I’ve always loved the thought of jetting off to one of those fancy weight-loss spas — the kind where a 4-star chef turns ordinarily salads into culinary masterpieces and, between rounds of seaweed wraps and Swedish massages, you still manage to drop 15 to 20 pounds. Unfortunately, my budget can barely stretch to cover the cost of travel supplies, much less the actual travel to such a location.

That means I’m actually going to have to work at weight loss. Fortunately, with Spring just around the corner, I’m hoping that becomes a bit more easy to do.

See, I plan on taking up walking this Spring. I figure that it’d be a good thing for my son and I to do together as a break during our homeschool day and, besides, it doesn’t require any extra equipment. After all, I already own a pair of feet so why not use them?

Besides, I’m pretty inspired by Becky Tuttle’s success: she’s lost 44 pounds by cutting out Coca Cola, eating 5 servings of fruit or veggies each day, and walking 10,000 steps.

To boost the number of steps she takes, she parks as far away as possible, wherever she is. She makes two trips by foot at home when one would do. She takes the dog for an extra lap around the block (the dog has lost weight, too). If she’s still short at the end of the day, she runs up and down the steps at home. And “If you go to Wal-Mart and Sam’s on the same day, you’re almost guaranteed to get 10,000 steps.”

I’m pretty certain she doesn’t mean going to Wal-Mart to stock up on Doritos and Sam’s for a gallon of Ranch dip, though.

At my husband’s request, I’m not going to be trying that Cabbage Soup diet until the weather warms up. He’s got a point: being cooped up in the house with the smell of cooked cabbage (and the GI symptoms that can produce) is pretty much anyone’s idea of hell. Which means I either need to look into hotel deals or wait and, well, I’m quite skilled at postponing anything diet-related.

Then, yesterday afternoon one commercial after another came on TV pitching Alli diet pills as the cure to all diet problems, which made it really difficult to enjoy the jalapeño and bacon cheeseburger my husband made for our lunch. But it did remind me that I’d had a little success with Alli over the summer, so why not give it another try?

After all, I have everything I need already to get started: a spare bottle of pills and six brand-new pairs of dark-colored sweat pants thanks to a sale at Wal-Mart. Anyone who’s taken Alli in the past knows that dark-colored pants are absolutely essential to dealing with the possible “unwanted treatment effects” including bowel changes.

Bowel changes. Notice how they phrase that? It means stuff will be happening the likes of which you could never have imagined. It’ll be like a daily Dean Koontz novel inside your underwear.

If you wear underwear, that is.

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You’ve probably already heard about the Gorton’s fish fillet recall prompted by a Pennsylvanian woman’s discovery of pills in her crunchy-battered fish fillets. What you may not know, however, is that I have 19 boxes of these things in my freezer… the same 19 boxes I bought last July.

See, back then my husband was out of town for a month and I got it into my head that I’d eat nothing but fish and steamed veggies while he was gone. As luck would have it, our grocery store had a 2-for-1 sale on Gorton’s fish the first day he was gone so I bought 20 boxes and figured I was set for lunch and dinner for the next 30 days.

As luck would also have it, I discovered midway through the very first box that I don’t like Gorton’s crunchy battered fish fillets. In fact, I’ve since discovered, I don’t like eating fish more than once a week unless it’s sushi. (I could eat that stuff daily and still never grow tired of it.) So I moved the remaining 19 boxes to my downstairs freezer and promptly forgot all about them.

When I read the report about the recall the first thing that went through my mind was that I had finally found a way to get my money back on the darned things. Unfortunately, I’m not in the five states affected by the recall, which means I’m out of luck. Also unfortunate — as I’ve since discovered — my fillets don’t have any pills shoved into them.

Man, I never catch a break!

UPDATE 03.16.2008 – Turns out those pills in the Gorton’s fish were herbal supplements, although no one knows how they got there.

The cabbage soup diet (also known as the Dolly Parton diet for some reason) seems like it’s been around forever.

A couple of women over on the Fox health blog have been giving it a shot, though, and by day 7 each of them had lost five pounds. Oh, sure, with fad diets like the cabbage soup plan there’s always the risk of regaining every pound lost the instant you go back to eating “real food”, but that’s not what happened to these women:

After the seven days on the Cabbage Soup Diet we have both lost five pounds — and as a result we are keeping better track of what we are eating, when we are eating and why and how it is prepared. There are more fruits and vegetables in our diet, lower carbohydrate intake, less sugar and more exercise. I have personally lost another four pounds keeping this healthy lifestyle.

I’d love to tell you about my success on it, but I’ve never stuck with it for longer than one day because — as I’ve since discovered — I was doing it all wrong. I thought the point was to eat the soup, tons of soup and nothing but the soup for seven straight days. Turns out, there are quite a few other foods you get to eat, too.

Now, I happen to love cooked cabbage. I’m a pretty big vegetable fan in general, for that matter. But I have a hard time going for more than five days without meat. As I’ve since discovered, following the cabbage soup diet doesn’t require that.

So below the fold, for those who are curious, is the cabbage soup recipe along with the daily foods that are allowed. If you try it, let me know how it goes. You just might inspire me to give it a shot, too!

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Yet another drawback to being an overweight 40-year-old mother of two who has a history of smoking, drinking and exercising as little as possible: affordable insurance is something that, like thin thighs, I pretty much just dream about.

However, because I am a mother, I know that no matter how expensive insurance is, it’s well worth it. I know of too many people who figured it was a luxury expense so they didn’t insure themselves and, unfortunately, tragedy struck and left their families struggling to replace that lost income.

Luckily, thanks to my husband’s military service, our health insurance is free. A cash value life insurance policy, on the other hand, costs a pretty penny and, really, we have better ways to use that money right now (like paying bills!).

Our solution? We’re looking into term life insurance which costs significantly less while guaranteeing that if something were to happen to either of us during the span of the term (10, 15 or 20 years), there’d be money available to support the surviving spouse and kids. Best yet, if we invest the money we’re saving on insurance premiums each month we can also build up a nice little retirement nest egg, too.