No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
–Albert Einstein
Anymore, I can’t resist the ads that pop up on my screen inviting me to investigate some surefire way to lose weight. I almost always know what I’ll find, and I’m always excited that it might be good fodder for the blog. Since I’m regularly researching health news now, the ads come fast and furious no matter what I’m doing.
Plus, I like to blow up online calculators.
The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in “calories,” which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none.
― Dave Barry
How are we all feeling today? In the Christmas spirit?
Well, never fear. A number of helpful news agencies have published some gobblitigook that will pull you out of that mood as fast as you can say Kris Kringle.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
–Unknown
After the catastrophe that was yesterday’s loss of all my writing (catastrophe to me; relief to some.) I am going to try again on the subject of idiocy that gets thrown about over the holidays.
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
–Laurence J. Peter
You knew it would happen. Thanksgiving is over, and now we must be subjected to a slew of articles about how to lose that holiday pound. Some of this advice is even packaged in implications designed to make you feel guilty: if you/us big fat Americans didn’t eat all this meat and all this fat at the holidays and get all fat and lazy and gorge yourselves/ourselves on fat and meat the whole world would be a better place.
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.
― Garrison Keillor
Last week the Roommate’s colleague rescued some kittens out of the trash. The poor little things were so tiny that anyone could see they were way too small to be taken from their mother. The lady had heard them crying in the dumpster.
She pulled the pathetic things out of the garbage. The garbage was behind the local restaurant…which didn’t bode well for Mother, I should say.
If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
If you’re not familiar with the term “calories in, calories out,” or CICO, it refers to the dearly held belief that somehow the laws of thermodynamics demand that if we eat X number of calories (energy in) and expend Y number of calories (energy out) that our weight will change by Z according to how much we over- or under- ate our caloric needs. This formula is trotted out as the ultimate answer for obesity.
And it’s idiotic.
‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.’
–Lewis Carroll
When I first read Why We Get Fat, by Gary Taubes, and even more so when I delved into his longer book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, I felt a kind of mental relief, as if someone had removed a splinter from my brain.
He was born on the finish line, so he thinks he won the race.
–unknown
So now you know what’s happened, but how did it happen? That’s the real question. So I’ll tell you the answer.
It was a normal morning. I’d eaten my 1 measured cup of Cheerios and skim milk. I’d drunk my banana/kiwi/blueberry/plain yogurt smoothie. I’d had some black coffee, no sugar. Now it was time to exercise.
Ask Me How It Happened 