06.18.07

It’s Not Easy Eating Greens

Posted in Gaming, Rants, Site News at 4:56 am

First things first: Double XP Weekend was nice, and I did much battling as Ayu. Thing is, though, I’m starting to get a little disillusioned of City of Heroes in general… I don’t want to say anything one way or the other just yet– I’ll definitely still be around for Issue 10 to see if that helps any– but right now it’s looking like it might be time to move on. That’s not the big news.

Also, I did some tinkering with some DDR pads over the weekend. The “universal” pad is completely shot; no amount of surgery could bring it back. As it turns out, the Xbox 360 pad I picked up (being USB) should work well on the Mac, but there’s just the matter of the drivers for it (there are 360 drivers for OS X, but they don’t support the Beat Pad just yet– in true geek fashion style, I figured out the bits that needed to be added to the GPL’d driver and sent them off to the driver’s author after my compiler told me “f— off, I’m not compiling this, send it to someone who knows what they’re doing”). That also is not the big news.

More non-big news: podcasts are good, but I also picked up an audiobook for the car trips. Nine days until Live Free or Die Hard… I wonder if that’s the kind of movie that cosplaying for is frowned upon? If you ever come across a PS2/USB controller converter in Wal-Mart, leave it the hell on the shelf if you’re going to use it for Stepmania. Finally, there’s been rumors for a while that Konami has started the process of getting Pop’n Music to the US in the form of a Windows-based USB game called “Music Mania”, but I’ve no confirmation. If it’s true, well, yeah, awesome sauce indeed. All right, enough of this piddly little-news stuff. Time for the main course.

As most regular readers know, I’ve been making inconsistent efforts to lose weight. I’d had some progress last spring with a self-directed program that took me down 40 pounds over the course of four months; however, I fell off the wagon shortly thereafter and have reclaimed half of that. Still, I have to admit, eliminating even those twenty pounds made me feel quite a bit better. (It also did wonders for my DDR ability, but that’s neither here nor there just yet– oh, and for the record, yes, I am planning on re-starting that just as soon as I reclaim a home copy of the game, or get the desire to finish cleaning up my StepMania collection.)

The primary way that I was able to lose what I did was by monitoring my caloric intake and switching over to lower-calorie alternatives. I kept myself to an extremely strict (and somewhat drastic) 1500 calories a day, measured in ten-calorie “points”. Like I said, it did work very well for those four months (it started in late January of ‘06 and ran until shortly after E3 in May), but I just lost interest in keeping track after a while. I’ve taken some steps to rekindle my fascination with it (including flexing some AppleScript skillz to automate the “keeping track” bit) but ultimately it boils down to, I can’t eat anything that I don’t know the point value for, and I can’t know the point value for a lot of the really good food around work because it’s all custom-made (ie no major fast-food places). As a result, I’ve been looking into managing my food intake in other ways, and the solution that I’ve come up with is unorthodox but still possible.

I’ve stopped eating meat.

Note that this isn’t “I’m going to stop eating meat” or “I’m going to eat less meat”. I have stopped. This is in progress. I went through a transitional period last week, where I ate only one meal a day containing meat (usually my last meal of the day, dinner at home, to use up what I had left); this period is officially over as of this past Friday. As scary as it sounds, I am now a pescetarian. (Not vegetarian. You can have my seafood when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Pescetarian sounds like a disease, though, so don’t freak out if I say “vegetarian” to people just to make things simple.)

I did a little reading up on the process of acclimating oneself to a lifestyle sans gore. Most of the websites I came across came at me from the angle of “you are going vegetarian because you love animals and because you’re protesting their condition”. That’s partially true. I love animals, that much is without question; the reason I love animals is because usually they can be consumed in a manner that is pleasing to my taste buds. Yes, I am abhorred by the extreme cruelty shown in the care and handling of some meat-processing plants, but by and large I have this glimmer of hope that they’re not all that way, and therefore I happily eat meat without regard for my immortal soul. It really boils down to the fact that I am not going to be giving up meat permanently (probably), and I am not doing it out of any misguided attempts at altruism. This is purely selfish, purely for me.

More than that, though, I’m going into this with the idea that it need not be permanent. My initial idea for the plan had me doing this for just about six to eight weeks, with the theory that after that point if I was at a weight I felt comfortable with, I could cease the meatatorium. Now, however, I’ve got it into my head to take it as far as it will go. In time I suppose I could either go back to being a carnivore, or wind up staying without meat. I’m not going to make any set plans right now one way or the other. For at least two months, that’s the way it’s going to be.

I’m not expecting any huge amounts of praise or glory or anything like that; I’m only announcing it so that folks who know me aren’t surprised when/if it comes up (incidentally, I’m not actually going to tell the people at work about it just yet; I’m waiting to see who notices it first, if at all). Also, this isn’t intended to persuade anyone else into following in my footsteps. If you like meat, then please, by all means, go ahead and eat meat. I like meat too, and I want to eat meat; but it’s better for me to not eat it than eating it. I can’t tell anyone else what to do, and I don’t intend to. I’m just saying, this is what I’m doing.

Which also means I’m likely to whine about it almost non-stop until I get used to it. Deal with it.

Anyway, as can be inferred, I already have some lessons learned from the experience: First, Taco Bell is not a good place for someone who does not eat meat; however, you can eat very cheaply there, as long as you like the bean and rice burrito. (ProTip: You only need one. Trust me.) Next, tofu is not an acceptable substitute for meat, no matter what anyone tells you; conversely, miso soup isn’t actually all that bad as a substitute for chicken broth if you filter out the extraneous stuff first (which is pretty good by itself too). It’s not all beans, either– I actually noticed that I haven’t made noodles for myself in months, and believe it or not I’m looking forward to trying the weird stuff that I always used to pass by on my way to the Spam. Oh, and then of course, there’s the fish… I love fish. I’ll eat fish every day of my life if I have to and I’ll be in total heaven because of it.

While it might seem that this is yet another of my half-baked ideas, if there’s anything this year so far has taught me, it’s that every once in a while I can see one or two of them through to the end. Besides, I figure that even if I fall off the wagon, I’ll be in better shape at the end of it than I was when I started. We’ll see, folks.

Ciao. (Get it?)

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