Would you walk for 40 minutes to lose a hundred pounds in a year?

Would you walk for 20 minutes to lose 50 pounds?

My roommate, She Who Shall Be Cursed for getting me into this diet, walks for 40 minutes (20 minutes, twice a day.) She's averaging 2 pounds a week on this diet. I walk for 20 minutes, once a day. I'm averaging 1 pound a week.

Understand, neither of us will be losing 100 or even 50 pounds. There's no way we're staying on this diet for an entire year. We're already intermittently homicidal after only 60 days.

Still, it does occur to me that if I dragged my behind out of bed and took a walk before work in the morning, now while the weather is still nice, I could drop another five pounds in the three weeks I have left before I go on "maintenance."

Granted, the supplements are a bit expensive. We're spending about $60/week on the supplements and vitamins. On the other hand, my grocery bill has dropped to $12 a week, so I'm actually spending almost the same amount of money on food. (It's amazing how much you save when you're not going through four bags of potato chips and a couple of bags of candy a week and eating dinner out two or three times a week. Food is expensive.)

(I think I'm blogging too much. It's become such a habit with me to type in the html codes for the formatting I use most often that I find myself "formatting" text in documents that aren't supposed to have html code in them.)

I'm don't really obsess about the diet as much as these blog entries make it seem. It's just that today I treated myself to lunch out, for the first time in six weeks, and I sat down and ate my entire day's allowance of food at once.

I dread the moment when all of those carbs wear off.

I have no idea what I'm going to do for dinner tonight (well, yes, I do, because all I can eat is lettuce and celery), but one thing I do know is that tonight's 20 minute walk had better be 40 minutes to work some of those calories off.

I have no self-discipline at all. It's very sad. I could blame PMS, but I've already been blaming PMS for everything I've done for the past six days and after a while that excuse starts to get a bit tarnished. I'm a glutton, that's all.

I have absolutely nothing to say that could be of interest to anyone besides myself today. I'm getting new tires on my car tomorrow. That's the weekend's planned excitement.

Last night I watched Will and Grace and it wasn't very good and now I'm regretting having given up CSI.

I finished The Belgariad and now I'm working my way through The Mallorean with occasional forays into Jingo (a Discworld novel that I somehow missed when I was buying and reading them the first time through).

But

I was thinking about fanfiction last night.

Specifically I was thinking about when I used to write the stuff. Every so often I stop and marvel over that.

There was a time when I did nothing but write. I wrote at work, pondered story events in my head as I drove to and from work, and hogged up the computer at home every night and half of every weekend. One year I went to Escapade and missed one entire day of the con because I was busy writing a story. I wrote incessantly and obsessively. It was like the stories were grabbing me by the brain and forcing their way out through my fingers. Writing was almost all I thought about. (You'd think the results would have been more worthwhile, but that's a different rant.)

And then, one day, it just sort of...went away. Poof. The one time I actually tried to write a story since that time was a dismal failure. I couldn't think of anything to say and, worse yet, I couldn't think of any clever dialogue not to say it with.

Isn't that weird? I think that's weird.

It's another subject that's on my mind these days, because NaNoWriMo is coming up again soon and I have to decide whether or not to write another novel this year. The people who sucked me into playing that game last year both wimped out without finishing their 50,000 words, which made me a little bitter, I promise you.

The thought occurs to me that I could work on last year's novel, add another 50k to it, or I could write something completely new and different.

I don't feel any actual urge to write any more, but as I recall, the freedom to write without regard for quality or logic was a lot of fun last year. Not like writing something that someone will someday actually read. (The grammar police may come after me for that last sentence.)

Anyone want to play? It's easier than you think, you know. I didn't even start until the 7th of November last year and I easily got my 50,000 words written before the end of the month.

Any takers?