Flatlined

In the movie Flatliners, a group of medical students headed up by Jack Bauer, decide classes are too boring to sit through alive. To achieve a new level of Zen, they decide it would be fun to kill themselves, one at a time, just to see what death is like. (I could have told them that. Just go see the movie Flatliners.) The basic procedure went something like this: The volunteer kills himself with some sort of injection, if I recall correctly. After being dead about a minute, the others defibrillate the hell out of him (or her), at which point the subject talks about what it was like to know someone who knows someone who knows Kevin Bacon.

What a great analogy for the last three weeks of my diet. Here’s an illustration:

That’s me standing over my diet. I’m in need of a dietary defibrillator at the moment. In this analogy, Julia Roberts represents Julia Roberts. (It’s a Zen thing.)

The movie itself is named after the term “flatlining” which refers to that beepy machine that measures your heartbeat with a bouncy green dot. (I believe the technical term is, indeed, beepy machine.) When the green dot moves in a straight line, and the beep turns to a boooooooooooop, you’ve flatlined. At that point, if you can’t be refibrillated, you’re about to join either Sam Wheat or Willy Lopez. (Am I allowed to mix movie metaphors?)

Here’s the closest thing to a dietary flatline:

I’ve overlaid last week’s weights with the previous two weeks’ weights. No severe upticks is good. But I’m stuck, which is bad.

There’s no mystery surrounding this. My average caloric intake has crept back up. I’m not overeating, which is good. But most days are coming in right at that “BMR” value, something obviously supported by this evidence. To get myself going again, I have three choices: cut back on the calories, exercise more, or start ordering cases of Acai berries. What would Jack Bauer do?