my name was earl

Over the last week, as part of my efforts to watch stuff I've got on DVD, I've been watching My Name is Earl episodes.

I really liked the first season of Earl and the second season is okay. The whole long-term arc of Joy stealing the truck didn't quite work, but it was still firmly focused on the list.

However, season three seems to be where it all went a bit wonky. The first part of season three takes place in prison, and it's really hard for Earl to really cross a lot of things off his list when he's in prison. I also seem to recall, though I've not go that far with the DVDs that later on he ends up in the comma, and if it's hard to cross stuff off when you're in prison, it's almost impossible when you're in a coma.

And that's where it went wrong, I think - Earl is about the list, not being in prison and comma dreams. I can kinda understand it, because when you have a list to tick off that tends to set a finite length to your series. The problem of course is that the show was cancelled after the fourth series, so rather than have a plan of "we'll finish the list by the end of this season" and wrapping it up nicely, it ends without ending.

Maybe I'll warm to it a bit more this second time around.

Also, I forgot to mention yesterday about the diet side of my slimming programme.

What I've been trying to do is stay below an absolute limit of 2,000 calories a day. In practice, I'm generally a couple of hundred below that in terms of counting. I'm also pretty sure that I'm over-counting, so perhaps I'm somewhere down around 1,600 calories a day on a good day or around 1,800 on a 'bad' day.

I'm actually deliberately over-counting, partly in order to be safe, but also because if I think I've hit 1,800 then that acts as a good break. An example of the over counting is that I count my daily yoghurt (very good for digestion - everyone should eat yoghurt, but you don't need to bother with those fancy pseudoscience yoghurts, good old fashioned normal yoghurt is where it's at) as 150 calories, where a labelling inspection suggests that, depending on variety, it's actually around 113-121.

This over counting/rounding up also has the advantage of making the maths a lot easier. It's a lot easier to add things up if everything is 150, 250 or 600 calories, etc.

Also, I've discovered a bit of a weird phenomenon now that I've reintroduced bread to my lunch. Basically, when it gets to evening I'm virtually not hungry. I often just have an apple, my juice (I'm fining it's really tough hitting the five a day thing on the diet) and my yoghurt and that's basically it. I tend to spread these out rather than having them all in one go, but generally I won't get peckish until just before bed and it's odd, but I quite like going to bed on an empty stomach now.

It's all a bit odd really - when I kicked this off, I was really struggling with a rumbling belly making me feel bad and occupying all of my attention, but now I almost quite like a bit of hunger. It almost makes the food taste better.

The only thing I am still struggling with is that I enjoy having a really full belly. To me, feeling stuffed after a meal has always been a part of enjoying a meal and that's the hardest thing to resist. I don't think I've ever in my whole life left an empty plate (assuming I like the food) and I know that's what normal people do - have leftovers because they're full. Well, I've never full enough to do that.