So, I finally went to see a doctor about my vertigo, since it wasn't going away by itself. Of course, when I've been hit by this in the past, it's never gone away by itself, but still, I delayed seeing a doctor.

What finally pushed me over the edge was the growing pain I was noticing in one of my ears late at night, making it very difficult for me to sleep. This shouldn't have surprised me, as previous bouts of vertigo have almost (but not quite) always been accompanied by an ear infection or two.

Saw the doctor the next day and, sure enough, two external ear infections and likely one inner ear infection. Many drugs and several days later, and the problem began to subside.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of one of the drugs in question is headaches (nothing new, alas), while another is increase in appetite. As the vertigo began to clear and as my appetite grew, I began to crave soda for the first time since I went cold turkey. While I didn't succumb, I did manage to stuff my face with a bunch of other foods, thereby putting my weight loss to a temporary halt.

But all that is over now, and my appetite has been somewhat easier to handle. The vertigo has vertigone, I've still managed to refrain from spending time with ol' Dr Pepper, and the weight loss has resumed. As of yesterday morning, I'm fourteen pounds below my maximum weight, and still slowly dropping.

Not that you could tell to look at me. I guess that's to be expected when one is already eighty to a hundred pounds over their ideal weight; a fourteen-pound drop really isn't all that noticeable. Still, if I ever am to get to the point where my weight loss *is* noticeable, I'm going to need to continue to make the measurable-albeit-invisible progress I've been making thus far.

There was a Saturday Night Live sketch a few years ago that made fun of Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or some program like that, where they have meetings and talk about being fat. In the sketch, the meeting leader kept saying "No food tastes as good as being thin feels," as a mantra. I'm guessing that this particular line is an actually line lifted from a real weight loss program. It's a great line. I occasionally think of it, and reword it to my current situation: "No Dr Pepper tastes as good as being thin feels...."

But I don't feel thin. *And* I don't get any Dr Pepper. And some Dr Pepper would sure have tasted great with lunch today. But, well, who knows? Maybe I can eventually get to the point where I'll again experience how "being thin feels."

I seem to recall it feels like being hungry.

When I saw the doctor about my vertigo, we also talked about my general health. He had me do some blood work, and it turns out that, well, I'm a healthy guy. I think he was disappointed. It's easier to say, "Being fat is bad for you!" if, in fact, you happen to have all kinds of bad things in your blood that correspond with you being fat. To be totally honest, my cholesterol is just the tiniest bit higher than normal. Alas, that was also true the last time I had blood work done (ten years and fifty pounds ago), and the proportion of good to bad cholesterol remains healthy, just as it was back then.

So, yeah, the doctor is encouraging me to continue to stay off the soda (and to eat more veggies, besides), and he endorses my plan to add some exercise to the program before too long.

I've been soda-free now for over a month. I'll only have to keep this up for the rest of my freakin' life.

PS: "Feed the fat. Because fat people are the hungriest people of all."