I love math, and I loved teaching it. 

I told my students, “It is the only thing in the world that makes sense.” If you do it right, the answer is utterly predictable.  There’s a fairness to it:  if you lighten one side of an equation, you must lighten the other.  There was the simple elegance of the Pythagorean Theorem, something so absolutely true that even today, when everyone argues about everything, it is universally accepted.  There’s that tricky ± in a quadratic formula that is scintillating.  And what is sexier than the swish down and up of a parabola?

Sometimes it was hard to convince middle and high school students that math had real world applications.  After all, hardly anyone travels by train anymore, going either 40 miles an hour east or 70 miles an hour west.  True, math can help you determine the height of a flag pole, and who doesn’t want to know that?  And if you need to break the ice at a company gathering, tell the politically incorrect joke about the flummoxed country boy who declared, “Pie are not square, pie are round.”

Turns out, I use math every day, counting my carbs and fats and sugar.  I use math so I can squeeze my fat ass into my jeans,

My friend Katy says when she wants to lose weight, she just uses a smaller diameter plate.  You don’t have to be Euclid to know what a 6” plate looks like, and you don’t have to be Oprah to know how to fill it. And you don’t have to be a pastry chef to know how much cheesecake a 6” diameter plate can hold.

Today I attended a function with three meal choices.

The first was a field green salad.  You can call this by any name you want, but it is essentially curly-edged grass. 

The second option was spaghetti, meatballs, and garlic bread.  Just reading the words made my mouth water, but of course I couldn’t have that:  simple carbs mixed with meat ladled over a pile of simple carbs with a side of simple carbs slathered in herbed butter. 

I did the mental computation, adding and carrying and such, and came up with exactly 45,025,039 carbs in that single meal.  I divided that by the number of carbs in green beans—thank God I spent a year of my life learning long division—and found out that, well, who cares.

The third choice was vegan chili.  It sounded healthy.  I mean, it was vegan after all.  But, then, so are Oreos and Fritos.  And Mountain Dew and Jim Beam.  “Yes, thank you, garçon, I will have the vegan chili.”

I smelled it before it was placed before me:  a cloud of cumin and onion and garlic with just a whisper of cocoa. 

And there it was:  a mound of fettucini I wasn’t expecting.  Delicious, I was sure, made with bleached flour, completely devoid of nutrition.  It was the color of cream, not like whole wheat noodles that are the color and texture of burlap. 

And on top there was cheese, oh glorious cheese, already a melted puddle of deliciousness dotted with diced onions.  Between the pasta and the cheese was a soupy chili made with lentils.  No creature with a face was tapped for this chili.

But before I picked up my fork, I started counting.  Cheese is a calorically dense food, but I eyeballed it and convinced myself it was only an ounce, the weight of a pair of dice.   I did the mental computations and concluded that there was about as much fat in that glob as was stored in my left ear lobe.  And, I reasoned, if the cow that gave the milk for the cheese was grass-fed, I would be getting a healthy dose of omega 3 fatty acids. 

The pasta . . . oh, that tangle of pasta!  The curving parabolas of semolina!  Fiber was nowhere to be found, but the fettuccini contained enough starch to stiffen a clerical collar.  40 grams/3 dice of simple (delectable) carbs. 

Even the lentils were legume pinatas fairly bursting with carbs, as much as in pasta, offset somewhat by their fiber.  How would the lentils affect my glucose? 

Fortunately, there is a simple formula I could use for determining lentils’ glycemic index:  the incremental area under the curve (iAUC) for blood glucose after consumption of a test food divided by the iAUC of a reference food containing the same amount of carbohydrate. 

Glad I love math and am not too in love with lentils.

Using my fork as a colander, I separated the pasta from the liquid and lentils.  I pushed the noodles aside and was left with a meal more efficiently consumed with a straw than a fork.  It was good-ish.

I took a break from my arithmetic to survey my tablemates. 

A man across from me was eating like a horse at the trough. The robust woman on my left was mopping up her spaghetti sauce with her greasy bread.  The dog ate their math homework.

The rest of us were the mathletes:  The woman across from me had pushed her half-full plate aside and was ingesting antioxidents from a wine glass. The thin woman on my right was dabbing her lips with her napkin, though it appeared she hadn’t consumed a bite. The woman wearing a beret had frills of field greens stuck between her teeth.

When I was a kid, my mother never allowed me to do my math homework at the kitchen table. 

That was a good rule.

Related Blogposts: 
My Weighty Weight
Never Marry a Thin Man
My Body of Work
Exercise:  It’s a Hoax
The Four Food Groups
Do These Chopsticks Make Me Look Fat
My Fitbit Impressed My Friends, Cleaned My House, and Saved My Marriage