Weight a Minute

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Many years ago, during Slope’s earliest incarnation, I wrote about an incident in my life in which I accidentally burned the roof of my mouth with Nutella spread that was too hot. See, I had spread some Nutella on some toast, put it in the toaster, took it out, and took a nice big bite. Yeowwwwww. Let’s just say that Nutella heats up a lot more than bread, and it was like having volcano toast.

It was so uncomfortable to use my mouth for the next couple of weeks that I ate very little and, surprise, surprise, a lost a nice chunk of weight in the process. Of course, once the innards of my mouth healed up nicely, I was as piggy as ever, but for a while there, I had slimmed down.

I wrote a short, light post about the incident, jokingly referring to my “Nutella Diet” and the weight I had lost. Even though it was obviously just a silly little anecdote, I got swarmed with attention and emails with people asking me to tell them more about the secret of this wonderful new diet. They wanted to lose weight, too, and doing so by way of Nutella sounded great. I had to write back a lot of people to explain that, no, it was just a joke, and there was no such diet. It left me deeply impressed with just how desperate people are for a painless way to lose weight.

Less than a month ago, I mentioned offhandedly that I was going to try to shed a few pounds of the cush that surrounds me. Desert Eagle, prickly as ever, snidely point out that I make cracks about obese Americans. This remark was supposed to shame me, I suppose, but it had the opposite effect: it made me realized that if I could trim down, it would actually give me something else to be sanctimonious about. So now I was fully motivated.

We’ll get back to my story in a moment; here is my progress so far: starting at a blimpish 196, I’ve managed to shed 6.4 pounds in about three weeks.

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And lest this not seem like much………

So, Tim, how’d you do it? Nutella again? No, no.

The thing is, what I did was ridiculously small and simple. And it didn’t cost me a penny. I’m too damned cheap to pay someone to tell me what to do. I just do things on my own. So, honestly, just two changes:

  1. Whenever I ordered a Philz Chai drink, I’d order medium sweet instead of sweet sweet.
  2. I do laps in my pool. And not even that vigorously. And not even that long. Like 20 minutes, tops.

That’s it. End of story. There’s the magic.

Now, if I actually tried really hard, swam like crazy, focused on every calorie, I’m sure I’d have lost a lot more. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was just to lose some circumference, maybe getting down to, oh, I dunno, 180 if I can manage. So I’m not ambitious.

To be honest, though, there is a “silent number 3” change that is simply a consequence of the aforementioned very minor modifications, and that is this: self-control. When I reach for the pantry door, ready to grab a handful of cashews to munch on, or a “power bite” to eat, I stop myself. No one is watching me. There isn’t an elf on the shelf. I just figure, damn it, I didn’t abandon my super-sweet chais just to blow it. So I don’t. And, as this actual chart of my weight indicates, I’ve got a nice steady downtrend on my hands.

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