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Remember this post? Hard to believe that was 200 days ago. Hard to believe I was safely in Onederland at that point. Hard to believe I was actually sticking to a plan for nearly a year. Hard to believe that today I’m twenty-three pounds heavier.

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My Christmas? Oh, it was lovely. What did I do? Oh, I ate and ate and ate and ate. Then I ate, ate, ate, ate. After that, I ate some more, then had dessert, after which I ate and ate and ate and ate and ate. Once I was finally done eating, I took a nap (yet somehow continued to eat, even while asleep). I woke up, then had a snack, after which I ate and ate and ate and ate. Then I fixed myself a well-deserved dessert.

How did I feel? Lousy. Huge. Awful. Sick. Stupid. Guilty. And not guilty in the sense of, “Oh, gosh, I really messed up my diet! Shame on l’il ol’ me!” But in the sense that I’m ever conscious of the fact that there are so many people who don’t even remotely have the privilege of over-indulging. It really bothers me that so many people struggle to support themselves and meanwhile I sit around moaning oh-gee-I-just-can’t-stop-eating. As if that’s a problem worthy of anyone’s sympathy.

I actually touched on this near the very end of my book. For those of you who don’t have a copy (or do, but never got that far) here’s an excerpt:

The diet industry takes in an absolutely astounding amount of money. I’ve read figures ranging from eighteen to thirty five billion dollars or more per year in the United States alone. You heard right, people are spending upwards of one hundred million dollars per day for one reason: they just want to be smaller. They spend money on diet foods and diet programs and diet surgeries. They spend money on supplements and herbs and magic pills. They buy books and magazines and videos. They join health clubs and purchase equipment for home. One hundred million dollars per day and all we have to show for it is endless news reports all saying the same thing: we’re getting larger and larger and larger, and there’s no end in sight.

When confronted with that thirty-five billion dollar figure, many people are appalled that such an obscene amount of money changes hands each year. The next reaction is predictable: “All they have to do is eat less and exercise! There’s no reason to spend that much money on such a simple problem with an obvious solution.”

I won’t even bother to respond to that statement. That’s what the rest of this book is all about.

What slightly fewer people pick up on is the raw, dark irony of the total picture. By some estimates, thirty-eight million people in the United States are “food insecure,” meaning they cannot sustain minimum food needs due to a lack of money. And almost a third of those are truly hungry and malnourished. This country is wealthy enough to feed itself many times over, yet millions go without. An extremely overweight population is a growing concern at all levels, yet hunger is on the rise. In one household, a woman will spend $100 on diet pills while only a few miles away another woman is unable to put food on her table. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

And that’s basically what I think of every time I gain five pounds over a ten day period. I can tell myself I work hard, and I deserve a break, and in the big picture it’s okay to stuff myself and then write a funny post about it afterward. But I was assembled with an over-active guilt chip; and it doesn’t have an off switch.

First Thursday of the month: time to reluctantly report in. Astute readers may have noticed the reappearance of “Return to Onederland” in the post title. Yep, I can’t pretend I’m mostly still in Onederland and “just over a bit.” No, based on the last couple weeks and what’s surely ahead, it’s time to return to Return to Onederland.

As you can see from the wonderful graphic image I created for today’s post, Day One #95 began this week. Why? Well, you already know why. It looks something like this:

Man! This is what the graph is supposed to look like after New Year’s Day. Not the week after Turkey Day.

The plan now is, of course, to hold it together as best I can until through the holidays. The real Christmas Miracle would be to wake up January 4 and find myself hovering around 200. I could be happy kicking off 2010 with that kind of a number. In second place would be: just holding where I am. Worst case would be . . . well, you already know what worst case looks like.

So here goes! Next post in this category will be January 7, 2010. And good luck to everyone until then. We’ll need it!

One of Hollywood’s greatest superpowers is the ability to revise history. It doesn’t matter what actually happened. All you need is the right screenplay, along with a halfway competent director, and you can make history whatever you want it to be.

Take The Right Stuff. This was a very good movie. It was, not, however, a completely accurate portrayal of what really happened. But that doesn’t really matter. It’s not a history lesson. It’s a movie. It was created to entertain.

I actually only have one personal issue with the film: it seems to be two stories in one. On the one hand, you have the main story following the Mercury crew. Then, off to the side, you get Chuck Yeager’s story. I’m not sure I would have adapted the book in that manner. Instead, it would have been better if it were three stories in one. Here’s how I would have written it:

On the one hand, you have the gripping story of the Mercury crew and their preparations to become the first US astronauts into space. Then, off to the side, we see how Chuck Yeager, in a feat only Harry Potter could truly appreciate, uses a broomstick to break the sound barrier. Thirdly, we have the triumphant story of how Charlie Hills breaks the second weight barrier and enters the “197 Zone.”

If that isn’t worthy of a ticker tape parade, I don’t know what is.

With three days in a row, I’m going to call that real. (Never mind that the first day I hit it, I also weighed 197.5 and 196.5 … so I just averaged all three weigh-in numbers.)

Last week, as I bemoaned flatlining, I wrote, “There’s no mystery surrounding this. My average caloric intake has crept back up.” So how about this week? As you can plainly see, I dropped two pounds. How does the caloric intake compare? No surprise whatsoever, peeps. While flatlining, my average daily caloric intake was 2084. This last week, it was 1743.

Apparently I’ve got the right stuff when it comes to losing weight. The challenge now is: how do we keep the Russians from obtaining this information?

In the movie Flatliners, a group of medical students headed up by Jack Bauer, decide classes are too boring to sit through alive. To achieve a new level of Zen, they decide it would be fun to kill themselves, one at a time, just to see what death is like. (I could have told them that. Just go see the movie Flatliners.) The basic procedure went something like this: The volunteer kills himself with some sort of injection, if I recall correctly. After being dead about a minute, the others defibrillate the hell out of him (or her), at which point the subject talks about what it was like to know someone who knows someone who knows Kevin Bacon.

What a great analogy for the last three weeks of my diet. Here’s an illustration:

That’s me standing over my diet. I’m in need of a dietary defibrillator at the moment. In this analogy, Julia Roberts represents Julia Roberts. (It’s a Zen thing.)

The movie itself is named after the term “flatlining” which refers to that beepy machine that measures your heartbeat with a bouncy green dot. (I believe the technical term is, indeed, beepy machine.) When the green dot moves in a straight line, and the beep turns to a boooooooooooop, you’ve flatlined. At that point, if you can’t be refibrillated, you’re about to join either Sam Wheat or Willy Lopez. (Am I allowed to mix movie metaphors?)

Here’s the closest thing to a dietary flatline:

I’ve overlaid last week’s weights with the previous two weeks’ weights. No severe upticks is good. But I’m stuck, which is bad.

There’s no mystery surrounding this. My average caloric intake has crept back up. I’m not overeating, which is good. But most days are coming in right at that “BMR” value, something obviously supported by this evidence. To get myself going again, I have three choices: cut back on the calories, exercise more, or start ordering cases of Acai berries. What would Jack Bauer do?