Tom's Diary

Dear [Melinda],

On curbing your appetite:

• When you cut back on the refined carbs, you may feel extra hungry for several days while your body adjusts itself to the new diet. You can attack such hunger with small, high-protein snacks like chicken or turkey breast, cheese, sardines (packed in mustard, hot sauce, or water only), and lean red meats. My favorite is deer meat when I can get it. It’s very high in protein but quite low in fat. Avoid the bolognas, spam, salami, scrapple, and such, because these contain lots of inferior meats and numerous additives and preservatives.
• Rid your diet of all caffeine (including green tea, black tea, orange pekoe tea, and Earl Gray tea, as well as all   decaffeinated   tea and coffee varieties). The caffeine can exacerbate hunger pangs and make weight-loss more difficult according to Weight Watchers. Alternatively, you can get similarly beneficial antioxidants in the herbal teas that are naturally caffeine-free (such as spearmint, peppermint, and the fruit-leaf teas like orange, blueberry, raspberry, lemon, and so on). The Bigelow and Celestial Seasoning tea companies make a wide variety of caffeine-free flavors. You can also find some wonderful tea blends in bulk at the health food store. Please note that   caffeine-free   is not the same as   decaffeinated.  The decaffeination process adds chemicals to an otherwise natural product, and does not remove   all   the caffeine. So it’s best to start with a tea that never had caffeine in it in the first place.
• Don’t expect your body to go more than three to five hours without feeling hungry. Even when your diet is pristine, experts say that it’s best to eat five to six small meals a day, rather than two or three big ones.
• Also, the medications you’re on may be amplifying your hunger symptoms. Get off of them as soon as you’re better.
• Take a high-quality daily multivitamin (like Centrum or One-A-Day). However, avoid mega-doses of specific vitamins and minerals. These haven’t been proven to work consistently, and they can poison your system if you flood your blood with them. The multivitamin helps ensure that you’re getting proper nutrition, even when your diet goes awry. They’ll also help your body achieve homeostasis and thereby reduce the frequency and severity of your hunger pangs.
• Avoid eating or drinking anything (except small amounts of water) within four hours of bedtime. [Eating too much too close to bedtime] keeps your digestive tract running while you’re sleeping, and this makes for a broken sleep (where you’re waking up in the middle of the night and cannot get back to sleep for hours).
• Avoid long naps during the day. The amount of time a person can nap without affecting his sleeping patterns at night varies from individual to individual. I can take up to a one hour long nap without impacting my night sleep. If I go over that however, I’ll either have trouble getting to sleep at bedtime, or I’ll go to sleep but will wake up during the night. You’ll have to experiment with this to see what works best for you.
• Your last meal of the day (say around six o’clock in the evening) should consist primarily of protein (like meats and cheese), as well as the complex carbs found in whole grains and vegetables. Eat your simple carbs (fruits) earlier in the day. Eating too many simple carbs can bring about pre-mature hunger and make it more intense than it needs to be. So if you want to reduce how hungry you feel during the night, avoid deserts in your evening meal.
• Be careful of how much milk you consume. Milk contains lots of sugar (lactose), which can make you hungry before you’re supposed to be. Try drinking the unsweetened soy (Silk) or rice drinks (Rice Dream).
• As a general rule, avoid eating anything white (sugar, flour, cauliflower, excessive salt, rice, Etc.). Such refined foods digest too quickly in the body, producing a rapid sugar rise in the blood, and promoting excessive hunger later.

Later,
Tom

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Dear [Tad],

No, I didn’t know Clark Tracy. Was he the one that Trish Badey took over from when she did the afternoon slot [on KDKA radio]?

Did you get my siren message? *snicker*

Tom Hesley

Dear [Parliamentarian],

The revised bylaws have been uploaded to the web site [here].

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tad],

Well, this fills in many of the blanks. I never heard Trow, although I saw Pallan often when I worked the student internship at KDKA in 1978-79. He was always nice and welcoming to me, and encouraged me to pursue my radio interests. And of course, he was the keynote speaker at our graduation. Good man. I liked him.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tad],

This is some interesting technology. I wonder however, how the environmentalists will respond to it. Radio waves strong enough to charge a cell phone may have deleterious health effects to those working close to the transmitters, not to mention the interference they’d likely generate.

Tom

[Art Pallan was a mid-day DJ who worked at KDKA radio in Pittsburgh. I worked with him during an internship I did there in my senior year in high school, and he was the guest speaker at my high school graduation ceremony in June of 1979.]

Dear [Tad],

We’re getting old man. I wonder when he [Art Pallan] left KDKA. Was it when they went all talk back in the 90s?

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tad],

Interesting that they’re suing for only one performance. It’s hard to believe that simply one performance would cause enough damage to Broadcast Music Inc. But the music industry is going really wild over even small infringements.

Tom

Dear [Tad],

Actually, I could give it to you in nanoseconds if you wanted. After all, it’s a computer. Would you expect any less than precise, to-the-second times? Besides, when DJ-ing, we need the precise timing. Makes it easy to find songs that can fill a certain amount of time such as that found just before the top of the hour. My software doesn’t search for songs based on length yet. But I’m adding that feature.

Tom

Dear [Tad],

Actually, the song is 3:59 – almost 4 minutes. Apparently, your voice mail system rounds the time down to the nearest minute.

Tom

Dear [Tad],

Well, it seems that I’ve developed a chronic case of insomnia these days. Oh, I can get right to sleep when I lay down, but four or five hours later, I wake up again, and then can’t get back to sleep for two to three hours. Since I’ve as of yet not been able to master this difficulty, and since I won’t take any sleeping pills, I figure that I might as well use this nocturnal awake time to get some real work done. Thus, the voice mail [to you] at 5:03 AM.

Tom