I never thought I'd see the day....

Well, that isn't exactly true. I've noticed for some time now that the sports "news" site CBSSports.com has dealt with more gossip than anything else, but I found this headline today amusing:

Who is baseball's fattest player?

Turns out they're getting the story from GQ (Gentleman's Quarterly), but still the fact that they're actually sharing it....

As you might expect, it's 95% pitchers who are the "fatties" in the league. I have often wondered how any self-respecting athlete - making millions of dollars a year - can't control their weight better, but to be honest, what bugs me about baseball players the most is their ridiculous facial hair! If they don't have furry little soul patches just below their lower lip, they've got a thin stripe going down their chin. If they don't have that, they've got a patch of hair underneath their chin, with about 4 inches of growth extending from it.

Do they really think that looks anything other than ridiculous? But...that's baseball players for you. Just as 90% of basketball and football players have tattoos (and I'm noticing more tattoos on baseball players mow, too) 90% of all baseball players with facial hair don't have real beards, but these effete looking things. (Note there's a difference between effete - useless, and effeminate).

Well, my off topic rant for today.

Let's get back to the point of the post. It's GQ, a "style magazine." And what are they doing? They are attempting to shame guys into losing weight. Well, I suppose it's tit for tat - women have been shamed into losing weight by the media for years (and then the media turns around and expresses concern that this actress or that actress might be anorexic), and now they're going after the men. Expect football players to be the next target.

One hamburger = one portion - and don't let your parents tell you different!

I accompanied a friend (and client) to her parent's house last night. Her brother, age 50, is staying with her parents as he's been out of a job for two months, thought apparently he's been offered a job now and will start later this month.

That's not the point. The point is this guy is short, about 5 ft 5, and at least 200 pounds overweight. And apparently he's been working on that weight for 30 years (long standing overweight is always more difficult to get rid of then newly acquired weight, but it can be done.)

Anyway, it was a simple meal, hamburgers on buns, beans, onion rings - (and yes I pigged out on the Onion rings and blossom sauce, full of calories though they were.)

But what I thought was interesting, and a bit sad, was that everyone else - mom, dad, sister and me, guest - each received one hamburger. But the dad - who did the cooking on the grill - actually cooked two extra hamburgers for the son.

Who ate them.

Later on, in talking to my friend, she told me that that's the way it's been the entire time the guy has been staying there. The parents always cook "one" portion for themselves, and extra portions for the son, who most definitely does not need them.

They are enabling him.

And it's not like he wants the food, apparently. According to my friend, her brother has mentioned that he "should cut back"...yet he has apparently never mentioned this to the cooks in the household, or if he has they haven't paid attention.

The moral of this story is... don't cater to your children's appetites. (Even your grown children's.) Unless they have superfast metabolisms where they can eat everything and not gain a pound.

Kids typically don't eat as much as adults. Don't therefore give your kid an adult-sized portion, and then throw away half the food on his plate that he doesn't eat. After two years of doing this you're teaching him (or her) that waste is okay. At the very least, save the food on the plate and if the kid feels like a snack later on, have him eat the rest of the good on the plate, not a candy bar or a cookie. (And monitor the cookie/candy bar intake. If the kid stops at just one, that's fine...if he eats three - time to remove them from the house.)

Girls of course require special care, as many of them typically eat too little rather than not enough. Yes - even girls as early as 10 have been inculcated to believe that they must starve themselves so they don't gain an ounce of weight, otherwise they will be teased unmercifully for being fat (and indeed, probably will be. But, that's a rant for another blog and another time.)

So if you're an overweight individual on the other side of the spectrum - you are trying to lose weight but your parents - or spouse - keep piling the food on your plate, don't just suffer in silence. Tell them you're trying to lose weight and please not to cook so much food! It's a lot easier to lose weight if family and friends chip in to help you.

'Dancing' helps Kirstie Alley slim down

Kirstie Alley is in the news again - she's been on Dancing With the Stars (a show I don't watch, admittedly,) and apparently she's half her size.

And that's great news! I'm very happy for her.

But I seem to recall that she had lost weight before...on Nutrisystem or Jenny Craig or something, and had gained it all back. So I hope that she has at last found the secret of maintaining her weight loss - which means she can't go back to her old style of living, but must maintain the style that enabled her to lose weight in the first place.

As a wealthy actress, this would seem to be easy. She's got the wherewithal to go to a dance class every other day for two hours, have fun and keep her body toned, and have a cook who can make her good, and healthy, meals.

For those of us who don't have that much money, planning is everything. We must make time for our dancing - or are biking or are walking or tennis, whatever are exercise/sport of choice is, and we have to cook our own meals - although we can do that in advance, cook up a batch of stuff on one day and freeze it for subsequent days. (I have always found that food tastes better the second day, or even the third day... the spices or what have you have had time to marinate through the dish...)

Anyway, congrats to Kirstie Alley, and sincere wishes that her new look remains her look...

And apprehension, of course. How quickly the media will turn on her if she dares to gain back five pounds or so...

Stargazing | ‘Dancing’ helps Kirstie Alley slim down

Thirty-eight inches. That’s how many Kirstie Alley has shed on “Dancing With the Stars” this season.

That’s how much the show’s costumers had to take in the cha-cha costume she wore in her first dance so she could wear it on the season finale Tuesday.

Kirstie has been coy about how many pounds she has lost.

“There will be some reveal of that at some point, but I really didn’t care,” she says. “As long as I kept changing and changing and changing, I really didn’t care. It was like, keep whittling, whittling, whittling. And the other thing that’s really more significant to me — I mean, I love the whittling, I like being skinny — I’m really strong and really agile, and it gave me a new life.”

The show’s costume designer, Randall Christensen, says that her costumes kept getting smaller and smaller as the show went on. “Isn’t she looking incredible?” he says.

Stargazing says: Yes!

Hot Soup for sore throats and colds

It's when we feel sick - cold or flu - that we can start to eat too much comfort food, and since we spend all our time in bed (well, unless we're married and still have to take care of husband and children, who of course can't take care of themselves even if you are at death's door) we get out of our exercise routine, and depending on how long this lasts, the pounds can add up.

I bring this up because I've had a sore throat for three days, and I'm just waiting for it to develop into a cold. Frankly, I don't mind the cold, but the sore throat is getting on my nerves. Hard to sleep when your breath keeps catching in your throat, and when you swallow it feels like you're constricting your throat around a razor blade (albeit a dull one).

No chocolate! No icecream!

I've been heating up a bowl of cream of mushroom soup, and I leave it as lumpy as possible - I find the lumpy mixture of soup, when hot, soothes my throat better than just the liquid version. And after a bowl of that, it generally has coated the throat such that I can fall asleep.

How to not get a cold? Well - studiously avoid those folks who do have colds. Also, it's not enough to wash your hands each time you go to the bathroom, try to avoid putting your hand on the handle of the door as you go out, too. Easy to do in those places that give you paper towels to use, harder if you can only dry your hands on those little air dryers! Always bring your own tissue to use.

OT: Never Give Up. Never. Never. Never.

Those are the immortal words of Winston Churchill, bracing England during the Battle of Britain.

I was thinking about them yesterday, while I was browsing through the headlines of the reports of the followers of a televangelist - or whatever the heck he is - Harold Camping, who'd been preaching for 7 years that the world was going to end on 21 May, 2011.

His ministry received over $700 million in donations in the last 7 years, all from people who apparently believe his tale of the Rapture and the end of the world. And in the last few months, several people apparently quit their jobs, and gave away all their money in preparation for The Rapture.

Well. 21 May came and went, and we're still here.

Will Camping stop predicting the end of the world? Of course not. Why should he? He made the same prediction in 1994, and that was wrong, and while you would have thought that all his followers would have left him after that, they didn't. They stayed with him, gave his ministry $700 million , and fully expected him to be right this time. And they will doubtless believe him when he redoes his calculations and comes up with a new day.

Meantime, what are they going to live on? Well, government welfare will doubtless step in to help them.

My own opinion is that, even if you expect the world to end tomorrow or the next day, you continue life as you've always done. You must always do what you can, until you can no longer do it, to quote the genius of Terry Pratchett. You don't give up and wait for the end, you prepare yourself for it. (And I'm not talking about giving up your nice comfy home, assuming you've got one, and moving to a remote cave to live a ridiculous existence for the next 20 years!)

I'm talking about continuing to go to work, continuing to enjoy life, with a nest egg in the bank and a nest egg in a strongbox in your house, and not worrying about stupid things like whether you're five pounds overweight.

Being one hundred pounds over weight is not stupid, however, and to increase the quality of your life, that must be taken care of, but people who obsess over a lousy five pounds..or even ten pounds... there's more important things in life to worry about than that.

But life is meant to be enjoyed. So go out and enjoy it!

Have You Had Your 6-Month Checkup Lately?

I was driving home today and had the radio on. One of those public service announcements came on: 40% of women who have heart attacks - first time heart attacks - die from them.

The announcement then urged women to go to the doctor for a checkup.

One thing the announcement didn't say was why so many women die from these heart attacks - typically, in women, heart attacks manifest differently from heart attacks in men, and so by the time an emergency room visit figures out that what you're actually having is a heart attack, you've died.

Therefore, it's important to have regular medical checkups - no matter what your age. Typically people don't get heart attacks until they are in their 50s, but quite a few people do have heart attacks in their 40s and even 30s.

It's important to visit a doctor. You may resist this because - if you're morbidly obese, you don't want to hear what he or she has to say - that you have to lose weight. Well - that's what this blog is for. With this blog I enable you to lose weight in a gradual manner, and then maintain your new weight once you've achieved your goal.

But you also may not go because you think you're perfectly happy. You eat right, you jog or bike, etc. etc. Sorry - that doesn't mean anything. There's a little thing called hypertension, the "silent killer" - if you have high blood pressure, you will never know about it until you have a heart attack - or until you go to a doctor and get a checkup. [OR, admittedly, if visit those blood pressure machines in the pharmacy of your local Walmart - on a regular basis. And write down your numbers each time so you can keep track.]

There's an old cliche - If you don't have your health, you don't have anything. And that is very, very true. Safe guard your health. Schedule a checkup with your doctor today.

Organize for Success

Are you a career woman as well as someone who is trying to lose weight - or maintain the weight you're now at?

Well, one thing that will help you is to get your life organized... this will help you not only in your career, but also in your weight maintenance goals.

A lot of people overeat because they are stressed out, and they are stressed out not so much because their jobs are stressful, but because the miasma surrounding their jobs stresses them out.

If "Weight loss books" lead the self-help book sales, "How to get organized" books are probably a close second.

A great percentage of people waste a vast amount of time in their lives - time that they will never, ever give back. Isaac Asimov refers to it as the unforgiving minutes.... well, he was quoting Rudyward Kipling... but Asimov was the epitome of the enjoy-a-holic, he never stopped working, but his writing was his work, and he loved to write, so he never considered it work.

But if you're in an office from 9-5 and hate your job, that could be paying havoc with your weight program - especially if you're not as organized as you might be.

Do you rush from home because you haven't had time to cook or make yourself a good breakfast, and thus grab a donut as soon as you get to work? Do you have soooo much work to do that you don't go to lunch, but rather grab a donut out of the break room to see you through until the evening?

And once evening comes, do you ease your stress by eating and eating and eating?

For some people, the stress is intrinsic in the job, for other folks, they cause the stress themselves because they are unorganized. Getting to work late, having to spend minutes and minutes every day looking for papers they've lost, having to recreate documents for the third time... it just goes on and on.

Get organized, and a lot of that stress goes away, and with that comes the benefit of not desiring to gulp comfort food all day long.

This could extend to your children, too, if you have any. Who rules the roost, you or your kids? If you let your kids sleep in until the last minute, or play video games while he or she should be getting ready for school, so that you're always leaving home ten minutes late to drop him off at school before you go on to work... you've got to fix that situation!

That's just one example (and one I take from my sister, who does all things at the orders of her son, not the other way around. As does her husband. The kid's nice enough now, at age 13, if spoiled, but I dread to think what he's going to turn out to be like once he hits 16....especially since the words "thank you" have never been part of his vocabulary.)

Well, that's a rant for another time and another blog.

Anyway...there's a corollary...a conjunction, between people who are disorganized and people who are overweight. It all comes down to time management. Those who manage time well usually (not always, but usually) also manage their weight well - at least, once they make the decision to do so!

Organizing also helps in other ways. If you set certain times for certain events, you will simply get more done, and when you look back on your life when you're in your 70s, you will have a lot of achievements to remember with pride, instead of looking back and sighing about "what might have been" if only you'd been more organized - and spent more time on yourself and less time on others.

You should always make time for yourself. Make time to exercise at a time that's right for you - when you feel most energetic, and if family and friends try to sabotage it, convert them to help you instead of hinder you.

If you want to spend an hour reading before you go to bed, instead of sitting on a couch watching your son play video games - because he wants you to be there watching him - go read your book! And tell him to read a book, too!

People who are unorganized often have other things in common with those folks who find it difficult to control their weight - they try to get organized and fail! That's because, like the weight issues, organization requires that you change your life habits and practices - and though it is possible to succeed in doing this, it wont' happen overnight. Like changing your eating habits, it must be done gradually.

But it can be done...and believe me you will be a lot happier, in the future if not now! - if you do it!