New Math.

So for a while I was counting calories.

And protein and fat and saturated fat and fiber.

It was a good learning experience.

It made me AWARE.

Just cream in your coffee bumps up the saturated fat you're taking in a HUGE amount--compared to eating steamed vegetables, even nicely prepared with lower-fat sauces.

Now I got a better scale for measuring my food.

Measuring cups were fine before.

I actually wanted a scale that measured in grams a while back--for coffee. It seems no matter what I do, how I measure, my coffee is black as pitch one day and the color of slightly rusty water the next. I swear I cannot master it.

With a gram scale, I can measure exactly 15 grams per cup, which is nice and strong without being sludge-like, BTW.

So with the gram scale--and BTW it was $14 at Ross Dress for Less, thank you--and a little math skill (a spreadsheet helps), you can figure out wonderful stuff.

Namely, you can figure out that yes, a half cup of low-fat cottage cheese is 90 calories, but 126 grams is exactly 100 calories.

This means you don't have to count. You just eat in 50- and 100-calorie-sized portions.

It's a bit more generous than only eating 1/4 cup of something.

Although when you see 100 calories of almonds and find out that it's like ten of the damn things, you begin to wonder--why bother?

But that is partly the point.

We don't think about how many calories is in our food.

We look at what seems like a nice filling portion.

But if you could see that 100 calories of cottage cheese is the size of a tennis ball, whereas 100 calories of carrots is two cupfuls, well you'd really think, 'Gee, those vegetables look awfully appetizing.'

A little more math, and you can make muffins and brownies from a mix that have not the 170 or 180 calories advertised on the box, but rather 50 or 100 calories--just so you can keep track.

Breakfast today? 120 g. of cottage cheese, 2 mini corn muffins, an apple, and espresso with 40 calories worth of milk.

That's 100 calories each for the first items and 50 for the last. 350 calories.

Obsessive? A bit. Moving towards greater simplicity? Definitely.

As someone who was thin for the first 20 or so years of my life, I don't really know how to control what I eat.

So this is just me teaching myself what people who had to care about such things always knew.

Know what's in what you eat. Eat reasonable quantities.

It's all about re-education.

As a philosopher once said, it's like a ladder you use to climb up that you don't need once you get where you need to be.

So my obsessiveness is short-term. Or that's my excuse, anway.

And who can argue with results. I weigh 151 pounds today, down from 164. My body fat has dropped from 20%--which it always was on Atkins, no matter what--to 19%. Okay, it's probably in the margin of error, but I'm happy.

And I'm heading down to 145, which I last weighed in 1993--over a dozen years ago.

Stay tuned.

--E. R. O'Neill