The key is going to be keeping up the variety! Man can not live on Pick-up Stix and Pei Wei alone!  The other thing I’m doing is not jumping straight back into the full-fledged exercise regimend.  I need to feel good physically before I get going again.  Get the syrup out of my veins!

Yet another point may be that I’m not going to hold myself up to a rigid schedule.  Perhaps stay off the scale for a while and just see what happens.  Watch the clothes get looser, etc.

I hereby declare that my original instincts were correct and that white proccessed flour, potatoes and sugar are of the devil.

I’ve found sunflower seeds to be a pretty neat treat.  They keep your mouth busy, are not all that high in calories considering how long they take to eat - and are a great source of vitamin E.

 Anyhow - ten hours and going strong.

I take two medications everyday.  If you want to know what they are, you can look them up under “noneofyourmonkeyyankingbusiness.com.”

A creature of habit I walk into the kitchen in the morning all groggy-eyed and pour a glass of water.  Uncap one bottle, take a pill, uncap the other bottle, take a pill and down they go.  This morning, as I was finishing the last gulp of water, a thought struck me.  One of those pills was brown.  I have taken the same two pills from the same two bottles from the same shelf in the same house for the last eight years, and neither of them have ever been brown.

I looked at one bottle. Fine, all white.  No problem there.  I look at the next bottle and they are all brown.  Squinting at the bottle I saw that the medication was called “DIETHYLCARRBAMAZINE”.  That’s not DIET-THYLCARBAMAZINE like a low-cal acid supresser.  It’s DI-ETHYL-CARBAMAZINE.  Like some serious stuff. 

I saw the next bit of information just as my wife walked into the kitchen.  At the top of the label, the patients name was listed as “Maggie Gates”.  Maggie is our little crack-sniffing fart-whiffle of a dog. 

The next bit of conversation went something like this:

Me: Hun, what are these brown pills?

Wife: Those are for the dog.

Me: when’d you get em?

Wife: Yesterday - at the vet.

Me: What are they?

Wife: Some precautionary stuff to keep her healthy.

Me: Can they hurt people?

Wife: Well, it says on the side that you’re supposed to wash your hands after touching them.

Me: Why are they on my shelf?

Wife: Because you feed the dog.  Stick one in a piece of cheese and stick it in with her food.

Me: Huh…..

That conversation had me Googling “DIETHLYCARBAMAZINE” the moment I got to my desk at work.  Turns out this stuff is prescribed to kill worms.  Now I didn’t think that I had any wild types of worms in my body, but there is this one little one that I have sort of grown fond of.  There are a lot of jokes that go around about burping that little guy, but I’d never actually want to kill him.

The next bit of information didn’t help.  Side effects of the medication include: Fever; painful and tender glands in neck, armpits, and groin.  Now that got me a bit worried because that one little worm I had mentioned above is located rather near what I understand to be my groin. 

Casting the Internet to the side I called my doctor.  Turns out he doesn’t have much occasion to prescribe DIETHYLCARRBAMAZINE.  Quack.

So I called the Vet.  Turns out Dr. Brown was in surgery and couldn’t step away from snipping off an anesthtatized cat’s family jewels long enough to give me life saving advice, so I talked to his nurse Vicky. 

I asked Vicky, “What’s with the “Wash Hands After Handling” label on the bottle?”  Vicky told me that some people are allergic to the stuff.  About as many people who are allergic to peanuts.  One small sigh of relief. 

So I ask Vicky, “What’s with the groin ache?”  She said that the information was from lab rat testing - and the rats were given doses 200 times more potent than a dog would get, which would be even less potent on a full grown man. 

I pondered for a moment how the lab guys knew the stuff made the rat’s nuts hurt.

Then she went on -”On the bright side, you’re good for heartworms, hookworms, roundworms and whipworms for the next six months.  As long as you don’t eat any infected dog feces.”  I told her I’d be carefull, but resisted asking how I could tell if it was infected.

My brain is a little bit bigger than my two fists put together.  Let’s be generous and say that there is a portion of my brain about the size of the top part of my pinky that’s in charge of saying “NO!” to junk food.

Now I’m walking past a Cinnabon and there is the wee little voice of the cells in my little pinky section crying out “noooo”.  Compare that with all the cells in my a$$, belly and tripple chin screaming “YES!!!”  It’s like Horton Heard a Who vs. a foghorn.  There is no competition.

I get the 6″ Turkey or Roast Beef with no cheese or oil.  I ask for plenty of all the vegetables, salt and pepper and vinegar.  I get that with the baked Lays chips, a diet soda and call it good.  It’s less than 500 calories and fills me pretty well. 

I DO feel that the higher glycemic index of the bread and chips makes me hungrier faster - but I have to broaden my options, or It will be too easy to fall again.

I’m making a concession or two this run.  Instead of NO BREAD, I’m looking at allowing for limited amounts of whole wheat bread.  This opens the door for a fine meal at Subway.  I get the 6″ Turkey or Roast Beef with no cheese or oil.  I ask for plenty of all the vegetables, salt and pepper and vinegar.  I get that with the baked Lays chips, a diet soda and call it good.  It’s less than 500 calories and fills me pretty well. 

I DO feel that the higher glycemic index of the bread and chips makes me hungrier faster - but I have to broaden my options, or It will be too easy to fall again.

I’m also back at the gym 3 days a week.  Doing mostly the elliptical.  I do 43 minutes at a crack.  I got to that number in an odd way.  I watch episodes of different shows on my IPOD Video.  I’m watching “Prison Break” right now.  Without commercials, these hour long episodes run 43 minutes.  I’ve heard that anything over 30 minutes of cardio is a waste, but I go the extra little bit.  I’m also averaging just over 900 calories per workout - which has a nice ring to it.

A member of CTU (Milo) is used to arm some briefcase nukes.  CTU (Chloe) finds the nukes.  CTU (Jack) disarms the nukes.  ’nuff said. 

The Vice President is plotting to overthrow the President in a time of major crisis – been there.

The Vice President’s political stance is at great odds with the President’s – done that.

A member of Jack’s family is used as a hostage to thwart CTU’s progress – got the T-shirt

We need some new stuff people!  An atomic bomb was already exploded in the Nevada desert!  Pretty sure that was season two or three.  Jack needs to take on something bigger and more devastating – like global warming.  Or illegal aliens.

Other general observations from last night’s show –

There was an incredibly complex piece of technology needed to arm the suitcase nukes.  Disarming them required a small Phillips screwdriver.

CTU was able to obtain real-time satellite imaging to find McCarthy’s speeding Maserati Quattroporte on the tangled streets of LA, but could not track Abu Fayed’s freaking helicopter?

Civilians are pretty much free to walk around CTU – with their cell phones.

OK, I’ll suspend my disbelief because 24 is one of the best shows on television.  I do think that last night’s two hour showing should have been more like an hour and ten minutes because NOTHING happened in the second hour.  Were they just killing time so that Karen Hayes can plausibly fly back to CTU (LA) from DC without breaking the time/space continuum?