For some reason it has been very hard to get back to the computer to write anything. But it is always gratifying to look back and read old blogs. Today I just want to remind myself that it is almost more pleasurable to not eat when you aren’t really hungry. Especially if the waistline is expanding. Yesterday I dug dirt in my backyard for two hours, trying to level the yard so that I might build an earthship shed out of tires. I started digging a couple of months ago but then realized that I was taking the dirt from under an old wall that had fallen in the past and was at around a 45-degree angle. And the prior owner of the house had built a new wall on top of the falling old wall. And they had stuck a lot of dirt, bricks and gravel under the old wall to keep it from completely falling. When I realized what I was doing, digging out the old wall, I stopped. Because I realized that if I kept digging out the old wall, the newer block wall on top would fall down also and I would have two walls tumbled down into my garden. So I went up to Homer’s car service station and grabbed three used tires. He has lots of them. I put them on a dolly and wheeled them home. I laid three similarly sized tires under the old wall that I had partially dug out. I butted them right up against the old wall and filled them with gravel that I had sifted from the dirt I had dug out from under the old wall. I laid them side by side and leveled them with a five foot level. When I was satisfied with my work I went up to Homers and got three more similarly sized tires. I laid a fourth tire next to the first three, then filled it and leveled it. Next I started a second row of tires on top of the first row and skewed how I laid them like you would cement blocks. Only I had to put cardboard inside the bottoms of the second row of tires so when I went to fill them with dirt, the dirt would not fall out of the tires. Then I filled this second row of tires with dirt and butted them up against the old wall. The next day I went and got two more tires, laid them on the second row of the tire wall and stopped there. I figured that this wall could be the start of the left side of the “U” shaped shed I would build out of tires. Then I decided against building the earthship themed shed and would just leave the tire wall in place and I would have to cement over the tires with a cement mortar mix. I decided against the tire shed because I figured my neighbors would not like it. But If Armageddon does come I could continue on the tire structure and I have seven tires already pounded and leveled. Working hard like this I think is ingrained in our DNA. I feel so much more in control when I work my butt off. It does not really matter what I eat. Because I am so preoccupied with working that I usually just go with the healthy option of just filling my gas tank with oatmeal. Sometimes I will just take an empty vitamin bottle and fill it with a half cup of ground oatmeal and ground sunflower seeds. And I let myself get really hungry. Then I will take the bottle out of my pocket and just suck down a mouthful of this concoction. I will wash it down with some coffee or water. If I am really hungry I will eat the whole bottle. But if I am not so hungry, I might just take a mouthful at a time and put the bottle back into my pocket. Surprisingly, a single mouthful can stop the stomach from growling for an hour or more. This will depend on how much I ate for dinner the night before or how hard I have been working. Working hard puts me in a zone where I am almost indifferent to food. And that is where I want to be. I am in control of the food that I eat and how much. The food is not in control of me which is usually the case when I am driving around in my truck. I want to pull into every restaurant that I pass. I hate when the food is in control. And we are all so vulnerable in our cars because it is just too damn easy. Our bodies did not evolve to sit and not exert ourselves for long periods of time. Probably in the future we will have treadmills where the steering wheels of cars used to be. And we can get some exercise on the way to where we have to go. We will even have to ask ourselves if we need to even go anywhere if we keep busy enough to not want to eat. And I think we all want to be in the zone of not wanting to eat. It simply feels better. Then after finding something to distract us from eating we can actually enjoy eating instead of just eating because we are bored. Bring on the distractions!