Fiddler on the Roof, Half a Bagel and a Architect

Hey you little Pisher,

(Authors Note: Pisher is the Yiddish word for “A young squirt”.  It can also mean “Bed Wetter” or “A young inexperienced person of no consequence”.  Even though I don’t wet the bed anymore I have to assume the writer is referring to me.)

I almost plotzed the other day when I heard you tell one of your clients that a good breakfast would be half a bagel with a schmear of peanut butter or a little bit of Lox.  

(Authors Note:  Plotz is a Yiddish word meaning to burst or explode.  It can be used either in humor and laughter or as a derogatory term referring to a state of aggravation beyond bearing.)  

Half a bagel?  What kind of person eats only half a bagel.  I have never heard of such a thing!

I think you are a Putz.

Signed,

Tevye, The Milk Man

(For Twenty Five Years she washed his clothes, cooked his meals and milked his cow.  Of course she loves him!  That really is nice to know.  You want something else that is really nice to know?  For the average person, losing weight isn’t as complicated as it is made out to be.)

Dearest Tevye,

For a second  I thought I was the only person who had an incredible resistance to change.  But then again there are probably enough inter-faith marriages and sewing machines to go around for both of us.

To answer you question “What kind of person eats half a bagel?” my answer would be:

A thin one.

(I am sure he has never heard of eating half a bagel either.)

The bottom line for an average person with realistic goals,  when it comes to losing weight things really aren’t as complicated as they are made out to be.

The person you saw me talking to was a client of mine who is an Architect who does projects all around the world. Often times his food choices are limited to what is made available to him by the people he is working with.  Advising him to pack his egg whites and oatmeal to a meeting all the way around the world in Singapore only to tell him to whip it out and scarf it down while discussing a multi million dollar deal just isn’t going to work:

(Pretty talented guy huh?)

Since the food he most commonly ate was a whole bagel with a big plop of cream cheese my simple advice to him was to dump half the bagel and replace it with a portion controlled amount of protein with a little fat mixed in.  This worked very well for the following reasons:

1.  It cut the calories down significantly

2.  It was not a significant departure from what he was used to eating and it was readily available.

3.  Replacing the highly processed carbohydrates in the half of a bagel with either the lox or peanut butter made the meal much more nutritionally dense for the calories he was consuming and it provided a greater level of satiety (feeling of fullness in English) which made it less likely he would eat 87 pounds of the Char Kway Teow they served at lunch:

(This is Char Kway Teow.  It is usually made from flat rice noodles stir-fried with lard, dark and light soy sauce, chilli, de-shelled cockles, sliced Chinese sausage, bean sprouts, Chinese chives, prawns and egg.  It is definitely not low calorie.  But then again…)

(This a man from Singapore making Char Kway Teow.  Maybe the reason why he is so thin is because even though the dish is very dense in calories he doesn’t eat it every day and when he does eat it he doesn’t consume about 100 pounds in one sitting.  We Americans can learn something from this that doesn’t involve us shilling out more money to the $60 Billion Dollar a year weight loss industry.)

So Tevye, now that you know the specifics maybe you won’t find my advice to be such a Shanda.

(Authors note:  I only know this word because it was on an episode of Law and Order but Shanda means “A shame” or “A scandal”.  I think I heard it on an episode of Seinfeld once too.)

I did also advise my client he could forgo the bagel entirely, keep the protein source intact, and instead have a couple pieces of fruit instead but that was too much for him to handle at the time so we just stuck with the half a bagel because that was what we was familiar with.

Hope that helps.

Till Next Time,

Yours in Chocolate Chip Cookies,

Mike Cruickshank

(I have no idea why this guy decided to wear his underwear to the beach but then again if I was built like that I would probably wear my underwear to the beach too.  And the grocery store, and the mall and Church etc.  The reality is if your goal is to look like this there probably aren’t too many bagels lying in your future.  But what most people need to understand is that such a physique is a mixture of age, genetics and a complete lifestyle dedicated to the pursuit of physical magnificence.  What it is not is a level you have to reach in order to feel pride in the way you look, fit in your clothes, function better in daily life or just be an overall healthy person.)