Odds and Ends. Or Perhaps I Should Call Them Scraps!

So I actually ate one of the Cookie Diet cookies. I saw two packages of them on the counter at a friend's house. I have gullible friends. I have friends obsessed with losing weight. This friend falls into both categories. She's prime cookie-diet prey.

I had somehow thought that these cookie-diet cookies were valid, true cookies, and that their consumption in the absence of other food was the secret: limit food quantity severely enough and you'll limit food calories, even if the little bits of food that you're eating are calorie-dense.

But these cookies are drier and less sweet than others. They're calorie-shaved cookies. And they're awful. Within them they've got some rice or something that, when combined with water, is supposed to create an impression of fullness in your stomach, I think.

You know what creates an impression of fullness in MY stomach? REAL food, and lots of it. You can't fool me with a tiny, specially engineered cookie.

I'm not sure, because I avoid scales (as noted at length in the book), but I think I've put on a few pounds of late. Nothing drastic, and I'm not freaking out: that's the whole point of my journey, or rather my destination. I don't give in to panic. Panic was what always got me gorging: panic about the rigors of the diet in the offing, about the deprivation around the bend.

I mention the pounds, though, because with them, if they're indeed there, has come a growing awareness that weight maintenance gets trickier as you age. Five years ago, a worry about weight gain would prompt six miles of running instead of four. That took effort, but was doable, contingent on making the time and summoning the motivation more than anything else.

But now my knees scream if I push them too hard. I can't always do six miles, or even five. There are limits to my exercise I can do---to just how many calories I can burn.

Sure, I can switch from running to something else, and from something else to something beyond that, but it's clear that, as the years go by, the containment of portions is going to have to get more emphasis than the amplification of exercise. Have to wrap my mind around that.