don’t eat the shrimp heads, they are just here for you to enjoy before we fry them for you).

The tails were excellent. Crisp, cool, tasty, and not at all briny. While we ate the shrimp we noticed one of the heads still flickered with a bit of life, its little antennae and arms moving just a bit (a prayer for a quick trip to the the fryer?). Again we stared, enjoying the spectacle of freshness and a little uneasy with chewing on the rear of an at least partially ticking critter right before its eyes. Our waitress popped by, saw the shrimp moving, and giddily said something about freshness. After we polished off the tails the two heads were taken and returned very quickly and lightly covered with tempura. We were told to eat them while they were hot, which we did, and again they were delicious.

Apparently you can just eat shrimp right out of the net. Cooking shrimp is for suckers.

As if eating a shrimp tail in front of the shrimp is not enough spectacle for one meal we were also treated to quite a show by a trio of regulars who were seated at the sushi bar. The trio consisted of a couple and their two year-old, a sweet little yellow haired boy who eagerly devoured fish roe and seaweed, much to the delight of everyone at the restaurant (the sushi chef smiled twice all night, both in response to the appreciative little boy smashing the chef’s creations into his mouth). We have seen very few adults ravenously devour fish roe the way this kid did. I was probably twenty before I had sushi and have just now, in slightly more than a decade, worked up to raw shrimp tails and lightly fried heads. For his tenth birthday this kid may be eating the scales off still swimming salmon. My wife might have stayed and watched the completion of the family’s meal had it not started to occur to everyone that she was smitten with the little guy and close to abducting the boy.

We have decided to apply the principles of Shiro’s fresh jumping shrimp to all of our other meals. It may be hard on guests to stare at a cow’s twitching severed head over cheeseburgers, but we are committed to freshness and that is just how it is going to be.

Pop’ems!

This just in from that little end cap at the super market - Entenmann’s Pop’ems!  Don’t let their appearance fool you.  Your eyes may see “donut holes” but these little swetthearts are drenched in that thick, waxy, lovely and most likely calorie-free Entenmann’s glaze.  And the name!  How aluring is “Pop’ems” as an invitation to drain the box?  Pop’ems.  Say it aloud. 

Pop’ems. 

                                                                                       Pop’ems. 

                                                Pop’ems. 

Not that I have tried them.  But you should.

Meatless Meat, Part One

It has come to this. Meatless Meat. If you had told me that the precise instant some jerk invented the meatless corn dog the dead would rise from their graves, the seas would boil, and the sun blink out I might have believed you. Such things seems galacticly wrong. But apparently some doofus went to the time and trouble to try and figure out how to make a corn dog without the “dog” and we weren’t sucked into a black hole, so yippee for us. Can you imagine that being your life’s work? This if a food whose most perfect iteration featured meat that was, at best, loosely defined as “meat” and probably swept up off the slaughterhouse floor. The same lunacy has inspired a surprising line of meatless meat products available at your local grocery.

The Meatless Chicken Patty, in regular and “spicy,” by the people at Boca Burger, remains a welcome addition to the new diet. Calories-wise they weigh in at about 150 calories each. We broil them or just let them sit in a pan over a medium heat for fifteen minutes. They are basically soy and water and I do not think you could burn one if you dropped it on the sun. At the time of my first exposure these seemed to me to be the most ridiculous things I had ever eaten (and in the last 18 months I have eaten worms, whole grilled sparrows, and kangaroo). Sadly a few week’s time would prove me wrong. On the upside they are tasty, crispy, and easy. Years of eating cheap, crappy fast food chicken has dulled my sense of taste to the point that had you served me one without telling me it was a veggie patty I wouldn’t have noticed.

The Meatless Corn Dogs made by Morning Star are also a vegetarian food. In my defense these things taste almost identical to their counterparts made from the parts of pig and cow you’d hope there were regulations against serving. They are a cool 150 calories each. While I stand by the taste I still feel I am falling into a sick, twisted, Bizarro World of food stuffs. But if you think a veggie Corn Dog is weird take a gander south….

The villains at Gardenburger make BBQ Riblets. These are a heftier 240 calories per serving and made of soy. The sauce is actually very good – sticky sweet and spicy. Charmingly enough the fake meat is pressed to look like a little slab of ribs. They’re funny. They also taste a little better than they have a right to. You won’t confuse them with the real deal, but that isn’t the point. The point is, I think, that I am a total weenie. Let’s rephrase and contextualize that a bit better to salvage something respectable from the carnage of my manhood:

Dieting is hard and the cravings can drive you nuts. You either spend half your time moody from daily denial or contemplating sneaking to Denny’s after your wife goes to sleep. The genius of these little meatless morsels is that they will never replace the real deal but they will provide a little guiltless indulgence when you need it (I suspect the magic would wear off if you ate these more than once a week).

I have to editorialize a little (more) and say it frosts my cookies that the righteous wing of the vegetarian and vegan movement condemns meat for a variety of reasons but then drive the market for fake meat. If meat is murder or meat it unhealthy, why do you insist on meat-like products in your diet? I doubt that the half-aisle at the super market is aimed at frustrated meat lovers who aspire to see more of their waist. Wouldn’t we think it odd that a person might express outrage over bestiality but still own a blow-up goat?

Alas, I should not take out my frustrations over the difficulty of trying to scale back on my desire to eat whatever I want whenever I want on the poor vegans. They suffer enough. At least the meatless aspect of my diet serves to accentuate the joys of real meat, stick and all, when I have earned the treat. But I still feel like weenie. I’m pretty sure John Wayne, Dick Butkus or Charleton Heston never ate a Meatless Corn Dog. Not without beating half to death the person who handed it to them.

Meatless Meat, Part Two

The Corn Dog. Timeless treat, fried and conveniently located on the end of a stick. If you like your meat on a stick, and who doesn’t?, you love the Corn Dog. This little piece of mad science defies one of the two definitive principles of Corn Doggery by replacing the cheap meat we so love buried beneath the insulating corn coating with something only slightly less meatful. At least they kept the other definitive attribute, the stick (which you still can not eat – that will be a good day if it ever comes).

In Australia they call Corn Dogs “Pluto Pops.” If I know the Aussies like I think I do, they would call the veggie version of the Pluto Pop a “f*$#@! *&^$!@!!” and stomp me to death with their rugby cleats.