WEIGHTY ISSUES
This Washington Post health blogger read a book about eating, weight loss, and calorie-counting around the world...and it got her thinking:
"The 80 entries in "What I Eat" are organized according to how many calories each person's daily menu contains. The range is astounding -- from 800 to 12,300 a day -- but most people's tallies hover around 2,000 calories. The book got me wondering how many calories I consume in a day. I don't count them. In fact, I deliberately shunned calorie-counting during my recent weight loss effort.  Focusing on calories, much like keeping a detailed food diary or counting "points," skews my judgment, somehow. I find I spend too much time obsessing over those details, whereas if I simply put in place some simple rules for eating that automatically keep my food intake where it should be, I can relax and think about other things. Those rules include serving myself smaller portion sizes, never taking second helpings and never picking at food while I'm preparing a meal or cleaning up afterward. I don't eat anything after dinner (except a cocktail), and I don't eat sweets. I've lost the weight I aimed to lose and then some (I'll be reporting in full on the Me Minus 10 campaign in an upcoming column)."

This makes a lot of sense to me.  And I know many folks worry about their weight.  Don't obsess over the small stuff, would seem to be the lesson here.  Keep the big picture in mind.  Good advice...

LANGUAGE ARTS
Meanwhile, many of us in the Moebius and facial-difference crowd are online, using the new online lingo that's popular these days.  But is it harming our language?  I hardly think it's the end of the world in any case, no matter where we come down...but I found this piece on the issue today amusing.  See what you think:
"The last time I paid attention to the American vernacular, "awesome" (from "awe": reverential fear or wonder) was a rather cute grownup word tossed around on the playground to describe fast rope-skipping and such. Now I see it is common currency among real estate agents, the military, doctors, NASCAR commentators, and even the ethereal voices of NPR. I heard one smug woman the other day interviewing a minor author. "You new novel is awesome," she purred. He purred back. I thought, "Whatever."  "Awesome" has the British laughing at us again. One Londoner wrote on the web recently that it is "a word Americans use to describe everything." What we have here is a trend I'll call double reverse migration, or the snatching of a children's word by adults after it had first been snatched by the kids.  Some adults are still stymied by these two syllables, though. A junior executive friend of mine recently received a herogram from her boss -- a woman comfortably salaried in the middle six figures -- that consisted of one word: "AWSUM!"  Part of American lingo creep is normal in a healthy language, and some of it can be fun. I won't deal here with Sarah Palin's formulations, the Twitter or texting crowd, fashion patios, tech talk or satellite radio. Eventually someone will do the book.  The list of neologisms and vulgarisms will be long. What is a visitor to make of words like "diss" meaning to trash, "sick" meaning excellent, "rad" meaning even better and "wicked" (at least in New England) meaning best? They don't teach this stuff in ESL classes.  People who work with words are alarmed by slippage into vocabulary that was once over the line in mixed company....
Some proper households are on edge. My daughter gasped when her 12-year-old interjected a "WTF?" into dinnertable conversation. "Chill, mom," he said. "It means 'Why the face?'"....Whatever."

"Practice as if you are the worst, perform as if you are the best."
-Unknown
"I know the price of success: dedication, hard work and an unremitting
devotion to the things you want to see happen." -Frank Lloyd Wright