RIGHT ON TARGET. BY MARION D.S. DREYFUS

 

Unorthodox slimming

Ideosyncratic ways of looking at losing

Yeah, but will you believe me if I let you in on it?

Let me say, right off, I never go on anything as organized as a diet. Several reasons. Mostly, as a health writer, as well as a human being with ears and eyes, I don’t believe in them. And I believe, moreover, that within a pound or two, I am …acceptable. Since I fit into the same clothes I’ve owned since the dinosaurs were in diapers, whatever the avoirdupoids I’ve accumed hasn’t been off-putting enough to have me check into the reduction roller derbies stashed around the wealthy ‘burbs like prize heifers in a mad-cow breakout. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have second thoughts along with the second helpings. Several enormously helpful if whacko ideas that work for me, though there’s no telling how they’d do for you, are these gems of the gordicide I practice.

Go to the Dentist often.

Experience expensive, time-consuming, marginally excruciating oral surgery. Have him pack on the sutures, the putty, the dental membranes. Have him cluck often at how inflamed everything is in your right upper quadrant, and how your left lower is catching up pretty quick. Have him give you the Megillah of Instructions to Take Home, with its comforting rinse hourly, and  eat nothing hot.

Or cold. Or hard. Or too delicious . (No, that last one’s mine. I just get carried away with obedience modification techniques.) For a week, you will feel wretched, and your eating will be cursory and only induced to stave off crawling sensations on your skin. Eating forbidden festives will not be high on your list during this recuperative time.  Besides, after you pay the bill (on the spot, unlike the way you, say, get paid), there’s little discretionary funding left to afford the giga-calorie Starbuck’s caramel latte that is supposed to not count because you had to walk three blocks to get there, and then  slouch your way back. That walk of shame nets you maybe 10 calories, if you’re lucky. The lilting creamy latte with drizzle of nectar atop a giant feat of Oy-cramming is close to 550 calories. Yes. In one lethal weapon.

In fact, think about it. Any surgery you have, other than a husbandectomy or the parallel distaff side, will cause the same sequellae. The more you pay for your surgery, the more wretched you feel afterwards, the longer. Figure you’ll shell out $500 per pound lost. Thus an eyebrow lift, let’s say, costs (I can’t say for sure) $3,000. You’ll be bleeding and all for a while, you’ll need pain killers and an icebag. You’ll feel  unable to express anything save  a wan smile, and your appetite will be dead. This will last a week or two. This will result in six lost pounds of unwanted flab. (Not on your forehead, of course.)

Move to high places

No. Not crystal meth raves. I’m talking the Andes. I lived in Bogota, Colombia, and San Jose, Costa Rica, which are both pretty high above sea level. No matter what I ate-- and in homesickness and anomie I ate almost as often as I breathed--shallowly-- the polluted stuff they sell as air in that neck of the globe—I gained not a gram. In fact, I lost and lost. One day, when I donned a pair of slacks I had not worn for some time, I accused someone of switching clothes on me; they were that loose, I thought it was a joke my cohab was playing on me. I lost weight steadily, without trying to for a single moment. I ran, mornings, and biked, getting to appointments, but that does not convert the lbs to lb-minuses at normal altitudes.

Yes: Wanna lose and lose steadily? Live the reasonably active high life on the Jura or visit the Himalayas.

Vacation in the heat.

Now I’m a person who will escape rote at the drop of an air-mile coupon. One peripatetic friend merely has to appear on my telephone ID, and I’m packed, ready to follow anywhere the suggestion wafts. But I can’t help noticing that when I shlepped all the stomach-lurching way to the Antarctic, I trundled along the ice shelf like a good little chinstrap penguin, but held onto the layers inside my layers with the unreasonable tenacity of Lance in the Tour de France. I ate more to ‘keep up’ that mythical ‘strength’—though it never flagged for a minim. Instead, take a year in the Tropics. You’ll eat, you’ll sweat. You’ll walk, you’ll sweat. Coming back, your clothes will flap like the becalmed sails of a zonked-out cap'n. The weight loss equation is roughly the same as the operational one: If your hol sets you back $8,000, figure on losing 16 pounds. Only if you’re actively in the baking middle of someplace scorching, and only if you actually move a body part other than your eyes.

 Move to hot

Moved South, and I saw pounds melting off, without effort. I went to cold places, and…nada. Zip. I dressed to stave off cold. And ate to warm the bones. Neither was an effective strategy for losing. I went solo into the interior (what used to be called jungle) of Malaysia, and hiked the swelter, looking for the Rafflesia flower (that supposedly 'bloomed once every 1000 years.' Hah) for a couple of weeks. Wrong jungle. Among the wet sucking mud and the huge shallow trees, I found the pounds going so fast I had to take drastic action to keep my pants up. Drink fluids, though. One guy I met under the verdant canopy was almost passed out from dehydration and poor nutrition. I gave him biscuits and water. an hour later, he was right as rain, haring off through the huge dense trees.

Don’t use—dare I say it?—A/C

It won’t kill you. To keep yourself reasonably  breezy, fan yourself. Use your left hand, which isn’t doing much, anyway. This uses up energy, and is unnoticeable as exercise. You save money. You save the environment. And keep those enemies of mankind in their black gold without customers—gotta be some moral brownie points in that, right?

Come late. Leave early.

This does several things. First, you miss the first courses, and sometimes, people won’t notice and you can get away with just the entrée. Also, coming late to parties, especially when people can see you come in late, makes you sweat --and lose. Leaving early, harder to do if you’re enmeshed in conversation or lust for the creme brulee, means you might miss the 750-calorie dessert.

Overdress 

Sounds dumb, but it works. Protect against sun damage, and you lose weight by extra heat churn. Weight isn’t guaranteed to come off, but the principle holds in other applications, such as in that gym, where sweating out usually produces a drop on the scale. And it’s a lot easier than 50 pushups to just layer up a little. 

Keep it on the shelf

This one, while another no-brainer, is not a unique-to-me unorthodoxy. But it isn’t going the exercise route, walk a half-mile to three daily, climb steps, turn down seconds, you know the drill.  If you can’t resist Haagen, you Dassn’t buy it. Omit anything that makes your pupils dilate and your mouth salivate when it passes within 4 paces of your nose. Snub the soda. Walk briskly around the Oreo aisle.

Tithe

Well, not tithe, exactly, but what’s the word for fifthing? 

Juice is delish, abundant in vitamins, and counts as a fruit out of the needed four to six that are recommended daily. But OJ and its sibling citrus are killer sweet. Very high in fructose, heavy on the carbs. What to do: Pour in a slim near-inch of juice into an 8-ounce glass. The rest, fill to the brim with either icy water (burns more than tepid) or boiling water (admittedly, this has not been everyone’s charm, but if it works …hey, who can argue?).

Fine Print

Do these work? Do they guarantee loss in the body politic? Making no hard-and-fast representations,  I still wear the clothes I wore at graduation. And I’m fitter than most, eating whatever I like, and never going anywhere near anything resembling a diet.  (Full disclosure: OK, I do work out, lift weights, ride a bike. Yoga-cize. But they are less effective on the scale than my unorthodoxies.)

 

Anglican Church vote for economic sanctions against Israel

Not only is the Anglican Church unilateralism off-putting and-- without question-- fundamentally anti-Semitic, it is unjust and horrendously destructive of the current understandings the countries of the partnered roadmap have had with the aborning structures of the PA. No matter what Israel does in its eviscerating efforts to create peace, the world finds glee in fault-finding only with the  beleaguered  speck of a country sitting in the mud of two dozen violent theocracies, some billion people overall, bent on destruction of the little Jewish state with its insignificant population of 6.5 million--1 million of that figure being Arab-Israeli citizens.

The Kelo Supreme Court Ruling on Eminent Domain: Contrasts to Israel's Disengagement Pullout

The difference between the two difficult circumstances --in the U.S., a grab of several houses in a neighborhood is harsh for those sustaining the forced loss. It goes against the very tenets of free American citizenship. Most urban renewal or public use properties will probably occur in disadvantaged neighborhoods, where homeowners or proprietors are too strapped or naive to put up much of a fight and where they may not have lived for very long.  In Israel, where some 9,000-plus persons stand to be evicted from their longtime homes in Gaza and northern Samaria, the situation is direr. It's not just the homeowner or small businessman who loses: The land expropriated by Sharon's storm soldiers is critical to bulwarking the entire Israel against attack.

This past June, the U.S. Supreme Court came out with a ruling that is highly irregular: "Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall or any farm with a factory." These are the words of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in her dissent from the draconian Supreme Court ruling in the case of Kelo vs. The City of New London. Kelo is an outright repudiation of the most basic American principle - constitutional protection for life, liberty and property. Kelo permits the state - or any well-heeled politician or pottage-seller - to wrest away one's property for a price - whether the homeowner agrees or not. There has been a similar furious reaction to the forthcoming Israeli Gaza/northern Samaria pullout called the Disengagement - and the groundswell against this wholesale 'Jew-ectomy extraction' is mushrooming daily as the date nears. Many in the U.S., too, are up in arms over the implications of both situations. There are numerous ugly parallels.

The response of the citizens of Israel, growing ever more vociferous and more united against the current prospect of departure from Gaza and northern  Samaria, cannot be said to be in agreement with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. I write with a heavy heart. Where once it was a point of distinctive merit to be privileged to interview Sharon, 'the Lion,' some 10 years ago, now I view that time as through an inverted prism - it appears very small and very far away, both in time and political temperature. He is no longer that same king of the jungle. Though he is in a jungle of poor judgment and even worse political acuity. Friday, 24 June, after a simple demolition of the legal and historical rationales for the day's ruling that, essentially, governments have free reign to appropriate private property, Justice Clarence Thomas looked down the road at real-world effects:

"The consequences of today's decision are not difficult to predict, and promise to be harmful. So-called 'urban renewal' programs provide some compensation for the properties they take, but no compensation is possible for the subjective value of these lands to the individuals displaced and the indignity inflicted by uprooting them from their homes. Allowing the government to take property solely for public purposes is bad enough, but extending the concept of public purpose to encompass any economically beneficial goal guarantees that these losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful. If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect 'discrete and insular minorities,'. . . surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this Court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages 'those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms' to victimize the weak." Ante, at 11 (O'Connor, J., dissenting). It remains to be seen what the ultimate reaction of the American polity will be to this unpopular and strained decision on eminent domain. Likewise, it is yet to be known how the Israeli citizenry will ultimately behave - or not behave - in the face of what appears to be a corrupt hand-wash between the none-too-fastidious Israeli judiciary and Prime Minister Sharon. The difference between the two difficult circumstances is that to the polity in the U.S., a home or a grab of several houses in a neighborhood is harsh and dismaying for those sustaining the forced loss. One stands to lose one's home and hearth, no matter how humble. This goes against the very tenets of free American citizenship. In the event, attendant compensation supposedly to some extent mitigates the loss, should such "public usage" takeovers transpire.

One difference between the U.S. conundrum and the looming Israeli Disengagement is that most of the urban renewal or public use properties will probably occur in disadvantaged neighborhoods, where homeowners or proprietors are too financially strapped or naive to put up much of a fight, and where they may not have lived for very long. In Israel, where some 8,500-plus persons stand to be evicted from their longtime homes in Gaza and northern Samaria, the situation is direr and the upshot of a different complexion and tenor. In Israel, the land expropriated and crudely stripped of its historic Hebrew residents is critical to bulwarking the country against attack. Gaza and Samaria are, of course, critical in several ways. They are critical in the minds of Israelis as their land by right and after aggressor battles defended against and won. Sharon's decree, as the words of Clarence Thomas indicate in regard to the Supreme Court ruling, is also deeply perverse. It encourages, even rewards, the very people who ought not to benefit from the sweat of the Jewish people, to disproportionately and for no reason reap land and goods they have by no means earned: aggressor Arabs under Mahmoud Abbas. People who have done nothing but flout the law and signed agreements, and delivered crude savagery on a metronome beat. Can anyone with more than room-temperature IQ envision the corruption-pocked PA Arabs ceasing forthwith their fervent and everlasting attacks and attempts at destruction of the State of Israel and her inhabitants? Is the DNA yet created that could convert such a blood-hungry thuggocracy from their textbook-infected, sermon-supported, nefarious off-label jobs and career destruction goals? Gaza and Samaria are critical to the hearts of Jews, as the chip-chipping a way of the Israel landmass (the U.S. - and U.N.-sanctioned 'whittle process' of five decades) is shrunk yet another time. Good-bye harmony. Hello brag rights to the terrorists and street demagogues who will waste no time usurping credit where none is due.

Those to be evicted in Gaza and Samaria are not eager to move, to accept cash in lieu of living resourcefully in homes they have built up over 40 years, raising children and grandchildren. Make no mistake: The loss of morale is as high-profile a body lesion as is the loss of land. In this case, the Arafatian wanna-be's who shepherd the Palestinian Authority have repeatedly failed to live up to even the most basic tenets of the dismantle-Zion document mysteriously known as the Roadmap. In psychology, extinguishing a negative behavior is accomplished in two complimentary ways: Non-reward for continuance of the action that annoys and by praising compliance with newly modeled behavior in line with the hoped-for comportment. But those under Abu Mazen (no less than under the late, unlamented Yasser Arafat), have complied with neither. No surprise. Does anyone imagine that the unmitigated death-dealing, ammo-smuggling, tunnel-building and rocket-attacks barbarism that have been a continuous ignominious constituent of the PA during the past five years, despite the Security Fence and Israel's vigilant IDF, will be extinguished?

 

AUGUST 25, 2005

In grief, we salute thee:

Sights the world has never before seen between Jew and Jew 

 

By Marion D.S. Dreyfus, WJNA Columnist

 

 

NYC. -- The images spooled out in astonishing profusion, images on the world’s TVs, through cameras wriggling with disbelief and uncertainty for the next moment’s focus of resistance. The men in orange standing shoulder to shoulder on the roof of the synagogue in K’far Darom bespoke the fierce pride and love of the Israeli citizens of Gaza and Samaria for their flag, for their people, for their land of blue and white wrested at such cost from the grudging Other. Images that made one weep with empathy for the hurt of both sides. Those who might in error have thought of the Jew as just men of the book, as parchment people with days or weeks of fight in them against the Islamist horde, have seen something they have never before seen. With heart and indomitable pride, the resisters threw ingenious sand, and oil, soapy fluids, and foam at the men coming at them from below. It was civil disobedience that retained its humanity, despite the water cannon. Though there was concertina wire on the side of the resisters and huge cattle-car-like crates to safely lower the K’far residents from the roof to the ground of acceptance, it was not the all-out savagery of enemy to enemy. There was song. There was prayer. There was the embrace of soldier and resister, arm in arm.

 

Whoever in history has seen its like?

 

These implements and tools were retardants to being captured and expelled. They are none of them fatal, none of them health-impairing. The men on both sides looked like Wes Craven zomboids-- powdered and scabied with paint and sand and oil and powder. But they are not by a long long shot even the same nasty accoutrements of the long-running PA intifadeh --masterminded and denied by the echt-terrorist, Yasir Arafat, and continued by his proxy, Mahmoud Abbas. Not rocks. Not cement. Not live bullets and rat-poison-infected belts, or rockets or kalashnikovs. These are Jews, and Jews do not throw damage at other Jews, even at the behest of a Prime Minister or a Rosh Memshalah. Who cannot love a nation whose staunchest and bravest soldiers approach their brethren with compassion and empathy, even in the face of soap and foam and sand and various ingenious projectiles  thrown over them in an attempt to retain the homes these Jewish stalwarts have known for almost four decades?

 

Who could not marvel, while the tears fall, for the never-before scenes of Jew against Jew?

 

The issue at hand is a Laocoon one, and one cannot avoid the implications of the pullout for the rest of Israel, despite one’s heartfelt empathy for the residents who have been carried out of their homesteads.  The issue, put simply, is that the demographic imperative forced the hand of the government to evacuate an area that, if it had been encircled and incorporated into the country proper, would with its numbers of hostile Arab residents, overwhelm the fragile balance of the body of Israel. Too, the precious resources needed to defend the 8,500-some residents of these regions in Gaza and Samaria are outsize to the other considerable needs of the government, often under attack via nefarious infiltration and overt assaults, not to mention so-called suicidalists seeking maximal damage and careless of their own lives.In my living room, staring obsessive at the pictures that broke one after another over the airwaves, the agony of the two parties hit me deeply. I love the Israel Defense forces, having served in it five times, if briefly. I love my people, and especially my warrior-strong braves who wished for nothing more than to continue their meaningful lives on the fringes of civilization that rejected them but, at the same time, admired and envied them.

 

Like the do-or-die fight nearly 60 years ago over the vessel Altalena, between two factions that resulted ultimately in the birth of the IDF itself, the last time two Jewish forces engaged in critical  confrontation, this is an epic moment. But unlike that sorry spectacle in the history of the state of Israel, which resulted in the deaths of heroes, this evacuation was achieved with a remarkable restraint and compassion. What will happen now to these strong and courageous patriots is not yet written. It is hoped that the government of Israel will keep to its word and settle these dislocated people with the same compassion, and the same generosity of spirit and treasure, that they were approached by the… decent, humble and empathic… SWAT teams of their own extended family.