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Unless acted upon by a net external force, a body at dinner, will tend to remain at dinner and a body, fasting, will tend to remain fasting.
- Isaac Newton's first law of dieting

I'm on a diet. I have been a bad boy and greedy with Helen's artful cooking. She makes a sauce that if poured over gravel i would bust my teeth to eat. But even before tasting her ambrosia, in my bachelor years, i wasn't exactly mindful of what i ate. You see up until that point i really didn't like food - and saw eating as a distraction from whatever i was doing at the time, usually computing or photographing. Eating was an interruption. And so my eating habits were of convenience - read: fast food - and a lot of it so i wouldn't have to interrupt whatever i'd be doing in the next few hours. I was thin.

I also fasted. Fasting is easy for me, partly because of my antipathy for food, partly because i saw it as part of spiritual cleansing. But as i grew older, fasting stopped being a monthly event and eventually narrowed to once a year for about a week. The thing is after the 3rd day of a fast, i tend to forget about food, and the very watered-down fruit juices filled my belly without interrupting my industry.

But this is the first time i've ever looked at my growing real-estate of a belly and thought: do i have genitals? Of course i do, but my little paunch had turned into a sprawling billboard advertising my gluttony. Hmmph. I should've been warned by having to buy all new belts after moving in with Helen, but even that didn't do it. My epiphany came when i found a pile of dress-pants at Sams Club with a built-in hidden elastic strip that expanded (for when i eat, right?) and thought "What an amazing invention!" Whoah there, Vlad the Inhaler! Next i'll find myself dressing like Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack. Not just poor taste, but golf shirts and patterned shorts... I was getting fat. What a short, ugly word that. After discovering it for myself, on myself, i felt fat - and that's even worse.

I had never dieted before and only had narrowed my eyes at Helen when she suggested portion control. Self control isn't my strongest behavior. At work they began a health initiative at work of Lighten Up 4 Life i decided to try it despite my personal distaste 4 using numbers 2 replace words (I really h8 it). At first, educating myself in the values of calories and carbs gave me something to focus on and it was fun, but after a while that wore thin and i wasn't getting thin. But wait, i'm good at fasting, so i'll do that. While that isn't healthy for the long run, at least i would continue losing weight. But Helen isn't fasting and still making culinary art. So what to do?

The weird thing is my mind works best with simple, if strange concepts. If i continue to fast, but allow myself a small meal once in a while, that is attainable. And so that's how i look at it now. Fasting punctuated by portions of food. It's like eating desert only. I get to have the power over my eating by not doing it, but rewarding myself with lunch and dinner. And an occasional yoghurt late at night if i've been good.

So i guess i'm rewarding myself for not eating, by, um, eating. But that's what works for me and i've shed about 20 lbs in the process and will continue on this path probably until it becomes it's own habit. My future reward will allow me to watch myself peeing in the toilet. Not exactly a highlight, but some kind of twisted sense of being healthy.

Over at the Sniff What I'm Stepping In blog, Amy attended a seminar that boasted statistics about worry:

* Only 1 out of every 7 things you worry about will actually happen.
* Of that number that do occur, only 1 out of every 5 will have intolerable consequences.

So, as you feel worry coming on, give it a sequential number like #1 for the first worry, #2 for the second, etc...

Only when you hit #35 should you give it any measure of your concern.

But to be serious for a second, even using these statistics, worrying is clearly not a good predictor of bad things happening, and so it's not worth giving much time to it. It's a huge waste of our minds. Humans are known as the 'poor weather animals,' meaning that we tend to do best under bad conditions. It's under duress and hardship that our ability to adapt (especially with the mind) starts to shine. Interestingly, it's when we're busy adapting by applying solutions and trying answers that we worry less. It's when we have a modicum of relatively stress-free time that we begin worrying about what might happen.

Besides, we don't seem to become more prepared by worrying about something, only less surprised that it happens. It doesn't lessen the trauma or the emotional pain. Life will go on regardless of whether we predicted it or not. Whether we worry about the possibility or not.

To me the point is would i have been better off by spending the entire cruise of the Titanic hugging the lifeboats? I think not. At least that's not the kind of life i want to lead. Better to try and live fully and embrace life than cling to fears about what could happen. And what if i chose to hug the side of the Titanic that began listing, where the lifeboats couldn't be lowered? I would have not only wasted the entire cruise on an amazing ship, but i still would have hit the drink and still been among those listed as missing at sea.

Worry is mostly a waste. Let it go, Luke. Better to become more efficient with my mind at learning to live, i say.