I made my goal, due to spinning classes and lots of kombucha.

But I still have 11 hours to lose a half of a pound!

Guess where I am going???

You're right! I'm off to the colonics clinic. Woo Hoo! Think your best thoughts for me.

I just wanted to be the first to say that today is a special day. And not just for the reasons you think it is special.

Take a look at these beautiful people. They are going to change your lives.

Today, my fellow flaabers, is the first day of the rest of your life without George Bush and this can only mean good things. Here are just a few reasons the next four years will be looking really great for you and on you:

1. Your days of emotional eating are over. No more sitting on the couch drowning your sorrows in a couple of bags of Pepperidge Farm Milanos because George Bush is your president. Face it people, W was making you fat and unhappy.

2. Your drinking binges are over. Who needs the calories? No more twelve packs of beer to hide the shame you've been feeling for the last eight years about being an American. Stop drinking yourself into a pointless depression. Instead, have a glass of red wine tonight when you toast the new president. It's better for you.

3. If Obama is in the White House, this means anything is possible! You too can acheive your goals, whether it's to lose 20 pounds, to break the glass ceiling, or to stop eating pasta every night and finally fit into those jeans you're going to wear to your local inauguration party.

4. Smart people make you healthier and they are just plain fun to be around. Smart is the new black—it just looks good on everyone. Just having someone as smart as Obama as our new president, seeing his face on your TV and hearing his voice on your radio, is going to make you feel like taking better care of yourself. You're going to exercise more. You're going to want to be smarter, too. Everyone benefits.

5. The bar has been set higher. Barack and his lovely wife Michelle are both stylish lean machines. Watching them is going to make you want to look as good as they do. You have something to work for at now. So, get to it.

I can't really blame my job. Though I do snack a lot while I am writing.

I can blame late-night TV watching for the extra pounds I've put on over the years, that and a certain hormonal combination of age and reproduction. Let's just say my daughter didn't have any baby fat. I took it all.

But here's an interesting idea. Your job is causing you to overeat. Or to eat badly. Of course Oprah doesn't sit in a cubicle all day. But here is an interesting graph supplied by a woman who works in a call center:

I am so tired of black! So what if it is slimming! It is boring! It shows no fashion imagination.

I've decided I like red. I am a risk taker. So what if red makes my ruddy complexion look ruddier. It makes my butt look great!

When I am not hunting naked with my new girlfriends, chopping wood, or rearranging furniture, you can find me in the kitchen eating pie. Not baking pie, just eating pie.

Anyone who knows me knows well that I LOVE PIE. I love a good buttery crust! I don't even so much care what goes in the good crust, I just need something to fill it.

So, you can imagine my HORROR when I found out about these three "unwise" pies. Just for the record, I think that phrase is an oxymoron, and I think the person who invented it, no doubt some clueless copyeditor, as I have been in my former pre-hunting days, made it up.

I have suggested some alternative SKINNY PIES below.

Three Unwise Pies

1. Pecan Pie—can be anywhere from 500 to 850 calories per sugary slice. Made with almost 100% sugar based ingredients, minus the crust and the nuts. Do yourself a favor and choose the cucumber pie instead.

2. Raisin Pie—Savory raisins with a rum base contain about 650 calories a slice. If you eat this pie while dieting, God will kill a kitten and you will have to watch.

3. Mincemeat Pie—Similar to Raisin Pie and just as hefty in calories. Stay away from this already yucky sounding pie.

Three Skinny Pie Alternatives I am Suggesting

1. Cucumber Pie—Get some fiber in your pie instead of sugar. Ever heard of cucumber sandwhiches? Well, why can't they make a good pie, too?

2. Wheat Grass Pie—Sure to turn you off of pie for good. This will make you so sick to your stomach you will never want to eat pie again!

3. Acai Pie—Impress all your friends with the correct pronunciation (Ah-sigh-eee Pi) and win them over with your knowledge of this new IT BERRY. Don't add sugar, though. Not even Stevia. Just throw them on the crust and brag about how healthy you are.

4. Knit Pie—The Best No-Calorie pie. All you do is look at it, or put it under your winter cap to help keep you warm.

CAUTION: if you eat this pie, it will clog up your colon. In the event of colon clogging, just click on one of the links to the right.

I burned 2 calories writing this!

Here are some tips for choosing clothes that make you look slimmer (because I hadn’t actually thought about that as an alternative to losing weight!). I got these from an advice site for fat people:

1. Buy clothes that fit you. Wearing clothes that are too tight leads to bulges and lumps (but not the good ones). Try things on before you buy them!

Trying things on: This is great advice! I always wondered what those women were doing in those little rooms with the mirrors that you see in stores! I thought they just needed some alone/reflection time.

2. Choose items which skim over areas you want to disguise. For instance, if you want to make your tummy look flatter, move away from skin-tight vests.

What are they talking about, skim? I think these shorts looks good on me:

3. Make sure you are wearing the right underwear. This is important. Thongs and g-strings are all well and good if you have no fat on your body. Does this mean only skeletons can wear thongs? We should let all those college girls know this ASAP. 

I guess this girl is too FAT for a thong!

4. Highlight your good bits (see camel-toes picture above for a good example). If you have a beautiful slender neck, but a bit of weight on your waistline, draw attention to your neck with an eye catching necklace, or other accessories.

Whenever I try to highlight my good bits, I end up getting arrested. So this isn’t fair advice.

5. Work on your posture. Stand up straight, pull your stomach in, and your shoulders back. Whenever you get the chance, look in the mirror and make sure you are not hunched over. Bad posture can add pounds visually.

Okay, I have tried this, but I do have to sit in my profession. And my co-workers get really angry at me for staying in the bathroom for so long watching myself.

6. Wear more black! Black virtually slims out everyone.

That means this guy is going to have to change teams. I think the Raiders would be better for his figure.

Someone should tell him to wear more black!

7. Keep an open mind about your size.

I guess it when it comes to losing weight, the thinking goes like this: Open mind = good. Open mouth = bad.

 

You can make fun of my naked hiking/hunting expeditions with my new girlfriends all you want, but the fact is, for one hour of shooting all those yummy birds that fly overhead we are burning 306 calories! Compare that to your little drive over to Whole Foods to get your organic chicken! I bet you are barely burning 40 calories, especially if you get a good parking spot.

Here’s what else I found out from my recent foray into calorie counting. Chopping wood for 20 minutes, which I sometimes do for at least three hours a day (my husband just sits around eating bon bons and complaining about how cold it is, so I spend half my day getting wood for the stove. And it gets really cold in Santa Cruz. Yesterday it was like 62 degrees!) = 123 calories burned for every 20 minutes.

Okay, here are some other ways I am BURNING CALORIES so that I can make my flaab deadline:

1. Rearranging furniture for 45 minutes burns 301 calories
2. Ironing for 60 minutes burns 167 calories (but I don’t own an iron, so I’m gonna have to run out and get one)
3. 15 minutes of sex with my bon-bon eating husband (that’s a generous estimate) = 64 calories
4. 30 minutes of foreplay (with my paramour) and then 15 minutes of sex with my husband = 108 calories (and that doesn’t account for the sprinting in between houses!)
5. Writing = 1 calorie per hour. So that means my four hours of writing a day is only burning 4 calories! Shitake! It's a good thing I don't write poetry anymore, or my stomach would be even bigger.

But here’s the good news. One hour of cycling or spinning is burning 691 calories. And, because I often spend at least 45 minutes a day rearranging furniture (I am a very particular person), and four hours a day writing, this means on a spinning day I have burned a total of 996 calories!

Stick that in your little oversized sweater and lycra leggings, chicas!

As I say all the time, it's great to have workout buddies! It helps keep me fit!

I have been going to spinning classes! I love them!  And I have been doing a lot of hiking! I love hiking!

I have also discovered a new group of girls in my area who love to WORK OUT together! Oh, and they also belong to the NRA, which is so unusual for Santa Cruz! We have so much fun going on hikes together, and we help keep each other in shape!

Also, we go home and cook together after our hike!

Despite the bad rap it gets and sometimes deserves, marriage can be filled with pleasant things.

NOTE: Don't let anyone fool you into planning your life around it, though. Those people are deluded, and they will dupe you in other ways, too. Live your life, and then remember that you forgot to get married. Don't panic if it's not happening yet. Some day you will wonder, what is everybody in such a hurry for?

Here are some things I love about being married:

1. Sex on demand (almost better than TIVO)

2. Someone to take action when you say, "Take This Bag of Double-Stuff Oreos Away From Me!"

3. Someone to tell you when that sweater really does make you look like a bag of potters clay.

4. Someone to commiserate with when you proclaim you're going off of alcohol for a month. Someone to make you check yourself when you say "If you go buy a bottle of Vermentino tonight, I'll help you drink it!"

5. Someone to watch and chide late-night whole grain Pizza Hut ads with. Oh, they're so HEALTHY!

6. Someone to tell you that your stomach is not that big, it's just the way you're sitting.

7. Someone who accepts you—even likes you still—while, or more likely AFTER, you've had your high-protein diet, snack-free afternoon, no before-dinner glasses of wine, low blood-sugar meltdown, in which you threatened to permanantly move to France and drink amazingly cheap but outstanding wine without him.

8. Someone to watch America's Next Top Model with. Someone who doesn't humiliate you for spending an hour online trying to find out what happened to the winner of Cycle One. Someone who is even interested in seeing her picture. (Not THAT KIND of interested!)

9. Someone who shares a gym membership with you.

10. Someone who embraces, even admires, your search for the perfect capuccino.

After fighting—wait, me fight? OK, debating—on AV about Ann Coulter (I called her a human cockroach), I realize that I'd much rather have her be my enemy than Kill the Whales.

The thing is, if I make her my enemy then she gets more attention.

My thing is I want to pretend she doesn't exist. I don't want to give her anything, including any of my time and energy. I get sick just writing her name. I think she is one of the foulest creatures to hit the screen.

OK, I know what E. jean would say. She'd say YES, MAKE HER YOUR ENEMY!

I really do think of her as a human cockroach. Is that so wrong?

I am hitting the gym every day and do my Pilates...so I am confident that I will make my goal. Sort of.

OK, I better make AC my enemy just in case.

It's January 5, otherwise known as Januwagon (back on the wagon). Despite the terrible cliche—I'm going to get in shape now that the holidays are over!—I'm serious. I am back on the Abs diet, kind of.

And off alcohol and off sugar...except for those dried mangoes that taste so good.

I'm doing the shakes again: yogurt, vitamin B, omegas, whey protein, frozen berries. Yum. I just try to have one a day so that I can cut the crazy sugar cravings.

All this is is high protein snacking, really. I like it because I don't get all psychotic with low blood sugar, which is an unfortunate trait in our family. The husband and I realized at some point that most of our arguments transpired around 5:00, right before dinner time.

With a little protein throughout the day I am less likely to become a raging bitch of a dinner date.

Now I'm going to the gym to deal with my sciatica (yes, I am a 65 year old trapped in a 40 something body).

Oh, and lest I become a cliche, too:

Why not get in shape, WHILE I drink morning coffee.

Nothing like a stomach virus to help clean you out.

Mmm. My daughter woke up at 3:00 am, got in bed with us, and then threw up everywhere. No surprises. We'd eaten a bunch of Red Vines at the movies that afternoon, so guess what color the bed clothes are now?

I know, TMI.

But now I've got it too. Make us better before New Year's Eve.

Warning: my sense of humor wanes when I am sick. I'm not very funny in this state. And what good am I without it? OK, that was just the self-loathing talking. Really I am a confident, beautiful person who is capable of anything! Good enough, smart enough, etc. etc.

The good news is: the actual detox can begin now.

FYI: It hasn't really happened yet. I got off wine. That was good. Then x-mas happened, I visited the family, and — THE PLUNGE.

But I embraced the plunge. I held it tightly with my fat little fingers. I kissed it. I caressed it. I loved it.

And I felt like shit the next morning(s). But, hey, now I know. And, it was a really great couple bottles of wine.

Looking forward to getting over this bug so I can move onto the New Year's PLUNGE.

Here's my new strategy: GOING TO THE GYM EVERY DAY, or at least every other day.

Every time I do a search for stomach flab, I get this guy. How can we get him on Flaab? OK, now that I have inspired you, please go back to your dieting.

ooops. I swore in my title. I don't do that often. Don't get me wrong, I have a sailor's mouth, despite, or perhaps because of that fact that I am a mom.

OK, so this might not have anything to do with my cleanse, which I should say is going OK to fair. I am not drinking wine, but I have been spotted at two cookie decorating parties in one week. Really, I just wanted to paint and look at the cookies. But, of course, this is usually not how the night progresses. I have practiced some restraint however and I am confident that I will not have to pay kill the whales come Jan. 31.

But, back to the bullshit topic. One of my favorite advice columnists is writing his advice on Percocet and Vicodin. So, maybe that doesn't matter to you. Maybe everyday you read on Percocet and Vicodin. Maybe your best days are on Percocet and Vicodin. I can fully relate to that and have wanted either of those at times during my cleanse.

To be fair, this advice columnist is recovering from surgery. But still, it makes me laugh that he is prefacing each column with "I am writing this on Percocet and Vicodin," or some approximation of that. This one I had to share though, because it is relevant—uh, somehow I suppose. I guess it makes me think about the difference between what I perceive about my health and well-being (i.e. my cleanse), and what it actually true:

"This brings me to the subject of bullshit, the rampant bullshit that passes for knowledge, the arrant bullshit that passes for conversations on airplanes and in bars and restaurants. There is such a difference between knowledge and bullshit. Bullshit is just the stuff that comes out of our mouths. It's the stuff we believe we know. It's stuff like, "Well, the black bears are the dangerous ones." I'm down in Florida and I'm just hearing guys talk. I'm thinking, how the fuck do you know black bears are the dangerous ones? Are you a wildlife behavior specialist? That's what I mean about bullshit. We believe things about ourselves and about our children. That doesn't make them so.

Bullshit is OK if you're not going to actually be messing with the bears. If you're just sitting in a restaurant bullshitting, that's fine. But if the guy is there with the bear, wondering if it's going to attack him, he wants better information."

OK, so I guess my question is how do I know if my cleanse is bullshit or not? I mean, I feel good about it, but is it really doing my body any good?

Search me, O God, [oh, How frisky he is!!]
And know my heart today;
Try me, O Savior,
Know my thoughts, I pray.
See if there be
Some wicked way in me; [YES! I have many wicked ways in ME + Many wicked X-Mas cookies, too.]
Cleanse me from every sin
And set me free.

I praise Thee, Lord,
For cleansing me from sin;
Fulfill Thy Word,
And make me pure within.
Fill me with fire
Where once I burned with shame; [OH Yes, I like this! Fill Me With Fire Baby!]
Grant my desire
To magnify Thy Name.

Oh Jesus, you really needed to start your own Master Cleanse program. You wouldn't have been so poor! Gosh, think of the possibilities.

This Christmas, I am so white.

Here's another reason why, excerpted from Stuff White People Like, which I am always blathering on about because I think Christian Lander's blog—and now NYT Bestseller—is funny enough to consider it a great abs workout:

"When white people are unable to blame their parents for their problems, they blame food. In fact, whenever a white person is feeling tired or depressed it is almost always linked to the food they eat. The only solution is to undergo a cleanse. During this process they will tell you how much more energy they have and how they feel great.

They will also tell you how their body is breaking down and passing all the toxins of the past six months or year. If you are ever roped into one of these conversations, it's important to understand that white people are just looking to be told that they are being very healthy, or at least healthier than you. As such, the best response is to say, "WOW, I wish I had the willpower. I'm probably going to die at 45."

I know, I know. My cleanse is so—predictable. I like to stick to racial/cultural stereotypes. It just makes things that much more simple.

Reading the book is almost better than Pilates, BTW.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me
a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me
two sausage pies and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me
three ribeyes grilling, two sausage pies,  and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes grilling, two sausage pies, and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me five enemas, four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes grilling, two sausage pies and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me six fried cheese balls, five enemas, four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes grilling, two sausage pies and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me seven pork dumplings, six fried cheese balls, five enemas, four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes grilling, two sausage pies and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me eight Bailey’s coffees, seven pork dumplings, six fried cheese balls, five enemas, four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes, two sausage pies, and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me nine cannoli, eight Bailey’s coffees, seven pork dumplings, six fried cheese balls, five enemas, four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes, two sausage pies and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me ten chocolate cheesecakes, nine cannoli, eight Bailey’s coffees, seven pork dumplings, six fried cheese balls, five enemas, four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes, two sausage pies and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me eleven French Bordeaux, ten chocolate cheesecakes, nine cannoli, eight Bailey’s coffees, seven pork dumplings, six fried cheese balls, five enemas, four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes, two sausage pies and a steaming cup of Detox tea

On the twelveth day of Christmas my true love gave to me twelve shots espresso, eleven French Bordeaux, ten chocolate cheesecakes, nine cannoli, eight Bailey’s coffees, seven pork dumplings, six fried cheese balls, five enemas, four eggnog lattes, three ribeyes, two sausage pies and a steaming cup of Detox tea.

Yes, this is a Christmas tree made of cannoli. Is that so wrong?

Oh Lowly Night!

O Lowly Night! The wine is in the pantry,
Please help me find something else to drink.
Long lay Colette in sin and error pining,
She asks for strength while the husband is a’ wine-ing.
A thrill of hope the sober world rejoices,
For yonder drinks and new and glorious choices.
Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the AA voices!
O not so kind, the night when all looks rotten;
O night, O Lowly Night, O night divine!
O night, O Holy Night, O bring back my wine!