The Brooks Atkinson Diet

I have been an intermittent faster for decades longer than intermittent fasting has been cool–or whatever it is now, for cool is not quite the mot juste, and in a certain sense intermittent fasting is the very antithesis of cool—not in the sense of being “naff” or corny but in the sense of being conformist rather than rebellious in ostensible spirit, in seeming to be a “lifestyle choice” that the “experts” rather than “the kids” would have one choose. I say “seeming” and “would have” because as near as I can tell, a critical mass of “medical professionals” enthusiastically or urgently recommending intermittent fasting does not yet exist, such that one tends to feel the pressure to take it up as a very gentle one manifested in the news that it has been taken up by some friend or relative whom one does not regard as especially flaky or kooky. Of course, like the accepted label for most other crazes and would-be crazes, “intermittent fasting” is something of a misnomer, a sort of cross between a pleonasm and an oxymoron. The actual empirical referent of the term is a congeries of eating regimens that have nothing in common but their deviation from the traditional three-square-meals-a-day pattern and none of which involves fasting in any traditional “meaningful” sense. To be sure, one may say that one is technically fasting whenever one happens not to have a piece of food in one’s mouth or gullet, just as Mark Twain could waggishly imply that he had quit smoking each time he had put off lighting a cigar by an extra hour. And yes, we all know that “breakfast” is called “breakfast” because it “breaks” the eight to-ten-hour food-free interval begun after supper of the previous day, but from this etymological fact we ought not to infer that the medieval Englishpeople who came up with “breakfast” regarded that interval as a proper fast any more readily than we ought to infer that the early-modern Frenchpeople who came up with la petite mort regarded every act of coition as a fatal event. No, what with their all living within a day’s walk of some wild-eyed, hirsute, hairshirt-sporting anchorite, these medievals knew full well that a proper fast consisted in living on nothing but water for days if not weeks on end, with the odd handful of wild berries or crust of moldy bread thrown in every few days to keep one from giving up the ghost a minute sooner than the Good Lord would have preferred; they were simply indulging in a bit of that winsome poetic license that they have since become so anonymously famous for (cf. window’s derivation from wind-eye, lord’s from loaf-ward etc.). I myself did not regard my dietary regimen as so ascetic as to be termed fasting when I first stumbled upon it way back in the late 1990s. For my embarkation on IF was by no means the result of any sort of plan; rather, I just sort of discovered IF in consequence of a longish bout of the flu in the course of which my appetite was much depressed and I consequently found myself eating much less often, and in much smaller quantities, than usual. Why, sometimes I would pass through an entire solar day without eating anything at all! And to my immense surprise, I found that as I was thus eating less frequently and less massively, my waistline was getting slimmer and slimmer. You see up until then, when I was in my late twenties, I had been I will not say a firm believer but a firm hoper in the received opinion-eme that one put on weight as a matter of course as one got older, and that tinkering with the size or frequency of one’s meals could do nothing towards stemming the never-ebbing tide of lard. I may even have been a firm-ish hoper in that only slightly less canonical received opinion-eme that holds that as one withholds nutriment from the body, the so-called metabolism compensates by increasing the bulk and heaviness of the flesh one is already carrying (obviously such a process would violate one of those laws of Newton that received opinion in its “scientism” holds very dear indeed, but received opinion has never balked at inconsistency). In any case, there was no denying that I had put on a substantial amount of weight with the passage of years, having gone as I had from being able to fit rather loosely into a pair of size 30 trousers at the age of nineteen or twenty to being able to fit only rather snugly into a size-34 pair by the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. But now, at the end of this flu-bout, I suddenly found those size-34 trousers almost unwearably baggy, and when I thereupon checked my weight on the nearest scale, I found that it was 125 pounds, a whopping four pounds lighter than my high-school graduation weight of 129. It was as if I had undergone some sort of magical Ron-Howardian rejuvenation that had instantaneously transformed me back into my real, natural self, of which my ca. 160 lb. size-34 wearing self had been a horrible perversion or mutation. And having become the real, natural me again, I was darned if I was going to allow myself to degenerate into the pervert or mutant again. My plan for holding onto this new old me was either childishly or diabolically simple: I would go from eating three meals a day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—to eating just one; usually dinner but occasionally lunch, and very occasionally breakfast. Six of the seven of these meals each week were to be normal-sized, and the remaining one, to be taken as a sort of weekend mini-Mardi Gras on Saturday or Sunday, was to be extra-large-sized. A normal-sized lunch or dinner then typically consisted for me of a typical non super-sized fast-food meal—a cheeseburger or other sandwich (usually a six-to-eight inch submarine-style one but occasionally a club-style one) and a non-heaping helping of French fries; and an extra-large lunch or dinner of three or four trips in one sitting to one of downtown Baltimore’s three or four excellent Indian Sunday daytime buffets. I should further mention that I also allowed into my gullet as much booze as came its way in the evenings—typically three or four beers’ worth on weeknights and six or seven on Friday and Saturday nights. I should perhaps still further mention that I lived in an eighth-floor apartment to and from which I almost invariably took the stairs instead of the elevator and even (although I am still unclear on whether the nicotine exerts any accelerating effect on the digestion) that I was a half-pack-a-day cigarette smoker (albeit of one of the nicotine-poorest cigarette-brands on the market, Marlboro Ultra Lights). Anyhow, I had been sticking sedulously to this regimen for a year or two when one genuinely fine afternoon (for I still vividly recall that there was then not a cloud in the sky), after I had just crossed the twenty-four hour inter-meal mark, I was suddenly assailed by a terrible migraine complete with nausea and that disagreeably “psychedelic” visual phenomenon known as an aura. This was but the third time in my life that I had suffered such an attack, the previous two having happened when I was about 15 and 22, respectively, and while I could recall nothing of what I had eaten or not eaten in the run-up to those earlier attacks, as received medical opinion held (as it still holds) that migraines were often brought on by dietary anomalies and the only conspicuous anomaly of my dietary regimen was its twenty-four hour rule, I thought I had best slacken that rule ever so slightly. And so I added a light snack—typically a muffin or bagel-and-cream cheese—to each of the six non-big-meal days. And thereafter, none-too-slowly and ever-so-surely, the poundage started creeping back. On stepping onto the scale for the first time since the start of the new regimen, in 2001 or 2002, I was shocked to discover that I was weighing in at a hefty 140 pounds, and by 2008, when I paid my first visit in more than twenty years to a so-called GP and hence could no longer keep my weight a secret from myself, I was dismayed if not shocked to be hovering between the low and mid 150s. Shortly after that first GP’s visit, I quit smoking, and in about 2012 I hit a peak weight of 160 pounds. Curiously enough, at about the same time I had another migraine—this time a purely visual one, unaccompanied by any head-pain or nausea—and from that point onwards these ocular migraines occurred not infrequently—say, two or three times a year. Whence I could not help ruefully concluding that whatever was causing them, it was not fasting as such, and so I reimposed the twenty-four hour rule, replacing the snack with a “Lincoln continental breakfast” of coffee alone, although en revanche I began allowing myself two big meals at the weekend. This brought my weight back down to the low 150s, around which I seemed to be able to make it hover thenceforth. All through this period, I was at least able to console myself with the awareness that I was consistently able to fit into size-32 trousers, although the fit was sometimes a very close call, and on more than a few occasions I found myself having to cope with the embarrassment of the sudden scarpering of my waistband-button in mid-wear. At length, in March of 2020, the nationwide COVID system-of-life shutdown imposed on me the greatest change of my mode of living in a quarter-century. I was compelled to relocate from my (since 2003) sixth-floor midtown Baltimore apartment (to and from which I had habitually transported myself via the stairs just as I had done to and from the previous one) to my mother’s house in the outer suburbs of Tampa, Florida. This relocation marked a shift from an agressively three-dimensional space to an aggressively two-dimensional one, for not only was (and is) central Florida a veritable flatland compared with super-hilly central Maryland, but my mother’s house was (and is) a basementless bungalow (hence I have if nothing else escaped the fate of being a modern archetypal loser “living in his mom’s basement” [although living in the same room as the one in which one spent one’s childhood and early adolescence, as I have since done, is “arguably” even more loserly]). Hence, although I remained a full-time pedestrian and elevator-shunner I was bound thenceforth to get much less exercise as a matter of course in the course of my Alltag. Moreover, in the matter of food I was now confined to the selection available at the nearest Publix and Winn Dixie supermarkets (not that Baltimore had exactly been a gustatory Mecca for me towards the end, when for convenience’s and personal safety’s sake I had dined almost exclusively on the deli offerings of the now sadly defunct Eddie’s Market of Charles Village plus Domino’s delivery pizza or and sandwiches from a very nearby Subway at the weekend), and, for the occasional weekend treat, to delivery from the handful of restaurants, such as Domino’s and Chili’s, for whom we were “within range.” Because as Dr. Johnson says, “no man likes living under the eye of disapprobation,” and I knew my mother did not approve of my to-my-mind moderate (but to her mind doubtless wildly excessive) drinking, I cut drastically back on the booze, eventually only allowing myself a single beer a day consumed in conjunction with my single proper meal; en revanche, I reinstated the once-a-day snack. I expected the pounds to keep piling on, but to my pleasant surprise, at the end of about a year of this regimen taken in synchrony with an almost totally sedentary "lifestyle", I found that I had seemingly lost a modest amount of weight inasmuch as my trousers were fitting me ever slightly more loosely. So the weight-reduction could only have come mostly from the booze-reduction: a sobering discovery in two or more senses, for it definitively disabused me of a notion that I’d always cherished although I’d always “intellectually” known it to be false —viz., that my booze intake in Baltimore had been but a light-caloric garnish on my solid-food intake. Anyhow, another year passed without my getting any fatter, and yet I was far less complacent about my girth than I had been in my last years in Baltimore, when I had apparently weighed very slightly more. Why was this? Why, because I had crossed the threshold between my forties and m fifties, and for the first time in my life, I thought I was beginning to look my age and therefore unprecedentedly to “mutate” along another vector than that of mere bulk. To be sure, my hair had begun turning gray when I was in my early thirties and had been accurately describable as “salt-and-pepper” for nearly ten years—but it had not thinned in the slightest, such that I could have restored it to its original jet-black glory with a dash of dye had I so chosen. But otherwise I had felt as though I looked to be the same person at forty or even forty-five as I had been as an eighteen-year-old, barring the pudginess of my face-cheeks and the addition of a suspicion of a“spare tire” around the waist; and I had always known that these mutations were as reversible as the hair-color change, albeit only at a much slower pace (but en revanche, in their case the reversals would have been “organic” and autochthanous rather than artificial and adventitious). But on turning fifty, I discovered that I had visible and palpable furrows in my brow and visibly sagging skin on my limbs. These were changes that manifestly were not reversible (at least not by someone as financially ill-heeled as me [to be sure, I would like to think I am not so effeminiately vain as to stoop to Botox or cosmetic surgery, but until--if ever--I become rich enough to decline such "elective surgery, I shall be powerless to aver in good faith that I would never elect it]), such that I could only hope to return to a semblance of my corporeal self in the register of the overall outline of my body, by becoming a genuinely skinny man again, albeit only a genuinely skinny late middle-aged man rather than a genuinely skinny young one. But short of reimposing the one meal a day rule, I could think of no means of effecting that retransformation, and the fact of the matter was that since moving back to Florida, I had grown much more sentimentally attached to the once-a-day snack than I had ever been to it in Baltimore, for it no longer consisted simply of a paper cup of coffee and muffin hastily grabbed at Starbuck’s or some mom-and-pop competitor thereof, but rather complicatedly of an ever-varying combination of Stroepwafels, biscotti, and English muffins lovingly toasted in my very own toaster, along with liberal lashings of ever-varying blends of loose-leaf tea lovingly brewed in my very own teapot with water lovingly boiled in my very own electric kettle, and lovingly sweetened and softened with my own milk and sugar. Then, about two years later still, in the early summer of 2023, I was visited by a second event that unexpectedly pointed out to me the path back to skinniness—viz., a visit paid to our house by three of our out-of-state-residing relatives. The visit was brief, between three and five days in extent, and yet it was somehow long enough and sufficiently disruptive of my Alltag in all the right ways to catalyze the desired transformation of my organism. Firstly, the nearly hourly occupation of our cramped and cluttered kitchen by three extra meal-preparers, together with two or three dining-out events along the way, prevented me from eating all my own snacks and repasts at the regularly scheduled times—on one day I managed to have a snack but not a meal, on the next a meal but no snack, etc. Secondly, as the visit included two day-trips—one to the sponge market of Tarpon springs, the other to the Tampa IKEA—that exacted several miles of walking apiece, I got more exercise during it than during any comparable stretch of time I had lived through since moving back from Baltimore. To my delighted surprise, on the day our relatives set off back to Georgia I found that for the first time in donkey’s decades my belt (for I have always been a religious belt-wearer in consequence of being a religious tucker-in of shirts [for there are few if any things that look more unfinished or “off” than a beltless man with his shirt tucked in]) was having to serve as more than an ornament of my couture, that if I didn’t buckle it at least as far as its antepenultimate hole my trousers began making as if—albeit only ever so tentatively as if—to slide off my hips and backside. So then, I concluded, if I wanted to keep the weight off I would somehow have to routinize the very recent disruptions of my Alltag; I would have to see to it that I was regularly sometimes (but only sometimes) eating a meal but not a snack, and vice-versa, within a twenty-four hour day. And I readily enough perceived that such regularization would need to consist simply in separating the teas from the full meals by a time-span longer than twelve hours but shorter than twenty-four. I suppose for mostly aesthetic reasons I chose the time-span exactly halfway between twelve and twenty-four—i.e., eighteen. That interval would allow each meal and each tea to take place at the exact numerical time as its generic predecessor and successor, but on the opposite side of the AM/PM divide: thus an 8AM Monday tea would be followed by an 8PM Tuesday tea, and interposed with a 2AM Tuesday meal, which would in turn stand face-to-face with a 2PM Wednesday meal. The whole thing had a kind of planetarium-like beauty and simplicity about it, with meal-satellites and tea-planets oscillating around the sun or planet that was the kitchen at endlessly repeated intervals of eighteen and thirty-six hours. But I rather unreadily perceived that some Ptolemaic complications, so to speak, would have to be introduced into this new system if my residence in my mother’s house was to survive its implementation longer than a butcher’s fortnight. First of all, by three or four-year-old tradition, my mother and I did all our grocery shopping once a week, every Saturday afternoon. I suppose this need not have presented a hitch had two of my thitherto seven weekly meals not come to center on sandwiches centered on cold cuts that only kept for three or four days and that therefore had to be prepared and consumed by the Wednesday immediately after the grocery-shopping trip, sandwiches so exquisitely tasty (and the reader will, Lord willing, taste with his mind’s tongue just how tasty they are before getting to the end of the present screed) that I could not bear to “swap them out” with entrees composed entirely of less perishable ingredients. And so, like a metaculinary Julius Caesar or Pope Gregory, I intercalated a single exception to the new 18 and 36-hour rule that would allow me to consume both of those selfsame sandwiches at regular weekly intervals: I decreed that the fourth full meal of the week (counting from Monday) would be followed not eighteen hours later by a fourth tea but rather twenty-four hours later by a fifth meal, which would in turn be followed eighteen hours later by a fourth tea that would round out the week and allow the whole merry cycle to start again on Monday. Second of all, as my mother was and is less rigid a gustatory regimentarian than me, such that her kitchen-monopolizing episodes are more both more frequent and more irregularly scheduled than mine, I was obliged, vis-a-vis certain eating events, to settle for a time-range rather than an exact time, such that these eating events were sometimes bound to occur, say, fourteen or twenty hours before or after the next one, although owing to the rigid emplacement of the time-ranges themselves, I would on average still be adhering to the eighteen-hour rule. And so the entire weekly schedule has come to shake out or down as follows: On Monday, a meal at midday (i.e., starting at any time between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.); on Tuesday, a tea at mid-morning (i.e, starting at any time between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m.); on Wednesday, a meal starting at 5:00 a.m. sharp (for I can afford to be sharp in the small hours) followed by a tea starting between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m.; on Thursday, a midday-starting meal; on Friday, a mid morning-starting tea; on Saturday a 5:00-a.m.-starting meal; and on Sunday a 5:00-a.m.-starting meal followed by a 9:00-9:30 p.m.-starting tea. The exercise component of the new regimen was much more swiftly slotted into place, for despite the impossibility of getting anywhere useful therefrom--aside from the nearest branch of the public library--without a car, our neighborhood itself is eminently walkable, consisting as it does of a single thrice-zig-zagging residentially-cum-agriculturally-zoned two-laned road debouched into, at the fourth and six zags, by either end of a meandering residential street so lightly trafficked that it isn’t even divided into lanes, and two rectilinear and likewise purely residential and laneless side streets of a single longish block apiece. Not that I’d quite describe it, the neighborhood, as preeminently walkable, as it features sidewalks only along the side streets and intermittent stretches of the meandering one, and despite (or perhaps because of) the plainly posted signs indicating sharp turns with ten-miles-per-hour speed limits , not a few daredevil local drivers are wont to traverse the zig-zagging road at speeds suggesting that they are practicing for (in my mother’s words) “a drag race.” En revanche, one might plausibly argue that this dearth of sidewalks is just what the doctor—or a doctor—would have ordered, inasmuch as the bumpy and springy surface of the naked shoulder of Florida grassland provides my foot and calf muscles with a substantial but not overly strenuous workout, and the “cardio” portion of my exercise regimen as admirably seen to by the occasional need to dodge one of the aforementioned would-be drag-racers lest I share the fate of the squirrels whose disturbingly fresh carcasses I espy lying in the middle of the zig-zag road more than weekly.

A pedestrian circuit of the entire complex covers just under four miles and takes just over two hours to traverse, at least as my shank’s mare now ambles. Naturally the vicissitudes of the weather prevent my traversal of that circuit with perfect once-a-day rigor. And naturally, this being west-central Florida, the so-called lightning capital of the world, the vicissitudeme I must contend with most frequently, and with most peremptorily preventative force, is the thunderstorm. Thunderstorms occur here most often in the long summer—from about mid-April to late-September—of which they form a part of the daily weather pattern (such that the meteorological question of the day is not if there will be such a storm but at roughly what hour one may expect it), but they can occur at any time of year, and vexingly enough, the weather-forecasting “apps” are not at all good at determining whether an approaching precipitation-event will take the form of a spell of drizzle (which I would boldly and patiently walk through) or a full-fledged lightning-and-thunder-fest (which I would avoid even more timorously than I would the plague). And on top of that, one seems to have to multiply the chance of rain by three or four to determine the actual likelihood of its occurrence. And so whenever the forecast chance of rain is more than about five percent, I resign myself to forgoing my walk. But in so doing I do not forego my day’s exercise. No: the show must go on in the form of an indoor exercise regimen, whose particulars I shall (Lord willing) itemize at a more propitious moment. At the present moment, it obviously behooves me to report on the effects of my latest “fitness” regimen on my personal mass and volume, for the proof of the non-eating of the pudding is obviously in the thinness and lightness of the non-eater. I am afraid I am unable to furnish such proof in technically verifiable numerical terms, as I have not weighed myself or been weighed by anyone else since starting the regimen (or indeed since my most recent GP visit, in November 2016 [!]), but I think it’s pretty safe to say that within a year-and-a-half of its start I had re-attained if not fallen a little below my college weight, for by the end of 2024 I was having to pull my belt (officially size 34 but inexplicably meant for a size 32 waist according to the manufacturer) down to the penultimate hole to keep my size-32 slacks from not tentatively but precipitately sagging all the way down to my ankles. And I have consistently found myself in this embarrassing yet gratifying corporeal situation ever since. Moreover, the new regimen has apparently caused several other salutary effects that I had either not not been counting on or had not expected at all. My ocular migraines have ceased completely (touch or knock on wood), and I have not come down with a single cold—although I own that the handful of supplements that I take daily (and that I aim to itemize along with the rest of the above-promised particulars) rather than the diet itself may be to thank for this. I do, however, think that I may safely thank the diet itself for almost completely ridding me of the curse of heartburn, which I had previously been wont to suffer from after nearly every meal, such that I had been wont to go through an entire bottle of TUMS in a single month, whereas now I find myself checking the two bottles thereof I still have to make sure their expiration date hasn’t yet passed.

So I would appear to have arrived at a perfect diet-cum-exercise regimen, one that allows me to maintain the original essence of my personal presence in the world, the me of my late high-school and early college years, in perpetuity, or as close to perpetuity as the mortal condition of man allows. But of course that concluding clause “as close to perpetuity as the mortal condition of man allows” is bound to waft ratty smells into the nostrils of any discerning and streetwise reader, for as every such reader knows (and as I myself freely acknowledge, for all my abovementioned resilement from the “m” word qua alibi for gluttony) caeteris paribus, we inexorably put on weight as we get older, such that if I have indeed been adhering to a single dietary-cum-exercise regimen over the past two or three years, I should perforce be at least slightly fatter now than when I began adhering to this regimen. And the truth is that while I have been rigorously adhering to that regimen to the extent that I have remained a sovereign of my own gustation and physical activity, at no point has my sovereignty thereof been absolutely absolute; for I have had not infrequently been obliged to sacrifice that sovereignty to certain friends and kinsmen at holidays, on dining-out nights, and so forth—occasions on which I may expect to consume more food and booze than during even the biggest full meal in my regimen. I typically accommodate such a cessation of sovereignty by skipping the regimen-dictated eating event that would ordinarily follow a full meal scheduled at that time—such, that after, say, a Wednesday-night social dinner I won’t eat anything until a midday meal on the ensuing Friday; even so, I do usually feel ever so slightly fatter for the next few days. Anyhow, from my ability to maintain a stable volume and mass only with the supervention of these occasional big meals, I cannot but infer that my present regimen is an ineluctably emaciative one for a man of my time of life, that had I stuck to it with uninterrupted rather than intermittent rigor, I would have long since withered away into a skeleton. But of course, as my m-word is presumably getting slower and slower with each passing day, for aught I know, five years from now I will have to skip out on big meals entirely and cut out a tea or two from each cycle to avoid tumescing into a veritable jumbo butterball or king-sized roly-poly. But I'll roll over that bridge when or if I come to it. For now, the Ptolemized-cum-Gregorian 18/36 regimen with the occasional big meal seems to be working. As for various reasons, the imposed big meals have been supervening quite rarely lately, I have taken to scheduling monthly personal Mardi Gras(es); that is to say, to making sure I have exactly one big meal a month by ordering in pizza every four or five weeks. We'll (or at least I'll) see how that works out. If I start feeling my trousers fitting more snugly, the obvious way to start slimming down will be to swap out one of the meals with some less calorically hefty assemblage of nourriture, but that is easier said than done, for truth be told, I just sort of settled into my current gustatory rota without glancing at the Nutrition Facts on the labels of any of its constituents, and truth be further told, I continue to avert my eyes from the "Calories" fields on those labels as best I can. I shudder with dread of discovering that one of my beloved open-faced turkey sandwich racks up a four-digit calorie count and could consequently stand to be of disburdened of half its payload of meat and cheese, although I own that I have not managed to avoid learning that a Daehlman's Stroopwafel exceeds a Nonni's biscotto by a whopping eighty calories, a discovery that has prompted me to differentiate my teas into small, biscotto-centered ones, to be taken when the next meal is sited less than eighteen hours hence, and big Stroopwafel-centered ones, to be taken when that meal lies more than 20 hours in the future. And now that I am rattling off specific brand names and genres of comestible, I suppose the moment has at last come when it behooves me to specify exactly what I have been eating all these past three or four years. So then: my first meal of the week, a mid-day Monday one, consists of a microwave-heated open-faced turkey-breast, mustard, and cheese sandwich accompanied by an eight-ounce tub of hummus of varying brandage and exactly as many Snack-Station pretzel chips or Stacy's pita chips as are needed to scrape that tub clean. To itemize the contents of the sandwich in more detail: it consists of two slices of Artisan-brand bread (which is packaged in tapering loaves, such that the bottom slice is gargantuan and the top one is minuscule; and for this sandwich I use the third and fourth-largest slices) surmounted by a generous layer of "delicatessen-style" Boar's Head mustard, surmounted in turn, and in continuing ascending order, by two slices of Boar's Head Chipotle Gouda cheese, a half a pound of some flavor of Boar's Head turkey breast (although I have been known to alternate the turkey with Black Forest Ham, and am giving serious consideration to resuming this alternation), and four slices of Boar's Head three-pepper Colby Jack cheese (all of these ingredients being evenly apportioned between the two bread-slices, such that each side of the sandwich contains one slice of Chipotle Gouda and two slices of Colby Jack along with a quarter-pound of turkey and layer-half of mustard). The second full meal, the 5:00 AM-Wednesday one, consists of the same sort of the sandwich on the two largest loaf-slices with Boar's Head Londonport roast beef substituting for the turkey, along with a Red's organic bean-and-cheese burrito as a side. The third meal, the midday-Thursday one, is a merry 1970s-CBS-Sunday-prime-time-esque "wheel" cycling from week to week among three menus: a full eight-ounce bag's heft of Vigo black beans and rice plus a Red's Organic beef and cheddar or cheesy beef burrito sandwiched between a slice of Boar's Head Chipotle Gouda and Boar's Head three-pepper Colby Jack; a full 12-ounce box's heft of Velveeta macaroni shells and cheese plus a burrito of the just-mentioned type and preparation; and the full microwave mini-tray of a personal-sized Skyline chili spaghetti topped with a heaping helping of Kraft or Sargento shredded process cheese and several handfuls of Ritz Toasted Chips (in Cincinnatian parlance such a combination is known as a "four way," although citizens of the Queen City are wont, mystifyingly eenough for an assemblage of landlubbers, to make their top "way" out of oyster crackers), along with a Red's Organic queso-and-beans burrito (this burrito apparently differing from the bean-and-cheese one only in having a higher ratio of cheese to beans). The fifth meal, that of the largest small hour of Saturday, is an Italian-themed diptych; or, rather, triptych whose second panel is an exact copy of the first: for two Saturdays in a row I have a full microwave tray of a family-sized Hormel's Italian roast beef meal (or, when the Italian is unavailable, of that same manufacturer's roast beef tout court) plus the full microwave mini-tray of a personal-sized Rao's chicken Parmesan, topping both entrees with liberal lashings of Kraft grated Parmesan cheese and ever-varying varieties of Rao's jarred pasta sauce; and on the third Saturday I have a full microwave tray of a family-sized Rao's meat-lasagna meal topped just as liberally with the aforementioned toppings (and sans side-dish). The sixth and final meal, that of the largest small hour of Sunday, is pan-Oriental-themed, consisting as it does of two P.F. Chang's personal-sized microwave meals--Korean style pork and noodles alternating with chicken lo-mein and chicken pad-Thai--followed by a couple of handfuls of the above-mentioned Ritz toasted chips in lieu of the traditional post-prandial (at least chez moi [for I suppose chez les autres chow mein noodles are traditionally used as a topping on the main meal or even more traditionally tossed in the trash along with the plastic cutlery and packets of duck sauce and soy sauce]) chow-mein noodles. Each of these meals is washed down with a twelve-ounce bottle or can of a beer of an alcohol content ranging from six to nine-and-a-half percent (here I won't bother to specify brands or brews, as they are presumably almost entirely of merely aesthetic significance, in contrast to the brand-designations of the food items, all of which "map onto" realities of somatic import) and followed by a dessert consisting of a single Outshine or FreshFruit fruit bar, three-quarters of a liter of tea (black with milk and sugar for the midday meals, herbal and merely sugared for the small-hour ones), and a two-teaspoon six-to-eight ounce dilution of Calm's powdered magnesium citrate drink mix. As for the four weekly teas, they, like the midday desserts, are centered on a three-quarters-of-a-liter potful of tea, but here the tea is unvaryingly black. And this potful is inevitably accompanied by an English muffin, together with the above-mentioned biscotto or stroopwafel, depending on whether the tea is small or big and a very small bowl-portion of cereal--a single layer of Post spoon-sized shredded wheat in the case of the small teas, and two Weetabix wafers in the case of the big ones. The topping of the English muffin also varies: for the small teas I alternate between butter and cream cheese, and for the big ones between strawberry or raspberry preserves and Nutella--this not out of meta-caloric considerations (for if anything I am inclined to think that the dairy toppings are calorically heftier than the non-dairy ones) but gustatory ones; i.e., simply because I find that a sweet topping complements the ultra-saccharine flavor of the stroopwafel better than a savory one. I also add a splash of milk apiece to the tea and cereal and a teaspoon of sugar to the tea alone. For beverages between eating-events I allow myself an unlimited supply of water evenly divided for thrift's sake between Pellegrino and Publix spring water, and infused, for minimum potability's sake (remember, ye fetishists of un-iced tap water and excoritors of bottled water-drinkers qua spendthrift prima donnas, that tea was invented only because common Chinese soldiers of umpteen-thousand BC, the very dregs of ancient East-Asian society, found the flavorlessness of the boiled water imposed on them by their superiors insupportable!) with so-called water enhancers of various brands and flavors, all of them (per Nutrition Facts) zero calories per one-squeeze serving (such that I am resigned to the probability that I am consuming as many as 1.9 calories each time I drink a sixteen-ounce bottle of water [i.e., supposing the manufacturer has seen fit to hoodwink nanny-pinafored Uncle Sam by rounding down to zero from .49]).

So there you have it: my present dietary regimen in its entirety. The reader will have observed that apart from certain ingredients of the various sauces--ingredients that in total would perhaps amount to a single tomato and a few shreds of hot and mild bell-pepper and hot-pepper--the regimen is entirely bereft of vegetables--that it contains no salads of any size or kind, and no sides of cauliflower, kale, spinach, broccoli, autc.--and from this observation he is not only entitled but obliged to infer that the nutritive value of vegetables is effectively zero. Of course I have already mentioned that I take certain supplements and yet I have not specified what those supplements are, so perhaps the reader has inferred by default that they include those trendy new ones that purportedly somehow manage to pack an entire kitchen-garden's harvest into a tiny capsule, such that I am smuggling in plenty of veggies after all. But in point of fact these supplements consist of nothing but a chewable vitamin C-and-zinc tablet, a vitamin-D-and-K gummy, two so-called Superbeet gummies, two magnesium gummies, and two tart-cherry gummies. So while I am admittedly covering a fair amount of the nutritive ground supposedly infungibly supplied by vegetables, I am also missing out on a fair amount of it--notably, Vitamins A and B with their multitude of "complexes" (a word whose overtones of Freudian neurosis are are ineluctably telling in this context), which must mean either that I am getting a sufficient amount of these nutrients from other kinds of food or that they aren't indispensable to biological homeostasis after all. The reader may further have noticed that while the regimen is fairly sarcophilic, containing as it does at least one example of every sort of meat barring fish (and game-flesh, if that be a separate category), it is dominated by so-called carbohydrates, what with all five of the meals being superstructed on some sort of starch and all four of the teas consisting almost entirely of starches and sweets and no meat at all; whence he is not only entitled but obliged to infer if not quite that "carbs" are indispensable to biological homeostasis (for I have no way of proving that I am not effectively deriving all my weekly nutrition from my pound-and-a-half of meat and a half a pound of cheese) at least that they are not the none-too-slow-working poisons as which they are now conceived by vegans and dedicated carnivores alike. Of course it has not always been thus; of course as recently as, say, the mid-twenty-oughties we were still living in the nutritional dark ages of the U.S. federal government's now-notorious "food pyramid" of which carbohydrates occupied the base and broadest layer because they were supposedly the bedrock of good nutrition and the least dispensable category of food. Thankfully we are all much more enlightened now; now we know that the placement of carbohydrates was merely a manifestation of the federal nutritionists' corrupt beholdenness to the Big Carb lobby. But I will be so boldly antedeluvian as to say that I reckon that at least in that there granting of pride of place to carbs the food pyramid was spot on, for that was after all but an iteration of millennia of received meta-nutritional opinion that must have been within spitting distance of wisdom inasmuch as the human race had managed to survive into the late twentieth century while cleaving to it. For after all, our Savior famously said, "Man does not live on bread alone," not "Man does not live on veggies [or flesh] alone"; after all, he pointedly employed bread as a synecdoche for all the nutriment required by the body in contradistinction to the spirit. And when the hungry rabble of late-1780s Paris descended on Marie Antoinette en masse, did they complain of a want of meat or vegetables? No, they complained of a want of bread; and in her notoriously unfeeling rejoinder did she say "Then let them eat haricots verts or foie gras"? No, she said, "Then let them eat cake"; in other words, she immediately reached for a foodstuff that was as "carb"-engrossed as bread itself. And is it not bread rather than beef-jerky or asparagus that is proverbially known as "the staff of life"; i.e., the thing that allows us to keep moving along from one hour and day to the next in our terrestrial journey? All of which suggests that the devisers of the food pyramid acted most sensibly in placing bread and other carbs at its base, that in doing so they acknowledged that carbs wrere the body's most essential nutriment. But I don't want to cut those devisers too much slack, for after all, between this base and the layer devoted to meat and other sources of protein they interposed the layer devoted to fruits and vegetables, thereby insanely intimating that one would sooner starve to death by abstaining from broccoli or spinach rather than from beef or chicken. Any geometrical figure that accurately reflected and prescribed our actual dietary needs would have to take the form of a trapezoid, consisting of a base containing bread, rice, cake, crackers, potatoes, etc., and other carb-bearers and above that, a slightly narrow layer containing beef, poultry, pork, milk, cheese and other animal protein bearers, although I suppose at a pinch it could be transformed into a sort of ziggernaut--i.e., a trapezoid surmounted by a tiny triangle corresponding to the one in the original pyramid containing "oils and sweets" and now containing "fruits and vegetables" and flagged with the italicized warning "Use sparingly" but now containing all fruits and vegetables and flagged with a Comic sans invitation of "By all means, use if you care to," for one would merely wish to convey that the consumption of fruits and vegetables was by no means needful, not that it was actually harmful. Why, then, did the devisers of the food-pyramid come to place vegetables at a more basal level than meat and dairy, and why does everyone now seem to regard all bread products as poisonous, and why do today's meat, lard, and tallow-fetishists affect to use "carbs" as sparingly as vampires use garlic? Why, simply because all of them, like every other Occidental alive since 1935 at the latest (I am taking that year as my terminus a quo simply because I recall a film made in about that year wherein the female lead says to the male lead something to the effect of 'It seems that everything enjoyable makes you fat,' and I can't recall any earlier film, novel, autc. in which the fear of growing fat from overeating is mentioned) take for granted that everyone is "always already" consuming a total of the essential nutriments--of meat, bread-products, and dairy--that happens to be more than what is needed for "homeostasis" and that is accordingly more than mildly poisonous "in a certain very real sense," such that attempting to displace the excess of essential nutriments with heaping servings of vegetables, which take up room in the stomach but add no girth to the belly, makes a certain perverse sort of dietary sense. Up until the early twentieth century, Occidentals ate pretty much whatever they liked, and what they liked was lots of bread and meat, with perhaps a few spoonfuls of carrots or a leaf or two of spinach on the side, and a smattering of fruit as a topping or filling of some cake or pastry-centered dessert. And by and large, this non-regimen worked out just fine and dandily, because most people were still getting enough exercise not to turn into rolly-polies. Of course thanks to occasional outbreaks of so-called vitamin-deficiency diseases like rickets and scurvy, they discovered that they could not do without the non-cereal progeny of the land entirely, but they reacted to this discovery with the "targeted" application of small amounts of specific fruits and greens, as that eighteenth-century British naval administrator did when he started requiring the sailors under his command to consume a lime a day qua prophylactic against scurvy. They most certainly did not infer from this discovery that they had to replace their gargantuan mutton-joints and beef-roasts and pork chops and turkey drumsticks with equally outsize salads, and none of us would be here now (nor would our grandparents or even our great-grandparents have been here before us) if they had drawn that inference, for they all would have perished of starvation. But then came the twentieth century, with its litany of incentives to gourmandise and disincentives to exercise, and people started noticing that eating whatever they wanted was making them fat, and so they reached for the veggies qua calorie-free stomach fillers--not consciously, but instinctively, so to speak. And eventually the technocratic nutritionists twigged that this instinct could be "weaponized" into an official public-health guidline. In hindsight, the 1992 food pyramid strikes me as a diabolically well-nuanced "nudge" campaign. The nutritionists knew that everyone had to start eating less of everything of actual nutritional heft, but they dared not put vegetables at the bottom of the pyramid and carbs at the very top for fear that a handful of hapless saps would both take them at their pictorial word and prove disciplined enough to make that word unflesh and consequently waste away into nothing (and consequently expose the federal government to a class-action lawsuit). Then in the very early twenty-first century came the great discovery that the food pyramid-devisers had unjustly given a bum rap to meat and dairy products, and as at every such moment, popular sentiment went overboard, such that the pyramid was stood on its head and people started thinking of bread and every other sort of carb-based foodstuff as poisonous even when "used sparingly." Why, then, have we not since seen an "epidemic" of carb-deprivation-induced starvation, even as "carbs" continue to be generally regarded as poisonous? Why, simply because even when people are trying their hardest to ween themselves off "carbs" they are still eating more "carbs" than they need to supply their bodies' day-to-day energy needs. If they ever got to the point of cutting out carbs completely, they would soon perceive how essential carbs are to terrestrial survival. Instead, on feeling tired and confused after gorging themselves on bread or cookies, they cut their bread and cookie intake in half and from the ensuing restoration of vigorousness and clear-headedness infer that it was carbiness rather than the massiveness of the bread and cake that was the cause of their malaise. The fact is that, for all the growing prevalence of intermittent fasting, people are eating too much of everything too often thanks to their continuing adherence to the three-square-meals-a-day regimen (which for most people includes at least one snack to "tide them over" between breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner). This adherence would seem to be partly the force of collective habit otherwise known as tradition and partly a corollary of that erroneous but intuitively rational notion that one's ability to move about in the world over the course of a day is immediately powered by the food in one's stomach, such that it is as foolhardy to pursue one's Alltag on a nearly empty stomach as it would be to undertake a long car trip on a nearly empty gasoline tank. In truth, that ability, that fuel, is provided by the fat derived from meals consumed days and weeks earlier and stored alongside one's muscles and in one's viscera, such that the food in one's stomach is but fuel in preparation and hence by no means essential to one's quotidian locomotion. But the misconception of stomach food as fuel would doubtless have gone the way of the dodo and chicken à la king qua top-ranking airline entrée (see Calvin "Bud" Trillin's 1980-something essay on this topic if you doubt that there ever existed such a preparation as chicken à la king, let alone that it dominated the kitchens of the friendly skies) had it not been abetted by a certain misconception of-cum-attitude to the appetite that is impervious to naked reason in virtue of receiving constant somatic reinforcement. I am thinking of the confusion of low-level satiety with hunger. Most people fancy that they are full not when their craving to eat ceases but when they "can't eat another bite" from the plate in front of them; complementarily, most people fancy they are hungry as soon they begin to find the prospect of eating another bite even ever so slightly appealing, as soon as that prospect ceases to catalyze stirrings of nausea. And so they betake themselves thrice a day to the breakfast, lunch, or dinner table with a feeling of indefeasible entitlement. One sees evidence of the established hegemony of this attitude-cum-conception all over the place--in, for example, the moment in the early-1980s film My Dinner with Andre when the emaciated Andre, an off-and-on full-blown ascetic, asks the pudgy and unregenerately sybaritic Wally whether he is eating because he is actually hungry or because he just wants to "stuff [his] face," or the likewise commensal moment in the early 1990s film Glengarry Glen Ross when Al Pacino's character argues to his tablemate-cum-client that defecation is a sensually superior experience to ingestion because one always feels as if one had "slept twelve hours" after taking a shit, whereas one always merely becomes listless after eating; or the mid-2020s moment when I heard some online cookery expert assert that the consumption of every meal ceases to be enjoyable after the first few bites. The reader will be unsurprised to learn that this experience of mid-meal super-satiety has become quite alien to me, that thanks to my adherence to the 18-and-36-hour rule, I enjoy each and every meal I consume from its first bite to its last and take in the last bite with not an iota less gusto than that with which I took in the first; and that upon the conclusion of the meal I feel as I had slept many more than twelve hours and as if a sunny, activity-rich day lies ahead of me. And such being the case, it would seem that each and every one of my fellow living Occidentals would be strongly inclined to take up the 18-to-36-hour rule if only out of purely egoistic hedonism, if only out of a desire to enjoy food thoroughly and consistently instead of being compelled to regard its consumption as a burden and its digestion as an affliction three-quarters of the time. But alas: I fear that I am not going to "take" my fellow-Occidentals "with me" ([sic], incidentally, on the absence of "living" this time round, for I by no means take for granted that I will still be alive when, if ever, I succeed at taking any of them with me {for so fierce and stubborn do I assume the opposition to be that I am envisaging a "timeline" of at least several decades}) until I can convince them to effect a radical revolution in their entire personal systems of metaphysics and ethics. For in the first place, it would be disingenuous of me to let the reader suppose that my delight in partaking of the fruits (strictly metaphorical ones of course!) of the 18-to-36 hour rule is purely somatic and sensual, for it is in fact inalienably implicated in a fundamentally Aristotelian view of the telos, the ultimate purpose, of eating; which is to say that an unquantifiable but undeniably large proportion of the satisfaction I feel while consuming one of my regimentally appointed meals derives from my belief that I am eating just and only just as much as it is appropriate for me to eat--specifically morally appropriately for a person who metaphysically (or ontologically) is the sort of person I am. I know for certain that I am small-boned and slight of stature, and I also at least believe that I know for certain that fulfilling my worldly telos necessitates my exercising my mind more intensively than my body; accordingly I believe that it is most seemly for me to be skinny almost to the point of emaciation and that it would be most unseemly for me to develop a massive paunch, or even massive biceps and a so-called six-pack. Moreover, I cannot pretend that the intervals separating my eating-events from each other are uniformly pleasant; indeed, I must admit that most of the later hours of those intervals are downright unpleasant; that especially during the run-up to a proper meal I tend to be quite peevish, and that during that run-up I often must summon up or forth considerable strength of will in order to attend with adequate concentration to the mental task immediately at hand (case in point: the composition of the present sentence of the present essay), but by hook or by crook I manage to summon up or forth that will-strength, because I believe that the task in question must be attended to then and there and that it is not yet time for me to eat; and because I know that were I going along with the three-square-meal mob, I would find it equally difficult to attend to that task owing to different causes--to the listlessness invariably engendered in my organism by gastric repletion, and to the guilt I would feel at having failed to stay true to my telos. But there is, I am afraid, even more and worse to it than that--more and worse that I strive to overcome in myself and that my fellow Occidentals will have to be persuaded to strive to overcome in themselves if they are ever to join me at the fasting table. For you see, it seems to me that the gourmandizing impulse is only partly (and not necessarily even mostly) explainable in terms of the gratification of cravings, that this impulse is in large if not largest part actuated by far a far more sinister department of the human will. For you see, it seems to me that an inescapable concomitant of leading a corporeally bounded existence is a perpetual fear of the ongoing and irreversible loss of corporeal integrity. "The fear of death" is but an ill-placed euphemism for the feared phenomenon, inasmuch as it only begins at the moment immediately after the death of one's organism. Not to put too fine a point on it: I am referring to the fear of the ongoing and irreversible rotting away (or gnawing away by rats and other unsavory critters) of one's skin, flesh, and viscera. Any attempt to scare this fear away with the reflection that one won't mind the phenomenon because one will after all be dead when it is happening is bound to be unsuccessful, because one is always contemplating the evanescing body in question from the point of view of one's present occupation of it (or, to be more ontologically precise, coextensiveness and consubstantiality with it). The inexhaustible rash of god-awful movies about vampires and zombies would appear currently to be the most salient of such attempts (i.e., inasmuch as the "undead" beings on which these movies center assume a hope-instilling heroism in at least putting up a fight against their deliquescence, in contrast to their pathetically quiescently passive dead-tout-court peers), and the Christian eschatological promise of reunion of the soul with the body the noblest (and, God willing, the only well-founded one). Pollyanna secularists would have us believe that the average human experiences this fear only very occasionally, and I have no way of proving them wrong. All I know is that I experience it almost constantly and that the surest-fire way I know of scaring it away is to put myself on the outside of some solid food. The process of banishment is bipartite and sequential: first, in reducing the well-defined and readily identifiable sandwich, cookie, or what have you, into an undifferentiated pulp with my teeth, I affirm to myself the wholeness and distinctiveness of my body relative to a portion of the world that surrounds it. And so by the conclusion of such a chow-fest, I have proved to myself that I am more than a match for any depredations the world might wish to visit on my person, that indeed, at least for the time being it is the world and not I that has more to fear in the way of loss of corporeal integrity. But then, a scant three or four hours later, the indigestion or sub-satiety sets in, and I am just as terrified as I was before the meal. To be sure, there are other means of scaring away the Verwesungsangst, and "arguably" more effective ones, but they take rather a long time to cultivate and require more than a modicum of self-discipline for their maintenance. The most effective such means I know of is or are the execution of some self-commissioned job of work requiring at least several months for its completion. In my case, such a job is almost always an essay such as the present one or the translation of an extensive literary text, but for someone more "mechanically inclined" it might satisfactorily take the form of rebuilding the engine of an automobile or restoring the finish of a bulky piece of antique furniture. "Or, say, the piecing together of a dinner table-engrossing jigsaw puzzle, or the completion of Level Umpteen-Hundred of Undead Ninja Sorcerer-Warrior?" No! I emphatically do not include vacuous self-contained pastimes within the ambit of such projects, the essence of whose realization consists in having produced something that might be of conceivable interest to other people. For one is after all aiming to show that one can hold one's own in the world, which own-holding is inalienable from the demonstration of one's utility to that world (not that the results of such undertakings need prove useful to the world in the producer's here and now, but merely that they should seem usable in some extant or conceivable portion or version of the world inhabited by people with the taste or skill requisite to appreciating or employing the resulting entity or object). Perhaps not quite needless to say, I regard the dietary-cum-exercise regimen promulgated via the present essay as a perfect example of such a project. And unlike the aforementioned car-engine or cabinet it exists not merely as an achievement to be passively contemplated by oneself or others but also as a car engine-rebuilding or cabinet-refinishing-like endeavor to be imitated by others in turn; and such imitation will perforce exact the same sort of self-discipline that one must bring to bear on all such endeavors. And I realize that owing to certain ineradicable contingencies of "lifestyle," this self-discipline will be attainable by few of even the small minority of present-day Occidentals who might wish to attain it. I am deeply sensible that the peculiar features of my mode of living, especially in the most recent years, have greatly facilitated both the initial designing of my regimen and my subsequent adherence to it. For the past few years I have had no "nine-to-five job" to report to and have consequently found it not only convenient but entirely natural to eat dinner-type-food at five o'clock in the morning. Moreover, although because I do not live alone I must make allowances for another person's kitchen-use schedule, being spouseless and childless, I have never had to accommodate other people's dietary preferences and peccadilloes; and I am deeply sensible that it simply isn't financially or logistically practicable for the father or mother of a family either to adhere to a completely different diet from that of his or her spouse and children, to eat turkey sandwiches and humus at the dinner table while the rest of the family is chowing down on pizza or cheeseburgers; or to force his or her own diet on the wife or husband and kids. But for all the discouraging force of these considerations, I do not despair of eventually garnering a goodly mob of proselytes--first because as I have already made plain, in my own implementation of the regimen I have had to deviate rather eccentrically from the 18-and-36 rule several times each week, and I freely grant my disciples permission to deviate no less eccentrically therefrom, and eccentrically in their own idiosyncratic ways. If they find it especially convenient to have a midday meal (i.e., a conventional lunch) three days in a row and to follow this sequence up on the fourth day with a continental breakfast they should by all means follow their convenience's bliss. All that really matters is that the gaps between meals and snacks average out to 18 hours and the gaps between meals to 36, and that the gap between any two eating events does not fall short of 12 hours or exceed twenty-four. Second, although reports of the death of the "nine-to-five job are obviously premature, there is no denying that this type of job is much less salient and prevalent than it was even a decade ago. I would even go so far as to say that it has become a minority "lifestyle"-centerer in the Occident, that most Occidental adults either work at home or, like the present writer, stay at home as a matter of course because they lack any remunerative employment. Such seeming to be the case, one would think that there is ample room for the average Occidental family to experiment with departures from the three-square-meals-a-day regimen. G.K. Chesterton once admitted that at home he and his wife and kids sometimes ate from plates and dishes placed directly on the floor. I myself don't see the appeal of such indoor picnicking and am rather inclined to warn any head-of-household against it unless he happens not to have any pets (or at least any pets that are both hairless and featherless and perfectly housebroken). I am merely citing it as an example, like my 18-and-36 diet, of a heterodox dining arrangement, an arrangement that Chesterton could get away with admitting he favored because he made a living as a full-time self-commissioning writer--i.e., the very antithesis of a nine-to-five man. And surely as Occidentals grow increasingly conscious of inhabiting a civilization (or pseudo-civilization or post-civilization) not demographically dominated by nine-to-five people they will be more amenable to heterodox dining arrangements like the ones imposed by my regimen. One can even imagine a certain "synergy" developing between the adoption of my regimen and the ongoing practice of certain non-culinary domestic institutions of the post nine-to-five world. Take home-schooling, for instance. As long as it doesn't matter what time of day little Johnny learns his multiplication tables (not that schoolkids [at least American ones]are any longer required to learn multiplication tables, but one can at least dream, in the spirit of the present essay, of an Occident in which they will again be required to learn them, and if I had opted for the Pythagorean Theorem [which I hear tell even most American schoolkids still are required to learn] instead of the multiplication tables I would have been obliged to deprive Johnny of his ever-so-endearing "little" [i.e., because I would then have been presenting him as a gawky middle-school pupil]) provided he learns them by the end of the school year, why should he not take in his afterschool dish of Spaghetti-O's or Beanie-Weenies at midday or five o'clock in the morning rather than at four o'clock in the afternoon? And the mention of Spaghetti-O's and Beanie-Weenies makes for a nice segue to the adducement of my third reason for not abandoning all hope--viz., that unlike most diets, my regimen contains no specific prescriptions or proscriptions of specific food-types. To be sure, I have painstakingly cataloged each and every constituent of my implementation of the regimen not only by food type but also by brand, make, and model; but I hope it is perfectly clear that I do not expect my menu-choices to be copied to the letter by anyone. Obviously a strapping six-foot tall eighteen-year-old lumberjack is going to require much larger meals and snacks than mine, and although I suppose he could procure himself the requisite culinary heaps by quintupling up on the caramel stroopwafels and shells-and-cheese dinners, he will doubtless find it more convenient, not to mention more enjoyable, to consume food-genres that pack more gut-punch into individual servings--Hungry Man "extra-portion" dinners, and so forth. I suppose I have been so circumstantial in my description mainly for the benefit of any sympathetic and genuinely competent and honest nutritionists and culinary chemists (if there even is such an occupation as culinary chemist) who may come to read this treatise. I imagine such a person poring over my catalog with a red pencil and, summoning his voluminous knowledge of the ingredient-scape of the American supermarket shelf, crossing out or check-marking each item depending on its conduciveness to homeostasis in relation to the other items, and substituting more eligible alternatives as needed. "If only he'd opted for an El Paso inorganic refried-beans-and-cheese burrito as the side-dish of his second meal of the week," this person may muse, "he could have had two Nonni's biscotti instead of one Nonni biscotto at one of his small teas" or "how serendipitous it was that for half of his first meals he preferred Boar's Head Black Forest Ham to that same company's Tavern Ham, for if he had opted for the latter, he would have been compelled to cut out that precious first big tea of the week altogether!" And out of such investigations there might eventually develop a full-blown scientification of the 18-and-36 regimen that will specify the ideal foodstuff-combinations to be consumed at each of the points of the schedule, and perhaps even cross-index its specifications with the would-be-regimentarian's age, height, sex, and occupation. Finally but not finically (this neolgtstic variation of "last but not least" being a sort of pis aller for the segue that I can't seem to come up with), I am not completely unhopeful because a scant or hefty three decades ago--and to some extent even as recently as a super-scant four years ago I was after all where Joe Occidental is now, such that I can't help feeling the force of his skepticism. Wie gesagt, I used to think that the accumulation of poundage was something that simply happened with advancing age and over which one could at best exert nugatory or temporary control. And by the same token, if I could be persuaded to the contrary conviction over the course of a single week, and to act successfully on that conviction for many years thereafter, I cannot but infer that even if I reach but a literal handful of Occidentals (literal as in five, not literal as in small enough to fit into my hand), each and every one of those proselytes will prove a faithful practitioner of the regimen, and those who staunchly adhere to a creed and embody its precepts over many years will perforce not fail of preaching its gospel far and wide and making many converts.

My adherence to the 18-and-36 rule has additionally afforded me priceless insight into the phenomenology of addiction. Reformed abusers of all the usual naughty substances are wont in reminiscing about the bad old days to say, "Before I took up drinking [or shooting smack, smoking crack, etc.] I had a thousand problems [problems of the paying the mortgage, ignoring the mother-in-law's back-seat driving, and hearing out little Johnny's teacher's complaints about his classroom misbehavior type]; after I took up drinking [autc.], I had just one: how to get my next drink [or smack, crack, autc. fix]." And in reminiscing about my pre-versus-since-18 and 36 days, I am much inclined to utter the selfsame utterance, mutatis mutandis; only unlike these repentant substance-fiends I am much of a mind to put a "positive spin" on it rather than a negative one. For to be sure, although I dare not enumerate them for fear of sending the reader reaching for the proverbial record-breaking wee fiddle, I have, let us say, three-fifths of my share of proper problems--i.e., difficulties and shortfalls that I genuinely need to address, and whose attempted addressing I tend to find more than a mite demoralizing. But since adopting the 18-and-36 rule, I have found these problems much easier to live with; since then I have found that no matter how much of a "bad day" I am officially having by the yardstick of the burdensomeness of my problems, I can manage to carry my way cheerfully through that day as long as the next eating-event in the regimen-rotation gives every sign of taking place at its appointed hour on the then-present week's schedule--as long, that is, as I can be reasonably certain that I am going to have the opportunity to consume that next Stroopwafel, that next roast-beef sandwich, that next boxful of Velveeta shells and cheese. Such being the case, I cannot but describe myself, vis-à-vis the object of my jones--i.e., food--as what the moderately famous American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt terms a willing addict. Of course, this jones-object of mine, food, differs from most if not all other jones-objects in two signal respects: that one never takes it up inasmuch as one has been partaking of it since one's birth (or, from a "pro-lifer"'s perspective, since even before that, via the nutriment supplied by the placenta in the womb), and that if one ceased altogether from partaking of it one would die. And yet it is only since my self-submission to the 18-and-36 regimen that food has come to assume the problem-unifying power that booze, crack, etc. proverbially assume in the problem-scapes of active substance-addicts. "So what exactly are you getting at here with all this negative-autohagiographical blather?" Let me "stick a pin in that question," because I shan't be able to answer it until I have supplied a further detail about my craving-scape as follows: as the reader is already aware, in my Baltimore years I was wont to consume about a six-pack's heft of alcohol each day, and to consume it mostly on my lonesome; such that by all the standard clinical measures (not that I give a tinker's hoot about those measures) I was an alcoholic. Such having been the case then, and given that the clinicians assure us that "once you have become an alcoholic, you will always be an alcoholic," one might expect, given that the regimen allows me less booze per week than I formerly allowed myself per day, that I would now be continually hankering for a drink, and hankering for one more keenly than I ever did during my harder-drinking days. But I have experienced quite the opposite phenomenon: my craving for alcohol has dramatically dwindled--not, admittedly, into nonexistence but certainly to the diminutiveness of the gentlest of itches. I certainly look forward to my monthly mini Mardi-Gras when I am not impelled to "stay the second glass," but not with the rabid passion of a dope-fiend awaiting his next "fix"; rather, as I would to an upcoming vacation-trip if I were the usual sort of person who regularly takes vacation-trips. But I wager that if I were to be told that I had to postpone my next scheduled ingestion of a Stroopwafel or a serving of Velveeta Shells and Cheese by a half a day, I wager I would fly at the teller's throat with a degree of demented fury that would put to shame Frank Sinatra's performance in The Man with the Golden Arm or Jack Lemmon (or whoever it was)'s in The Lost Weekend. And from this displacement of alcohol from pride of place in my craving-scape I cannot but infer that my earlier craving for alcohol was but a stalking-horse for my craving for food, that I was drinking so much booze principally if not exclusively to forestall the hunger pangs that would otherwise have set in owing to my self-enforcement of my already fairly stringent dietary rules (i.e., as you may recall, one meal a day at dinnertime, and with no morning or midday snack to eke it out from about 2010 onwards). In short, I cannot but infer that food-hunger is the sovereign craving that rules all other cravings, that the gratifications of all other addictions are but pis-allers or succadenea for the gratification of the craving for food. For whatever the fetishists of neuroscience may say, however many water-tight studies they may be produce in proof that umpteen times as much of a given neurotransmitter is generated by a hit from a crack-pipe as by a bite from a chocalate-chip cookie, the truth is that no drug is capable of producing as viscerally powerful a feeling of complacency, of satisfaction with and confidence in one's emplacement and future prospects in the world, as a dose of food ingested when one is genuinely hungry. Samuel Johnson once said that all happiness derived either from pleasurable reflection on the past or hopeful anicipation of the future, and that the only time a man was at all content with the present was when he was drunk, and I am afraid this assertion is one of very few Johnsonian apercues with which I cannot concur; but I do not doubt that he tendered this assertion both in good faith and with all the evidence that his own somatic experience could furnish, for as every surviving authenticated portrait of him proves, Samuel Johnson was quite a corpulent man who took care never to miss a meal. (To his credit, Johnson recognized his overweightness as a shortcoming and aimed to remedy it, as can be seen by a resolution to "reduce my corporeal bulk" that occurs in one of his diary entries.) Hence, in his uninterrupted satiety he could not help craving the bottle and discovering in drink the contentment that that super-satiety had robbed him of.

All of the above being the case, it goes without saying that sticking to an eating-regimen such as mine requires a prodigious amount of willpower. But by hook or by crook, that amount thereof can and must be summoned: however ardently one may crave food one must forbear from eating any if it is not yet time to eat, and when that time comes, one must not eat a bite more food than the amount appropriated to that time. One must effectively apply to one's stomach our Savior's admonition regarding the right eye,mutato mutando, even if it is deucedly more difficult to pluck out a stomach than an eye. One must come to terms with the ultimately ineluctable fact that this sublunary existence is punctuated by episodes of mingled dread and regret, and to make do with the only means of scaring away such miserable feelings, however fleetingly, that is (or are) also conducive to our somatic well-being rather than detrimental to it. Would-be curers or treaters of addictions to chemical substances have always (or at least since 1776, the publication-year of J.M.R. Lenz's novella The Country Preacher, wherein the eponymous protagonist's wife tries to cure him of tobacco-smoking via such an assertion) maintained that it is the drugs themselves that engender one's susceptibilty to this feeling, that those happy many who have never picked up a drug-jones are perfectly content to sit still indefinitely à la Pascal's counterfactual unmiserable man. The fact is that we all labor under the burden of fearful discontent by default; that in the absence of the somatic gratification provided by food or drugs, or of some preoccupation that purposively concentrates the mind's or body's energies, we all find it impossible to sit still; the would-be curers or treaters of addiction have merely managed to delude themselves into thinking otherwise by making a problem-consolidating addiction out of their anti-drug sermonizing.

I am moreover mindful that because my regimen requires the apportionment of its culinary constituents into rigidly unvarying quantities, its would-be exponents are likely to run aground on (or fall afoul) of two Occidental institutions that are even more sacrosanct than the three-square-meal rule--viz., the taboo against throwing away edible food and the cult of leftovers, that they are likely to feel pressure to eat more than the prescribed amount for fear of letting food go to waste. I suppose one could avoid ever transgressing the taboo by simply confining one's purchases to types of food that are effectively imperishable--i.e., canned and packaged goods that do not require refrigeration and whose expiration date merely denotes the moment at which the contents cease to be quite as palatable as it should be. (I own that I personally hold even my imperishables to a higher standard, that I do not hesitate to chuck a doubtless still sufficiently flavorful bag of pretzel thins or snack crisps into the bin on the expiration date itself. But I appreciate that others are less fastidious than me on this score.) Howbeit, for those who, like me, find that they cannot dispense with perishable goods altogether, the only surefire way of avoiding discarding food altogether is to check the expiration dates of all products against the regimen schedule in advance of purchase, such that one can be sure that if, for example, one is scheduled to consume an eight-ounce tub of hummus six weeks hence, that there eight-ounce tub with an expiration date of five weeks and six days from now will do, whereas that other one with an expiration date of six weeks and one day (or, if you are as fastidious or worrisome as me, six weeks and zero days) won't. As for the cult of leftovers, I concede that I can by a very taxing stretch of my imagination envisage a version of the regimen that allowed one to avoid flouting it: I can envisage, for example, the careful apportionment of minuscule sub-portions of leftover shells and cheese into Tupperware containers and their subsequent freezing into effective imperishibility, followed by their sub-subsequent consolidation into a microwave-reheatable full portion; but my imagination's gorge rises against actually consuming such slop, and I expect every empirical reader's imagination's gorge rises against it as well. I suspect that most empirical readers will try to get avoid desecrating the cult by preparing in advance three or four portions of something that they can blarney their way into thinking will remain palatable after three or four weeks of refrigeration--say, a full-sized brisket or rump roast apportionable among three or four weekly servings of roast beef, only to find themselves either throwing out half of the ghastly thing by week three, or, more likely-ly consuming three-quarters of its slightly less ghastly incarnation on week two (either all at once on the proper day, or on three separate occasions, the second and third of which are officially earmarked for some other food-preparation) and thereby only avoid desecrating the cult by violating the regimen. People are always saying that leftover food actually tastes better than food consumed on the day of its preparation, but I am firmishly convinced that such talk is pure "cope," that there is not a single present-day Occidental who if he had only his personal gustatorial druthers to propitiate would ever gladly consume a scrap of leftovers. The whole thing strikes me as an anachronistic holdover--a leftover in its own right, if you will--from the age of the great potato famine, like all that anachronistic news-speak about "children going to bed hungry" (which for decades has elicited from me the silent retort, "I dare say the only person of any age in this world who is still going to bed hungry is me, mate" [for regardless of the nationality of the commentator, such blather never fails to draw out my inner Cockney]). Not that a proper worldwide famine is not a none-too-improbable possibility, what with the "disruption of global supply chains" ever looming in the offing, but that it is not as if one is going to be able to drink a drop of that long-since-curdled milk or eat a bite of that long-since-putrefied beef when that famine hits. The important thing to remember is that no matter how much food you end up throwing out, you will be saving money, because you will be eating much less food than you formerly did. I dare say your savings will be astronomically huge even if you switch from preparing all your food at home from scratch to consuming all of it exclusively at Michelin-starred restaurants (and Michelin-starred tearooms, if such places of hospitality exist).

I have elected to dub or christen my regimen the Brooks Atkinson diet in honor of that celebrated newspaperman of the middle to late twentieth century. Not that I have any evidence that Mr. Atkinson ever followed an eating and exercise regimen even remotely comparable to mine or even that I am the world's biggest Brooks Atkinson fan. Indeed, I have not read a single sentence of his doubtless multi-million word sized journalistic corpus. Howbeit, I have been kindly disposed to that long-deceased gentleman ever since 1988 or 1989, when I first saw his tired, deeply lined face glumly staring out at me from a high-school journalism textbook into which his New York Times obituary had been inserted as a specimen of that article-genre (I then being required to tote around that journalism textbook because I had unwisely chosen journalism as one of my "elective" class for that year, and finding myself often browsing that primer because I had nothing else permissible to do while the entirely feminine balance of the class billed and cooed over the layout of the forthcoming yearbook). And I daresay his play-reviews put to shame those of sub-simian hacks now presumably writing about the stage for the Old Gray Lady. Howbeit, I am "not going to lie to you" and pretend that I have bestowed the name of The Brooks Atkinson Diet solely or even principally in honor of Mr. Atkinson, for the principal reason he struck me as deserving of this honor was that he happened to share a surname with the deviser and promulgator of one of the most famous and notorious dietary regimens of the late twentieth century. Hence my regimen is called "the Brooks Atkinson Diet"not only in honor of Brook's Atkinson but also in allusion to this other twentieth-century Mr. Atkinson's regimen. And here, as with Mr. Atkinson's output, I am entitled and unashamed to plead near-total ignorance. I cannot even remember the other Mr. Atkinson's Christian name, and if I ever knew what range or selection of food-choices his diet consisted of or in, I have long since forgotten every scintilla of that information. In point of fact, the only thing I know about this Mr. Atkinson apart from his devising of this diet is that some twenty years after that diet's heyday, and hence at a presumably well-underway if not necessarily ripe old age, he died of a heart attack while jogging. I further recall that the website and radio obituaries (for being no Zeitungsfresser, I saw no printed ones) that commemorated that sudden but not altogether untimely death were of a markedly different tone than that of Brooks's New York Times necrology, that far from solemnly repining at Mr. Atkinson's disparation and eulogizing his diet as a monumental achievement in the annals of nutritionism they waggishly pooh-poohed the diet as a Pet Rock or parachute pants-like flash in the pan of the Zeitgeist, and almost tsk-tskingly vented the supposedly crushing irony of that evangelizing nutritionist's powerlessness to avoid being felled by cardiac arrest--as if the heart attack's sole efficient cause had been his adherence to his own regimen, as if, indeed, he would have been presumably still alive and kicking (and jogging) had he stuck to a more conventional nutritional habitus (perchance the one then possibly still inculcated via the above-much-discussed Food Pyramid). Why, then, the reader is doubtless still wondering, am I electing partly to christen my own regimen after Mr. Atkinson? Is this not a publicity blunder on par with the line of Hemingway-branded rifles or shotguns launched a quarter-century after that author's firearm-actuated suicide? The glib answer to this pair of questions is of course that there is no such thing as bad publicity, as the ad-men behind the Hemingway shotgun campaign doubtless reflected (although for all I know that campaign crashed and burned like the Hindenburg owing to a wave of outrage-backlash), and I am indeed hoping that the clicks-by-association will be sufficiently numerous to draw in enough readers intrigued by the namesakehood to offset the larger crowd of searchers repelled by it. But there is a second, po-faced answer that I would at least like to think I cherish more deeply than I do the first. You see, even at the time, I regarded those obituarists' waggishness at Mr. Atkinson's expense as the shabbiest of cheap shots, superstructed as it self-evidently was, for all its levity, on a sincere and serious belief in a bizarre but seemingly all but universally subscribed to idée reçue--the presupposition that the eating-regimen is an infallible panacea, that if one could just alight on the right sorts and combinations of foods to ingest, one could live for ever, a presupposition that would seem to be no less firmly or widely presupposed in the Occident now than then. And I wish to make it flagrantly and abundantly clear that I am making no such claim on behalf of my regimen. I own that according to today's food boffins there is some evidence that aging is partly a function or epiphenomenon of the caloric heft of the food one ingests, that with the absorption of every particle of matter that must be converted back into energy, one is more than figuratively speeding up the burning of the candle of one's organism; such that all other things being equal, a hearty eater is bound to live a shorter life than an abstemious one. The problem is that all things are never equal when it comes to human physiology, (NB: my forbearance from invoking the god-awful g-plural noun) such that even relatively speaking, an abstemious diet can only offset the life-expectancy of a disease-prone constitution; and more fundamentally, that aging and dying are physiological processes that we must all eventually undergo willy-nilly. Hence, I tender no claim that the adoption of my diet will contribute a jot to its adopter's longevity; and by the same token, I hope that no current or prospective pracitioner of it will instantly give or pass it over should I go the way of Mr. Atkinson a day sooner than Methusaleh or even than Boswell or Beethoven (i.e., two men who perished at only a very slightly older age than my current one of fifty-four). In my view, being no fatter than one was designed or created to be is a worthy end in itself, and I reckon a sizeable chunk of present-day Occidentals agree with me. But of course for all I know I may discredit my regimen along similar lines long before my death. I may, that is, do the meta-dietary equivalent of falling off the wagon (a tumble that will of course coincide with my falling off the wagon in the regular meta-alcoholic sense should it witness my resumption of heavier drinking). For as I have already disclosed, I remain subject to the non-erotic temptations of the flesh, and there is no guarantee that my will will (no apologies for the unsightly but indispensable repetition of "will") remain resilient enough to prevent me from succumbing to them. But should you ever hear of my being caught devouring an entire box of Stroopwafels less than twelve hours after taking in a quadruple-decker roast-beef club sandwich on Texas toast, or of feasting on both shells and cheese and black beans and rice between sunrise and sunset of a single winter's day even as you yourself have been adhering swimmingly to the 18-and-36 rule for umpteen successive months, I would urge you to keep going in the teeth of my involuntary apostasy. For as Dr. Johnson noted, there is no form of moral judgment more widely abused or misunderstood than a charge of hypocrisy inasmuch as good advice remains good advice however unsatisfactory the adviser proves at heeding his own counsel. He who manages to follow the 18-and-36 rule far longer than I do may very well prove to be the Brooks Atkinson Diet's Christ to my John the Baptist, a person far more adept at securing apostles to my creed than the present Voice in the Wilderness, and at thereby ushering in a veritable millennium of intermittent fasting, wherein the three-square-a-day routine is as laughable and distant a memory among mortal men as the follies of their terrestrial lives are said to be among the saints in Heaven.

A word or three about my backup indoor exercise routine is in order, because I am sensible that unless he lives in an arid desert climate of the type that prevails in, say, southern New Mexico and Arizona (I have, incidentally, often pined to relocate to Phoenix for the sake of the walkable weather conditions alone [yes, it's hotter than hell there, but the Phoenecian heat is after all a "dry heat," and the asperities of its skin-charring perennially naked Arizonan sun can as easily be avoided as the gentler ones of the intermittently cloud-veiled Floridian sun by the judicious scheduling of all walks at dawn or dusk]) the reader, like me, is not going to find it practicable to walk four miles outdoors each and every day of the year, and because it (the routine) does not simply consist in pounding out four miles of fit-bit steps at a steady walking pace. I don't know how many miles one would have to walk indoors to procure the amount of corporeal wear and tear exacted by a four-mile outdoor walk, but it has got to be at least double owing to the lack of underfoot resistance from the terrain and heart-and-lung pummeling from the temperature and (especially in Florida) the humidity. Of course I know that there are such things as treadmills that can artificially compensate for the first of these lacunae, but I can't expect the reader to purchase such an expensive piece of equipment merely in order to try out my regimen, especially as I haven't yet stooped or risen to such a purchase myself (nor, I hasten to add, to the purchase of a cussed fit-bit), and of course with a treadmill one is still exercising in a climate-controlled environment, unless the heating or air conditioning happens to be on the fritz (and if you would like to try treadmill-walking after putting your climate-control system on the fritz [which of course would entail switching it off several hours before the start of the session to allow one's indoors sufficient time to acclimatize fully to one's outdoors], by all means be my guest; indeed, I am eager to learn of the efficacy of the results). Of course, in order to put my indoor exercise regimen into practice, one will have to have at one's disposal an indoor exercise environment that is no more corporeally constrictive than my own, and so a word or three about those surroundings is in order. I do all my exercising in my childhood bedroom, a twelve-foot by twelve-foot space rather heavily cluttered with my own belongings and various impedimenta my parents saw fit to dump here during my quarter-century absence, when it repeatedly alternated between service as a lumber room, a home office (in the American familial sense, not the English governmental one), and the family cat's bathroom (which last office is now being served by my brother's childhood bedroom across the hallway). Between my bed and the remainder of the room's furniture (chest of drawers, bookcase, desk, etc.) is a two-to-three-foot wide semicircle of bare linoleum floor that constitutes my walking-and-jogging track. A round trip around this circle at a jogging pace takes about a sixth or seventh of a minute or eight to ten seconds. The bed, once denuded of its covers and pillows, serves me as a sit-up mat and push-up prop. My routine exacts an hour and fifty minutes, a duration I settled on about a year-and-a-half ago because it then matched the average time-length of my outdoor walks, although these have lately been tending to take more than two hours to complete, presumably because advancing age has forced me to walk more slowly ("The roads get longer and longer, and my legs shorter and shorter," as the old tramp in the opera more colorfully puts it). This or these 110 minutes are divided into 22 five-minute chunks or modules. The first module consists of five minutes of nonstop jogging in semicircles. The second module consists of five minutes of nonstop semicircular walking. The third module consists of as many push-ups as I can complete in a minute followed by four minutes of semicircular walking. The push-ups are of the easy or sissyish sort (I honestly don't know what the term of art for them is) wherein instead of stretching oneself out at full prone length on the floor one makes a sort of ramp of one's body by propping one's arms on an elevated surface (in this case, my bed, as already hinted [and the surface of its mattress being about two feet above the floor]) and only resting the tips of one's toes on the floor behind one. The fourth module consists of as many sit-ups as I can complete in a minute followed by another four minutes of semicircular walking. My sit-up mat is again my bed, and so the sit-ups like the push-ups can perhaps be regarded as sissyish or less taxing than the real or typical deal, as a proper two or three-inch thick athletic mat placed directly on the floor puts up considerably more resistance to the downward pressure of one's body than does a six-inch-thick spring mattress. The fifth module consists of more jogging, the sixth of more semicicular walking, the seventh of of more push-ups plus walking, the eighth of more sit-ups plus walking, and so on in rotation until one gets to the last two modules, which both consist of uninterrupted jogging (such that one may alternatively regard them as a single ten-minute module of jogging). I don't know what more to add to the description except that my preferred walking gait is of that vaudevillian or Loony-Toonish sort wherein one thrusts each leg out as far out and obliquely as it can go with each step; I suppose I prefer it simply because it makes me feel a bit less as if I am merely pacing in circles like a proverbial caged animal, although I dare say many a fitness guru has advocated it on the grounds that it provides the most intensive workout to this or that muscle or combination of muscles. Not that I give a tinker's hoot whether any fitness guru would approve of this or any other part of this indoor exercise routine of mine; all I care about or know is that so far this routine has kept me as skinny as its outdoor counterpart (for far be it from my scholarly hungerkünstlerisch self, wie gesagt, to go seeking for a so-called six pack or biceps!) even during the central-Floridian midsummer, throughout which the forecast chance of rain seldom falls below thirty percent (and since being caught a waterlogging downpour during one outdoor walk last summer and nearly struck by lightning in another, I have resolved not to venture outside unless that forecast chance is in the lower single digits at the highest). Obviously the expression "your mileage may vary" applies to this routine with more than usual literality--which is to say, inter alia, that one (and possibly even I) could possibly remain equally skinny if (one) were to lavish all 110 minutes on jogging. I have interlarded the push-ups and sit-ups purely by way of forestalling the supervention of the "loneliness [not to mention the boredom and vertigo] of the long-distance semicircular jogger," but if the reader reckons that he will be able to tolerate this supervention and is averse to sit-up and push-ups, he would probably do well to give an all-jogging routine a try, especially if he happens to be blessed with a larger and less cluttered exercise-space than mine.

Last and certainly least, a half a word on my attire during these exercise-intervals is perhaps in order. The only concession I have made to the sartorial norms of today's "fitness culture" is in my choice of footwear, wherein I have opted for a pair of Sperry nautical sneakers. I suppose whether one even regards these sneakers as properly athletic depends on whether one thinks that lounging on the deck of a sailboat (as opposed to sailing such a vessel, which activity seems to require the wearing of Sperry's more ruggedly constructed boat shoes) is a proper sport. At any rate, I own that the sneakers are more comfortable and less hard on my joints and bones (not to mention more suited to exposure to the terrestrial elements of the Floridian outdoors) than the Florshiem and Dillard's-own-brand dress brogues that I wear on all other occasions when I venture outdoors, or even than the Deerfoam moccasin slippers that I wear around the house. Otherwise, whether exercising indoors or outdoors, and even if the ambient temperature is the upper 90s, I am clad as I am otherwise always clad--viz., in a long-sleeved button-up cotton, cotton-linen blend, or cotton-polyester blend shirt and full-length trousers, with a cotton undershirt, cotton boxer-briefs (apologies, ladies), and cotton-nylon-blend crew socks underneath. Doubtless this getup has occasioned much undisclosed bemusement and amusement in the people with whom I occasionally cross paths in the course of my walks--especially the joggers and cyclists among them and especially in the non-winter months (I should of course point out here that I am taking a warm-to-hot day as my default day of reference; for on those handful of Gulf-Coastal Floridian days on which the temperature falls below 60 degrees, my fellow exercisers and I tend to be singing from the same sartoriall hymn sheet inasmuch as all of us then tend to be covered from head to foot in more than one visible layer [my outermost layer being a hooded windbreaker on 50-to-60 degree days and a wool pea jacket on 50-or-below ones]). Let them be amused and amused away, I say, for I know that my clothes are at least as comfortable as their more socially acceptable athleisure-wear or full-blown professional athletic togs, and of course I don't give a tinker's toss about reducing wind-resistance or friction. Seriously, Volker, my overwhelmingly natural-fiber wardrobe undoubtedly "breathes" far more deeply and coolingly than their microfiber or spandex (the thought of the very existence of spandex, incidentally, has not infrequently made me wish that "the Almighty had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter") tank tops and hot pants, and any reduction in heating afforded by the extra exposure of skin to the air is surely more than counterbalanced, from a meta-hygienic point of view, by the concurrent exposure of that selfsame skin to the depredations of the Gulf-Coastal Florida sun, which though not quite of Phoenecian ferocity are not exactly of Archangelskian tenderness even at dusk. (And speaking of exposure to the sun, I own that I am a timorous enough skin-cancer valetudinarian to wear a hat on each of my outdoor walks--a cotton-canvas fisherman's porkpie on hot and warm days, and a wool "Lenin cap" on cool and cold ones.) No less seriously, Volker, I fancy that most people if they had their druthers--i.e., if they didn't fear being stigmatized or even institutionalized as pathologically stuffy or retro-Victorian--would likewise walk or even jog cap-a-pie, that comfort has got nothing to do with their opting for taking the outdoor air in skimpy clothing, that they are simply acquiescing in the hokey mid-twentieth-century-originating notion that because Florida is a tropical [sic (this part of Florida at least being merely sub-tropical)] paradise, one is obliged here to be dressed for the beach at each and every minute of one's off-the-clock hours (not that one escapes the pressure to dress skimpily in less proverbially paradasiacal parts of the Occident, but that in those parts it is perforce exerted less often and under the auspices of "taking full advantage of the unusually nice weather we're enjoying"). In other, shorter, more impersonal words: the cult of athleisure-wear is every bit as moronically retardataire as the cult of leftovers. But I freely own that unlike that cult the athleisure-wear cult's potential impingement on the fruitfulness of my regimen is materially nil; and such being the case, if you find that you cannot bring yourself not to cave to the athleisure wear-fetishizing mob, by all means knock yourself out (in two or more ways).

THE END