Icecream Diet

"Fuck salad."
- anonymous salad hater

Human stomach is like a sophisticated chemical net. It traps food and filters it. It throws away the bad stuff and stores the good stuff. Later, your body uses the good stuff to make you move, dance, sing, or even sleep. Yes, body uses the energy from the stuff to make your heart beat. Even while you sleep.

That's why you can lose weight while leading a completely sedentary lifestyle. How? By eating less energy. That doesn't mean eating tasteless foods. In fact, you can easily lose weight while eating two bars of ICE-CREAM per day. Or one piece of cake. But that has to be it. I mean, think about it this way -- if you are a car you need to drink gasoline. You can dilute gasoline with something awesome like wine. Then it would taste better but you would have to drink more of it. Wine is a horrible energy source for cars (but an excellent one for writers).

So, can one lose weight by eating ice-cream? That sounds crazy. It's not crazy. Unfortunately, modern weight-loss myths paint this "losing weight thing" as grueling. Everyone probably has this picture of a fat guy stuffing himself with salad. He's probably crying too. That's a bunch of bullshit. Fuck salad. Cabbage is a low-energy food but you can gain weight eating salads. Especially if they have oils (high density energy chunks).

The thing is, your body spends a certain amount of energy (measured in calories) per day. It has been approximated quite well and it's called basal metabolic rate. In a way it's like gas mileage in a car. Here's an example. Let's say Jerry weighs 170 lbs and measures six feet tall. He wastes 1900 calories per day just sleeping and breathing. An average scone from a coffeeshop has 400-500 calories. That means Jerry here can eat 3 scones per day, barely move, and still lose weight. Why? Because 500*3 = 1500 and 1500 is less than 1900. But he would have to only eat those 3 scones. No soda (~160 calories per bottle) unless it's diet (0 calories per bottle).

One can drive more or less in a car, and similarly one can will energy-spending into reality. Walking for example makes you spend more energy than sitting down. Fighting grizzly bears with a pocket-knife -- a lot of energy. Lifting a skyscraper while fighting off grizzly bears, and running -- an OMFG SHITLOAD OF ENERGY. So, there you go. Want to lose weight? Fight off grizzly bears, run, and eat ice-cream.

So, to start off you can calculate your personal basal rate. Google 'basal metabolic calculators' and find yourself floating in a sea of basal metabolic rate calculators.

Then, keep a log of everything you eat and try to keep the total of calories under your estimated energy expenditure. It doesn't have to be precise. You don't have to do it everyday. You don't have to do it all. It just expands your awareness of how your body works and how different foods affect it.

After a while, you will learn to intuitively see how much energy different things have for you and learn to eat them accordingly. Unfortunately, the intuitive "bigger -> more energy" thing doesn't work here. An apple has less energy than a small chunk of cheese, for example. Since science sometimes works in counter-intuitive ways, people are often mistaken. But that's a subject for a different essay entirely.