Equilibrium, er, Equality, um, Equivalence, aw hell...BALANCE!

In my quest to regain some of my original health, I've been missing sweets a lot. It's been a long time since I've had a good piece of chocolate; I haven't had cake in months; sodas and softdrinks are now anathema (or rather, they should be, but in my soul, I still "heart" them, and I hope they understand why I have to do this); and most painful of all, I've forgotten how ice cream looks, smells, and tastes like. Ohhh...I've been thinking about ice cream a lot, let me tell you.

I've been reading up a lot on nutrition, and consequently getting lost in all the details. Frankly, I'm no dietician, and I don't need to know how everything works. We ride cars, planes, buses, and trains everyday, but we don't need to know how they go, right? We just need to know more or less that they work, get in, and ride. So to break it down into clear terms for myself without needlessly getting mired in complexities, I've come to the simple conclusion that what we were taught as kids still holds true: Milk, vegetables, and fruits are good for you; lay off as much as you can of the fats, sugars, and simple carbs; you'll need a bit of meat and some fish for the protein, especially if you can't go vegetarian; and water is the best drink around, though alternatives like tea and unsweetened fruit juices work fine in moderation.

And taking it down to the most basic tenet: if you expend more calories than you take in, you will lose weight (the transitive holds true, that if you expend less than you take in, you'll gain weight instead). So, to lose my spare tire, I've got to exert more, or take in less, or both. Since I'm very limited in how much I can exercise because of my bum knee, I'm going to have to do more of taking less in.

Which is when I thought about how ice cream is made (and butter, too!). No, not the way they're made in modern-day factories and plants, but how they were originally produced way back when. You know, before mass-produced electricity. All you had was a wooden bucket, and a hand-crank (or a churn, in butter's case). You had to turn that hand crank to mix all the ingredients before you could get your ice cream. You had to work that pole up and down before you could get your butter (oh boy, there I go being naughty again--oh behave!). In other words, you had to work those calories off before you could eat them. Those old-timers knew what for, because that's balance! You can't gain weight if you sweat the pounds off first!