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How I lost weight by playing Starcraft

April 6, 2011

A few months ago, I bought black jeans. They were the first I’d owned as an adult and as such, I didn’t plan on pairing them with a tucked in Daffy Duck t-shirt. Straight leg, 7 For All Mankind, size 8. The only problem was that, when I tried them on minutes after having them delivered, they didn’t fit. I mean, technically I could get them zipped but they made my waist look like an overflowing bowl of oatmeal and turned my ass into an innie.

I was crestfallen. I don’t obsess over how much I weigh, but at the same time, I love being a size 8. It’s the ideal size for me but when I couldn’t fit into these, I reluctantly accepted it and put them back in the box to be returned.

Around the same time, my boyfriend and I were at Target for another one of our routine visits to pick up one specific thing but leave with 11 things that are completely unrelated. So, since we were there for paper towels, we ended up bringing home two copies of Starcraft II. Even though I do really enjoy a good self-sabotage, I was completely against buying the game. The conversation went something like this:

HIM: Let’s get Starcraft, we had so much fun with the last one.

ME: No. I don’t want to have to be cut out of our apartment just so I can be weighed on a livestock scale and then watch them throw away my Pringles.

HIM: It won’t be that bad.

ME: Define “that bad.”

HIM: I’ll make sure you get to keep your Pringles.

ME: Not helping.

HIM: We’ll be responsible with it.

ME: Last time we played Starcraft, we never had sex, we only left the apartment to get pizza and I think you developed lower back problems.

HIM: So is that a no?

Starcraft, for those of you don’t know, is a real time strategy game made by Blizzard – the same people responsible for World of Warcraft. This means that, like WoW, Starcraft’s main objective is to make you fat beyond your wildest dreams. And if it doesn’t make you fat, it will give you acne in places never thought possible, social anxiety and/or an unnatural attraction to Funyuns.

It looks like this:

The objective: collect more resources than your opponents and then kill them with race-specific units (Protoss, Zerg and Terran). Kind of like Monopoly but with more blood and fewer beauty contests.

I don’t deny that Starcraft is a highly compelling game, despite the fact that 80% of the build order is the same every single time. But the independent variables are just ample enough that you keep coming back without gaining much, other than new methods for your opponent to call you a ‘cunt fag.’ And the slice of hope that 20% of your game – what, on average, amounts to maybe seven minutes – will be marginally different is what motivates a two hour time suck.

But, as you can tell, I’m playing it anyway. And as I’ve already revealed – one of the reasons for that is because I’m actually lose weight doing it. It’s simple, really, and I don’t even have to do butt clenches in my computer chair. The secret comes down to delayed gratification – which can be applied to anything. Before agreeing to buy Starcraft together, my boyfriend and I made a promise to each other that if we wanted to play, we would have to take a walk around the neighborhood for approximately 30 minutes.

Sadly, since installing this rule, I’ve probably never been in better shape. After a while, we stopped associating walking with Starcraft and began exercising on our own initiative. On the surface I thought it was great to kind of cheat the expectation that participating in online gaming meant that you were destined for a lifetime of elastic waist jeans.

Not only am I at least five years away from that reality, but I’m now regularly wearing the black jeans that previously looked like compression stockings. Recently, I took the opportunity to try them on again and not only do they fit, but there’s enough room for me to be three months pregnant without even knowing it.

But, seriously, I hope it doesn’t come to that because I don’t know how to walk that off.

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If I have a girl I’m naming her Spicy Asiago Ranch Chicken Club

April 3, 2011

In February of last year, I stopped eating fast food (In-N-Out doesn’t count). A few months after that, I stopped going to franchises altogether. It has nothing to do with being a vegetarian, food allergies or Morgan Spurlock. Simply put, fast food made me feel awful. And the food from casual dining franchises didn’t make me feel much better.

So I swore it off. Fast food was easy since I never really liked the stuff anyway (You’ll always be my baby, Burger King Croissan’wich). But franchises were harder to shake since they typically know just the right mix of carbohydrates, fat, and stone veneer interiors to make you feel fancy. To move the process along, I started a mental ‘never again’ list of franchises that I banned myself from after particularly bad visits. The first draft looked like this:

Olive Garden – Diarrhea. Again.

Red Robin – Experienced severe headache and nausea after fifth basket of bottomless fries. Should be illegal.

Applebee’s – Found a tag in my food that came from the bag that they microwaved it in.

Red Lobster – Bad service, average food, will miss the Cheddar Bay Biscuits.

Chili’s – I really think they’re trying to kill me with the Southern Smokehouse Bacon Big Mouth Burger.

It seemed that they all had two things in common – unremarkable food and a threat that I might shit my pants. After a while, it became really easy to kick franchises out of my life, too. So I did. And I don’t regret anything. I feel great, my pants fit and I no longer worry that I’ll die in a TGI Friday’s.

However, sometimes I slip up. And by ‘slip up’ I mean that I get something with a lot of bacon on it, dip it in whatever non-dairy based ‘ice cream’ treat I can find and then cry with the wrappers in my arms, wondering why I ever said goodbye to ‘#5 With a Biggie Fry and Apple Pie Aubrey.’

So, about the Biggie Fry. It showed up this past Friday night and brought along a Spicy Asiago Ranch Chicken Club, made just for me by Wendy’s.

Get your tissues or socks or banana peels ready, because I’m about to describe what’s going on with this sandwich. First, there’s a tenderly breaded chicken fillet. That’s topped with a sultry bundle of crispy applewood smoked bacon. Dripping down all of that is creamy ranch and melted asiago cheese. Then there’s lettuce or something, but I take it off because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to feel a thing.

This sandwich is the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I say that as someone who has three Safeway Club Cards. It combines the best of what fast food and casual dining franchises have to offer. So basically, it’s quick and there’s a lot of ranch dressing.

To give you an idea of what my four minutes as a demigod looked like, I’ve come up with a rough sketch of my Spicy Asiago Ranch Chicken Club experience:

Fireworks are simulated

 

I swear I’m getting back on the wagon tomorrow.

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America deserves to be fat and poor forever

January 26, 2011

Well, it happened. The number of people afflicted with chronic depression has finally intertwined with an overall lack of funds, resulting in the production of one truly heinous product.

The idea here is basic. Deliver as much shitty food in one box as possible, offload cookie dough contaminated with rodent feces and prove how useless the FDA is for letting a word like “WYNGZ” take the place of “RAT MEAT.”

But come on, something as authentico as DiGiorno wouldn’t steer us wrong, right? Roughly translated, it means ‘day’ in Italian. It’s not the most inspired choice but, “We use mechanically separated chicken parts for our pepperoni and sausage pizzas” is way, way too long. Oh and their slogan, “It’s not delivery. It’s DiGiorno” essentially means, “It’s not this awesome thing you love. It’s kind of a parody of this awesome thing you love but hey cheap ass, you don’t have to tip a delivery guy so just choke down your chicken beaks already.”

What’s ultimately upsetting though is that they come in the same box. Buying a frozen pizza and a slat of pre-made cookie dough separately says, “John Hughes movie night” or “Slumber party with friends.” Buying it in the same box says, “I’ll write my suicide note right on the back, next to the heating instructions and I’ll be all like ‘Life Instructions: Don’t do it, they’ll never love you back.’”

But for all of its repulsiveness, it is idiot proof for the $4.99 frozen pizza buying demographic. And if I’ve gleaned anything from recent eating habits in the U.S., it’s that convenience will always outrank substance and in some cases, eradicate it entirely.

DiGiorno: One pan, one oven, endless tastiness*.

*bowel obstruction

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Self Control Will Find You In the End

January 25, 2011

I’m in rehab.

Ha ha, just kidding. I’ll never admit to my real problems because they’re too beautiful and kettle cooked. But what I will admit to is the fact that I have a huge issue with extricating myself from the internet. Like, one terabyte huge. See? I get it. The worst part is, I split my time between only three websites, maybe four – Twitter, Gmail and Wikipedia. Honorable mentions go to Amazon, TV Tropes and Maru’s Youtube channel. That’s it. That’s what consumes my time spent on the computer. And if you want me to be really honest, I just threw in Wikipedia to make it seem like I could possibly win a spelling bee someday.

I’ve auditioned more methods of productivity than the Westboro Baptist Church has poster board.  The closest I came to success was the 30/30 method – work for 30 minutes and break for 30 minutes. It worked pretty well, mostly because 30 minutes is a lot of time to research lyrics from one hit wonders of the 90s. Too much time, really. After a while, the efficacy of my method began to wane and I learned that I simply can’t condition myself to have constant internet access. Before long, the time I spent being productive became indiscernible from the time I spent being overly concerned with the game theory behind The Biggest Loser. I’d find myself casually checking Twitter or responding to an email thinking, “This won’t take much time” and guess what it took a lot of time. There was always something new to click on, something new to say. For me, and just about anyone who didn’t get high off of glitter glue in their formative years, there’s always something to say.

Then while looking through Cool Tools hoping to find the perfect Lego set for my boyfriend (he’s legal), I stumbled upon SelfControl. Steve Lambert, creator of SelfControl, does what any self-respecting, bearded artist does and makes things for himself. He made SelfControl because he needed it. I need it. You probably need it, too.

SelfControl will look like this on your computer:

And that’s it, really. You click the start button, hope to hell you didn’t accidentally max it out to one day, and wonder what you ever did without it. I recommend starting at 15 minutes. If you get through it without a panic attack, bump it up to 30 minutes. But keep in mind that nothing will stop SelfControl. You can’t simply press ‘esc’ and you can’t just restart your computer. You can only take a hammer to the screen and sob while your shoulders violently leap toward your ears.

SelfControl will only blacklist sites that you choose, so if you find yourself visiting Neopets to feed your Chomby (this is real) during your block of productivity, you have the option of adding it to your Blacklist in real time.

Steve has thought of everything short of maybe a few scrolling Jackée Harry-isms like, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” It’s a strait jacket for almost all of my poor choices. Aside from the one where I make Jackée Harry references. I’m fairly certain that can’t be helped.

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Bathroom technology is superior to all technologies including modern medicine

December 1, 2010

Look at my toilet. Look at it. This is where I pee.

Aside from being a lesson in how the internet can be a terrible, terrible place, this is also my way of encouraging everyone to buy a bidet. Those of you who live outside North America might already have one. As for the rest of us, come on. Reaching around to clean your ass with something that may as well be hamster bedding is some truly Homo habilis behavior.

The impetus for getting one came from my time spent in Japan, where the toilets have more features than most luxury vehicles. Heated seats, electronic flushing sounds, a gentle mist feature for the vagina and a pressure wash for the asshole. It had to be mine. Of course, I could only reasonably expect the pressure wash for do-it-yourself installation, but it has still changed my life. When it showed up I thought, “Huh, this will be nice to use periodically.” Now I use it just for fun. I might be using it right now.

This particular bidet fits neatly under most standard toilet seats and takes about a maximum of ten minutes to install. It has manual settings that range from “Springtime Mist” to “Power Bottom” and after establishing your safe word, it’s just pure happiness coursing through your veins, or rather, asshole.

I really don’t know what more I can say to convince you.

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