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I ran a half marathon today in 2:08. This is significantly faster than my best time so far and at the same pace that I could barely do 10 miles in while on a low carb diet. Besides vastly expanded cardiovascular capacity, I’ve noticed a few other changes after dropping low carb:

*A slight bump in mood. Sugars tend to make me happy.
*A return of the mid-afternoon nap-urge.
*Small increase in ability to lift weights.

Assuming the two were equal difficulty, I would stick to low carb. The level amount of energy throughout the day is wonderful as is the fact that low carb almost forces me to do low calorie. I will re-try on Monday.

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1/2 a bagel with a 1/2 oz of cream cheese
A bottle of juice
An English muffin
2 cups of strawberries
A 1/2 can of ravioli
1/2 a salami sandwich
1/2 of chicken wrap
A small caesar salad
2 oz of cheese and crackers
An apple
A banana
A Fiber One bar
A Reese’s chocolate Easter egg

I ate constantly today but nothing over about 250 calories.

I miss the days when I could have three square meals consisting of two cheeseburgers and consider myself at par.

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Instantaneous anger of the esoteric could be considered my bailiwick as I’ve gotten angry over corn napkins, the pronunciation of pagan holidays, photosynthesis and now most recently the discrete nature of most foods. Sticking to “stop eating when you reach a point where you won’t be hungry again for a bit” has helped but has led to some odd portion sizings and today I got mad that I couldn’t have 4.5 chicken strips and 2/3rds of an orange as that would be my target portion size for a lunch. Going from having 21 tater tots to 18 was fine but 12 to 9 was much more noticeable despite being the same absolute gap. I can’t have a 1.5 egg breakfast sandwich but 2 is too much and 1 is too few so I’ve switched from sausage to bacon to pork roll and back to bacon after the chef at work started giving me double slices. I ordered a chicken salad last week and wanted 6 oz of chicken not 5 or 8 and upon going with the 5 had some salad left over as I hadn’t considered that’d I’d receive enough croutons to build a small bunker. Foods more amenable to continuous change tend to be grains that tend to put me to sleep or liquids which leads to weird cases where Max gets 2 of my 12 oz of corn chowder soup.

Strangely, other things ignore this trend as while I can limit myself to 3 Oreos at the end of dinner, I’ve not been able to master only having 4 Fig Newtons. I’m pretty good with having 3 oz of cheese but having 2 oz of corn chips proves elusive. So there is my first-world-problem temper tantrum of the week.

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Homemade salads have eluded me for years.  I’d buy a head of iceberg lettuce, some appropriate other pieces and attempt to create a salad.  I recognize that salad is simply a glorified way of getting dressing into one’s body but found the repulsive power of lettuce an impediment.  In a flash of midnight inspiration, I realized that the fact that the lettuce was iceberg lettuce was the problem.  Romaine and I appeared to have always gotten along, so I moved onto the next phase of Operation: Salad 2010 Background: I’ve found the best New Year Resolutions I make to be the ones of the nature “I will try this”.  Some have led to life changes, others simply a ticked checkbox.  One of my 15 or so items for 2010 was “make my Caesar salad”.  I purchased the appropriate pieces and not quite willing to make my own dressing, started with a protosalad of romaine lettuce and Newman’s Own Caesar Salad dressing.  I added dressing, checked for coverage, added more, checked again, added more, and I think I hit the right amount of dressing.  I reachedthe bottom of the salad bowl and found a kiddie pool’s worth of salad dressing.  I then went through 3 more bowls of salad to go through the dressing.

I tried again today and anticipated the dressing trap, used about 1/2 as much, which still resulted in an excess of dressing.  I like Ranch dressing as I know when I’ve hit my target, but I can’t differentiate between freshly washed Romaine lettuce and dressing.  This may be a rare genetic/social deficiency like my inability to identify antecedents.  On the plus side, I’ve gone through two heads of Romaine lettuce trying to master what probably comes to humans naturally.  I haven’t been this regular in a while.

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Marketing’s recent return to our office clime has resulted in some odd collisions.  As a thank you to engineering, they left out donut holes for us assumably the night before as I saw no marketing folk in when I arrived at 5 AM.  There was a box on each photo copier and the coffee area and each of my passes about those areas netted two more donut holes, a habit some other early risers also picked up.  When the first marketing person did arrive the donut holes were largely gone and consolidated into one box that I wound up finishing the next day as no one wanted to take the last one,  despite having no qualms with consuming this lone survivor’s numerous kin.

I briefly convinced myself I’d not consumed in excess until I calculated that each box would have had to have been about 1/4 mile away from each other to create sufficient calorie expenditure to equilibrate input with output.  At least if I stuck to the two furthest boxes I could be fine within an order of magnitude.  That’s good enough in many sciences, I hope nutrition’s one of them.

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Joe’s Pizza on 206 serves mediocre pizza at high prices of around $3.25 a slice for a sixth of a 16″ pie topped with at least 3 meats. Three of us went to lunch today and thinking ourselves sneaky purchased a polymeat pizza while rubbing our hands greedily thinking of the ensuing savings. Instead of a fresh pie at a more reasonable price, we got six reheated slices at a cost of $24.00. Yep, it would have been cheaper to purchase six single slices (19.50) rather than the whole pie. Is there some sort of pizza gestalt such that the whole pie is much more valuable than the pieces? Is this his passive aggressive way of saying “stop eating my food, panda jerk”? Did he see our sneaky handrubbing?

Time to go back to jerky cured in a 40°C environmental chamber. Where else can you get ISO 9000-certified dried beef?

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It’s been a bit of an office ritual that a coworker of mine would scan my clothing for food stains.  Most have some sort of culinary christening as despite my best efforts I usually get hit with something.  Recently, I somehow got a bit of egg under my dunlop.  The next day, I somehow managed to get a blot of ketchup on my shirt and pants positioned symmetrically about my waist like I’d dropped the Heinz bottle and caught it by kneeing myself in the bosom.

But something magical happens when I’m driving.  While eating while driving lies somewhere between road-head and the radio in terms of lethality I can safely consume an entire chicken cheese steak while driving.  Today I stunned my coworkers by eating a Chipotle steak, rice and pepper burrito one-handed with not a blot show.  Maybe if I got a MarioKart wheel or simply played Radar Love I could emulate this road-borne success at the work desk.

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Day 1
Coworker: You have a stain on your shirt.
Me: Yeah, baja chalupa, always gets me.

Day 2
Coworker: Did you change your shirt?  There’s a stain on it again.
Me: Yeah, baja chalupa strikes again.

Day 3
Coworker: No stains.  Did you find a way to navigate the baja chalupa?
Me: It was cold today, the stain’s on my jacket.

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I go through bursts of hating to eat out.  It’s a poor value in that I’m essentially paying for a table and for someone to periodically interrupt the conversation.  Joe and I changed tack and for $12.00 we enjoyed about two pounds of chicken strips and a pound of tater tots washed down with some swell apple cider.

Driving home with my arm out the car window holding the champagne-like bottle and drinking it at red lights and modifying my route to drive by as many police stations as possible was my attempt at evening entertainment.  There just aren’t enough cops out at 10 PM on Tuesdays.