My Greatest Weakness

Food. I love it. I'm addicted to it. But not the leafy, green, healthy stuff. More like the meat n' potatoes stuff, bread, the stuff I grew up on.

But you'd know that if you had paying any attention. I don't like to try "diets." I have this fear of winding up like Karen Carpenter. Besides, who likes to struggle and starve?

So I tried Nutrisystem. This is the system where they send you food. I ordered too much food -- one mistake I made -- and ran out of room to put the entrees, the desserts, and the snacks. I think another mistake I made was checking "diabetic," which meant that the food was mainly, well, bland. Boring. You have the option of selecting several things they will NOT send you, and while I found that valuable, there were too many for their lists. The best part is that they have a marvelous tracking system online. But in the end, the food was too bland, too cardboardy, to eat.

I then tried Bistro M.D., which looked like an upscale version of Nutrisystem. These meals you actually put in the freezer, and then pull them out, microwave them (all a standard 2.7 minutes, I learned after practice), and then keep track of what you eat. The tracking system online is non-existent, which was too bad. And I ran out of freezer space very quickly. In the end, however, the food was too bland, not interesting enough.

I am now on a modified Visalus shake system. I like the shake system as long as cherries are in season. You can use orange juice (which has a lot of sugar for my diet), non-fat milk, and fruit to spice it up. It has a very pleasant, slight vanilla taste. Cherries make a fanTAStic shake. But strawberries? Too bland.

I'm still experimenting with this. I like the idea of the shake, because I don't have to cook, I don't have to wander out to a diner, and I know it's good for me. But I've got to find some better fruit to put in the shake.

October Is Health Month

Pardon me for saying this, but I dislike October. The health part. Not the birthday part or the Halloween part, which I love.

For some odd reason, October is often when health issues start calling. I just got a call from my clinic: It's flu shot season. Certainly I signed up for it. (I will take any shot for almost anything. If it means not getting the creeping crud and there's a shot for it, that's a no-brainer decision.)

I got a letter yesterday about my regularly scheduled mammogram. It said I was "overdue" for the check-up. They even stated when I had had the last mammogram: 11 months ago! How often do I have to be prodded and x-rayed? That benign cyst they found in my right breast several years ago keeps paying back dividends, I suppose. It was benign, though. What's the big deal?

At this point, I'm going through everything they request. There are certain things I won't do, I don't want to do and refuse to do. These things are not in that narrow realm.

You know, come to think of it, I think it's time for my every-three-year colonoscopy. Crap.