Dieting guidelines for the non-dieter

I'm trying to figure out whether I'm a diet person.

By that I mean I'm wondering if I can follow the prescribed actions required by a diet program. Is it in me to join Weight Watchers? Or Jenny Craig? Or Nutrisystems? Or any of the other billion or so weight loss programs you see advertised on television.

While I consider myself healthy, my body mass index tells me I'm overweight by 15-20 pounds of too much beer belly. I still have a skinny ass (if I do say so myself), likewise my arms and legs. The weight I want to lose is right around the middle.

But I don't know that I'm a diet program kind of guy. I like to eat what I like to eat, especially since I'm maintaining a recipe blog -- Eats@Home -- which gives me a tremendous excuse and reason to experiment with all kinds of food.

But I've at least come around to studying a diet ... not following it, mind you, studying it. It's the "Flat Belly! Diet For Men".

And when I say I'm studying it I really mean I'm studying it. I'm reading through it, analyzing how it might work, debating how it might not work, agreeing with myself to adopt some of its recommendations while rejecting other recommendations out of hand.

For example, I wholly reject the notion of giving up coffee for any length of time, as the book recommends as part of a four-day "cleansing" program. Under no circumstances will I give up coffee. There will be blood, otherwise. Hide the women and children. It won't be pretty.

What attracted me to the book, which I browsed through recently at the bookstore, were the quality of the meals. They were the kind of meals I like to prepare -- bold flavors, spice, meats and cheese.

The Flat Belly diet is big on what it calls MUFAs -- monounsaturated fatty acids. They're contained in oils, olives, nuts and seeds, avocados and dark chocolate.

The Flat Belly diet claims that MUFAs reduce bad cholesterol and increase good cholesterol, ward off Type 2 diabetes, lower inflammation, maintain brain health and -- best of all -- target belly fat. So the idea is to have a MUFA with each meal but keep each meal at less than about 450 calories.

So I'm experimenting with MUFAs, which isn't that hard to do, quite frankly. I'm trying to watch my portion and trying to retrain my brain that a series of small meals through the day rather than a breakfast, a lunch and a dinner.

I am not a good dieter. I need a diet I can adapt to my needs, not a diet that I have to adapt to its needs.

So far, at least, I'm a good student of how to diet.

Maybe that will let me split the difference. Instead of losing 20 pounds, I’ll study the diet, use the parts that fit my personality and lose 10.

We'll see. Time for coffee.

Robert Parker: An appreciation

I don't remember when I got turned on to Robert Parker and Spenser.

Was it the "Godwulf Manuscript" from 1973 that got me started? Was it "Looking for Rachel Wallace" in 1979? Was it "Early Autumn" in 1980?

I just don't know how it started, but I'm thankful for whatever circumstance or whoever it was that made me pick up my first Robert Parker book featuring Spenser -- like "The Fairie Queen" poet Edmund Spenser -- but just Spenser, the Boston-based private detective.

Parker died at 77 on Jan. 18, at his desk, working no doubt on a book that included friendship, loyalty and love ... along with a few punches, maybe a shooting or two, and some of the sharpest dialogue you'll find.

In 37 novels by Parker, Spenser made things right -- not because he was paid to, and he often wasn't paid, but because he felt morally obligated to do so. He was loyal to doing the right thing for his friends, for his girlfriend (psychiatrist Susan Silverman) and for his clients.

Over the years Parker taught readers a lot about loyalty through Spenser. We watched over the years how feverishly in love and loyal he became to Susan Silverman and to his sometime partner Hawk and other characters.

Here's the thing about Parker. The Spenser series wasn't literature. A Spenser book wasn't going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was entertainment. It was witty -- you won't find bon mots as bon as Spenser dialogue.

Parker was prolific beyond Spenser, creating a series of books around female detective Sunny Randall and baggage-laden Jesse Stone, police chief of Paradise, Mass.

It was my hope that in some future book Parker would somehow feature all three of his characters in one story. He'd hooked up Randall and Stone together, as collaborators on a case and, briefly, as lovers. But Spenser hasn't been in the mix with the other two.

Parker's Spenser series was turned into the "Spenser: For Hire" television series, which starred Robert Urich in the 1980s. The Jesse Stone novels became TV movies starring Tom Selleck in 2005. "Appaloosa," Parker's 2005 Western, was made into a 2008 movie starring Ed Harris. Parker created Sunny Randall at the request of actress Helen Hunt. Maybe there's a Sunny Randall movie in the works starring Helen Hunt?

I foisted Parker on my children as a way to help them get away from the day-to-day hub-bub. It was a way, in the still of the night, to clear your head, I told them. I heard from my son David on the day that Parker died. David told me "reading him at such an early age is probably the reason I became interested in film noir."

Parker was a gourmand, something he passed on to Spenser. Spenser is frequently cooking. Given my own interest in cooking -- and especially my interest in eating -- I always thought it might be fun to assemble a cookbook based on the recipes that Spenser cooked up during each investigation.

Personally, I loved the discipline of Parker's work: he wrote five pages a day, five days a week. That he died while writing is perfectly fitting.

There are books in the can apparently. Parker's next book, "Split Image," a Jesse Stone book, is due out next month. And, according to what his agent told the media, Parker had turned in several books that have not been published, including some in the Spenser series.

Parker is gone. But not entirely. Sunny Randall remains. Jesse Stone remains. Spenser remains. Loyalty remains.

Give me a college football playoff

College football's bowl games have lost their luster.

As a Baby Boomer, I'm old enough to remember a Sugar Bowl, Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl and Cotton Bowl.

No gimmickry. No marketing hype. No Citibank, no Papa John's Pizza, no Tostitos, no Meineke Car Care.

The bowl games were as pure as their name, meant to feature the best teams in the country on a New Year's Day extravaganza for fans eager to know who was the best of the best.

With so many bowl games today, we just don't know who's the best of the best when it comes to the top tier of college football. The Bowl Championship Series -- the arbiter of the chaos -- dilutes the importance and dulls the shine on the significance of bowl games.

There were 33 BCS bowl games to cap the 2009 college football season. They started with the New Mexico Bowl on Dec. 19 and they finished with the Citi National Championship Bowl on Jan. 7.

Sure, there were bowl games that attracted a lot of attention. But there were some stinkers too. Was it really bowl-worthy to have 3.5 million people watching the Dec. 22 MAACO Las Vegas Bowl between BYU and Oregon State?

My problem is that I'm left with the sense each year that we don't know who the national champion really is because there is no playoff system at the highest level of college football.

There is for college basketball, and sports fans love it. We dive into March Madness head first.

There is for the second tier of college football -- Division I. My University of New Hampshire Wildcats made it as far as the quarter finals before losing in the snow to Villanova, which ultimately became the Division I champs.

And there is for Division I college hockey. And it's great.

Unfortunately for the BCS, it's less about a true playoff and a true champion and more about money. The BCS is a $116 million business for the top tier schools, which is why Congress is so interested. There's an air of anti-trust that reeks among the BCS colleges.

But this isn't Congress's place. It's not a Democrat or Republican issue. It's not a White House issue.

The colleges and universities should fix their own house.

For the 2008 season, 108 million fans watched at least one bowl game. But many then -- as they are today -- were conflicted, according to a Neilsen survey at the time.

It found:

• 51 percent of all respondents agreed that “college football needs a tournament system like that which is used in college basketball”;
• 20 percent disagreed with the idea of a playoff;
• 9 percent were undecided;
• The most passionate college football fans (indicated by their responses) held stronger opinions: 62 percent want a playoff.

The men and women at these colleges and universities should be smart enough to figure this out. They are in college, after all.

Turn down the noise

No, health care reform is not the most pressing issue facing the U.S. Congress.

Neither is propping up the economy, or terrorism or global warming.

It's the ads on TV that are too loud.

You heard me correctly, and I didn't have to say it that loudly by PUTTING IT IN CAPITAL LETTERS!

I'm really tired of TV ads yelling at me.

As I advance through my middle years I admit that I don't hear as well as I used to. But I don't need the extra volume of a television ad that's trying to sell me a car, a high cholesterol medication or an adult diaper.

It's seems everyone is shouting like Billy Mays, God rest his loud-mouthed soul.

The issue has been around for a while, but -- maybe it's just me -- but the problem seems more pronounced now that we've gone digital. Analog was loud and annoying; digital seems more piercingly loud and annoying, it seems to me.

Congress is finally addressing this issue of national importance.

In mid-December the House on a voice vote passed a measure that requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enforce federal regulations requiring that television advertisements not be excessively noisy.

The measure was written by Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., after discovering it was a long-standing common complaint with the FCC.

Commercials would have to be aired at the same volume level as the programs they accompany.

Eshoo calls her legislation the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act -- CALM, for short. Gotta love it.

While I'm safe and sound at home -- cocooned somewhat from terrorism, health care woes and global warming -- I don't want to be assaulted by another means.

You can get your point across without screaming.