I gained a lot of weight in April. Over five pounds, over the big 90 for the first time in a couple years. More than I've gained inpatient at places that specialize in forcing people to gain weight.

The horrible irony: I was almost content. One of my scales said the "right number." I just wanted to lose two pounds so my other scale, which reads higher, would satisfy me too.

But this post isn't a pity party, nor is it a discussion about my weight. Having fallen into the weight-gaining dieter's oblivion, unable to look at what was going on, it's useful to put a spotlight on what happened.

The mechanism by which the diet pill involved facilitated weight gain might actually be helpful to other people in other contexts.

I haven't put out the next post I'm writing in the series on satiety, physical and metaphorical.
I haven't finished the thoughts on transformation as momentum through critical mass rather than singleton skip from black to white.
Several collections I've promised to review languish in the basket of my guilt.
I haven't taken courage to publish my horrific "gained weight from a diet pill" story, although I think the story might well offer benefits: what said pill actually does might be useful in other contexts.

So, big failz, yes? This post is about why. Also, perhaps, about why I've more or less kept some of "it" together despite.

In his article discussed in the previous post, Dr Christianson recommends plain, boiled, cooled potatoes as the most effective "hunger blocker." It's important to recognize that this article can't be taken in isolation and must be seen in the functional medicine/paleo discourse in which it was written, no matter how mainstream an audience he's reaching for.

To which point, as I already hinted, you can't mention plain, boiled, cooled potatoes without bringing up the food reward hypothesis and the concept of resistant starch (separate but related).

A well-respected and charming functional medicine doctor, Dr Alan Christianson, recently published an article about satiation in the context of (implicitly calorie-restricted) dieting for weight loss. After running through a few studies purporting to show that the foods you might expect to be satiating are not so, he settles on potatoes--but not chips or fries, mind you--as the most satiating food, and crowns his article with a "recipe": boiled salted potatoes, cooled and finished with a little olive oil.

Now it's not clear to me if the brief research survey is mere preamble to the drumroll recipe or if the recipe is mere rider to the 'shocking research findings,' nor what sort of naive audience is intended here, but there are so many things about this article that seem so wrong to me, it'll probably take two posts. Let's get started.

Of course I wasn't going to let the solstice pass without some sort of commemoration. Especially since the day bore me an epiphany, in a circadian-related area I'd been staring at without being able to see what I needed for far too long.

Yesterday's solstice day, epiphany and all,  was also case in point for what I wrote recently about altered mental states having their efficacy and utility. But yesterday, I was scared. 

It's hitting 110 degrees today. So yesterday I finally bought shadecloth to cover my sunken beds. "Bought shadecloth" is a deceptive to-do list item, as it involved figuring out which store sells the cloth, where in said store it's located (store, of course, being a very big box), and what sort of shadecloth to get.

This means there was some inertia toward that whole project, despite the fact that I'd wanted to do it for some time. Also in inertia limbo: fixing the fence, and cutting back dead weeds in order to reach the fence, for which I had to purchase the appropriate tool, a matter of $10 but still a matter of inertia.

High heat is here. High, dry heat.

Elsewhere, gardeners favor raised beds. Here, contrariwise, we sink them. Cooler, shadier, hold moisture better. I take sacks with me into the river wash and bring home plant debris, horse poop, bat poop, as mulch that is also shade. 

What's alive so easily parches to death; what's already dead doesn't compost because it's just too dry. I love heat, but when it's so high above my body temperature, it makes me wonder if there is after all a "too hot."