How Bob Mould and Justice Scalia helped me lose weight. Really! You've got to go with the inspiration that happens to come your way in life.

A few years ago, when Justice Scalia gave a talk at the Law School, I ended up sitting next to him at the luncheon that followed. When I somehow had the nerve to banter about how neither of us was eating the dessert, he told me about his diet, which sounded like the Atkins diet--I think it was the South Beach Diet. His comment: "You can have all the butter you want, but you can't put it on anything." That inspired me to go on a diet, just because I figured, it was so strange to talk about dieting with Justice Scalia, that I had to go on a diet. So, thanks, Justice Scalia!

More recently, following a link from (I think) Gawker, I checked out diet tips at Bob Mould's blog. Now, Bob Mould offering diet tips on his blog is scarcely on the level of a personal discussion with Justice Scalia. But one of the tips was to buy a good scale, with a link to Amazon. You may remember my recent run-in with my doctor's scale, which weighed me about 20 pounds more than my home scale. The home scale was pretty untrustworthy, because I could stand in different places on it until I got a weight I was willing to accept. So Bob Mould's advice and link caused me to get the high tech scale. It arrived and forced me to see the reality: the doctor's scale was right. So now I'm desperately trying to live up to that scale's standards (aka "reality") and am Atkins-ing once again. So, thanks, Bob Mould!