How not to lose weight

Alternate title: how not to indulge a chocolate craving.

Or: How not to make fudge.

Take your pick.

But first: weight this morning, 195.something. Size - still one up from where I was - I dug into the retired pants pile since everything I have is dirty and found to my dismay that the pair I found, discarded 2 months ago for being too big, is now snug.

Meanwhile, last night after dinner I had a "MUST HAVE CHOCOLATE" moment. Digging through the cupboards I found most of a bar of unsweetened ghirardelli. We were out of almost everything one might put in a chocolate confection including eggs and flour, but amazingly, the wrapper had a recipe for fudge that involved only: the unsweetened chocolate, some semi-sweet chocolate chips (which, I'd forgotten, we had some of), some sweetened condensed milk, which I usually keep on hand for the occasional pumpkin pie, and vanilla. Turned out we only had unsweetened evaporated skim milk, and it further turned out, when I opened it and found a weird yellow liquid with shredded looking milky bits, that evaporated milk has an expiration date that, in this case, was more than 2 years ago. But it smelled OK, so I proceeded. (Being a truly pathetic creature.) We were also short on the chocolate chips, so I added more unsweeted baking chocolate, plus sugar.

Can you tell this is not going to end well?

I melted all in a double-boiler, added the vanilla, and it tasted OK. Next step was to pour it into a pan and let it set in the refrigerator for 2 hours. I poured, and left - went to a movie (no snacks there, good on me.) Came home, found the chocolate had congealed into something resembling nothing so muich as sewage sludge on top, with a thin liquidy layer on the bottom.

Naturally, I ate some.

It looks just as disgusting today, and I've been picking at it all morning and into the afternoon. WHY? WHY don't I just pitch it? Why don't I look at the chocolate mess, and look at my too-small, formerly too big pants, and say, STOP. THE. INSANITY.

I guess I can try LPTEBA's suggestion and post the weight I want to attain next - say, 193, on little post-its all over the house. If my kids ask about them I can tell them they're for math practice and give them some subtraction problems.

By the way, I did hav ea great workout today - a one-hour Pilates class plus 45 minutes on the elliptical, on the "fat-burn" setting. It's weird - to lose fat you're supposed to work out at a lower heart rate. I'm so used to working in the 130-150 range, and the machine kept silently yelling at me to slow down to 119. The good thing was that by doing so, I could indeed continue for the whole 45 minutes. I iced my hamstring by sitting on a pack of frozen hamburger meat (well-wrapped - it's going to be a pot of chili tonight) and rested too - trying to nap while listening to my kids and their playdate play school. It's so cute to hear 8-year olds give each other (and the little sister) instruction about US geography.

Oh, and here's some more consolation: apparently women with small waists and big asses are smarter, and pass their brains down to their kids. Something to do with Omega-3-fatty acids - we naturally have more of them. So instead of bemoaning the fact that pants never fit the 14-inch difference between my waist and my hips, I should be glad!