Yours portly had a particularly grueling school year last year, and I fell into my bad habit of overeating to cope with the stress. Because of an unfortunate quirk in my schedule, I did not have time for lunch most day, which meant I would eat a large breakfast, then gorge myself during a morning planning period on whatever lunch I had packed. I’d get home in the evenings very late and tired, and would proceed to eat even more.
Fortunately, I didn’t quite get to the “disgracefully fat 271.8 pounds” of the 2022-2023 school year, but I still chunked up a bit. At the time of writing, I’m slowly dropping weight, and am down from about 260 pounds to around 252 pounds.
My approach, as always, is intermittent fasting and the elimination of most snacks. Essentially, I skip breakfast; eat lunch around noon; and eat dinner around 6 PM. If I have a particularly light lunch I might have a snack around 3 PM—a fig bar, for example—but that’s about it.
I’m not much of a “get-out-there-and-exercise” type, either, and with the brutal heat and humidity this summer, I’ve become quite sedentary, treating my house like it’s some kind of biodome habitat plopped onto the surface of Venus. It reminds me of that Ray Bradbury short story, “All Summer in a Day,” in which Venusian schoolchildren only get two hours on the planet’s surface every seven years.
That’s how I’ve handled summer: take Murphy out; go to lessons; do the bare minimum outside; get back inside. It works, but I’ve become like George Costanza during “The Summer of George“—atrophying due to a lack of movement.
Well, I’ll be hoofing it again soon enough.
With that, here is 28 July 2023’s “The Joys of Fasting“:
The Portly Politico 