Okay.  After a night’s sleep and a reboot I can now get my cursor into this edit field.  That wouldn’t happen yesterday.

So I’ll just sign off this post by saying that I did that 601 calories in my 31 minutes yesterday morning.  The rest of the day was normal and uneventful.

Dinner was…. no, I’m not documenting food choices anymore.  It was good.  We’re never hungry.  I really can’t figure out how to split my eating into six meals a day instead of 3, because our day just isn’t structured that way.  But it doesn’t seem to matter much.  Maybe I’d shape up faster if I did it the way the program says to do it, but this is good enough.

On to a post for today now….

I’m feeling only slightly toxic today.  Yesterday was not a very satisfying cheater day.  I ended up working until four in the morning trying to get Garage Band to edit in some replacement verses for Tong Nian.  It’s coming a long, but I always find recording music a very tedious activity, and the editing software on Garage Band on the iPad is pretty lame compared to the software I’m used to working with.  Touch screen has it’s place, but precision work with words, images, and sounds isn’t it.

615 on the elliptical this morning in my 31 minutes.

I didn’t get up until eleven this morning.  It’s now a quarter past two and I still haven’t eaten breakfast.  Must get going.  Much to do today.

I’m proo freading a friend’s masters thesis.  Tedious work in an area not my specialty.  That’s one of the things that kept me up all night.  And today I have to get that done and also get my class prep done for tomorrow.  Aaaarrrrgh.  I need breakfast.

It’s now twenty to four.   I got caught up in finishing the proo freading of Wang Tao’s dissertation and still haven’t had breakfast.  That’s next.

Okay, had a shower.  Had breakfast (brown rice and chicken, since I’m out of greens)  and did some class prep.  Sent off Wang Tao’s dissertation with my revisions.  Then we rode our bikes to Auchan supermarket and picked up some supplies.  When we got home, I was hungry, so we made a snack of whole wheat French bread with tomato, cottage cheese, and marinaded chicken.  Mmmmnnnn.   Tasty.

I find it incredible that we can have snacks like this, never be hungry, and still get a better body out of the deal.

Now I must get back to work.

As planned, I’m now enjoying a stack of grilled cheese sandwiches.  We were going to ride our bikes to the super market this morning, about 30 minutes from home, instead of using the elliptical trainer, but it’s raining.  So I put in my usual 31 minutes.  597 calories (Well, it is a cheater day, after all.  And that’s still a good workout even if I didn’t break 600.)

It’s really gratifying to see progress, and to lose about half of my big belly.  Of course, what I really want is to be young and beautiful, and that isn’t going to happen.  I suppose “young for my age and healthy” is the realistic goal.  Do I expect to look like those six pack rippling abs dudes on the front cover of Men’s Health magazine every single month.  Of course not.  That’s a truly unrealistic concept of health and handsome.  So why do I get sucked in?  Asking that question is like asking why women want to look like anorexic stick insects.  It’s all marketing.

My thoughts now turn to maintaining the ideal body weight.  What is the ideal body weight for me?  I suspect it’s about 180 lbs.  That’s forty pounds lower than where I am right now.  I think most people would say this is too extreme.  That was my weight when I was a teenager.  For years.  I could eat anything I wanted to eat, and never gain a pound.  Why would it be too low a weight to aim for now?

And I wonder about what happens when I near my goal, which at the moment is just to dip slightly below 200 pounds.  If I keep on this program do I continue to lose weight until I disappear?  I don’t want to get into a cycle of gaining and losing and gaining again.  I don’t want to have to think about it so much.  Oh well, these are things to deal with in the future.  For now it’s obvious that I still need to lose fat, so that’s what I’m doing.  Just not on a cheater day.

I should add that Ruth is tickled pink with her progress too.  I like my woman to be tickled pink.

Those cheese sandwiches were delicious.  They included tomato slices and were significantly greasy.

The cheater day is almost over now.  I’ve just topped it off with a hot chocolate heavily laced with scotch.  We had pizza for dinner.  I have no greens in the fridge for breakfast.  Right now I’m cooking up some skinless chicken breasts which will hopefully last out the week.

Somehow this cheater day has not satisfied.  We’re too busy.  Time has just flown by, with music being a big time consumer.  Banjo practice.  Recording Tong Nian on Garage Band.  We took my guitar in to a music store today and got a pickup put in it.  I’m very happy with the pickup.  No holes were required.  The cable plugs in where the strap peg used to be, and the unit has a strap plug to replace the old one.  It also has a volume control, discretely hidden just inside the sound hole.  Now when we play someplace we will have one less microphone to worry about.

My weight this morning – 99.9 kg.  Just barely under 100.

That’s 220.2 pounds.

Starting weight was 109.6 so weight loss to date (which I keep telling myself isn’t important) 9.7 kg. = 21.4 pounds.

I’m not really up yet.  It’s only 6:25am on a day with no classes.  Going back to bed for a while.

Ruth is now up and has done her elliptical exercise.  Her starting weight was 73.9 kg and today she weighed in at 66.8 so she has lost 7.1 kg. or 15.7 pounds.  Way to go, Ruth.

I didn’t break 600 calories this morning.  But 599 is close, and totally acceptable in my 31 minutes.  We’ve been watching a great documentary on the Chinese revolution while I exercise.  It makes the time fly.

Okay, a good day over now. We just finished the photo session and here are the results.  I’m not looking like a teenager, or a movie star.  But I am looking more in shape.  I’m gratified.  This is only the end of week 7.

Tomorrow is a cheater day.  I’m looking forward to a grilled cheese sandwich for breakfast.

603 calories on the elliptical this morning in my 31 minutes.

Maybe now is the time to explain the 31 minutes.  It all started with wanting to do 30 minutes every morning.  But then we started putting the iPad on the machine so we could work on our Chinese or read something while working out.  The iPad covered the numbers, so to make sure I got in a full 30 minutes while I got the iPad set up and working, I added a minute.  So 31 minutes is like a baker’s dozen.  It’s a baker’s half hour.  No, a workout half hour.  And now that I’ve explained it, it doesn’t seem worth explaining.

No Chinese greens in the fridge this morning.  I forgot to buy any yesterday.  So my breakfast is just brown rice and skinless chicken breast (that sounds horrible, the skinless bit makes it sound ugly).  I really miss the flavour of the greens.

Okay, the day is over.  Soup for lunch again.  I started a fresh soup stock in the hotpot.  We had leftovers for dinner, and then a meal of beef and potato and green beans after our Chinese class… oh yeah, I wasn’t going to detail my diet any more.  Not really much point because it is pretty standard now.

The big news of the day was that I accidentally cinched my belt in to the fourth hole this morning.  That’s obvious progress.  It didn’t stay in the fourth hole, because that’s just a bit too tight.  But I’m heading in the right direction.

We’re absolutely infested with mosquitoes.   Getting eaten alive.  Time to get the mosquito net up again.

Time pressure seems to be mounting as we near the end of term.

608 calories on the elliptical this morning in my 31 minutes, plus some time at the beginning when I didn’t realize I hadn’t started the timer.

Breakfast is the usual, same old same old, but I’m not tired of it yet.

Must shower and get to classes.

Okay, nothing much to report on the day.  Lunch was the leftover soup, as usual.  Very tasty and chock full of veggies as we approach the end of the pot.

I had another banana when I got home, the last of them.  Then Ruth cooked up a fabulous near vegetarian dinner – beans and tofu stir fry, a backed potato with the contents removed, mashed, and reinserted on the skin on a bed of cottage cheese.  Very tasty.

We just took the dog for her evening run and poop beside the bikes and stopped in at the fruit store for two bananas, some cherries, a couple of apples and a lump of durian.  And that’s it for the day.  I think I’m going to stop detailing the food I’m eating.  You get the idea by now.  It’s a simple diet.  I’m never hungry.  And I am losing flab.

604 calories in 31 minutes on the elliptical.  No time for posting.  Too busy.

Okay, the day is finally almost over.  Let’s see what I can remember of it.

Standard breakfast – Chinese greens, skinless chicken breast, brown rice all boiled in whey with a dash of soy sauce.  I’m getting very fond of this breakfast.

Ate the aging banana at some point during the morning, or just before lunch.  Lunch was our soup again.  It’s very thick with veggies  and was made on a beef stock, so the meat is more a condiment in it.  We finished up the last batch of brown rice and I started a fresh batch.

I went to the campus veggie store before dinner and picked up some more Chinese greens, a couple of onions, four more bananas,  some kind of mushroom that looks like a thick penis, a package of mushrooms that absorb flavour and have the texture of beef fat when cooked.

Dinner was half a can of salmon each, with brown rice and steamed Chinese greens.  Nothing fancy, but I’m getting very fond of brown rice.

I just ate another banana for a late night snack.  I wonder how much those kinds of calories set back my weight loss, but I mostly don’t care.  I am losing weight, and more importantly losing belly flab.

Ruth was singing the praises of this program today, noting that she doesn’t feel hungry or particularly deprived,  mostly because of the cheater day.  That takes the curse off the program.  One day when we can eat anything we want really makes it easy to be strict for the rest of the week.  My only sense of sacrifice comes from those days, like today, when I really didn’t want to cook dinner and would have much preferred to say, let’s eat at a restaurant.  But that’s something I can handle.

I think my friend Goody, the vegan, would not approve of all the chicken we are eating, or the milk products, or the beef stock stew.  But I’m not ready to go vegan.

Okay, time to get to work on the Oppornockity Tunes home page.  It’s mosquito season again.  I’m getting eaten alive in my office here.  Must get my dian wen pai (electric mosquito racket that fries the bastards.)

605 calories on the elliptical trainer in my 31 minutes this morning.

Standard breakfast.

Lunch: standard leftover soup now heavy on veggies and very thick.

I’m crashing for a nap.

Well, not much to report for today.  My morning class had six students and my afternoon class had three. It seems they don’t want to do do the speaking assignment, and the best way to avoid it is to not come to class.  Sigh.

I had an apple with the last of the cottage cheese for a snack when I got home.

Ruth cooked up a stir fry of leftovers plus added long beans, with a bean salad.  I’m tired.  I’m going to bed soon.

It’s Sunday and I’ve been sitting at this computer since about nine in the morning.  It’s now a quarter to twelve.  Haven’t eaten anything, and I must get on the machine.

I feel a lot less toxic than I probably should this morning.  Cleaned up a whole bottle of huang jiu yesterday, with our hot pot dinner, and then came home to finish off the inch or two in three other bottles.  It was a good cheater day.  Now… back on the program.

601 calories on the elliptical in my 31 minutes.  It took a sprint in the last two minutes to break 600.

Breakfast was freshly cooked brown rice, Chinese spinach which took some rescue work because much of it had liquified, the last of my last batch of skinless chicken breasts, the whites of two eggs with just a bit of the yolk of one that got mixed in, plus a dash of soy sauce.  Tasty.

I’m now cooking up three more chicken breasts for breakfasts to last the week.  I’m boiling them in whey.  Which leads me to my next thought.

I have refined my cottage cheese production.  I now put the whey back in the milk cartons.  It goes in the fridge and we use it for cooking instead of using water.  I hate waste, and the whey adds nutrition without adding any obvious milk flavour.

Time to hit the shower.

It’s a cheater day, but I’m about to climb on the elliptical trainer anyway.  Just as soon as I can get my new banjo lesson (Beginner’s banjo vol. 2) downloaded from the Musicians Workshop.

609 calories on the elliptical in my 31 minutes this morning, while I ate crumbly, oily, Chinese almond cookies.  Now that’s a cheater day breakfast.

My frustration this morning is with my downloadable banjo lesson from The Musician’s Workshop.  The file they give me seems to be corrupted, and I get an “unexpected end of archive” error when I try to open it.  This takes most of the convenience out of buying on line.  I’ve sent off the email.  Let’s see how long it takes them to respond.

Like most cheater days, this has been a slightly weird day.  I went off to Starbucks and bought my vente latte.  Then I went out searching for a guitar store that Jack told me about.  Walked right past it the first time and ended up in some older market area with a man selling fruit trying to get me interested.  On my way back to Wanda Plaza I found the guitar store, priced a pickup for my guitar that I think I will buy and have installed.  It only takes one small hole, unlike the pickup that Jack bought that would remove square inches of the guitar body.  It’s quite expensive – 1,300 RMB which is close to two hundred bucks Canadian. (Okay, $190.16 CDN at today’s exchange rate.) but it would probably cost quite a bit more in Canada.  In fact, I’m sure it would cost two hundred just to have it installed back in Canada.  So we’ll probably buy it soon.  That will help solve the terrible microphone paucity that’s usual at gigs here.

The thing is, I’d only had a couple of Chinese almond cookies for breakfast, a blueberry muffin with that vente latte, and then I had a second vente latte.  Wow, was I buzzing.  Fortunately, shortly after I got home two students took us out for a hot pot dinner, which was delicious and accompanied by a full bottle of huang jiu.  That seems to have balanced my body chemistry.  I thought I was stuffed, but we stopped at the campus store on the way home and I bought some hong shu pian (sweet potato chips), which I’m munching on as I finish off the bottle of huang jiu.  Does all this constitute a balanced diet for a cheater day?

Right now I’m feeling like a cheater day is never enough.  It’s twenty to eleven.  I need a shower.  But I think I’ll quietly practice my banjo a bit longer.  I’ve almost got “Blackberry Blossom” down pat, a very simple version of it that is.