I post the same on both blogs, but I'm a little behind here. Agh!

How To Gain Weight and Keep it On

Posted on February 21, 2012by apronheadlilly

Not everyone wants to be lean and lithe dressed in long skinny pencil skirts and shapely tops. Not everybody wants the stares and admiration of an adoring public – to be drop-dead gorgeous. Some of us want to be “pleasant” with the comfort and invisibility of moo-moos and bulky blouses. Besides, a little extra weight smoothes out the spaces between the wrinkles.
The following ten tips should help you counter the thin culture, gain that extra twenty, and keep it on.

1. Never work out with weights or even carry heavy packages. There is the danger of increasing muscle mass which raises your resting metabolic rate, and then you might burn extra calories while watching TV or reading a book, which could not only cause tremendous guilt but could cause you to lose a few pounds.
2. Walk your socks off. Walk, walk, walk. You will have a healthier heart, but you’ll not lose a pound. The only thing thinner will be the soles of your shoes.
3. Invest your retirement in liquid diet drinks. Not only will you not lose weight, but if you supplement with a few Snickers bars here and there, you’ll gain substantially.
4. Join a gym. We all know that muscle weighs more than fat, and also just looking at all those hard bodies in leotards is good to tip the scales a couple of pounds.
5. Speaking of scales, weighing yourself everyday is a guarantee you’ll not lose a gram, and you’ll have the satisfaction of watching that little black arrow creep higher and higher. Perseverance pays.
6. Have babies—lots of them. Make sure to watch what you eat and exercise faithfully; that way you’re guaranteed not only to finish your pregnancy with an admirable weight gain, but you’ll also have that lovely bulge of elasticized skin to droop over your belt, should you ever be brave enough to wear one again.
7. Have a mid-life crisis with plenty of whining about the mess you’ve made of things. A good healthy dose of depression coupled with an extra large bag of chips and soda should not only be good for an appreciable weight gain, but the aluminum in the soda can might just promote enough memory loss so you don’t care.
8. Recycle all your low-fat cookbooks. You’ll help the environment and recover the taste of real food.
9. Buy an expensive outfit for that special occasion coming up; and it’s a sure bet that by the time you need to wear it, you’ll have gained enough so it doesn’t fit.
10. Heap bitter insults on your skinny friend who by changing from regular soda to diet soda lost fifteen pounds. It won’t necessarily help you in your quest, but it will feel really really good.

If all else fails, age gracefully. You’re guaranteed to pack on at least ten pounds a decade, so just be patient. I know I’m really looking forward to that one—the culmination of all my dreams.

Two almost profound thoughts for the day . . .

Photograph is totally unrelated to the blog post. :-)

Some folks see the glass as half full, others half empty.  My husband thinks I see the glass as half empty, but I say, "Wait . . . you mean you got a glass!"

Why is it that when you hear of Ecoli and other horrible life-threatening outbreaks, it is in relation to things like organic spinach or sprouts, or maybe beef (I read the Robin Cook novel, so I know how that works!).  If there were a serious risk of dying from chocolate (I mean other than the end-game effect), it could save many a diet.

Another totally unrelated image just because I can.  It's my neighbor's tree! :-)

The Weighty Issues of Weightloss

I have a plethora of diet and nutrition books.  They are bookended in my library by other fiction, like The Lord of the Rings and Little House on the Prairie, with a basket of Robin Cook medical mysteries close by in case of emergency.  The sum total of the diet books’ weight is close to my own–neither has shifted much in the last few years!

I have the LA Diet, The Maker’s Diet, The Serotonin Diet, Be a Loser, and my favorite ones The Longevity Diet, and The Anti-aging Plan.  These last two take the unique approach in encouraging adherents not to eat.  I’d say eating 5 almonds for breakfast is close to revolutionary!

And of course none of these diet plans agree with one another.  On the McDougall plan, you can’t eat anything but raw, organic veggies and fruit (not much fruit!).  Okay, I’m in that ballpark.  But no oil–not even olive–and no avocados. 

The Hippocrates Institute guy lives on sprouts and juiced raw everything.  The Gerson plan says sprouts will give you arthritis and otherwise kill you.  One book says I can’t eat anything along with fruit, and another says I can’t eat fruit.  Well, that kind of takes care of the combining problem. 

 One touts high protein–meat, meat, meat–and cites studies from Inuit folk in bygone days before the invasion of MacDonalds and Starbucks to the great white North.   Another cites studies from African bush people who eat nothing but plain grass, roots, and rocks and live longer than American couch potatoes–unless, of course, there is an outbreak of civil unrest and genocide.

So who do I believe?  I gave up Diet Pepsi 2 years ago, so that should add at least 5 years to my life.  But I’ve had a appendectomy surgery, and that supposedly takes off 10.  I eat largely an organic vegetarian diet, but I do eat some meats that are not plugged with antibiotics and growth hormone.  That should give me another 10 or so.  And when I do eat steak (rarely), I sit on the floor so as to eat lower on the food chain. 

My biggest sin is coffee, but it is organic.  The creamers . . . mmm, not so much.  With all this dietary concern I might add a year here and I might lose a year there, and I could be so distracted that I wander into the street and get hit by a truck.  So I figure the best mantra is to cite that this is the day the Lord has made and I will rejoice and be glad in it–after my spirulina shake.