Eat more ice cream!

Mike and I just bought an ice cream maker. Hans suggested we get a hand crank, but with the quantities of ice cream that we eat, we'd have unnecessarily bulging biceps after only a few weeks. Little M has been the impetus for our first two flavor creations: strawberry, rhubarb, lavender sorbet and pear carmel ice cream. She's as addicted to reading the cookbook and choosing new flavors as we are to finishing off a pint a day.

This steady increase of our ice cream intake appears to be inversely proportional to my desire to train and race. I have definitely lost the bug (you'll have to hang tight another day before my tell-all Superweek report is posted). I listened to podcasts of Spanish news broadcasts today and was quite content to completely space out and pay no attention whatsoever to my powertap.

So, the question of the day is, how to eat copious quantities of ice cream, enjoy my crisp Spanish rose wine, not train, and...drum roll...not gain weight.

Luckily, I have teammates to support me in this endeavor. Amanda housesat for us while we were in Europe and discovered a fascinating tidbit while reading Bill Bryson's, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" On average, people have 5 pounds of dead skin.

So, what's a non-training, ice cream eater's response? Buy a loofa! I've been loofa-ing steadily now for 2 days, resulting in a .1 lb weight decrease. Then again, maybe I just ate less ice cream today than yesterday. My mediocre results led me to do some very serious research on the interwebs to see how else I can address this dire issue.

Here's what I found. You'll have to trust that this is straight off the web as there is no bibliography at the end of this post:

• Did you know you can absorb up to five lbs. of chemicals every year from make-up and other "beauty" products?


• You swallow about one quart of snot every day.


• About ten billion tiny scales of skin rub off your body every day. In a lifetime, you could fill eight five-pound flour bags with dead skin.


• Most people nearly have 5 pounds of dead skin, normally. If they can shed these 5 pounds within a short duration, then it would really be good. But most of them are trapped with their busy schedules and are unable to spare any time for the workout sessions. Hence a new device has been introduced that assists in removing the dead skin from the body using a vacuum system.

My August training plan:

Buy a heavy-duty vacuum, blow my nose several times a day, toss out the makeup, loofa morning, noon, and night...rinse...repeat.