Vegetables, schmegtables ... hand me the ice cream scoop!

In true Jojo style (no holds barred, throw all caution to the wind, throw all common sense out the window, commit 100% before you have the details, etc) I have embarked on a low-cal diet. It's been a week and a half and it's been pretty good so far and I've learned a lot including the fact that dieting is as full of paradoxes as the rest of life. A hard boiled egg, much ballyhooed to be the "perfect" food is far from "perfect" at 211 calores. Shoot, for 211 calories my "perfect" food is an entire cup of Blue Bunny Low Fat Vanilla ice cream at 160 calores. An oreo has half the calories of an apple (with this knowledge firmly implanted in my brain I resent eating fruit but do it anyway for the vitamins and the antioxidants ... sigh). Big Macs and Super Stars with cheese should just be outlawed and, in fact, all fast food should bear a skull and cross bones warning label and have the same sales restrictions as tobacco. NO ID? No french fries for you!

Mostly what I've learned is that eating low-cal is much easier than it was 15 years ago when I tried it last. Technology now provides so much variety it's crackers! Literally. You can now buy little 100 calorie sacks of crackers and cookies and snack cakes. It's a holiday everytime I go to the grocery store. There's been no food that I've had to give up. Notice I said food -- alcohol is yet to be researched. I wish I'd known about all this when I was marching cuz the combination of a low-cal diet and drum corps would have turned me into a sliver of my former self. Nonetheless, I'm giving it a shot now and I'm not finding it all that difficult to eat 1200 or fewer calories a day. Sure weight loss will be slow but the goal here is really a healthier heart and lower blood pressure and those are already peeking over my horizon. My resting heart rate dropped from 106 to 91 in the first week. I haven't graduated to the point of worrying about carbs, proteins, etc but I'll get there. In the meantime, while I may never be svelt, I now know I can eat healthy and feel good and for some inexplicable reason this makes me feel really, really, good.

I'm going at this with the same tenacity I go after everything else with -- so I I've got my teeth in it and I plan to shake it til it dies.

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