In totally non-writing related news, the wife and I have been trying to cut out high fructose corn syrup. For her it’s been part of a process of elimination of different things to see what improves her well being. After reading about last year’s study at Princeton, I’m wondering if that has influenced my weight gain over the years. So, an experiment.

This obviously won’t be a very scientific experiment, as there are other variables that will kick in with this. We’re finding that a lot of bread uses high fructose corn syrup. When eating out and the only options are sandwiches, sandwiches and more sandwiches, then we find ourselves having to make alternate choices or just not eat a sandwich. My latest bad habit has been getting breakfast sandwiches every morning, which are now off the list.

And we’re finding all sorts of weird things that are “safe” on the basis of not having HFCS. The most common thing we’ve found looking at nutrition information for restaurants, especially for fast food, is that it’s the breadier items that have HFCS, like buns, sliced bread, English muffins, etc. Tortillas seem to be okay, so hooray for Mexican food? Breading also seems to be HFCS free, so when I had to figure out a fast meal on short notice yesterday my best option appeared to be Chicken McNuggets. (Strangely, they aren’t as good as I recall.)

Parallel to this, my wife and I have decided to try walking more and come up with backup plans when the weather doesn’t agree with us. This adds another factor to our potential for weight loss, so it also taints the examination of HFCS as an impact.

For the first time in a long while I’ve weighed myself. This morning I clocked in at 331, which isn’t as bad as I thought. It’s about where I was before my last weight loss adventure, so I didn’t really gain a whole lot more weight than before.

Wish me luck!