Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that I’ve lost a lot of weight – at my lowest point, I’d lost 86 pounds. I am literally a different person than I was when this all started President’s day weekend of 2007.

But in the last couple of months since school started, I’ve gained about ten pounds back, and that realization has been extremely frustrating.

I can tell you exactly why: I’ve eaten like crap. Being back in school, exercising a lot, and bike commuting have made me feel like I had a license to eat whatever the hell I want.

The problem is, eating whatever the hell *I* want means eating about 30-50% more than I actually should eat. I’ve always been terrible at portion control unless I’m really, really concentrating on how much I’m eating.

And if you’re eating that much, unless you’re Michael Phelps swimming 10,000+ meters a day, you’re not going to burn all that shit off.

I always felt when I was working and trying to lose the weight that I would treat the weight loss as my second job. I think I need to get back to that mentality, because I’d slipped away from it for the last 3-4 months and that’s when things started to fall apart.

The thing that’s probably going to help me the most in getting back into physical shape is the fact that I am a complete tightwad: Most of the additional calories I’ve been taking in have been purchased in restaurants or off Twittering food trucks and not in grocery stores, and are thus expensive in both cash money and fat-assery.

So I’m getting back on the Public Declarations of Nutritional Intent bandwagon with a few resolutions to get this shit back under control, because I can already tell if I don’t it’s going bad, bad places which will require much larger pants:

- I will no longer count my bike commute as part of my exercise for the day. Either I actually work out or I have to really watch what I eat – I must choose one. It’s only about 2 miles each way anyway, and it’ll be a lot less strenuous in the uphill direction once I buy a bike that’s not a completely rusted out piece of shit (more to come on that in a couple weeks, hopefully).

- For larger platters, I need to stop stop eating halfway through, wait 15 minutes, and then decide if I am actually hungry for more or just wanting to finish it for the sake of finishing it. I have always been the “I must finish everything on my plate” type, often to my detriment. I need to be a lot better about stopping when I’m physically full.

- I will order healthier stuff when eating out. I will, in fact, have the salad. I will stop ordering the freakishly enormous chicken burrito from every Korean/Mexican Fusion food truck that pulls up to the quad. The healthier stuff, unsurprisingly, is usually cheaper because it’s just physically less food.

Proofreading this post, I realize I sound like I’ve become a little unhealthily fixated on food, but the problem is that if I’m not, I become flat-out unhealthy.

The good news is, I think I’ve identified the problem before I allowed it to get completely out of hand. We’ll see how it goes undoing the damage I’ve already done.

It’s official: I have the flu. I tested positive for Influenza A, although apparently for the seasonal type rather than the H1N1 piggy flu type, which I suppose is a small mercy. However, it’s still the damn flu.

My fever spiked to 101.9 before I went to bed last night, though it finally broke sometime in the middle of the night. I woke up at about 2am and felt a lot better, but realized my sheets were completely drenched in sweat. That was just awesome.

The worst of the fever seems gone – I’ve been hovering between 99 and 100 all day today – but the coughing, exhaustion, and loss of appetite are still on full-force.

I will say, the flu is a very effective (though not at all recommended) way to balance out the fact that I ate like a pig in Chicago. Between basically having to force-feed myself even the 1200-1400 calories a day I can get down and spending a lot of extra energy on such illness-related tasks as sweating profusely, I’m already back down to what I weighed before I left.

I would have preferred the traditional exercise method, but I certainly can’t deny the efficacy of the flu.

The doctor wrote me a scrip for Tamiflu, which she thinks will be effective in preventing this from turning into anything worse, as well as possibly knocking a couple days off the end of the illness.

She also gave me among the more amusing doctor’s instructions I’ve gotten in a while, which were “Sleep a lot, drink a lot of fluids, and watch a lot of T.V.” Waaaaay ahead of you there, doc.

I thought for a bit about what the hell I was going to do with the gigantic goddamn lemon, and finally, I figured I might as well just keep going with the literal theme of the day:

Yep, I made lemonade. An absolutely ridiculous amount of lemonade from one lemon, in fact. Normally to make this amount of lemonade you’d need about seven or eight normal sized lemons.

It’s actually pretty tasty, though we’ll see how well it holds up after spending some time in the fridge.

This monstrosity has been hanging from the lemon tree in my apartment complex for the last few months. Today, just as I was heading past it to go to the gym, it fell off the tree, right next to me.

Given everything that’s been going on lately, I had to laugh. Life has now taken to literally giving me lemons. Guess it’s time to break out the sugar and make some lemonade.

I eat a lot of Healthy Choice frozen food. I am a terrible cook and I’m trying to lose weight, so their products appeal to me.

One of their more respectably tasty entrées is their “Chicken Margherita”, a nice little chicken and pasta dish. For years, it was served in the traditional small, flat box.

The packaging has recently been changed, however:

They have decided, for some reason, to make this a “Cafe Steamer” dish. This is problematic for several reasons.

The first is that it vastly increases the size of the packaging, to the point where I can’t fit more than one in my freezer at the same time. Why is this?

Because each individual package is now two very large, thick pieces of plastic: A bowl the sauce sits at the bottom of, and a steaming basket that sits above it with the pasta, chicken, and bits of tomato and garlic.

This leads me to my second problem with this change: Did anyone think of how much more waste this whole process produces? To go from one flimsy piece of plastic to two very strong ones a) cannot be cheap and b) is just a wee bit earth-unfriendly.

And frankly, it doesn’t really taste any different from the way it did when you just nuked the traditional flat package.

It does, however, lead me to the most amusing problem: Hilariously obvious instructions.

This is a picture of the directions on the back, which you can click to enlarge:

I direct your attention to the text in italics on the bottom right. If you can’t read it from the picture, it says:

Meal can also be enjoyed by placing steamed food on a plate and topping with sauce.

Wow! You mean I’m not legally obligated to use this giant plastic thing included in the packaging? I totally thought that’s what I was agreeing to by purchasing this Cafe Steamer.

Overall, it adds up to a needless, wasteful, and downright silly redesign of a product that was just fine the way it originally was.

I was famished when I got back from the gym today, so I poured myself a big bowl of milk and Cheerios. I got about three bites into it when I realized, “Gee, despite the fact that it smelled okay, this milk tastes awfully sour.”

I realized how sour as I was pouring the bowl into the garbage disposal. The milk wasn’t pouring, it was oozing. Hopefully the few bites I had aren’t going to come back on me later.

I was out of non-cereal breakfast food besides eggs, so I said, okay, I’ll just make myself some scrambled eggs. So I scrambled up the eggs, and go to turn on the stove. Of course, the electric stove starter isn’t working.

I broke out my headlamp and looked behind the stove, and somehow it’s managed to come unplugged. My arm is neither thin nor long enough to reach back to the plug on its own.

I MacGyvered up a poking stick from some vacuum cleaner parts, but I couldn’t get enough leverage to actually push the plug back in far enough to get it working.

I tried to pull the stove out, but it’s firmly wedged in. Finally, I gave up and decided to use my big long lighter to just light the damn burner.

I looked all over the place for the big long lighter. Couldn’t find it. Finally gave up and used a normal lighter, almost burning my thumb off in the process.

But at least I had my eggs, which I ate while calling the landlord and telling him to send over some guys to help me plug the damn stove back in.

I realized tonight as I stopped off at the grocery store on my way home that it’s been an astonishingly long time since I actually went to the grocery store for more than about five items.

Since my foot surgery, I’ve gotten highly addicted to getting my groceries delivered. It’s so much easier than going grocery shopping that I hadn’t been in quite some time, despite the fact that I think it works out to be slightly more expensive.

As I got out of work at a reasonable hour tonight and have been running low on many foodstuffs, I decided to actually go to the grocery store.

About five minutes after I walked in, I heard the voice of George Oscar Bluth in my head, saying, “I’ve made a huge mistake.”

There was…so much food! And it was all on sale! I had to buy it now or I’d lose out on my chance to save $1.65 on a box of couscous!

The other problem was that I’ve gone into severe stock-up mode for the long winter of unemployment that’s about to descend on me, and there were several items there that helped me in my goal of trying to keep my average meal cost hovering around $3.

I now have enough cheese to clog the arteries of even the most fastidious jogger, enough cans of Chunky soup to make a three-story pyramid, and bunches and bunches of Honey Bunches of Oats. Oh, and several boxes of couscous.

Luckily, I think I now have enough food to get me through about mid-January, except perhaps having to pick up the odd gallon of milk from time to time. Although I suspect I’m going to be awfully sick of Chunky soup by that point.

So I’ve mentioned my joking plan to subsist on cat food should the strike put me out of work to several people, and I’ve learned a couple of things about inexpensive food:

1. There are a lot more ways to prepare Ramen than you’d think.

2. People seriously will eat anything when they’re stoned. More than one person mentioned eating dog biscuits while high. One even touted the biscuits’ high calcium content as a potential benefit.

So I used to eat a lot of pizza, but as I’ve been trying to lose a large amount of weight, I’ve limited myself to one pizza per five pounds lost.

After a long break because I took so much time off the gym after my surgery, tonight was a pizza night. I was very excited about this, because I looooove pizza, and trying to be disciplined is…well, trying.

I called up Papa John’s to order for pickup as I left physical therapy, since they’re doing a $6.99 large one topping deal on pickup orders. Here is the relevant part of the conversation I had with the guy taking my order:

Him: And what topping would you like on your pizza?
Me: I’ll have half pineapple and half cheese.
Him: Just cheese?
Me: Yeah, plain cheese.

So imagine my surprise after plowing through half my breadsticks and opening the pizza to eat when I found nasty-ass anchovies on half my pizza, the half that was supposed to be plain cheese.

Now I don’t eat seafood at all (food poisoning when I was ten gave me what’s basically a conditioned taste aversion), but even if I were to make an exception, it would not be for oily, salty, gross, horrible anchovies.

I suppose it’s probably better for my continued weight loss that I ended up just trashing that half of the pizza. Still, it’s a bit frustrating to have to throw half a hot, fresh pizza in the dumpster.

Using the tried and true method of “weigh self holding cat, then put cat down and weigh self, then subtract,” I was aghast to discover that Chaplin now tips the scales at almost 17 pounds.

I put him on the “weightloss/hairball control” formula of cat food when he hit 16, and while he stayed at 16 for a while, I can’t figure out why he’s suddenly started gaining again.

The only thing I can think of is that since I’m now home to notice that his food dish is empty as soon as he finishes with it, I might be feeding him more.

Still, it explains why I fear my ribs are going to crack whenever he comes and sits on my chest.

I’ll have to keep a better eye on his food, otherwise I’m going have to get him a little kitty treadmill.