Well, I am still looking at myself with respect to Temperance – this is interesting!

1. Temperance - Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

Well since I started examining myself I have found a few things that I need to improve upon. Eating is the main one, I love to eat and I eat fast. I think that is a leftover from my days in the Navy, not sure but I think. Both are bad, eating to dullness, stuffing too much crap in my pie hole. Eating fast can not be good for the digestive system either. I have found that it is not even that I am eating bad things, I just eat too much of it, whether it be a salad or a steak or ba-skeddi – I did not even realize that eating to dullness was one of my hobbies. Not until I started looking at it. I suspect that is why I am overweight.

I did see a commercial that other day that told me that being overweight and having extra weight in certain areas was not my fault at all. It has to do with the stress at work and the fact that I am older now and my slow metabolism – what a bonus I thought, my fat ass has nothing to do with my obvious lack of self-control at all and is somehow not at all my fault or caused in anyway by my shoveling food into my face like someone who knew not where there next meal was coming from – shameful!

So Bride and I have decided to change some things in our lives, not a diet per say but a change in lifestyle. There are a number of things we are implementing into our lives and a number of things that we are looking at removing. I think more than anything it boils down to portion control and moving my chubby ass around more. The more movement the more food one needs, the less movement the less food we need. It all sounds so easy but I know it is not.

A couple of years ago I decided I would change my eating habits, I ended up losing about 52 pounds. It took almost a year but little by little the weight dropped off. I was astounded at the ease at which the plan was working, it was not hard. I knew though that when I hit my target weight it would be harder to transition from losing to maintaining. Then on October 24 of 2009 my Dad passed, for reasons I can not really get my head around I completely abandoned my new way of eating. I have pondered that for some time but I stopped eating from the outside edges of the grocery store and packed the weight back on, I was stunned, amazed and ashamed all at the same time. No idea why my Dad’s death would manifest itself in my abandonment of my new eating habits, I had been doing it for a year.

So I am going back to a better way of eating, less of everything. I do not plan to cut anything out per say but just reduce the intake. I will I think slow the intake of beef in the process but the reasons for that have nothing to do with losing weight. Bride picked up come cookbooks that are geared towards a diabetic because that is a very good way to eat, regardless of whether one is diabetic or not. I am looking forward to seeing some of the master pieces she will be creating. I am also going to continue to watch my intake, I know I am not going to be perfect but if I slow down long enough to just look at myself and what I am doing I know that will help he curb the intake. I usually eat so fast that I never pay attention to volume.

I really never even noticed it before I started looking at Temperance, it really amazed me to start analyzing my behavior. I have not really been pleased with what I am finding out about myself but as they say, problem recognition is the first step to problem resolution.

The other part of temperance is not drinking to elevation. I do not drink so I decided to look at the coffee intake. I drink a cup from Gate every morning, and most days I go get a second cup before 10am and then most days Bride and I go to the park on the river with another coffee to watch the sun go down. Doesn’t seem to bad right, well considering that each cup is 24 ounces, or 72 ounces total for the day. That is over a half a gallon of coffee a day – holy shit that is a lot of coffee and of course in that coffee has Irish Cream flavoring. Now that stuff has 35 calories per tablespoon, and get this – I just measured it out and I put 8 of those bad boys in each cup. There is a little pattern on the inside bottom of the cup so I filled the cup to that mark with cream then filled the rest with coffee. That is 840 calories a day in coffee cream for petes sake, I have run off the rails on that.

So the other day Bride had some scoping work done and we met with the doctor a few days later to go over the results. He indicated the stomach lining was problematic and asked, do you drink caffeinated coffee, yes was the answer. He said that has to stop, coffee was OK - but she was to stop the caffeine part. So Bride is obviously not happy about that. A bit of research quickly told me that caffeine is not good for the lining of any stomach. That has lead me to, in an act of solidarity, stop drinking coffee for a while. If I do have some it will be decaffeinated. I am somewhat scared, tomorrow is my first day. The last time I stopped drinking coffee was when I stopped smoking. It, along with Mt. Dew were triggers and I never have picked the Dew back up but after a month or so I brought Juan Valdez back into my life.

I have pondered the why a lot lately. Why do I eat like I do not know where my next meal is coming from? Why do I need more than a half a gallon of coffee a day? I am not sure of those answers, I did determine that I think it is getting worse. I pondered that as well. Maybe I do not know where my next meal is coming from, not the very next one but with the economy the way it is…………. So I ponder that and looked back our evolutionary arc. Back when Homo ergaster was roaming the eastern and southern parts of Africa back in the early Pleistocene he would pack on the weight when the times were right. Food was short and they, along with all the other quadrupeds migrated around to where and when food was available. Maybe an evolutionary protection and survival gene has kicked in to insure that I persevere, again I thought – NOT MY FAULT.

I have wondered about that and many other explanations for the way I am. It could have something to do with the MONSTROUS portion sizes that we have all been lead to believe are normal. We used to need a lot of calories when we were an agrarian society, we were not sitting our overgrown asses in office chairs, we were working the land for the food we were eating – and that work is NOT easy. It is not just the fast food joints, most everywhere you go to eat serve you WAY more food than is needed, supersize it please. That goes back to the marketing that we are bombarded with, if we buy in we are doomed. Even a healthy choice frozen meal is more food than we need.

It is not easy to find all the answers but I am still looking for them. Without the answers to the why, it makes it hard (at least for me) to understand my own egregious actions and if I cannot understand why, how can I commit to the why not. Not sure what the answer for me here is but I know I want to ponder it a bit more. I am in no way perfect and I am not any delusion that I will be able to fix all these problems I have with food and drink but if I can train myself to look closely at it each time hopefully I can at least make a conscience effort to control it – that is really what I am hoping for. I hope anyone who is working on this with me is getting as much as I am from it.