A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless unless e chooses to identify emself, posted recently about spending money on food and then throwing it away. My friend said that wasting money, but saving calories/fat, was still a waste.

I have a very different approach. I have been dieting, in various forms, for a few years; this approach is something I came up with very early on. For me, money is no object if it keeps me eating well. This probably also stems from my dozen-plus years as a vegetarian; it is often more expensive to live as a vegetarian than to eat meat. So maintaining my chosen dietary lifestyle has been expensive for a long time. As a dieter trying to lose weight, though, I am spending even more money, and I am okay with that.

Currently, I spend about $450/month on food. This is because I am on Diet to Go, which provides all of my food for me. It’s a good plan, and it’s successful: I have lost almost 30 pounds since January. Because it is successful, I don’t mind paying for it, even though it is about $150 more per month than fending for myself. Money is much easier to come by than weight loss, and if something costs money but allows me to lose weight, then I prefer to take the easier, more expensive route rather than struggling to lose weight - and being unhappy as a result - just to save some money.

I feel the same way about going to a restaurant. I am paying to be satisfied. If I don’t eat everything on my plate and I don’t want to bring the leftovers home, then I don’t. I paid for the meal, not the food - if I have enjoyed the meal, then I have gotten my money’s worth. Sometimes I will bring leftovers home, but only if I’m really going to eat them. Alternatively, I will deliberately only eat half and then have the rest at a later time, thereby getting two meals for the price of one.

If you are poor, or you otherwise need to watch every penny, then my approach is not for you. I’m not saying my feelings about food and money work for everyone, but they work for me, and I am happy this way. I manage both food and money in a way that I am satisfied with. It’s
become a way of life for me.

I was rather surprised by the following news bite from the Washington Post:

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit that called for milk sold in the District to carry a warning label for people who are lactose intolerant.

The suit, filed by an organization that promotes vegetarian diets, asserted that Giant, Safeway and other local distributors of dairy products had been negligent in not warning consumers of the potential effects of dairy products on people who are lactose intolerant.

The suit was filed in D.C. Superior Court last fall by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and was subsequently transferred to U.S. District Court.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ruled that federal law on food labeling would preclude the action that the plaintiffs were seeking in the District.

Wait a minute. They failed to label milk so the lactose-intolerant could avoid it? Milk? Um, it’s milk. Even if someone with a sensitivity has no idea what lactose is or what other products it might be in, they know it’s in milk. Am I missing something here? Why should there be a warning on milk? The name of the group is misleading too, because PCRM sure seems to focus a lot on food and animal testing ethics - it’s like a kinder, gentler PETA that’s pretending to be a medical organization. I’m sure they have doctors on staff, and I’m sure their tactics are much more sane than PETA’s methods, but…they’re not really focusing on what they purport to be about. But anyway…milk? We have to tell the lactose-intolerant to avoid milk?

• Today I am down to 161 pounds. I started 2006 at 187.5 pounds. That’s progress, but I still have a while to go.
• I now know three people who have the Sidekick 3. I am not one of them, and I only ever see one in person but he doesn’t usually have his with him then. I don’t think I’ll be wanting one anytime soon.
• I decided to put away my iPod until the new battery and/or the AC adapter arrive. I was going to try updating the firmware because that sometimes helps with battery life, but I didn’t remember that you have to plug it into the wall to complete the firmware update. So it’s a brick till I get the AC adapter, I guess…argh!
• It is so frustrating not to pick at my new tattoo. I want to poke it and move it around and play with it. I think if I got another design on me I would want an ILY handshape.
• I decided to revamp the way skins are presented on my site. Instead of having a skin listing in the sidebar, I now have a skin selection page complete with screenshots. I also put up a single AdBrite ad; so far I have earned 53 cents from it but that’s just from network ads - I don’t think anybody will actually buy an ad on my site. But hey, 53 cents is more than I ever got from AdSense. I don’t like advertising in general, so I may get rid of it eventually, but we’ll see.
• My car was reluctant to start Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, so I took it in last night. It had also been balky about changing gears (it’s an automatic) but that apparently isn’t the transmission or anything else - they said it was just running the A/C that changes the load on the engine. They said the starter might be going bad but it would have been $350 so I said I would wait, and the guy admitted that was actually fine. Turns out I was overdue for my inspection (oops) and in order to pass I needed two new tires. Tires plus inspection plus oil change (that was overdue too) totaled about $215, not bad.

• I’m going to quit Diet to Go for a month and try NutriSystem’s all-vegetarian diet. It doesn’t have as much variety and the food isn’t fresh (you don’t even have to refrigerate or freeze any of it, although you do buy your own fruits and veggies), so I probably won’t stay on it for a long time, but it’s cheaper than DTG and I have been desperate for a change.
• I got my Sidekick skin and applied it. It came out okay; could be better applied but I think the curved nature makes it impossible to get it perfect. They have a money-back guarantee, but I’m going to wait a few days and see how it goes before contacting them.
• I am genuinely nervous about tomorrow, when I’ll be seeing Mr. Misogynist again. He was the interpreter last year for this contest. I know Jerry said he wanted me for the important stuff, but I’m nervous just about being in the same place as this guy. Who knows if he’ll even remember me. Ugh, I am just so unsettled about it.

Bulleted update, with the help of little mushrooms from binkybeads!

• I have been feeling vague passes of colds lately, like lots of sneezing or just feeling icky. Today it’s a sore throat, although I didn’t notice it until I had to do a bunch of voicing.
• Interpreting a phone call between a deaf client and a completely incompetent helpdesk tech is quite possibly the most irritating thing I’ve ever done. I used to be a helpdesk tech myself, I knew exactly what the answer was, and I was powerless.
• Today I am dropping off a FedEx package with some forms for that government job application I mentioned a while ago. Keeping my fingers crossed but not raising my hopes too high.
• I finally cleared out the 21,000+ spams in my Gmail spam box. I wish you could change the threshold for when it clears it - 30 days is obviously way too long, since my account turned out to be about 10% spam in less than a month. It seems okay for my trash bin though.
• This weekend I will be going off my official diet for the first time since January 3rd. We are going to NYC this weekend (I am interpreting at the Leather Leadership Conference and A will be attending several perfume-related events) and leaving Thursday night, so I can’t pick up the food on Friday night like I’m supposed to. I’m going to buy some cereal and frozen meals so I can at least approximate the Diet to Go experience. I’m a bit wary, but I’m looking forward to it because DTG was getting a bit old.
• It feels so good to park in the regular lot. Contractors have had to park in satellite parking for three years (the entire time I’ve been here) and take a bus back to the main building. They finally opened up the new parking area to us yesterday; my commute has been reduced by a minimum of 15 minutes and it often took longer than that for the extra time to/from satellite parking.

• I lost 11 pounds in my first month on Diet to Go. I know it won’t continue at that rate, and I need to start exercising a lot more, but I am pleased with that start.
• I kind of exercised today: I went geocaching with a guy from the NoVAGO group. It was a couple of hours of tromping around in the woods, probably 1.5 miles total, with some light rain part of the time. We found all four caches in Fox Mill District Park.
• Toadie weighs in with her thoughts on the pet dumping.
• This one is important! I need your help! For a while now, A and I have had a website in the works about MK&R’s cat Mischa. (Those are my sister-in-law and her husband, by the way; they live with us.) They like to tease us with fake websites: “Oh, I found a new website today! Know what it was called? YouAreADork.com!” So we started teasing them back about MischaIsAFattie.com…and then we went out and registered it! So there is a website at that address with pictures of Mischa, stories about him, etc. Please go look at the website and sign the guestbook with a comment about how FAT Mischa is! Once there are lots of comments in the guestbook, we’ll casually suggest that MK&R go look at that URL. (And yes, we will have taken down the Xmas theme by then - we just didn’t have it ready for Xmas.)

Today is my 25th birthday, and I am fretting about whether or not to go out to dinner. I have done extremely well with my diet, and I haven’t eaten anything inappropriate even in the face of emotional adversity. But it’s my birthday, and I want to go out to dinner. My plans are very specific: tonight, go to Sunflower and get my favorite dish, which is soy protein chunks done up kind of like Chinese food. At home, maybe a little bit of alcohol - like a little bit of kahlua, maybe, if I have any at all. This weekend, one piece of cake. (It will be ginger spice cake because that’s what my sister-in-law wanted, and her birthday is also today - she’s exactly two years younger than me.)

It sounds to me like I’m being pretty reasonable. One meal out, possibly a small drink, and one piece of cake. But I have been so rigid on the Diet to Go menu for two weeks that I’m scared to go off. I’m losing weight very well. Is this going to kill my diet? Will I only lose half a pound this week instead of a pound and a half? (Or whatever.) I’m just not sure what to do! Part of me is tempted to just eat tonight’s bean burritos at home, but I know A was also looking forward to going out to dinner with me. I’m scared of breaking the rules.

Just a brief update. The diet is going reasonably well; tonight right after dinner I had some milk and a pear and felt like I’d eaten too much, which is probably a good thing. The food continues to be tasty; the breakfasts have not been too interesting but the lunches and dinners have been quite good. I saw my first fake meat in tonight’s Tamale Veggie Pie, and the Black Bean & Feta Wrap I had for lunch was really good, as was the little wild rice dish that went with it, which had chopped pecans and cranberries. Yummy stuff, I’m enjoying the food on this diet. Still get hungry though; hopefully that will change.

This morning I signed up for Diet to Go, a frighteningly expensive diet plan. At about $435/month, it’s more than a Weight Watchers membership and probably more than Jenny Craig or anybody else. So why am I doing it? Well, I’m tired of seeing the scale go up instead of down. I feel quite frustrated because as far as I can tell, I have been eating pretty well, and it’s not working, which just makes me want to throw up my hands altogether. So on Tuesday and Friday evenings for the entire month of January, I am going to stop at their office near my work and pick up the meals for the next few days.

I signed up for the 1200-calorie/day vegetarian plan, for three meals a day. Someone who works for my company also uses Diet to Go and he said he started on the three meal plan but soon realized he could put together his own breakfasts more cheaply; I have decided to start with three meals anyway because I want to see if it really works. This does depend, of course, on not eating anything but what they supply to me. That’s how I’m going to look at it mentally: NO cheating. There will still be other food in the house, of course - I don’t live alone - but I think I can mentally handle the concept of “no, you can’t have that, it’s not on your plan.” But that has to apply to everything - I think my weakness has been the “eat what you want” attitude of simple calorie counting and Weight Watchers. So I’m going to try the approach of not eating anything I want.

I’m still sedentary, and I need to change that too, but meanwhile I’m going to start Diet to Go and see how that goes for a month.

I was up for a while last night with a headache so bad I had to wake A to get me some Advil because I couldn’t move enough to get it myself. She also called the emergency on-call number my doctor has, and the doctor who responded said if it was really bad I could go to the emergency room. I’ve never had a migraine before, so I wasn’t sure what was causing this, but I finally managed to fall back asleep with the help of A and some TV to distract me. (I was kind of torn - focusing my eyes on the TV was painful, but it was also distracting.)

But this morning I am exhausted. I had a silly little slim-fast shake and some grapes for breakfast, and a diet soda with caffeine when I got to work, but I am falling asleep at my desk. If my client hadn’t been here today I probably would have gone home, but I do need to be here all day for him. So I’m contemplating having something with sugar to help wake me up, but I don’t know what to have. I don’t want something that’s high in calories, but that’s what happens when you have sugar. I guess I’ll head down to the snack bar and see what I can find…I better do that before I fall asleep.

Added: Hooray for Cracker Jack! Only 150 calories but 19g sugar. I feel a bit more perky now. I also bought my lunch salad ahead of time, because every time I wait until I am ready for lunch, they’re all gone. My salad. Mine.