I Can't Weight—One Man's Diet (From
book Spider’s Big Catch) Gary E. Anderson www.abciowa.comLike many people, I've decided I need to take off a little weight from holidays—the holidays of six years ago. But I've never dieted before, so being a conscientious kinda guy, I logged into my favorite web browser for some advice.
I found 3,978,158,342 sites offering help with losing a few pounds. (In fact, I was so overwhelmed, I had to grab a sandwich before even tackling search.) As a public service, I'll try to encapsulate what I learned, although I may have gotten a little confused by some of terminology.
Most of sites spent considerable time talking about calories, so maybe we should start there. As far as I could make out, a calorie is defined as amount of heat it takes to raise a gram of water from 58 degrees to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
Immediately, that fact brought several questions to mind. First, who decided that? Why 58 to 60? That’s not even hot enough to take a bath in! Next, if one calorie raises temperature of water 2 degrees, and human body is 90% water, why don’t millions of Americans boil over during holidays, after consuming billions of calories at one sitting? That definition implies that a person should be able to eat a million calories a day, as long as he spaced them out, to avoid boiling over. You could eat, let your body cool back down, then eat a bunch more, and never gain any weight – it made sense to me. That concept must be common knowledge to world at large, which would explain why you so rarely see people boil over in public. But since I’m new to this dieting business, it came as exciting news for me.
