*Transcendental *Logic

I ended yesterday with fourteen dots. 

!!

Now, to be clear about something, I’m female and not at all big (i.e. short), so 1400 calories is probably a good, healthy, non-weight-loss amount for me to be getting daily.  (If I really wanted to be losing weight, I should probably be on a 1200 or even 1000-calorie diet — but I’m not worrying about that yet.)

Fourteen, however, it’s less than I thought I was getting on a routine day, that’s for sure.

…And it is probably a bit less than I was getting, actually.  I was really surprised at the effect the Intuition Diet had on my eating habits — not that it was a huge, profound effect, but that it had an effect at all — probably, I’d guess, about 200-400 calories worth of effect.  And that was without trying to restrict my eating at all!

The effect simply came from noticing what I ate, and knowing that when I ate something, I’d have to put the corresponding dots on my hand.  Just that little thing meant that I put more thought into what I ate, rather than grabbing what was closest or easiest to make.  I sought out healthier foods.  I paid better attention to my portions (sometimes to surprising benefit — instead of grabbing one of my mom’s Hershey Kisses here and there throughout the day, for a total of gods-know-how-many, I chose to have a "serving" of them as a late snack…but the small handful was actually a bit more than I wanted all at once!). 

All day long, I noticed myself thinking, "I could have that…two dots…I’m already up to nine…yeah, I’m not really hungry yet…I’ll wait until dinnertime and have it as dessert if I’m still hungry."  And, "Man, I need a snack…yeah, there’s cookies, but that’s three dots…wait, I didn’t eat the carrots I brought yet.  I’ll eat those first."

No trying.  Just paying attention.  I mean, that may not surprise you, but I’m pretty flabbergasted! 

Today, I’m doing the exact same thing — just paying attention — but, now that I know that I can have fourteen dots a day and not be hungry, and not even change my habits very much, I’m aiming for fourteen.

…And by the by, just so everyone’s aware, I realize that this might not be a "diet" that could work for anybody but me.  Or maybe not anybody at all.  I’m killing two birds with one stone here, if it isn’t apparent:  I’m trying to eat healthier and lose a little weight; and I’m testing a personal pet theory:  That attention itself is a positive force.  Maybe one day, when I don’t have an arseload of papers to write, I’ll try to explicate the theory a little better, but anyone who’s read Eckhart Tolle knows exactly what I’m getting at, probably.

…

…By the way, where did we get that sick metaphor, "To kill two birds with one stone"?  Not only is it gross, but it’s kind of stupid…stones aren’t all that valuable, or hard to throw again.  Who cares if it takes two stones to do the job?  Now, killing two birds with one bullet, I can understand why that would become an idiom…but that’s in some sense even more disgusting, isn’t it?  I bet if I started saying it that way, people would cringe. 

This entry was posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 8:01 am and is filed under ditch medicine for suburbia, psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.