Max "Bunny" Sparber

Tuaca
St. Germain
Jumbie
Campari
Drambui
Chartreuse
Canton
Lillehammer
Chambord
Limoncello

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

Baudette, MN: Walleye Capitol of the World
Blackduck, MN: Home of a giant duck statue
Blue Earth, MN: Jolly Green Giant statue
Brainerd, MN: Talking Paul Bunyan statue
Cloquet, MN: Frank Lloyd Wright gas station
Spring Green, WI: House on the Rock
Darwin, MN: World's largest twin ball (and Twineball Days)
Duluth, MN: So much to see
Finlayson, MN: St. Uhru's Day Parade
Franklin, MN: Catfish Derby Days
Grand Rapids, MN: Judy Garland birthplace
Hibbing, MN: Birthplace of Greyhound Bus
Kellogg, MN: LARK Toys
Lake Denton, MN: Wind Farm Learning Center
Montgomery, MN: Big Honza's Museum of Unnatural History
Nevis, MN: Emu Ranch
Northfield, MN: Jesse James Days
St. Peter, MN: Soderlund Pharmacy Museum
Tyler, MN: Abelskiver Days
Walnut Grove, MN: Laura Engels Wilder's Little House on the Prairie

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

I SET THE START DATE for this project at Feb 1, so it doesn't officially begin until tomorrow, but that hasn't kept me from being a busy little beaver. I have already gotten a good start on a number of the projects, and completed three. So here is a status update on my work on the project before it even begins.

NEWLY COMPLETED PROJECTS:

UPDATE ALL RESUMES, POST ONLINE: I completed this on the 27th. I used a Web page called Emurse, which allows you to create your résumés right on their site and then automatically formats them from a selection of formats. You can then download the résumés in a variety of formats, as well as store them and even post them on the site. Additionally, it has the advantage of being easily updated. I have two résumés, one for my work as a writer and editor, one for my work as a playwright. Both have been posted on this site, the first under my about page, the second on my playwrighting résumé page.

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

I TOOK THIS PHOTO of a house in the Irish Channel because I liked it; in particular, I like the blue of the house. New Orleans is sometimes called the farthest northern city in the Caribbean, and part of the reason for this is the architecture, which is often not unlike buildings you would find on a Caribbean island. These buildings are also often painted soft pastel colors that seem appropriate for the tropics: pinks, yellows, powder blues.

I WOULD NOT have thought that there is a lost Sailor Martin song. After all, I write them and provide Sailor Martin's voice, so you would assume that, if Sailor Martin has any songs out there, I would know about them. You would figure wrong. While I was going through my digital photos last night, I stumbled across a video from 2005, when I lived in New Orleans, that I have no memory of. When I played it, I realized it is a rather bawdy song by Sailor Martin -- almost certainly the first one I ever wrote. It's a rather bawdy demand for alcohol and other naughtiness, and, in the interest of providing a complete inventory of the work of the Sailor, I am reprinting it here.

LISTEN TO "BUY ME SOME GIN":



DOWNLOAD "BUY ME SOME GIN."

More Sailor Martin.

BUNNY gently glides by the iconic sign for one of Minnesota's last great drive-in theaters.

MORE FROM THE JET PACK TOUR!

I LOVED THIS little food shack, which I recall being Uptown. The name of the place might require some explanation. "Tee," as in "Tee-Eva," is short for "auntie." "Creole" is a word with a few meanings. It sometimes refers to the children of the colonial settlers to Louisiana. It sometimes refers to the black slaves who were born in Louisiana, rather than those imported from Africa. It tends to be used now to just to mean "native to Louisiana," so creole tomatoes, which you will see sold on the side of the road, and tomatoes that have been grown by locals. There is also a style of cooking known as Creole, and presumably this is what Tee-Eva offers. It's a style of food indigenous to New Orleans and borrows from almost everybody who ever settled there -- it is a creole style of making food in the way that creole is often used in academic setting, as a blend of cultures. Obviously Tee-Eva offers a style of this food that emphasizes the food of African Americans who live in the south, which would be the "soul" component.

Aside from the colorfulness of Tee-Eva's, I have always appreciated the fact that you can learn a lot about New Orleans just by reading the name of the business.

HERE IT IS, day 29 of my diet, the end of the fourth week, which means there are six weeks left of this particular diet. I weighed myself this morning, the first time since last week, and, as it turns out, not weighing yourself for a week is a good idea. I've dropped five pounds since the last time I climbed atop my lying scale. That's almost 16 pounds total weight loss since I began this diet, so I can see how Toby Kebbell, who was eating much less than me when he made the movie RocknRolla, managed to lose 40 pounds in nine weeks.

I haven't written much about the diet lately because I haven't much to say. As I had hoped, it's become something I don't think about very much. The only real adjustment I have had to make over this past month is walking away from food when I am still hungry. I was not accustomed to that, even though I knew it takes a little while for your stomach to catch up to your eating, and so it neglects to tell you that you are full for a full. 20 minutes is the number that is bandied about; I haven't researched this yet, and, based on my experiences of investigating common wisdom about dieting, I wouldn't be surprised if that number was something somebody just made up one day that has then been passed on uncritically. I have, however, researched how the body decides it is full, and it is an awesomely complex process in which your hypothalamus, which is located in your head, monitors your body's hormones (along with an astounding variety of other stimuli, including daylength, things you smell, and your body's temperature) and, in essence, taps you on the shoulder to let you know what you should be doing. Not enough glucose in your blood, for instance? You will get a tap on the shoulder in the form of hunger, telling you it is time to eat. Too much glucose? Tap, tap; you're full. This, of course, is a drastic oversimplification of how the hypothalamus goes about its business. Regardless, it's a pretty busy little organ, and so perhaps it can be forgiven if it takes a while to let you know you are full.

But the result is that you have to walk away from food when you are still somewhat hungry, or you will eat to the point of feeling overfull. There is only one group on earth who have made this practice an element of their culture, the Okinawans, who have a saying: Hara Hachi Bu. Roughly translated, this means "Eat until you are 80 percent full." Okinawans, by the way, live longer and are healthier than anybody on earth, and it has become popular to credit their diet for their longevity (and there may be something to that, as Okinawans who move elsewhere, such as Brazil, and reject their native diet in favor of that of their adopted countries often have shortened lifespans.) They are definitely thinner than your average American, as Okinawans typically have a body mass index of 20.4. while the average American BMI is somewhere in the vicinity of 28 -- mine is somewhere around 26 right now.

Now, there are a lot of conversations that can be had about how accurate BMI is in assessing weight or health, and the various other cultural factors that might encourage longevity and health in Okinawans, and that's all a little beside the point. The point is that they tend to walk away from food when they are still a little hungry, and, if their experience is consistent with mine, in about 10 or 20 minutes, they feel quite satisfied with the meal they had. And, if you are used to eating until you feel stuffed, it's going to feel strange to stop eating before you feel full. Further, the feeling of satiation is quite different than the feeling of being full. Rather than feeling that I have filled my belly, I simply stop feeling hungry. In some ways, it's not as satisfying as pushing yourself away from the table with the cry of "I cannot eat another morsel," opening your pants to make room for your distended belly, and staggering into the next room to fall asleep on the sofa. Compared to that, this feels ... anticlimactic. But it helps take the weight off, and my goal is not to be an overstuffed bon vivant who takes pleasure in excess, but to be thin. And so I must forgo the real dramatic pleasure of gluttony for the less satisfying experience of the surcease of hunger.

More Rock Star Skinny.

IN MY MIND, I think this is what I figured the French Quarter would look like before I moved there. Turns out I was right.

TAKEN FROM the book Cult Movies, by Danny Peary.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
All About Eve (1950)
Andy Warhol's Bad (1977)
Badlands (1973)
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Bedtime for Bonzo (1951>
Behind the Green Door (1972)
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)
Billy Jack (1971)
Black Sunday (1960)
The Brood (1979)
Burn! (1969)
Caged Heat (1974)
Casablanca (1941)
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Conqueror Worm (1968)
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
Deep End (1971)
Detour (1946)
Duck Soup (1933)
El Topo (1971)
Emmanuelle (1974)
Enter the Dragon (1973)
Eraserhead (1977)
Fantasia (1940)
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Force of Evil (1948)
42nd Street (1933)
Freaks (1932)
The Girl Can't Help It (1956)
Greetings (1968)
Gun Crazy (1949)
Halloween (1978)
A Hard Day's Night (1964)
The Harder They Come (1973)
Harold and Maude (1971)
The Honeymoon Killers (1970)
House of Wax (1953)
I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
I Walked With a Zombie (1943)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
It's a Gift (1934)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
The Killing (1956)
King Kong (1933)
King of Hearts (1967)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
La Cage aux Folles (1979)
Land of the Pharaohs (1955)
Laura (1944)
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
Lola Montès (1955)
The Long Goodbye (1973)
Mad Max (1979)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Man of the West (1958)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
The Nutty Professor (1963)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Out of the Past (1947)
Outrageous! (1977)
Pandora's Box (1929)
Peeping Tom (1960)
Performance (1970)
Petulia (1968)
Pink Flamingos (1973)
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956)
Pretty Poison (1968)
The Producers (1968)
The Rain People (1969)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
The Red Shoes (1948)
Reefer Madness (1936)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The Scarlet Empress (1934)
The Searchers (1956)
Shock Corridor (1963)
The Shooting (1967)
Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Sylvia Scarlett (1936)
The Tall T (1957)
Targets (1968)
Tarzan and His Mate (1934)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Top Hat (1935)
Trash (1970)
Two for the Road (1967)
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Up in Smoke (1978)
Vertigo (1958)
The Warriors (1979)
Where's Poppa? (1970)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

I AM NOT SURE who this woman was or why she was dressed like this, but seeing someone dressed in a manner that seemed borrowed from a previous century wasn't really all that unusual.

My list of fiction and nonfiction books to read in the next 1001 days:

FICTION

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me | Richard Farina
Brighton Rock | Graham Greene
The Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones book | Chester Himes
Flash and Filigree | Terry Southern
A Hall of Mirrors | Robert Stone
The Late Risers | Bernard Wolfe
Love in the Ruins | Walker Percy
Mumbo Jumbo | Ishmael Reed
My Gun is Quick | Mickey Spillane
Nightmare in Pink | John D. MacDonald
The Parker Series | Richard Stark
Quake | Randolph Wurlitzer
Red Dirt Marijuana | Terry Southern
Somewhere There's Music | George Lea
The Wanderers | Richard Price
Who Walks in Darkness | Chandler Brossard
Martian Time Slip | Philip K Dick
Mister Justice | Doris Piserchia
Masters of the Maze | Avram Davidson
The Book of the New Sun | Gene Wolfe
Gladiator at Law | Frederick Pohl
'Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" | Algis Budrys
The Demolished Man | Alfred Bester
And Chaos Died | Joanna Russ
The Fairy Chessmen | Lewis Padgett
Coming Through Slaughter | Michael Ondaatje
Dancers in the Scalphouse | William Eastlake
Deadwood | Pete Dexter
Homeboy | Seth Morgan
King Blood | Jim Thompson
Les Chants du Maldorir | Compte De Lautreamont
Same Bed, Different Dreams | Hugh Gross
Stone City | Mitchell Smith
Summer of Night | Dan Simmons

NON-FICTION

Confessions of a Hoaxer | Alan Abel
Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp | Pierre Cabanne
Heraclitus
Los Angeles | Reyner Banham
Mine Enemy Grows Older | Alexander King
Me and Big Joe | Michael Bloomfield
Ozzie | Ozzie Nelson
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol | Andy Warhol
Prejudices | HL Mencken
The Secret Life of Salvador Dali | Salvador Dali
Vegas | John Gregory Dunne
Write If You Get Work | Bob & Ray
Mondo Lucha a Go-Go | Dan Madigan
Flesh and Blood | Reay Tannahill
A Passion for Polka | Greene
A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities | Jan Bondeson
Hustlers, Beats and Others | Polsky
You Can't Take It With You | Jack Black
A Bear for the FBI | Melvin Van Peebles
Border Radio | Gene Fowler
Deliberate Speed | W.T. Lhamon, Jr.
The Great Roob Revolution | Roger Price
High Times, Hard Times | Anita O'Day
Hunter | JA Hunter
I Jan Cremer | Jan Cremer
Into the Heart of Borneo | Redmond O'Hanion
I Paid My Dues | Babs Gonzales
Juke Joint | Birney Imes
Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal
Wanderer | Sterling Hayden
When Sex Was Dirty | Friedman

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

NEW ORLEANS has a significant community of Irish immigrants and their descendants, which dates back to the end of the 1700s, when a wave of Irish immigrants landed in the city fleeing a wave of British prosecutions. One of the city's most famous residents, the fictional Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces, was of Irish extraction, and lived near the strip of the city where many Irish settled, the Irish Channel. The city had its first St. Patrick's Day Parade in 1809, and a small but merry parade makes its way from one Irish bar to the next in the French Quarter every year.

SO, YOU MAKE A LIST of 101 projects to complete in 1001 days. How do you go about actually getting them done? After all, there aren't many projects that can be done in one fell swoop. Most projects require a lot of time and planning.

I've decided to incorporate a little bit of the process used in Getting Things Done, which was sort of trendy a few years ago and I am sure still has a lot of adherents. At its core, it's a pretty straightforward system for organizing projects, and I have found it to be quite useful now and again. I'm not usually able to stick with it for very long, but, then, I've found I don't really need to. Last year at about this time was when I last really tried to get organized, and put together a list of things that I really, really needed to do, and put a Getting Things Done system in place, which I let slide a few months later. I went through my files today to get rid of the files from last year, and found that I had completed nearly every project I had created for myself, even without endlessly making lists and checking them off.

But 101 projects in an awful lot of projects, and more than I can keep in my head or mapped out on a Web page. And so I got out a stack of empty sheets of paper and on top of every one I wrote the date and the name of the project, and under that I wrote the very first step I would have to take in order to get started on the project. Then I put each one of the sheets of paper into a file based on where I would be in order to complete the task. If it was something I needed to do at a computer, for instance, I put it in the "computer" file. I won't break down the entire process for Getting Things Done (Wikipedia offers a nice introduction), but the process is basically to get everything down on paper, so that you don't have to try and keep it all in your gray matter. Once you complete one step in the process, you write down the very next step, and you do that until the project is complete.

Speaking of which, I have already completed two projects, as both were the sorts of things that could be done in a single sitting. The first was to subscribe to 20 blogs that deal with my profession -- in this case, I subscribed to blogs that address themselves to the subject of blogging, online journalism, and running an online forum, since those are the things I do for a living. I went a little overboard and subscribed to 28 or so blogs, but I'll probably whittle it down as the months go by and I find some of the subscriptions just don't suit my needs.

The other task was also an easy one, but one I have been dodging for a decade, at least. I got a tetanus shot. I was going to do it several months ago, and actually went to the phone to make an appointment, but as I was doing it I felt myself get nauseated and light-headed, so I hung up the phone. For whatever reason, I was more terrified of getting this shot than I was of getting the root canal, which I certainly did not enjoy but endured without too much fuss. I don't know precisely why I responded so strongly to the idea of getting inoculated. I have a high tolerance for pain, and seem to stab myself with something sharp at least once per week, which I scarcely notice. But for whatever reason, the idea of getting a tetanus shot terrified me. What can you do? These sorts of fears are rarely reasonable, and so you can't really reason yourself out of them. You just have to grit your teeth and do it, despite the fear.

I was planning on going tomorrow. I had it all mapped out. I would go in to work early and leave at three to go to the minute clinic. This would give me a full day to screw up my nerve. And, while I was thinking about it, I just decided to do it right then. Today, tomorrow, whenever, it was going to be equally nerve-wracking. And, if I did it today, tomorrow it would be done. So I left my desk, walked over to the Minute Clinic, got my shot, and was back at my desk before anybody noticed I was gone.

And, of course, it was nothing. I didn't even feel the shot. My arm is a little sore now, but no more so than if someone punched me in my shoulder, which is a feeling I remember quite well from high school. In a few days, it will just be a memory, and then I don't need to worry about the shot for another decade, and also don't need to worry about tetanus, which is no laughing matter.

Here's the strange thing -- I was encouraged to do so by Obama's inauguration. I got to thinking, here's a guy who was a Junior Senator, and isn't that much older than me. And a few days ago he stood in front of millions of people, including George W Bush, some of whom certainly wanted to kill him, possibly also including George W Bush. And he stood there and said this country has taken a wrong turn, and has had bad leadership, and we're in a bad spot now, and it is going to take a lot of time and a lot of sacrifice to fix it. He told the American people plainly that fixing it was, in part, their responsibility, and that it is time to grow up and do the right thing, because that's what adults do, even though it is hard. It was not an especially uplifting speech, nor was it a fancy speech, but it was plain and clear and honest. And, whatever you think about Obama, getting up in front of all those people and telling them the unvarnished truth the very moment he is made President takes courage. And I thought, you know, if Obama can do that, I can probably deal with a little poke in the arm.

And why else do we have a President but to keep me from getting lockjaw?

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

NUDIE COHN, nee Nuta Kotlyarenko of Kiev Russia, operated a storefront tailor shop North Hollywood that produced as many iconic costumes as any in history. Nudie was a product of the immigrant Jewish community of New York, and learned traditional tailoring there, but, along the way, something went a little haywire. Perhaps it was his brief career designing costumes for exotic dancers in Manhattan. Perhaps it was his obsession with cowboy movies, particularly those of Tom Mix, that he had watched as a young man. Whatever inspired him, Nudie made a career for himself creating garish costumes, often spangled with costume jewelry. At first, these outfits proved popular among the county-western troubadours and cowboy movie stars of the film colony, including Roy Rogers. Later, his outfits found their way to Nashville, where they are supposed to have inspired the song "Rhinestone Cowboy." Lefty Frizell was particularly fond of glittery creations, while Porter Wagoner was almost never seen performing without a Nudie suit. And, ultimately, they made their way into the wardrobes of rock and roll stars. Elvis Presley's famous gold lame suit that the King wore on the cover of 50000000 Elvis Fans Can't be Wrong was a Nudie. Gram Parson made quite a splash in a suit he called the "Gilded Palace of Sin suit," after the album that featured Parson in the ensemble. The suit included appliques of pill bottles and pot leaves. That suit, too, was a Nudie.

Nudie Cohn was famous for roaming through Hollywood in any one of a series of customized GM convertibles. Almost all featured the horns of a longhorn steer on the grill and hand-tooled leather interiors that looked more like horse tack than car seats. His vehicles were often decorated with symbols of the west, including pistols for door handles and horse shoes as hood decorations. In a town of wild characters, Nudie was one of the most recognizable.

And so why are we discussing a fixture of Hollywood on a project called The Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities? Well, there's a part of Nudie Cohn's story that gets little play, but is as defining as anything that happened in his life. Throughout his career, Nudie had a partner in his businesses, one Helen Barbara Kruger. Helen was a handsome blond woman, and Nudie had met her on his travels when he stayed at her parents roominghouse in Mankato. Helen, who Nudie redubbed Bobbie, and Nudie carried on a long-distance romance, and Nudie eventually moved to Mankato to marry her. Eventually, the two of them returned to New York, where they opened Nudie's for the Ladies, his store that specialized in costumes for burlesque artists. Her part in Nudie's success was considerable ("She ran the store," their granddaughter said on Bobby death in 2006), and, after Nudie Cohn died, she kept the business running for another decade. Bobbie was also the inspiration behind one of Nudie's early logos, that of a naked cowgirl in 10-gallon hat and holster, leaning on a fencepost twirling a lasso. Nudie was reported to have come up with the outfit when Bobby surprised him in similar attire, or lack thereof, and demanded to know when he planned to make the rest of her costume.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

I SUPPOSE, between this project and blogging about my diet, this blog is starting to run the risk of becoming one long self-help project. Well, don't worry. I'll get back to reviewing the films of William Shatner and tasting weird candy soon enough. But a few friends have started this project, called 101 Thing in 1001 Days, and I can't resist a good project, so I thought I would jump in as well.

It has taken me almost a week to put together my list. I wanted to choose things that I feel I really should be doing, or, in many cases, am already doing but want to formalize or finish. The whole idea is to give yourself 101 tasks and then get them done in about a year and three quarters. This project has been kicking around online for quite a few years, and so a simple Google search will bring up hundreds of Web pages where this project was attempted. Often these projects meet little success -- after all, this is just another form of setting some New Year's resolutions, and those have an abominable success rate. A lot of people manage to get a few items done, a few people get about halfway done, and one or two people manage to nearly complete their lists, but so what? It's a nice way to organize goals, and even the people who are abysmal failures at achieving them generally manage to get a few things done, so bully for them.

I've tried to make this list a real challenge for myself, so getting even half of these done will be quite an achievement -- although a lot of the things on the list are tasks that I really feel must be done. I will blog about them as I get around to them, but this is mostly for my own edification. Feel free to ignore these posts if they don't interest you.

The formal starting date for me to begin this project is February 1, but, really, I am going to get started immediately. It never hurts to work a little ahead.

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

HERE IS ONE OF THOSE bits of common wisdom that everybody sends you when you start to diet: If you don't eat enough, your body goes into starvation mode, and uses calories more efficiently, and as a result, you lose weight slower.

It's not true. Sorry, it just isn't. It's like the whole thing about drinking eight glasses of water a day for good health, which everybody is so sure is true, but has no science behind it at all. ("Those individuals that enjoy going to the bathroom would benefit from high fluid intake. But others definitely would not," Goldfarb said.)

That's not to say there isn't a starvation response. There are conflicting studies that suggest your metabolism may slow after a severe reduction in calories (one study suggests you must go below 800 calories per day for it to take effect). And it is a minor shift -- according to Weight Watchers, on a 500 calorie per day diet, while you should be able to expect to lost 3 pounds per week, you may only lose 2 1/2. Assuming that such a slowed metabolism actually occurs, when it may not. And starvation may actually boost your metabolism rate.

But of course, we're talking about actual starvation here, and not simply a reduction in calories. Just because you are eating very few calories per day, as I am, does not mean you are starving, even though people like to call it a starvation diet. Starvation should properly be called catabolysis, the biological process in which the body breaks down muscle in order to stay alive. On an average person, from the moment you stop taking any nutrition into your body at all, it will take between one and two months for catabolysis to reach a point where it becomes life threatening. In fairness, during a diet the body does tend to leech some protein from muscles, so, unless you are actively exercising, you can expect some muscle loss throughout a diet. But this is not the same thing as starvation. Starvation is when your body has absolutely run through its supply of fat and is almost exclusively consuming muscle.

So why does it seem like you lose less weight more slowly when you eat less? Well, it seems like part of the problem is that most people just have no idea how much or little they are actually eating. Studies have shown that people overestimate the amount they are exercising and underestimate the amount they are eating by as much as 30 percent. And while there are some formulas that can be used to approximate how many calories you need per day to maintain your weight, they tend to be pretty rough, out of necessity. Some days you will be more active than others. Some days you may have a higher or lower metabolism than others. And, apparently, your natural microbial gut flora might effect how many calories you absorb from food. There are a lot of little factors that causes people to make use of calories in small but significantly different ways, and so it is impossible to put a finger on exactly how many pounds per week you should be losing, or even how many calories per week you are consuming. So the best you can do is make an educated guess and shoot to eat less than you require.

So why is the myth of the starvation response so popular? I don't know. Perhaps it is because people want to eat more than 950 calories per day, and this gives them a reason to. And why not? As long as they are eating less than they require, they will lose weight, albeit more slowly. Is this better? Hard to say. Again, common wisdom is that you're best off shooting for a pound a week. But some recommend losing weight quickly and then focusing on keeping yourself at your target weight. The more reading I do on this, the more it seems like people are making it up as they go along, and there are precious few studies that provide absolutely clear rules about what works and what doesn't work in a diet. What I am learning is very simple: Don't trust any advice anybody gives you about dieting, and do what works for you. For the moment, a diet of 950 calories per day is just fine for me. If I get bored with it, or feel like it may not be working the way I want, I'll switch it up. But I am starting to wonder if there isn't so much confusion about dieting simply because people tend to do it so badly and for such short times, and are scrambling to understand why it didn't work.

I understand. It's not easy to diet. It's not fun. It requires a lot of willpower. And we don't live in an environment that encourages good eating habits -- far from it. It is very easy to be overweight in America nowadays, and quite hard to stay thin, unless you are either blessed with the appetite of a bird or some supernaturally high metabolism that allows you to eat whatever you want. Ultimately, I think dieting is not especially sustainable, whatever the diet, because it is so difficult to maintain good eating habits. It's like being kosher or vegan. You have to be extraordinarily strict in order to be thin, and, to a certain extent, you have to separate yourself from society. Friends going to Burger King? You won't be going with them. Hungry for a snack? The snack machine in the hallway isn't going to be much help.

I think people have to get used to the idea of yo-yoing a little over the course of their lives. You're probably going to put on a few pounds per year, even if you mostly eat nutritious food. Who wants to go through life constantly denying themselves stuff that tastes good, even if it is a little fattening? Probably the best thing we can do is figure out how to take those pounds back off again, and then get on with our lives. There is very little evidence that bouncing up and down by ten pounds is going to do you any harm, and, frankly, it seems like our body would be designed to handle this, because most animals in the wild jump up and down in weight based on the seasons and the availability of food. Bears lose between 15 and 30 percent of their weight during the winter, and they don't emerge from caves in the spring to nervous emails from well-meaning friends warning them they are going to be in trouble if they let their weight yo-yo like that.

Of course, it may just be that their friends are smart enough not to antagonize a hungry bear.

More Rock Star Skinny.

I DECIDED TO DO SOME READING about why my scale is lying to me. After all, I am losing weight. I can see it. My arms, which, for whatever reason, always seem to show my weight loss first, have started to revert back to the twig-like thickness of when I was thin. (Watching yourself lose weight is a bit like watching an inflatable toy deflate -- it starts to lose air in surprisingly places and retain it in others.) But my scale sometimes has me as having lost nine pounds, sometimes fourteen, and doesn't seem to actually be reflecting my loss of fat.

As it turns out, this is all my own damn fault. I have been weighing myself every single day. But weight fluctuates constantly, sometimes as much as five pounds or more in a single day, depending on how much sodium you might have taken in, or water you're retaining, or both, or how much glucose your liver is processing, or whatever. Apparently, it is counterproductive and discouraging to weigh yourself every day, and so I am going to stop doing it. I was just doing it out of curiosity anyway, but, rather than satisfy my curiosity, doing so has frustrated it. And so I will only weigh myself once per week, on Friday morning when I wake up. I have been charting my weight loss on Skinnyr. For those of you who are curious about the graph, for whatever reason, I will post it here, and you can see how I am doing.

Get your own graph at skinnyr

More Rock Star Skinny.

I'M TWO WEEKS into the diet now, and have lost somewhere between 10 and 12 pounds, depending on the mood my scale is in. Yesterday I weighed 192. Today I weigh 194. Tomorrow the scale will probably have me at 185, just to get me excited, and then the following day inform me that I weigh 230 pounds, just to be cruel. My scale is a bit of a sadist.

Regardless, I am losing weight. My pants are getting to be too big for me, I have to cinch my belt tighter, and people say my face looks thinner. Almost all of the weight loss happened during my three day fast, if you believe my scale, which suggests that my body has spent a week and a half insisting that no matter how few calories I eat, it will stay the same weight. Good luck with that, buddy. I'm eating 900 less calories per day than the guys who participated in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and those guys ended up pretty slender.

People balk when I mention this, or whenever I talk about how few calories I am consuming. After all, I am only eating about 300 more calories than people got in concentration camps, or about one slice of pizza more. But when the participants in the starvation experiment were given 1800 calories per day, it wasn't because that's as few as they could have. It's because it was a very cautious experiment, and they started off with people who were already pretty thin, and they spent six months bringing their weight down beyond simple fat loss to the point where the body was consuming its own muscle, which was consistent with the experience of a lot of Europeans during World War II. (Properly, it wasn't a starvation experiment, although part of the mission was discover the effects of starvation, but a refeeding experiment, to uncover the best way to take someone who was starving and make them healthy again.)

Now, you take a skinny man and feed him 1800 calories over the course of six months, he's going to end up a very skinny man. You take a somewhat chubby fellow like me and feed me 900-950 calories over 10 weeks, he's going to end of somewhat less chubby. I have no plans to ever get to the point where I am actually starving, and I would make the case that I am now eating better than I ever have in my life. You can check it out for yourself, if you like: Here is my food diary. As you can see, I am eating generous helpings of fruits and vegetables, and I manage to get a surprising amount a variety in my diet. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly the amount of nutrition I was getting before I started the diet, but then bulked out with massive amounts of sweets.

Last night was the first night since the New Year that I have eaten more than 900 calories or thereabouts, but it was a friend's birthday and there was cake, so I ate some. You can't be too rigid about this sort of thing; every so often, you need to indulge a little. And the truth is I don't know exactly how many calories I eat. I guess. I try to guess too high, but, for all I know, I may be under. Ultimately, there is no need to be exact about this. If I shoot for approximately 950, whether I come in a little under or a little over, I'm still eating fewer calories per day than I need to maintain my current weight, and my weight will decrease.

I've started thinking about weight as debt. If I am 30 pounds overweight and it takes 3500 calories to lose a pound, then I have a debt of 105,000 calories. This sounds like a lot, but lets pretend each calorie is a penny. I owe $1,050, which is not a lot to owe, and I can pay off about ten bucks a day. At that rate, I can pay down the debt in just over 100 days, or in about three and a half months. Of course, 160 is the high end of my ideal weight, and I am looking to get to the low end (this project is, after all, called Rock Star Skinny), so it may take a little longer than that. But, in the end, if, at the end of each day, I think about the calories I didn't consume as being debt I paid off, it makes the whole thing pretty satisfying, even when my scale messes with me.

More Rock Star Skinny.

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, Cameron Crowe's sprawling teen comedy about a schoolyear in the life of a dozen San Fernando Valley teens, was one of the first mainstream films to flirt with Punk and New Wave. The film feels like it has a kinship to, say, Repo Man, which actually had a bored Southern California suburban punk as its lead character. Fast Times exists in our memory as a sort of New Wave snapshot of checkered Vans tennis shoes, teenager girls who dress like Pat Benatar, Day-Glo colors, and teenage boys trying out pickup lines on cardboard standees of Debbie Harry.

It's surprising, on revisiting the film, just how little actual New Wave content there is. Sure, Elvis Costello can be spotted throughout the movie, but only in posters on the wall of the film's ticket scalper. There is no Elvis Costello on the soundtrack. And while the film opens with The Go-Go's and closes with Oingo Boing, the rest of the soundtrack is fleshed out with some decidedly mainstream SoCal pop, including a surprising number of songs by The Eagles. In fact, the song most used in the film is a Jackson Browne pop rock staple, "Somebody's Baby," which plays whenever Jennifer Jason Leigh is about to have an unsatisfying sexual encounter. The closest thing the film offers to a Punk or New Waver is Robert Romanus's Mike Damone, the scalper, who will stare balefully at the poster for Elvis Costello's Trust when life gets complicated for him, but Damone's musical tastes are catholic, as befits a scalper -- he's as likely to sing the praises of Earth, Wind and Fire as he is to tell you about the new Lou Reed album.

But if there isn't much actual by way of actual Punk or New Wave content to the film, there's something punk about its spirit. The film's main characters are not the popular kids in the school, but the kids on the margins. There is from Mark "Rat" Ratner, played by Brian Backer, a nebbishy and socially awkward kid who works in an ill-fitting tuxedo at the local mall, the perfect vantage point to jealously watch the more popular kids across the mall from him. He and Mike Damone have forged something of a friendship in which Damone pompously explains the secrets of the adult world to the Rat, but you get the sense that there is a lot more to the friendship. For one thing, neither kid has a SoCal accent -- the Rat sounds like he's from Brooklyn, and Damone has the sound and mannerisms of a New Jersey used car salesman (Romanus has explained that he played Damone as a recent Jersey transplant). The Rat isn't very good at making friends, while Damone -- well, people just don't like him. So the two East Coast boys have found each other, and there is something touching about their friendship: at the end of the film, after betraying the Rat's trust, Damone quiet pleads for them to be friends again, and it is not often you see someone with such a cultivated posture of cool begging a nerd to be his friend.

Their friendship parallels that of Stacy Hamilton and Linda Barrett, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates. Stacy looks to Linda for advice about adulthood in the same way that The Rat looks to Damone, except, although both Stacy and Linda are younger than their male counterparts, they have a lot more actual experience. While Damone and The Rat discuss what music to play when on a date, Stacy and Linda discuss oral sex techniques. Nonetheless, their experiences haven't been very good. Stacy's few attempts at lovemaking have been brief, painful, and had messy consequences, while the film clearly suggests that Linda is just being used by an older man who works for the airlines and has no interest in her except as a quick lay when he gets to town. The director, Amy Heckerling, was very interested in the idea that the characters in Fast Times are children who, because of jobs and cars and little adult supervision, are given the chance to play at being adults long before they are ready for it. When filming them, Heckerling often pulled the cushions off of chairs and gave them oversized props, so they would seem smaller than they are, and these tricks are subtle but effective -- on a disastrous date, the Rat and Stacy look positively minuscule in the adult world, where even the menus are unreasonably big.

It's interesting that just as this film was being made, the punk scene in Los Angeles was splitting into two distinct movement. There were the so-called Hollywood punks, who tended to be older and more pop oriented (this was the scene that spawned the Go-Go's), and this movement was being challenged by younger suburban punk rockers, who played a more hardcore style. These so-called beach-punks included bands like Middle Class, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks, and they tended to sing about their own experiences as bored suburbanites -- in other words, the sort of experiences detailed in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which was based on Cameron Crowe's experiences spending a year undercover at a San Fernando Valley High School.

There is a scene in Ridgemont High when the school's class clown, the perpetually stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli (played by Sean Penn, and one suspects the role will haunt him for the rest of his life) explains that all he wants from life is weed and waves, and you can imagine him simply narrating a song like "TV Party" by Black Flag: "We've got nothing better to do than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews." Beach Punk would have been the right soundtrack to Fast Times, but, honestly, the film was lucky to end up with the few New Wave sounds it does feature. The film made the studios quite nervous -- they had expected a raucous teen sex comedy and had wound up with something both rougher and more sincere, in which sex is rarely sexy and the characters are depressed and embarrassed messes. So the studios fought Amy Heckerling on every element of the film that seemed easy to fiddle with, including the soundtrack. Heckerling had wanted Elvis Costello on the soundtrack, and the studios forced the Eagles on her. She ended up picking her battles, and so we get the Go-Go's at the start at Oingo Boingo at the end, and almost nothing else. It would be until 1984 that a film would have the soundtrack that Fast Times should have had, when director Alex Cox filled Repo Man with the sounds of southern California punk, including having the film's punk lead character shout the lyrics to "T.V. Party."

MY POST-FAST WEIGHT GAIN has leveled off at about 195, and has been sitting there for the past few days. It's a little frustrating, in that I am ready for the scale to start dropping again, but weight loss is something that happens over time -- a lot of time -- and my impatience is going to do nothing to speed it along. Additional, the scale has very little to do with it. I have been losing fat over the past week. My arms have gotten skinnier and my pants looser. The scale doesn't reflect that, because rehydrating and leveling off my glucose has added in a few pounds.

I am still averaging between 800 and 1000 calories per day, generally coming in at about 950. It's the best I have ever eaten in my life, including generous helpings of fruits and vegetables. I have not had soda or processed sugar in the past week and a half. I am no longer winded by physical activity, I sleep well, and I feel alert during the day. I never crave sugary food, I never go to bed hungry, and I am almost always satisfied when I finish eating, even though my portions are quite small.

I reckon to get down to the weight I want, I will have to keep my calories down for about six months, although I may increase my daily calories somewhat down the road -- it will cause me to lose weight at a slower rate, but will allow me to occasionally eat something like a few slices of pizza, which, at this moment, could, by themselves, pretty much provide all of my daily calories.

One of the interesting things about this diet has been the discovery of just how little we know about how dieting works. There is a lot of junk information out there masquerading as dieting info, and people have been sending me well-meaning but unsourced suggestions. A lot of people seem overly concerned with my metabolism -- there is this odd sense that the metabolism is like a machine with a few settings, and, if you diet wrong, you're going to reset the machine to a slower setting. From what I have been able to gather, the metabolism is pretty complicated and never really fixed. Yes, undereating slows it down as the body switches gears to make better use of incoming calories. But eating smaller amounts as a series of small meals over the course of the day, as I have been doing, tends to speed it up. Physical exercise speeds it up. Age slows it down. Certain vitamins can speed it up. Your metabolism is constantly in flux, and there are so many things that can effect it that I have decided to take care of my calories and let my metabolism take care of itself.

I've also been hearing a lot about the body "detoxing," which seems to be the most popular junk theory in dieting nowadays. The idea is that we consume so much processed food that the body can't effectively dispose of our body's toxins, and so stores excess toxins in our fats, where they are released during dieting. There is little to no science behind this, but, then, there have been few real studies of the subject. Many scientists argue that the body is quite efficient at disposing of toxins. Some say small amounts of chemical residue from processed foods may get stored in fat cells, but these are quickly flushed out when the fat cells are broken down. I suspect some of this detox guff comes from the treatment of chemical abuse, as the first step in the process is often to give the body a chance to flush out whatever chemicals were consumed. Some of it certainly is borrowed from a pretty old idea -- that what we eat can contaminate the humors of the body, or that the humors themselves are capable of befouling the body. Whatever tortured logic is going on in creating the idea of a body that needs to be detoxified, it's all a bit beside the point, but when you start reading about weight loss you're going to bump into this particular pseudoscience all the time. (One site even proposed that the body, through some unexplained process, actually converts toxins into fat, which are then reconverted into toxins when you lose weight and just wander around the body, waiting for their chance to turn into fat again, so that dieting without detoxing is useless.)

I don't know why there is so much garbage out there about dieting, when the process for losing weight is so clearly established: Lower your caloric intake below what you need to maintain your current weight and you will lose pounds. Exercise will help, as toned muscles burn more calories than untoned ones, and exercise itself burns calories. And that's it. That's the trick. That's how it is done. There are subtleties as to how this plays out -- some weeks you may lose more weight, some you may not lose at all, and, if you're exercising, you may actually gain a few pounds in muscle, which is heavier than fat. But maintained, over time, this will cause weight loss.

And that's probably the rub. It takes time. A lot of time. Most dietitians recommend losing weight at the rate of about a pound a week. If you're a hundred pounds overweight, that's two years of weight loss before you slim down to what you want to weigh.It's easy to backslide, especially if you have bad eating habits. You can spend a month losing four pounds and gain them back over a single Thanksgiving. And the closer you get to your goal, the slower it goes. It's just not a quick process. And yet, if you look at the covers of magazines, they offer all sorts of suggestions for quick and easy weight loss. I wonder how well they would sell if their covers read "Lose 30 pounds in a year"?

Well, you're going to be a year older sooner or later, one way or the other. As I see it, I can either be slimmer this time next year, the same weight, or heavier, depending on what I do over the next six months. I've decided to shoot for skinny. It may take a while to get there, but, what the hell. I have the time.

More Rock Star Skinny.

THE SCALE HAS ME at 192.5, which is about two and a half pounds up from when I ended the fast, but that's deceptive. I suspect I was dehydrated at the end of the fast, as I was nauseated for an entire weekend, and I also suspect my body has been replacing the glycogen in my liver, which is good for a few pounds. I expected that this would happen, but I am looking forward to watching my weight start to drop again, which should happen in pretty short order.

Since I ended my fast, I have been eating 900 calories per day. This is less that half than the 2100 calories I would need to maintain my current weight, so, presumably, my body is burning about 1100 calories per day in fat (it's not quite that simple of a mechanism, of course). I intend to maintain this level of caloric intake for nine weeks, starting today, unless I get hideously bored by the whole thing, in which case I shall revisit my approach.

Strangely, the first day of my 900 calorie diet, I had a hard time finding enough food to get up to that number, even with a glass of whiskey. A salad is only 100 and something calories, even with dressing. Fruit comes in at under a hundred calories. Steamed veggies? You might as well be eating air. I have discovered that many fruit juices will eat up your calories very quickly, which is a shame, because while I know water is really the best thing for me to be drinking during this diet, I can't help but grow bored of it.

A few things I have noticed: My sweet tooth, which has always been enormous, is gone, at least for the moment. Totally gone. Nothing sugary holds any appeal. The thought of drinking soda actually slightly nauseates me. I don't think this will last forever, but it is interesting, and helpful, as it would be pretty hard to maintain 900 calories while I am gobbling down cupcakes.

Sometimes I finish a meal and am not satisfied, and I have had sudden fits of hunger during the day (although rarely), but I have yet to go to sleep hungry. At the end of the day, I go to sleep with a perfectly satisfied stomach, which I would not have expected.

My body has not yet gotten used to the reduction in calories, and, as a result, any sort of extended or sudden physical activity leaves me quickly winded. I do not expect this will always be the case, but it is a little annoying right now, especially as I must climb three flights of stairs to get to my apartment.

My mood has been excellent and I have not been feeling light-headed or scatterbrained. I can already see that I have lost weight -- I must tighten my belt more, and my face looks thinner. I have been keeping a journal of everything I eat, as a 2008 study determined that people who keep food diaries lose twice as much weight as those who don't. I have also made sure to eat a small breakfast every morning (usually some fruit), as there is some evidence that not doing so leads to weight gain, perhaps from overeating at lunch to compensate.

The best part of this diet, at least so far, is that I don't think about food, or the lack of it, all the time. I think the problem with a lot of diets is that they make you sort of obsessed about what you're eating, and people who are on the diets spend a lot of time thinking about food. Especially if you're a person who already has a problem with food, this seems unwise to me. With this, I basically eat when I am hungry, select food that is low calorie (which isn't much of a problem for me, as, with sweets out of my diet, everything I eat is low calorie), jot it down, eat it, and go on to whatever else needs to be done. When I get hungry again, I repeat the process. I don't really think about food any more than I did before I started the diet, and I suspect I think about it less, because I am no longer getting sudden urges to rush downstairs and buy a soda or candy bar.

But we're three days into this thing. We'll see how it is going a week from now, or a month, or two months.

More Rock Star Skinny.

I HAD TO BREAK MY FAST YESTERDAY. I just started feeling miserable and terribly nauseated. I did some research, which suggested the cause was an electrolyte imbalance, which can be potentially dangerous. I ate a little bit of soup -- perhaps three spoonfuls -- for lunch yesterday, and some rice and veggies later, again, only about two or three spoonfuls. I had a half bowl of spaghetti for supper, and drank some Gatorade, which reduced my nausea by quite a bit. Now I'm feeling a lot better. According to the scale this morning, I weigh 190 pounds, which is a drop of 12 to 14 pounds since I started this diet.

Quite a few years ago, when I first moved to Omaha, I went to the zoo there, and they had a machine that told you your weight if you were on Mars, or Venus, or the moon. I got on it, and it told me that I weighed 190 pounds. I had not weighed myself in years, and was laboring under the impression that I weighed 160 pounds, so this came as quite a shock to me. I suppose I had just been ignoring the signs -- after all, my pants size had been creeping upward. I once wore a 29, when I was far too skinny. Now I wore a 36. That suggests an expansion in the belly region.

At some point, I got bigger than that, when perhaps a better choice would have been to work my way down from it. But a few years ago I managed to diet enough to get myself back to 190. Then I got bored and stopped. I am determined to get lower than 190 now, which will make me lighter than I have been in 10 years. Actually, I should dip below 190 in the next week, and then my first goal will be accomplished.

Anyway, it's on to the next stage of the RocknRolla diet, eating 900 calories per day. I will be keeping a little journal of what I eat -- apparently, people who do that have something like three times the success rate of people who don't. I won't put it on the blog, because how boring would that be? In fact, I probably won't be doing daily entries on this anymore, but instead checking in every so often to report on my progress, especially when I switch diets. Skinny, here I come!

More Rock Star Skinny.

YESTERDAY WAS MISERABLE. My body ached, I had no energy, and late in the day I started feeling quite nauseated. I got up in the night and dry heaved. Then I went to the Web to see what other people's experiences of fasting were, and they described similar experiences. I've decided to end the fast portion of the RocknRolla Diet tonight, as I go back to work tomorrow and can't be vomity and low-energy there. I achieved what I wanted in the first part of this diet anyway -- I jump started the fat-burning process and dumped a lot of weight. According to my scale, I am now 191.5 pounds, a loss of over 10 pounds. I'll break my fast simply tonight, with some soup, and tomorrow I begin the second phase of the diet, in which I eat only about 900 calories of food per day.

DAY 3 OF THE FAST, and almost 60 hours without food. Yesterday was harder than the first day -- my stomach continues to shrink, which feels rather like someone is pressing down on it, and, of course, my habit is to feed it when it feels like that. So, while I wouldn't say I am precisely feeling hungry, I am feeling something that I usually, and reflexively, respond to by eating. So yesterday was an exercise in impulse control, as I constantly wanted to rush out and buy something to chew on.

The scale has me at six pounds lighter than I was a few days ago, but, again, that's probably mostly my liver's reserve of glucose (properly, glycogen), which can be quite a lot. Weighing yourself is not a dependable way to gauge weight loss, especially when you are dealing with a few pounds here and there. We can swell up just by drinking water and having salt, and that has nothing to do with how much fat we have on us. So I am weighing myself out of curiosity more than anything. When my pants start feeling loose on me, and my shirts start hanging off of me, that's when I'll know real loss has happened. And it should have kicked in already, or be getting ready to, as I must have depleted my backup supply of glucose by now and the body must be at the point where it gives up on burning muscle and taps into the fat.

Aside from the feeling of my stomach contracting and occasional, and very mild, headaches, I haven't felt any ill effects of the fast. I have as much, or more, energy as I usually do. I feel alert. There are no aches or pains. I sleep well. Were it not for this constant impulse to eat, this wouldn't be too difficult. I suspect it's a little like when people quit smoking; I imagine there is a constant, and hard to ignore, impulse to light up a cigarette that is as hard to manage as my desire to eat. I also miss the sensual pleasure of food. Eating is just so ... delicious. But it's just a week, and a week passes in no time at all. This time tomorrow, I will be halfway done with the fast, and three and a half days later it is on to the next stage of the RocknRolla diet -- eating less than 1000 calories per day for nine weeks. This doesn't sound like much, but Jared Fogel, the guy from the Subway ads, managed to keep his diet down to 900 calories per day by eating a half turkey sub and a foot-long veggie sub every day, along with a bag of chips. Some of what I eat, such as soup and veggies, are much lower calorie than a Subway sandwich, so, when I start eating again, if I choose my foods carefully, it's going to suddenly feel as though I have a superabundance of food.

According to some fast math, I need to take in about 2500 calories per day to maintain my current weight. The rough math of weight loss is that you must burn 3500 calories to lose one pound. So I should be losing about a pound every two or three days. I expect to have dropped down to about 195 pounds by the time this fast is completed, and, if I can maintain dropping a pound or two every week, I can lose 30 pounds by May. Now, 165 is still heavier than I am going for -- remember, I am shooting for skinny (which, for me, is about 140), but it will be a hell of a good start.


More Rock Star Skinny.

IT IS, AT THIS MOMENT, 33 hours since the last time I ate. I have never in my life gone this long without food. When I was younger, I used to fast every Monday, but it was a partial fast -- generally, at about 10pm, my stomach would start grumbling and I'd eat something. I had always read that if you can work your way through that, your appetite goes away.

This seems to be true, at least at the moment. Yesterday there was a lot of growling and noisemaking as my stomach contracted, and every time it happened I would get the urge to go eat. It wasn't really uncomfortable, but these are the signals the body sends when it's hungry, and I am used to listening to them, almost without thinking, so refusing them felt strange. At the end of the day, I developed a mild headache and a sense of lightheadedness. I believe the headache was from withdrawing from caffeine, and the lightheadedness was probably from my body running out of glucose. I woke up this morning four pounds lighter than when I weighed myself yesterday. This is the weight loss that they tend to say is "just water." It isn't, of course -- I drank a lot of water yesterday and am not dehydrated -- but it might as well be. It's my body using up the glucose reserved in my liver, and, when I start eating again, the liver will just go ahead and replenish that, and that weight will come back.

Despite my headache, I went to bed last night feeling unexpectedly good. I still feel good. I feel relaxed. I feel alert. My stomach is still contracting, but it doesn't feel like hunger anymore. My headache is gone. I watched television for a little while yesterday and was amazed at home many ads for food there were, and how good it all looked. Today, or, at least, right now, I have no desire for food. It shall be interesting to see how this progresses over the course of the week.

More Rock Star Skinny.

A SONG about watching someone else succeed in a town that wasn't very kind to you.

"I'VE BEEN TO HOLLYWOOD TOO" LYRICS:

I know that girl
On the teevee screen
I remember her
When she was just nineteen
She was pretty and tough
Bleached hair and tattoos
Look at her now
I've been to Hollywood too

She's working on
An expose
A tell all story
Of her Minnesota days
And if it's half made-up
Well it's at least half true
Look at her now
I've been to Hollywood too

She's in magazines
Four-page spreads
She's the subject of gossip
Who she quarrels or beds
She accepts awards
With teary thank yous
Look at her now
I've been to Hollywood too

We worked once at
The alternative press
And everyone then
Predicted success
Everyone expected it
Everyone knew
Well look at her now
I've been to Hollywood too

I saw her once
At a movie premier
A retrospective of
Her brilliant career
She didn't know me
As she bummed a cigarette
She didn't recall
That we had ever met
I lit a match
Casually
Then I said my name
And she looked at me
She nodded and said
I remember you
I remember that
You'd been to Hollywood too

LISTEN TO "I'VE BEEN TO HOLLYWOOD TOO":



DOWNLOAD "I'VE BEEN TO HOLLYWOOD TOO."

MORE NEW SONGS!

WELL, HERE IT IS, the morning of the first day of my diet. Actually, that's not quite right. It is the morning of the first day of my diets.

I've decided to lose some weight, which is a pretty common new year's resolution. And that's not quite right either. I haven't decided to lose weight. I've decided to become skinny. Rock star skinny.

I'm hovering at about 200 pounds right now. At 5'11", that makes me a bit ... beefy? Husky? Whatever you want to call it, it makes me a bit heavier than I would prefer. I was a skinny kid, but slowly, over the course of 20 years, I have put on a few pounds per year, and it adds up. Two years ago I decided to do a proper, well-considered diet, and over the course of three or four months dropped 20 pounds. Then I got bored with it and just went back to eating whatever seemed interesting. Two years later, I have gained ten back.

And there's the rub: Boredom. I know dieting is not supposed to be about weight loss, but instead about developing good eating habits. That's a problem for me. I don't have habits. I have whims. I don't eat at the same time every day. I grow quickly bored with what I eat, and switch to something else. Sometimes I'll forget to eat for a day. It's hard to develop good eating habits when you find habits boring.

No, in order for me to lose weight and keep it off, I must find a way to make not eating as interesting as eating. And that's hard, because chocolate is always an adventure. But that's what must be done, because the only way to lose weight is to take in less calories than you expend, and you do that by not eating.

Now, I can do any diet for a few months and be entertained by it. But ten weeks is probably as long as I can do anything new before the novelty wears off, and then I start investigating the tantalizing possibilities of chocolate again.

So what's the trick? How can I manage to lose weight when I'm so easily distracted?

I figure the best way to do it is to switch diets when one bores me. There are a lot of diets out there. Some of them are ridiculous. Some are reasonable. They all sort of work in the short term. Most of them don't work in the long term -- you gain weight back as soon as you go off them, because they don't instill new habits. Despite this, I'm going to try any diet that seems amusing to me and doesn't seem like I might emerge from it with an ulcer, a heart condition, and rotted teeth. I'll do this until I get back to skinny. At that point, I'll just monitor my skinniness. If I seem like I'm starting to not be skinny again, bammo, fad diet. At the very least, it will give me something to write about on my blog.

By the way, I know there is a possibility I will be besieged by panicked nutritionists telling me this is a very bad idea. Maybe so. I won't be jumping off into any diets at all until I have thoroughly investigated them and feel secure that I can tackle them without any ill-effects. This isn't some sort of reckless scheme to ruin my body. It's just a mechanism for addressing my desire to lose weight with a personality quirk that makes it very hard for me to do anything with any real consistency.

That being said, I am starting this project with the dodgiest diet in a lifetime of dodgy diets, which I am calling the RocknRolla diet, after the recent film by Guy Ritchie. And why am I calling it that? Because the film featured Toby Kebbell as a crack-addicted rock and roll star, and, in order to play the role, Kebbell had to shrink his body down to the emaciated frame of a drug addict. He did this as follows, taken from an interview in Premiere:

It was a rough ride. I basically starved for seven days because that basically allows the muscle to dystrophy — your body will eat your muscle very quickly, and of course, muscle's pretty heavy. And so I started off doing that, and then for one meal a day, I ate a very small meal, so it was basically a half tin of tuna, which is about 25 grams of tuna, on a pepper, with olive oil, Tabasco, and ground pepper. That was one of my favorites; that wasn't all I ate. Another of my favorites was perhaps porridge — oatmeal and banana. So that was it. It was just one meal a day, and that for nine weeks brings you right down to your bare bone

Now, I won't be doing that, precisely. Or, at least, I won't be eating tuna. But here are the elements of the diet:

1. A one-week fast. Despite what Kebbell says, if you do a real fast -- take in no calories at all -- the body only burns muscle for a day or two, and then jumps into ketosis, when the body starts devouring fat cells for energy. Fasting of this sort can be maintained for quite a while, and the body tends to let you know when you've used up your fat supplies by suddenly causing you to be ravenously hungry. A fast of this sort can go on for a month or thereabouts, but I think Kebbell was on to something. After a week, not eating becomes boring.

2. And that's when you switch into a low-calorie diet. I am not sure how many calories Kebbell was eating per day -- it sounds quite low -- but once I go off my fast, I will not be eating less than 800 calories per day. Otherwise, there is a risk of hypoglycemia, and I'm not interested in that. 800 calories is not very many, so I shall have to do what I can to make them as amusing as possible.

It's now been about 11 hours since I last ate and I have not yet started to feel hungry, which is not unexpected, as I usually don't start getting hunger pangs until two or three in the afternoon. I have loaded myself up with mineral water and vitamins, as well as fiber packets to keep my digestion from becoming sluggish. I imagine I will start to get very irritable in a few hours. The first 24 hours or so of a fast are the worst, until the body starts converting fat into energy. Then, from what I hear, fasting can become quite pleasant. I guess I'll find out, and I will report back. It's already starting to feel like an adventure.

Could be worse. I could be doing The Machinist diet.

More Rock Star Skinny.