Lately I've been feeling less than optimal. I've had a couple health scares, but I know what I need to know to monitor my own health to know that they are just that: scares. But I'm also smart enough to realize that those scares are there for a reason: if you don't watch out, they quickly become a reality.

So I'm working on shedding pounds again. I've maintained within 20 pounds of my current weight for almost two years (losing about 100 pounds to get here), so now I'm going for my goal weight of 250 (while it may seem high to you, it's actually pretty close to an ideal weight for my frame).

The biggest problem I have is, I actually KNOW what my biggest challenge to losing weight is. It's not so much in concentrating on eating less, but on eating at regular individuals. See, I'm not really a breakfast person, unless it's biscuits and gravy or pancakes. But seeing as the former requires putting artery clogging gravy into my system and the latter requires both butter and syrup, I usually skip them. And the dilemna begins, because I haven't kickstarted my system with a healthy breakfast.

Then lunch is a problem. I'm usually too busy to eat lunch, so I snack. That wasn't as much of a problem in Wisconsin, where there were numerous healthy food choices for me to select. But here in the Texas Panhandle, even baked Tostitos are hard to come by. God forbid I want a nice healthy chicken wrap, or better yet, a black bean and rice burrito.

Since I spend an inordinate amount of time at convenience stores, there's a temptation to buy food there. But see, that's entirely bad, because their food selections are usually fried, fried, and fried. So when I'm in a pinch, I usually settle on a packet of peanuts: good, good for me, easy to eat in the car, and relatively inexpensive. But even that gets tiresome.

Then there's the other problem. You know the old saying about certain foods: "I like them, but they don't like me?" That's me and meat in a nutshell. I LOVE a good steak or a good burger. But I don't like what it does to my health. Some people can metabolize the fats in red meats; I cannot. So any good diet for me means backing off the red meats. When I'm "on" my diet, I try to even minimize my fish, egg, and chicken consumption as much as I can.

I'm actually a pretty good vegetarian. I can make a number of creative, tasty dishes that appeal to most appetites (I made my famous tofu curry this past weekend). The problem here is the supply. As I explained on Mason's blog, I once made a complete Thanksgiving dinner that was all vegan just for the challenge. But not only can I not get tofurkey here, I can't get vegetarian broth. Fortunately, the markets have become savvy enough to carry Silk, so that's not a problem in itself.

I try not to spend too much time on the scale when I'm dieting because I have this problem of going to extremes. My tendency to overexercise is as strong as my tendency to overeat, so it's better to pay less attention to my scale and more to my receding waistline.

Boy, oh boy, what I wouldn't give to find 20 or 30 people around here sincerely interested in ordering from a co-op. That would help tremendously.