Cyclist Uncovers Secret Flab Source

I go to a gym whose slogan is: Flab bad; Muscle good. How can I not be influenced by such a succinct philosophy?

Raise your hand if this ever happens to you: You cut back on your food intake, you exercise your head off, you actually lose pounds according to the scale -- and the flab stays.

What in God’s Green Hell is that? I couldn’t take it so I asked my girl-doctor. Yes, she said I can blame it on issues of advancing girlness, but here's the good news: it might not really be flab. It might be water. And there’s something I can do about it besides gender reassignment surgery. She advised me to check out my sodium intake. I told her, If you mean salt-shaker abuse, compared to everyone in my family I’m an ascetic. She said start checking labels.

So I who have long dismissed the sodium-worriers of the world as having warts on the brain, began checking labels. And friends, I am apoplectic with shock.

My grocery shopping stretches into the night as I crawl through the aisles reading cans and packages. An envelope of instant soup? Two and a half times the normal sodium intake for a whole day! And soup so thin that it wouldn’t even count as a snack. And I mean the entire packet, not the two and a half servings it claims are in there. For me that would be a snack to help me make it to the next snack.

You know that food tracker site I mentioned yesterday? I plugged in my Super Healthy Guilt-Free Pizza recipe, and now it’s ruined. Now I’ll have to change the name to Sodium Immersion Carbo-Disc. Eating instructions: Ingest and watch foam rubber monster inflate.

Disappointed? Yes. Initially. But the minute I cut back, the change was so amazing that I’m completely converted. I’m tired of feeling like the beach ball that I’m not. Why would I go back to that? This is not a hard one. Eat this, feel bad. Don’t eat this, feel good.