The Football Fan’s Diet

By Matt DeReno
On The FFD

PITTSBURGH – While the subject of loopholes are all the buzz, what with AIG executive bonuses being bandied about in the media, I thought I would take a moment to discuss my loopholes. However, my loopholes are literally just that – loopholes on my belt.

When you use a rusty screwdriver to add another hole to your belt so it fits better, you can only justify the barbaric tailoring if the new hole is put in place so that it holds up your pants and not is there to loosen a python’s grip on your flab.

In other words, I would hate to destroy a fine leather accessory (Target, $9.99) by punching a crude hole in it so as to loosen its bottleneck on my waistline. Luckily, that is not what I had to do. You see, yesterday, I made the loophole tailoring with a dirty old Philips screwdriver while standing in my garage holding my pants up with one hand and my belt pulled taut around the piercing head of the rusty Stanley tool (now just think how that would sound if I messed up and wrote “Stanley’s tool”?).
The bottom line is I ran out of loopholes to make my belt smaller and therefore felt justified in taking tailing matters to my own garage. Call it vigilante tailoring!

Oh, the joy I took in punching a screwdriver through my belt to make another hole. I expect in a few weeks, the belt will be totally useless. The pants too, by the way, are close to being waylaid to the garbage can or secondhand store.

I liked these pants. These twill pleated jobs from Old Navy nicely covered my fat ass since I bought them in October. Now, I can almost pull them off without unbuttoning them. Good riddance I say. Somewhere a carnival caravan can use the material to make a circus tent.

I should also ad that I am still suffering this damnable sinus cold. It is mostly confined to my head, which means I had ample energy to hit the gym yesterday. What a day at the gym it was too.
I burned over 1,000 collective calories— for the first time ever— between the climber and the stepper machine at the Y. Later that day, I walked Coconuts, my dog, for an hour. I actually wound up burning more calories on the whole then I took in on the day. Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know. Funny though, this morning on the scale, this negative caloric intake for the day didn’t really make a difference on the digital scale.

I thought about that for a second. There have been times where I was close to having a negative caloric intake for the day before and so I know it was in reach if all the right variables were in place (such as swallowing a balloon and not being able to shovel anything down my pie hole). Minus the balloon, such was the case yesterday. I burned more calories than I logged.

Now that I did that, I have no desire to do it again. I think the danger is that you start on this mindset that the less calories, the less carbs, the less of this or that I have the better. So why wouldn’t nothing be the best?

Well, our bodies surely need fuel and “nothing” is not fuel. Negative caloric balances aren’t nutritious. In fact, negative calorie balances should probably be called starving. But, funny, I don’t really feel that hungry at all yesterday.

So the lesson is that I put up a negative caloric balance but I am not ever going to go out of my way to do it again. If I exercise the hell out of the Y then I will be sure to have a nice fat sandwich later in the day or pray tell, a frothy mug of hops and barely.

You see, I am not out to be the next Nicole Ritchie and the last time I checked, I don’t’ have a leading actor role to prepare for. So, I am looking better and feeling better. That is what the FFD is all about. That is what I am trying to do. I don’t want to have to create loopholes like starving myself to achieve the end result. I will, however, make loopholes on my belt if I have to. If I need a screwdriver to do so, then so be it. Speaking of screwdrivers, now where did I leave the orange juice? 

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