A Farewell to Scones

draft

 

I dont know where this will all end up, but clearly scones, homemade or otherwise, are mostly carbohydrates of one form or another.  And that cant be on my current diet, the diet I am on when I basically die.  I need to lose weight.  Period.

 

Bye bye scones.

Fat and Unhappy

draft

Letter to my friend Andy about being overweight.

The situation about losing weight seems to be somewhat complicated. It doesnt seem to be so much about the "healthiness" of the food I eat, although that is part of it, but is probably about the amount/calories thereof. I have been cooking at home every meal for about 15 years. I am a lacto vegetarian (which means I eat cheese and butter, but avoid eggs and of course meat of any type). But I have decades of bad food habits, big meals, and medicating anxiety with food. I have a sweet tooth. My metabolism has changed with age (my father warned me of this) and my exercise per day has gone way down. If you subscribe to the calorie theory of weight loss (and I only sortof do), then you realize to your horror that one scone may be the total calories permissible in a day. To that add the interesting evidence of calorie restriction and life extension, and you realize that you (or me, rather) is / are fucked. I have a variety of different cost/quality equations that I use to control my expenditures and I am most excellently knowledgable about reducing cost in this area, but sadly that would reduce fresh fruits and vegetables and increase carbohydrates. Bad. So I increase costs and eat healthy home made soups, stews and salads. Non fat dressing. Olive oil when an oil is used. Try to keep a lid on the amount of cheese, use half the butter a recipe calls for. On the other hand, life is short, and food is a big part of the pleasure I am permitted to get in this disgusting world we live in. With the orange moron as president and my life and career a ruin, who would begrudge me a half a stick of butter to make blueberry ersatz scones once in a while? Is that so much to ask from life?

So I am fat and unhappy and that is not the way its supposed to be.

Add to that the local culture where all the people here look like they just stepped out of a Nike catalog (and possibly did) and the situation is worse. And everyone here eats kale and my feeling is that the only people who are qualified to eat kale are people from the South, probably black, and they use a lot of tasty pig fat when they do so, and cook the shit out of the stuff. I dont go with this healthy kale thing.

Losing Weight

draft

The medical checkup found nothing of concern beyond some vitamin deficiencies and of course I am overweight.  Can I really succeed at a diet?  Food is my number one mood elevating device.  Two weeks into it, I have the various scales, I have been working on limiting the number & size of portions and off schedule eating.  This looks like its going to be a lot of work.

Garden Update Spring 2015

I have no idea who, if anyone, is interested in my gardening experiment. But here is my update, Spring 2015.

At first I was not going to have a garden this year since I have learned most of what I expect to learn and since I have much less time than before.

But I decided to plant another round anyway for the following reasons: the incremental work since everything has been set up is small, I own all the seeds and materials I need for most of this next season (e.g. insecticidal soap, copper solution, time release fertilizer), and because I wanted to see if I could get better results from the peas and beans disease wise by spreading them out. Also to see if I could get the lettuce to not bolt so fast by planting them in the shade.

So we planted

4 x rows pole beans

4 x rows sugar daddy peas

2 x rows oregon sugar peas

1 row and 1 container romaine lettuce, 1 in shade and 1 not

2 x containers basil

4 x containers sweet 100 cherry tomatoes

2 x rows carrots

I will plant a few containers of cucumbers and a few of semi-determinate hybrid tomatoes if I can find any.

In the past, a planting of this type has resulted in occasional useful crops of all the above vegetables, with some disease and bolting problems. As long as you are not depending on them, they are nice to have fresh from time to time. The pole beans and the peas are by far the most regularly available and actually useful (as I do not normally buy them at the store due to the prices).

The garden experiment is mostly over. It is fascinating to get a feel for the genetic and development issues in plants, and it is also fascinating to see with my own eyes the continuous struggle with disease and pests. If you have never seen this before, it is worth it. As an economic or health activity (e.g. save money or improve health with fresh vegetables) it is marginal. I would have to invest much more and scale way up before the incremental value was worth the investment.