The Ebenezer Diet

Poverty of course has not in the 21st century been noted as a great inspiration to healthy eating. While the traditional logic runs that if you have no money, you have no money for food, and therefore you buy less and eat less, and therefore you get thinner, and then you get rickets and die.

But of course in the 21st century, highly processed foods are cheaper than naturally grown ones, so it's tended to invert the natural order of things, meaning the poorer you are, often, the fatter and less healthy you tend to be.

Having said which, I have today discovered an exception to this rule - a loophole, if you will, by which the old rules can be forced back into place. The loophole goes like this:
1. Be obliged to attend a conference, and provide after-hours work in exchange for on-site lodgings.
2. Assume meals-expenses are included in this package.
3. Be very very wrong.
4. And very very stubborn.

In the event that all these things occur, you have created an Ebenezer Loop, with yourself in the role of Bob Cratchett. This works on the principle that you really really want an extra lump of coal, but your boss won't pay for it, claiming that if you were at home, you'd pay for your own damn coal. You then point out that you are obliged by him not to be at home, where you have sweaters and blankets and scarves oh my, and so would not need an extra lump of coal. And he says "Well, go there then. Bah. Humbug," and wanders off in the company of a bunch of transparent-looking scary dudes. That leaves you with two options - to pay for the coal (or in this case, the meal) yourself, and have the dissatisfaction of knowing that your boss has got one over on you, or you don't, and you don't eat, and therefore you get thinner, and get rickets and die.

This then is the Ebenezer Diet, on which I'm embarked for the next few days. Have to say, tonight I crumbled, and bought my own lump of culinary coal. Very nice it was too, but then very nice it should have been, given the third mortgage we had to take out to order the damn thing. That's it now - that's our coal allotment for the next four days. Tomorrow we freeze, dammit. Or starve, rather...

Erm...You ever get the feeling you've crawled up the ass of your own simile and lost the way back out?

Ahem...
Oh yeah - I did a weigh-in this morning, but I'm not going to count it as an official one, for two reasons. Firstly, it was Monday, dammit, not Tuesday. And secondly, (and admittedly only because I had the Monday get-out), although I was down a pound on last week at 16 stone 3, it was earlier than normal, and no matter what I tried (don't ask...just don't...) I couldn't get the heaviness I felt in my system...erm...out of my system before I weighed, so it would have been a false reading anyhow...

Having eaten my culinary coal, I'm now torn between options. There's a bed here...a real, soft bed with blankets and so on. There's also a kickass bath-tub and a shower that's on sabbatical from teh Starship Enterprise (before they started pissing about with sonic showers, obviously). And there's a wife to enjoy all of this with.

Alternatively, a couple of floors beneath us, there's a gym, with various state-of-the-torturer's-art machinery, on which I could exorcise some of my coal-bucket for the day...

Hmm...showery, beddy, wifey fun....

orrrrr.....

Pain, torture, and the smug sensation of moral superiority...

Bugger it, I'm gonna flip a coin. Annnnnd....hup!

Tails!

Crap. Piss shit fuck crap and damn...