Author Paul - The Wry Eye Guy

Results … Month #8

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Results … Month #8 (Down 40 lbs) results-month-8

I can’t believe it! I dodged a bullet. Again!

I’m down 4.2 lbs for the month. I could pitch that as another success story for this amazing dietary philosophy I’m practicing. But it just doesn’t feel like that. I blamed December’s lackluster results on the holidays, January’s on work travel, & I’ve been mentally preparing to talk about the winter blues & blahs as my excuse for February. While all those excuses are true, the really huge news in this month’s story is that I haven’t abandoned the diet. I’m hanging in there. Falling off the wagon, & that has happened several times, hasn’t resulted in some huge rebound.

I started this program by practicing for failure. Let’s be real here, most of us yo-yo dieters know that we start a diet on Monday. We enthusiastically make our way through Wednesday. By Thursday, we feel like we deserve a treat. The wheels come off on Friday. And we binge ourselves to a new high on the weekend. Just a little reward before we start a new diet the following Monday!

That’s why I needed to learn how to fail … first. And I’m not talking carrots & celery sticks here! You’ve seen pics of some of my failure foods along the way. When times are bad, I’m eating more failure foods, more often. During those times, I’m eating as I might expect to eat when the diet is “over”. It’s pretty good. I can live happily on a diet that includes French fries & ice cream. Though, even by my rules for failure, I’ll admit to overdoing it on the chocolate!

My big fear now is that things are tapering off. The downward slope of my weight-loss graph isn’t as steep as it was during the first four or five months. Is this the end? Is this as good as it gets? Or will the warmer spring weather, when it finally deigns to arrive, bring along some fresh enthusiasm for the program?

At this point, I am grateful that I haven’t done the rebound thing. But I’m not sure what happens next. I alternate between being cautiously optimistic and then, despairingly melancholic about ever getting to a safer, healthier weight.

The next couple or three months will be very interesting. I’m writing the story, but I have no idea how it turns out.

Welcome to March … here’s hoping it’s a good month for all of us.

Smart Way to Open a Blister Pack & Store Batteries!

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Smart Way to Open a Blister Pack & Store Batteries! 

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Safe & Easy Blister Pack Handling & Battery Storage

I’m fed up talking about diet & weight loss at the moment so, today, I thought I’d share something useful instead. This is something I stumbled across recently. After decades of shredding my fingers & hands with the sharp edges of cut blister packs, I discovered this method purely by accident.

If you’ve ever found your hands in similar condition after doing battle with a blister pack, I hope this helps.

It had reached the point where I would take out the antiseptic ointment & some plasters ahead of opening a blister pack. Knowing that a sharp edge or corner was going to reef at least one digit during the process of extracting the ridiculously well-guarded product. This last time, I found the holy grail!

I’m using my favourite battery blister pack as the example in this case, because batteries come with an additional problem. Or at least that’s true when you’re OCD like me! I have a horrendous fear of a couple of batteries bouncing around in a drawer, in the company of a couple of paperclips & a tissue. I can’t but imagine the paperclips perfectly connecting the battery terminals, so as to complete the electrical circuit & to then create sufficient energy to set the paper on fire & burn my house down. I know, I know! But it’s just how I am. And there are stories out there.

Anyway, I like to preserve the condition of the formed blister pack, in order to safely store the batteries in it. Since they are already all nicely aligned, with the positive terminals all facing in the same direction, they stay that way if you can store them in the original pack. And they are protected from any potential contact with those dreaded paper clips & tissue paper!

If you hunt down online solutions to blister pack challenges, you’ll find people suggesting all manner of techniques. But many result in the destruction of the blister pack, rendering it useless for long term storage. They also suggest the use of tools ranging from tin snips, through scalpels, & on to box cutters. I’m almost surprised there aren’t more recommendation for power tools! Not only do you have to worry about cutting your hands, now you’ve got to worry about cutting through your kitchen counter top! You can even buy a custom tool, designed specifically for cutting blister packs. I have one. It’s useful but it’s not as good as this little technique.

In this instance, I just used my favourite scissors. I decided to cut off the big useless piece of cardboard at the top, as you can see in the top left image. This was just to make the package easier to handle. But then, I accidentally broke the little strip of card that remained along the cut edge. You can see this sticking out on the bottom left pic. It’s the little white strip sticking up in the air. As I handled the package to pluck this little strip off, the blister pack, with all the batteries, began to slide out!!!

Flipping the pack over, I then realised that the backing card on the blister pack was now the perfect sliding cover for my little battery storage box! That the pic on the right hand side of the collage. All my batteries are now stored this way. Of course they are stored in their own little basket. On a high shelf. With no paperclips or tissue paper anywhere in sight!!!

Come on now, that’s a neat little technique, isn’t it!?!

Have a great weekend! 🙂

Mood Altering Foods

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Mood Altering Foods

Sourdough Bread

I’m being lazy, sorry. I am recycling this bread pic because I wolfed down the tomato sandwiches too quickly!

I generally don’t eat candies so I have no idea if that red food dye still gets kids going crazy in the classroom. What does seem to have an impact on me is bread. Though I’ll admit sugar might also be making a contribution. Whenever I fall off the wagon and eat bread, I’ve usually fallen so far off the wagon that I’m devouring cookies, candies, and who knows what else. None of which aid weight loss. And some of which may be playing with my head.

I’m generally an optimistic person. On a bad day, I’m probably just a realist. It takes a really bad day for me to feel depressed. Though on any given day, regardless of mood, I can certainly be anxious about uncertainty. Or about something that matters to me. Whatever my mood, I can make the situation feel worse by eating bread. I was feeling a little anxious the other day. My diet was off the rails and I simply couldn’t get it back on track. I have no idea why but, in the midst of this, I was inspired to test the bread theory. Again!

Growing up, I absolutely loved bread. There is probably no better way to eat food than stuffing it between two, heavily buttered, slices of a crusty loaf, is there!?! Bacon and eggs, ham and cheese, cheese and onion, French fries (the amazing Chip Buttie!), cold cuts, hot meats, even potato chips! Fresh bread, toasted, it doesn’t matter, all are simply great. Just on its own, there’s nothing like oodles of melting butter on an oven-fresh hot loaf. My mouth is watering as I write, though I only had a couple of almost-boring tomato sandwiches for lunch the other day. Even they were delicious. I couldn’t help myself, I ate more bread with dinner that evening. That evening I felt great. No indigestion. No feelings of malaise. No depression. Had I overcome the effect? Could I safely eat bread again?

Unfortunately, the physical and mental challenges caught up with me through the night. Disturbing my sleep and leaving me to lie there worrying about how I might ever get back to losing weight again. The next day was challenging, I couldn’t stick with the low-carb regimen I had planned during those sleepless hours. I felt quite miserable about it all.

Yesterday, I thought I’d try fighting one kind of starch with another and I committed to a predominantly potato day. I had hash browns for lunch. And a ludicrously large bowl of home-fried potatoes for dinner. Okay, I admit it: I went back and had a second bowl.  I started out with at least a cup of olive oil (it’s a really big pan!), along with six or 8 cloves of garlic, one medium onion, and some hot peppers for added flavour. And then that huge pot of cooked-and-cooled potatoes hit the pan with a sizzle. I did sneak in a chocolate-nut mix dessert too, drenched in heavy cream.

While my stomach was a little distended as I trudged up the stairs at bedtime, the noise in my head had abated. After a good night’s sleep, imagine how elated I was to find myself down 0.8 lbs the following morning!

Had I banished the bread banshees? Was it the feel-good butyrate produced by my tummy bugs from all that resistant starch in the cooked and cooled potato? Who cares! Feeling good is feeling good.

I’m not sure that I’m back on track yet. But I am cautiously optimistic!

Let’s see if I can make it through the rest of the week without making any more silly dietary decisions. Even if I have to force myself to eat more of those amazingly delicious absolutely awful potatoes! 🙂

Get Fat Like the Cat!

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Get Fat Like the Cat!The Fat Cat

At the weekend, our pet store was sold out of the grain-free cat food so we picked up a small bag of the regular stuff, to tide us over. That word “regular” is potentially one of the most dangerous words in the modern North American vernacular. We talk about regular sugar, for example, as opposed to sweeteners. It lends an air of acceptability and normality to things that might not necessarily be acceptable, nor normal, given our genetic inheritance.

As kids growing up in the countryside, our pets were free to move between the house and the great outdoors. We fed them table scraps and all sorts of foods that might be frowned upon by pet lovers today. Indeed, our parents weren’t impressed with our food disposal techniques back then either! However, given freedom of choice, animals are a little smarter than humans. It wasn’t unusual to find dead birds, rabbits and mice at our back door. These pets still knew how to eat a more natural diet, and they went hunting when they’d had enough of human junk food.

Now, as city dwellers, we feed our house-confined pets from bags of processed food bits. Yes, they have pretty pictures of salmon fillets and prime cuts of chicken on the bag, but some pet foods are heavily biased towards grain. Eating such foods, our cat got fat. No, our little kitten was obese! So we switched to the grain-free foods and … wonder of wonders … out kitty slimmed down a bit. She is still overweight. But I think it’s fair to say that she’s no longer at the kitty BMI level of obese.

We typically feed our kitty twice a day, morning and evening. Like all hungry pets, she nibbles enthusiastically when her bowl is first filled. But then she saunters off to lazily perform her morning ablutions. She’ll wander back and forth to the bowl for an occasional nibble so that her morning bowl probably survives ’til about lunch time. Her evening bowl usually has some few leftover pieces that will survive ’til the following morning.

I noticed that her morning bowl of this new bag of grain-based food was gone within the first hour!

Is it possible that cats can’t have just one cookie either!?!

And isn’t it funny how we like to feed our pets a healthier diet than we sometimes feed ourselves! 🙂

Results … Month #7

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Results … Month #7 (Down 35.8 lbs)Results Month 6

Is this result an abysmal disaster? A huge failure? I’m not sure. But let me tell you the story & you can be the judge.

It is a little sneaky of me to post results as I do. Unless you care to check back, it looks like being down a reasonably decent amount of weight, like 35.8 lbs, is a good thing. And overall, it is. Unfortunately, I posted exactly the same number last month! In other words, this is the first month where I have not lost any weight. None, zero, nada!

On a day to day basis, even on a weekly basis, my dietary approach looks kindly on failure. Programmed failure is not only allowed, it is embraced, as one of the keys to long term adherence. On a month to month basis … not so much. I was under duress this past month. And right towards the end of the month was the big annual trade show for my day job. This is probably the busiest month of the year for me. Preparing for the show, the activities of the show week, & the post-show work. To top it all off, I returned home with trade show flu! Shaking hands with so many people, from all around the world, it’s almost inevitable that you come into contact with a bug or two that you don’t already have resistance to. Naturally, there are dinners & events throughout the show. If I tell you that I had to attend business dinners at Ruth’s Chris Steak House on three occasions, you’ll probably have some sympathy for my predicament! 🙂

I made some really poor choices throughout this past month. The trade show week was even more disastrous. I can make all the excuses I want, but the bottom line is that if my goal is weight loss on a month to month basis, I can probably classify this month as a failure. The question I must pose now is this … do I pat myself on the back, offer self-consolation, & promise to do better? Or do I beat myself up in an attempt to berate myself into doing better this month?

I think I’m going with the latter! I know it’s not the modern way but then I was programmed in a different era. Let’s see how it turns out in this, the shortest month of the year!