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.