Thursday, June 28, 2007

Rib of the Pig

Pork ribs have a lot to recommend them. What's lost in bone is made up for in tasty fat, which makes it practicable as well as a delight to sloff down 2 kgs' worth of pig strip. They're so good, you can even warm them up in the microwave after being called back to computer duty, and they taste about as good as the batch you cooked fresh.

Ah yes, the pig is such a serviceable animal.

[Hint to the slippery: no trans-fats.]

Weight before I indulged: approx. 260 lbs. I got so excited, I forgot to weigh myself beforehand. And yes, I know that the Trump of Diet is less than a week away. I might as well have as much fun as I can while pre-obesing myself. It will be a challenge indeed.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Edging Towards Zero

Well, not really - what I mean by that is, edging towards the limit of my scale, it being 270 pounds. As the month of overeating approaches its end, I've managed to put on between 30 and 40 pounds. I have little doubt that, had I continued, I would have been well over 300 pounds by the end of the year.

To continue on a theme I've already written about: there's a lot of weight gain before the likes of me notices in terms of gross body size, except for the bulge in the stomach. Some of my pants are getting tight, but I'm still wearing them, and they're the same size that I wore (waist 38) when I was 220 pounds. Actually, they're the same size I used to wear when I was around 200 lbs., about eight years ago.

Lest I turn too thoughful, an overeating note. A box of brownie mix, prepared and cooked up according to box specs, makes a nice dessert after a comparably bulky meal. It may be too sugary for a standalone snack, though.


Weight before double decking dinner and dessert: 260 lbs.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Thoughts on Weight Gain

A little more than 24 hours ago, I saw that I had shot through the 240ish pound plateau. I weighed myself this evening and got 255 pounds, although I've recently gotten as high as a full 260 pounds. As July approaches, the imminence of the diet phase is beginning to sink in.

Based upon my own experience, I suspect that there are two reasons why it's so easy to gain weight over a long period of time: not only the plateauing effect, but also a disconnect between weight and body expansion. When I weighed in at 238 lbs, I had my belt on three notches from the beginning. I still do, and still had even when at 260 lbs. Not only that, I'm still wearing the same pants that I wore when 220-230 lbs.

The feedback betweeen a full stomach, weight change and body-size change in the parts of the body you notice is just too irregular to give any consistent warning. That's why it's so easy to go with the metabolism-boost effect and ignore the consequences. (It's hard to avoid a parallel with gambling, to be candid about this.)

With regard to my intake: I tried the 4 lbs of burger again, and came up short again, although this time I only left part of the last bun behind. As mentioned above, my weight was 255 lbs.before stretching my stomach in this way.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Sandwich Marathon, Part 2

This occasion is one of those rare ones where my eyes proved to be too small for my stomach. The pound of bacon I had, with about half a loaf of bread surrounding it, went down with room to spare this dinnertime.

Despite having recently cultivated a habit of munching on high-calorie snacks between meals, my weight just before breakin' with the bacon was 238 pounds. I've already mentioned the plateauing effect, and have confirmed yet again that it works in both directions.

The end of this month's part of the experiment is coming up; I've been in the stuff-myself part of it for three weeks, enough time to get used to a high-calorie intake. What this habituation entails for the belt-tightening to start next month remains to be seen.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Big Burger - A Warning

I've been so busy the last couple of days, I've almost forgotten to eat. In order to make up for the time squeeze, I tried to adapt an idea which came from a restaurant that serves a 10-pound burger. The tab for it is $200 - unless you can eat it within two hours, in which case it's on the house.

Trust me: this challenge is pretty durn challenging. As a veer-towards, I cooked up four 1-lb burgers, with a corresponding helping of fries. After an hour's worth of eating, I could only choke down three of them plus the fries. That's 3 lbs of fried beef, plus bun bread and fries.

I don't have a small stomach, and it has been stretched in the last little while. And yet, had I seen my gut as being up to the challenge, I would have been less than a third of the way through by the end of the first hour. By the end of the second, I would have had most of it left, ready for a nice big doggie bag, and a bill for two hundred bucks.

Word to the food-ambitious: if you're thinking of going for that challenge, try it at home first. It's a lot harder than it seems.


Weight before bumping into the eyes-stomach problem: 242 pounds. I'm back up to where I was.

Monday, June 18, 2007

10,000 Calories

Yep, in the last twenty-four hours, I have tucked away 10,000 calories.

- Pancake extravaganza: approx. 3000 calories. (They were big pancakes, with lotsa corn syrup.)
- Between-meal snacking: 4000 calories.
- 2 lbs of spaghetti with a tin of sauce, all of which went in the gullet and stayed down this time: approx. 3400 calories.

Making allowance for a little overcounting on my part, I've come in at 10,000 calories for a day.

This being disclosed/bragged about, I've noticed something. One of the benefits to overeating is that it gives your metabolism rate a compensatory boost, which means that many low-metabolism fatties like chomping down for the metabolism buzz. Unfortunately for me, I've found that it can be pushed too far, to the point where the sleep gets disrupted.


Weight before ascending to a five-figure intake: 236 pounds. I don't know why, but I've backslid.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Garfield Would Feel Challenged

Why? Because I've just chomped down a 5 lb. lasagna. Given the poundage, I had to take this one moderately; the closest I came to Garfieldesque table manners was insufficient use of the cutting knife, by restauranteur's standard. I used the fork all the way. It took me 45 minutes for 5 pounds of stuff-filled pasta - 9 minutes per pound. Not bad; less than an hour for the dinner.

Interestingly enough, this entire hunk of wheat, meat and added extras was about 2500 calories. Had I gone skimpy on breakfast and lunch, or skipped off on one or both, I could claim to have eaten a normal amount of calories for a man.


Weight before loading me up: another plateau. 241 lbs.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Chicken À La Whole

1.973 kg worth; that's what it says on the label. That's about 4 1/3 pounds of bird.

Of course, this is gross weight. Some of it was bone, and some of the juice got lost in the drip pan. So, having a nearly 2 kg chicken for dinner sounds more impressive than it is. This weight disparity is, of course, what side dishes are for. As I've done one before, a full dinner plate had to serve as the side plate, and a plastic jug-salver had to be commandeered to hold the main course. The two potatoes and three onions I added more than made up for the bones I left behind. (They did fill up the dinner plate - no kidding.)

This meal, unsurprisingly, filled me up plenty enough so that I couldn't pull out the bread, take it to the drip pan, and enjoy a "busman's dessert." I do have limits.


Wight before I gave a chicken carcass a decent burial: 241 lbs.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Pancake Tuesday

Specifically, the amount of pancakes that can be wrested from two cups of mix, an accompanying quantity of milk, three eggs (in total), about 1/8 cup butter, and all the corn syrup I could slurp back while eating them. Unfortunately for me, I was unintentionally stingy on the milk, so I wound up having a little trouble with the crumbles while cooking them. Chalk it up to inexperience.


Weight before churning out the hotcakes and pouring on the corn syrup: 242 pounds. I'm finally over the plateau.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Sandwich Marathon, Part 1

It should have been a nice, 3400-calorie dinner. I threw 2 pounds of sphagettini into the boiling oily salt water and a can of sauce into a side pot, and proceeded to dig in. 4 plates, which should have gone down without a U-turn.

Unfortunately for me, I hadn't realized that the stomach goes by volume, not weight. Since the spaghettini had expanded through cooking, my stomach ran out of room at the end of the third plate. I couldn't get the rest of it down.

To be candid, a little of what I ate came up. Yep; five or so minutes after I had given up, my stomach has issued the final warning that some of what I had ingested needed to be evacuated. So, off to the toilet I went. I actually vomited like a momma bird: just a little, to get the tank down from extra-full to full. No more. It makes me wonder if birds use the same correction-from-overflow technique.

Flopping in this manner makes a person cautious the next time round. So, I stuck to a sandwich marathon in my bid to get (if not my weight, then) my stomach capacity up. Not counting an introductory ralf-down, I managed to get four peanut-butter-encrusted sandwiches down my gullet before taking the prudent way out.


Weight before climbing back up on the belly-bloat express: 236 pounds. The recent plateau phase may be no more.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Don't Leave Your Ice Cream In The Fridge

As I found out with a 4L (close to a gallon) tub of the stuff, it mostly melts within a day, forcing you to get rid of it somehow. Rather than being wasteful of money, the option of eating it seemed preferable.

I wish I could go into detail as to why there wasn't enough room in the freezer, but doing so would take me into a side discourse on native treaty rights.


Since this particular food foray started at about the same time as the last, I really didn't weigh myself before its start. By default, my weight was 233 lbs. before I dug in.

Scaling Down

I haven't quite followed through on my hunch that my recent eating habits and the continual up-swill of stomach acid into my gullet are related. It seemed easier to find pallatives. I have to admit to scaling back somewhat now, though. I had to restrain myself to three chicken legs, four potatoes and three onions.

In doing so, I discovered something useful. If you cook your chicken dinner in the microwave, then the second plate is ready at about the time you've finished the first. Provided that you eat at a moderate rate.


Despite my belly's growth, my weight's still stuck in the plateau: 233 lbs.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Brain Food

There's nothing like a nice fish dinner. This definitely includes a bite of rainbow trout, even if it's one "fresh from the farm." Actually, the farm fish I scarfed down was pretty good, even if the butter chunks inside mostly ended up on the drip pan.

This particular chunk of fishhood grossed in at 1.8 kg, or 3.5 pounds. Some of this weight, of course, was head, tail, fins and bones, but the weight difference was roughly made up for by a generous "family serving" of fries.

Yes, it was quite a family meal. Since I happen to be a family of one, I felt satisfyingly justified in eating it all. Even if I had to use a platter as a plate, and a dinner plate as a side plate.


Weight before this family dinner: 233 pounds. Still.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Comparing and Contrasting

I'm finding out that it's more difficult to gain weight than I thought. In addition to the plateau effect, whose root is homeostasis, I've also gotten a case of acid reflux, thanks to my body's response mechanism working in another way: the recent surfeit of food has resulted in a recent overproduction of stomach acid. I have enough spare production capacity to get some of it up my foodpipe.

If only I had known what a challenge was ahead of me. I keep looking at the scale, wondering why it is so difficult to get up to 240 pounds. The size of my belly seems to be co-operating nicely, but the scale still confounds me.

It's almost certain that you've seen "Special K" being advertised as a diet food. It actually does serve well in that capacity, tasting fine with only milk. Perhaps my taste buds are out of whack, but I found that adding 1 tbsp of sugar to a bowl doesn't improve it that much, and leaves a gloppy sugar residue at the bottom of the bowl, which would only be appealing to the type of person who likes sugar as a between-meal snack. (Come to think of it, that does remind me of something...)

More promising, but ultimately disappointing, was the same amount of corn syrup stuck on top of a bowl. Maybe it's the idiosyncracies of my taste buds, but I found that a nice heap of corn syrup makes the cereal taste better than the sugar did. The only drawback is the residue of the syrup sticking to the spoon, which makes the first few spoonfuls kind-of sticky.

The best option, I found, was using chocolate milk; that made a bowl of "Special K" taste great. I suspect that others discovering the same thing is what led Kellogg's to offer a chocolate-covered version of the cereal.


Weight before the four-bowl breakfast: still 233 pounds.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Plateauing

In my recent baseline preparation for the latest gorge fest, I've discovered something. My June-centered goal to quickly accumulate poundage has run into a roadblack. I've actually plateaued.

Here's something else that's funny. After stuffing myself - most recently with a mushroom, ground beef and three-layer-cheese pan pizza whose volume seriously belied its area - I've begun to feel a kind of lassitudinous, not unpleasant buzz. Recently, I've also been sweating and, at times, panting like the stereotypical fat man.

Best guess: stuffing the face and filling the stomach right to maximum-F induces a rise in metabolism rate, which some may find pleasurable indeed, like feeling exercised without having to move a muscle (except for gastro-intestinal ones.)

This is new to me, but I suspect it's old and familiar to a hard-core fatboy. In the early stages, you can even kid yourself into thinking that the "gastro workout" fully compensates for the extra calories - and, when the plateau is over, you can fool yourself by remembering the early stages plus any intermediate weight-plateaus.


Weight before gobbling down a true my-cheese-runneth-over pan pizza: 233 pounds. I checked it three times.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Back on the track

One of the good things about relaxing in front of a movie, even one on the tube, is that overeating is socialized in this activity. In addition, the attention paid by snack food companies to making healthier snacks means that more can be consumed with fewer qualms. What better venue to gobble down both a pound of low-fat red licorice and the rest of a tub of ice cream?


Weight as measured before rediscovering the Law of Unintended Consequences: 234 lbs.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

An impure weight-gaining heart

Some time ago, I saw a report about a new diet approach on the TV. The idea behind it was that certain foods act as "appetizers," stimulating the body's hunger for more food. The imbibing of empty, tasteless calories would trick the brain into substituting the memory of a tasty, weight-gain-inducing food that serves as an appetizer. In order to reduce weight, the idea is to avoid those foods to control your appetite.

I imbibed 1/4 cup of edible oil so as to go through its motion, but I found something strange happening. That much oil does tend to curdle the stomach, so I wound up associating the taste of grapes, and at times ice cream, with feeling ill. Believe it or not, the memory of the grapes began to taste bad.

So, I've bumped into a variation of said diet, which may have an ironic efficacy. Edible oil is about 80 calories per 10 ml.; imbibing 1/4 cup of it means taking in 1000 calories at one shot. You'd think that this strategy would be awful for a diet, but the associated stomach-curdle may very well make it a good one, long term. I seem to have lucked in to an approach that's similar to the one traditionally used to get boys to stop smoking: "you're staying in your room, without meals, until you've smoked the whole pack."

Incidentally, I have a full, 2 L bottle of edible corn oil that's explicitly rated at 8 calories per ml. This means that the entire bottle has 16,000 calories. It cost me three bucks, implying that I got 5,333 calories per dollar. Sugar goes for a buck per kg while on sale in the same store. At 4 calories per gram, you get (at a sale price) 4,000 calories per dollar. So, it looks like edible oil, not sugar, is the food product that gives you the most calories per dollar spent.


Despite this report breaking this month's format, here's a weight report on me anyway: 231 pounds, right after drinking down the oil.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Twenty-Four

Weiners, that is.

The following takes place between 2:00 PM and 2:04 PM:

Got myself prepped and them ready for eating...all 24 of them. Two pounds in total.

The following take place between 2:04:00 and 2:14:05 PM:

Down my gut they all went. Despite continual jaw soreness, a bout of hiccups at weenie #4, recurrent throat blockage and a warning queasiness starting at weenie #22, I did it without a break. The time elapse is from the first bite to the final swallow, measured ungenerously.

Assessment of performance: Despite my lack of breaks, including for water, my performance was still mediocre, largely because I have yet to master the art of swallowing big chunks. This meant that a lot of my time was consumed by the need to chew. In order to rate at all in this event, I would need some practice in my swallowing skills. It's little consolation that my jaw muscles got a workout.


Weight before this time-limited endeavour: an understandable 232 pounds.

[For the "Goal and Purpose" of the blog, click here.]

First Experiment

As part of the full dinner and dessert, I had a "Pizza for One," designed for the microwave. It's called "Celeste," and according to the label on the back, it carries 380 calories per pizza and weighs 188 grams. It has a little saturated and trans fat in it.

It was easy to cook in the microwave, and came out nicely done after the recommended time expired. It was easier than the warning label cautioned to get it on the plate and ready to eat.

Since this is microwave food, and a basic serving at that, the dough was a little crunchy, but what was above the crust was quite nice. When I had finished gulping a single one down, my stomach felt full, and even warm. It left an aftertaste of spice. Once finished dinner, there was enough room in my gut for a dessert of approx. 500 g of ice cream. 'Tis the season, after all.


One more note: the above experience with the "Pizza for One" is based upon a selection from the appropriate experiences I actually had while ralfing down four of them. The ice cream followed the last in the "inverse sampling" chain.

[The box did say "Pizza for One," but no time date was specified betwen the last and the next. With a little opportunistic brass I can claim to have eaten "a pizza for one."]


Strangely, despite my pre-gorge preparatory nibbling (I need the stomach expansion), my weight clocked in at 226 pounds before starting to cook and eat. I had actually lost three pounds between this entry and the last; homeostasis evidently works both ways.