I do not understand weight loss. It's an absolute mystery to me.
For starters, when you lose weight, where does it go? And how do you make it go there? And don't tell me about counting calories and burning calories and all of that because it all seems so arbitrary. I know that diet is probably more essential than exercise because if I work out and it makes me want and feel justified to eat a burrito, then my net gain is zilch. That much I understand.
But here's what's baffling me today: I stepped on the scale after a weekend of considerable indulgence and I was two pounds lighter than before the weekend started. Since the end of July, I've been closely monitoring things. I've written here about how I cut out burgers and chips and salsa and pork and desserts. I was having reasonable success with that, but very gradual.
And then over the weekend I enjoyed two dinners of gut-stuffing proportion.
As I previewed last week, I attended the Cafe Homestead special prime rib dinner on Saturday night. I had high expectations for it and it definitely met them. By the time I ate the wedge salad pictured with this blog, I was well satisfied. It's amazing what pecans did for this salad. The wedge salad has become one of my favorite things during the last year and this was easily the best one I've had and it's because of the pecans.
Yes, the prime rib was delicious too. The twice-baked potato might have stolen the spotlight, though. And the dessert garnered at least two votes among my dinner companions as the highlight of the meal.
Did I mention the dinner included a fresh jalapeño which was stuffed with cheese and bacon and fried as an appetizer? Are you keeping score? That's four courses of deliciousness.
That followed a fantastic, though completely different dinner on Friday night. My friend Kaley invited me to join her and a co-worker for Friday night all-you-can-eat catfish at Griff's in China Spring. That entailed lots of fried catfish, but also fried jalapeños and coleslaw. When they call it "all you can eat" I'm sure they mean that you can go back and refill your plate with fried catfish if you so desire. I would imagine there are offensive linemen out there who can make them fill up more than one plate. I could not. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the catfish on Plate 1. If you're into catfish and you haven't been to Griff's on a Friday night, then you need to look into this.
So I left Friday dinner as stuffed as I could be and then accomplished the same feat in a totally different way on Saturday night. And after weeks of trying not to reach this state of being stuffed, I did it twice in a row.
So you explain to me how I could have been two pounds lighter on Monday morning.
