Joel Mathis

At the same time (and for the same reasons) I've embarked on a mission to lose weight, I've been getting started on medicine to bring my blood pressure down. With it remaining persistently but moderately high, the doctor this week ordered me to double up on the prescription. Today? I was wiped out by a combination of bad headaches, light fever, and unsettled stomach that I understand to be side effects. I took a two-hour nap after work, and woke only because my son was sent to rouse me. I feel like I'm starting this journey with a series of mistakes and excuses. But my body really is doing the thing it's doing today. So I'm going to celebrate one thing: Consistency of effort is not going to be easy to come by. But I haven't had a soda in a week. So. That's something. Just gotta string a few more somethings together. May 7 Weigh-in: -- Exercise: -- Breakfast: Bacon, egg and cheese on croissant Large iced coffee with skim milk Banana

If am to be successful, I need to figure out how to deal with stress, anger, rage, and general grumpiness without eating a large bag of potato chips. I don't wanna talk about it. May 6, 2013 Weigh-in (doc's office): 279 lbs Exercise : 1.48 miles of around-town walking. Breakfast : Veggie sausage, egg, cheese on toast Iced coffee with skim milk Um...Breakfast two: Iced latte with 2 percent milk Egg white and cheese sandwich on whole grain Lunch : Small bowl leftover chicken brown/wildrice Snack : Cup of trail mix. Snack : Greek yogurt Snack : Salt-n-vinegar chips (ooooooh no!) Dinner : Three bowls of salad (lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, cheddar, hard-boiled egg, Italian dressing)

A bit more than a decade ago, after 9/11, I lost a bunch of weight. It made me happy, I felt confident, and not coincidentally—from both a pants-size perspective and confidence perspective—I dated more during that period than at any other time in my single life. It was great. And all I did was two things: • I spent an hour on the treadmill at least four days a week. • I quit soda cold turkey. That's it. I ate whatever I wanted, and sometimes still ate too much. And I wasn't what you'd call slim: I'm never going to be what you call slim, I don't think. But I slimmed-down. It was awesome. And except for that hour a day on the treadmill—set at its highest hill settings, making me sweat like crazy—relatively easy. (Why did I quit? I got sick—sick with what now seems likely to have been a precursor to the diverticulitis that took me out in 2011. That at least consoles me on one level: If I got sick when I was fit, the illness was probably more genetic than

Clearly chunky. Lucky for me the black T-shirt has slimming qualities. Thanks to everybody who contacted me today, either through the comments here, my Facebook page, or via email, to encourage me and offer advice. I'm only a day into my weight-loss mission: One thing I haven't done yet is figured out how I'll do it. There are as many approaches as, well, people who have lost weight. I'm averse to strict calorie-counting—though it may be the way I have to go ultimately. I know from previous attempts that calorie counting actually made me obsessed with food. It's not wrong to think about what you're eating or how much; the calorie-counting process, though, triggers something in me that to think about food constantly, when I'm eating, when I'm not eating, mostly wishing I was eating. It actually works against healthy weight loss for me, I think. But: It may ultimately be that I have to calorie count in order to accomplish this. I'll be explo

So the blog is about to take a left turn, for reasons that will become apparent.  I keep thinking I've bottomed out. I keep finding not. Let's get up to speed very quickly: Two years ago this week, I went into hospital with stopped-up bowels. Turned out I had diverticulitis, a nasty infection on top of that, and was about to die. They performed a colostomy on me. Two months later, the doctors did a second surgery: A colon recission. That means they shortened up my colon. In practice, it meant cutting out old dead colon that had wrapped itself around my bladder. Oh, and: They punctured my bladder during the surgery. The colostomy, for what it's worth, created a hernia. And the doctors tried to fix that hernia when they reversed my colostomy in November 2011. But the fix didn't take. Today, I'm overweight AND lumpy in a way that being merely overweight doesn't describe. A CT scan a few months ago shows I basically have no abdominal wall between my belly b

The conservative writer Christopher Caldwell appears in this month's Claremont Review of Books , reviewing Closet to the Altar , a history of same-sex marriage by Michael J. Klarman. I'm going to leave most of Caldwell's arguments alone—Klarman can defend his own work—but I do want to contest Caldwell's seeming assertion toward the end of his piece that what makes the gay marriage movement particularly odious is its use of nasty strong-arm tactics: The most troubling aspect of the gay-marriage movement is that, more than any social movement in living memory, more than feminism at its bra-burning peak in the 1970s, it aims not to engage in lively debate but to shut it down. Scurrility has become a norm. In April 2009, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, told a Miss America judge she thought marriage should be between a man and a woman and got called a "dumb bitch" for it on the judge's website. If it is now easier to call people dumb bitches, then it makes

Over the last year, my blogging energies have been increasingly consumed by my work for Philadelphia Magazine . If you're looking for my thoughts on politics, that's probably the place to go. Thanks to those of you who have followed me here. I may return someday, who knows?

Interesting story in NYT today about how an American who won silver at the 2004 Athens games may now take the gold. Why? Retroactive drug testing : Doping protocols allow for officials to store samples for eight years and retest them for substances they may not have been able to detect at the time the sample was taken. When Bilonog’s sample was analyzed in 2004 at the Olympics, the results were negative, doping officials said. Eight years later, with new tests at their disposal, officials decided to re-examine about 100 samples from the Athens Games, focusing on certain sports and medalists. I'm kind of at the point that I don't care about athletes doping—I suspect that it's so widespread that it's no longer a competitive advantage, but rather a leveling of a dope-saturated playing field. I don't think that makes the competition that much less interesting: The drugs can't make the human body do more than it's capable of, ultimately. The testing protoco

Well, I'd love to hear from some of my Tabor friends about this , but the story SI describes doesn't seem terribly different from what things were like when I was a student at Tabor 20 years ago, at least in my mind. I even did a little research into WHY Tabor had a football team when I was there, digging through old stacks of the student newspaper. If memory serves, the team didn't exist until 1969. It started (and an existing soccer team shut down) more or less in order to stay in the KCAC—the worry being that the college wouldn't survive unless it maintained its membership in the athletic conference. The football team seemed to exist in a different universe than the rest of Tabor, which was no lip-service denominational college: It really did (and does) take seriously the mission of Christ-centered learning. The student body was pretty white and devout. The football team …much, much less so. Every year or so, there'd be one or two players who really participa

I understand that a newspaper applies somewhat looser standards in its letters-to-the-editor section than it usually does its own reported news and opinion columns, yet it's a source of unending irritation to me that the Philadelphia Daily News often lets blatant misrepresentations of fact reach its readers uncontradicted. I'm not against the Daily News printing opinions I dislike, understand. But I hate actual lies and untruths. And the latest emerges today from Pat Dougherty : Benghazi coverup? When will you do your duty to the American people and cover this tragedy honestly? You have covered for this corrupt administration for far too long. Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of this administration has the blood of those four dead Americans on their hands. You are complicit and their blood stains you also. Would you be so uninterested if this was a Republican administration? No, your headlines would scream of it daily! You are in bed with a man that, in his own

You almost get the feeling that Rich Lowry deliberately misunderstands : "O ne of the most extraordinary things about the post-election discussion is how Democrats and the media are hailing a more or less explicitly racialized politics in this country." Only if by "racialized" you mean "inclusive of more than one race." But I don't think that's what Lowry intends. Here's the breakdown : Roughly 72 percent of Americans are white. 12 percent are black, 5 percent are Asian, and 16 percent are Hispanic or Latino (which gets included in the "white" count, which is why this adds up to more than 100 percent.) Romney voters were 88 percent white . "We find that 2 percent of Romney's voters were black, 6 percent were Latino, 2 percent were Asian, and 2 percent had some other ethnic classification." And Obama? "Obama's support was 56 percent white, 24 percent black, 14 percent Latino, 4 percent Asian, and 2 perc

That's my suggestion in this week's Scripps Howard column , taking stock of the election results: Here's a bit of friendly advice to my friends in the Republican Party: It's time to stop being so afraid of minorities. It's the only way you'll survive future elections.  Save me the talk about how you're not afraid of minorities. Your party spent 40 years pursuing the "Southern Strategy" of demonizing blacks to curry favor with Southern whites. Your party held up Arizona's anti-immigration law -- along with its racial-profiling practices -- as a model for the nation. Your party just this year passed voter ID laws that were a clear attempt to suppress minority votes. And your party tried to win the 2012 election by digging up an old videotape of Obama just weeks before this election, suggesting (falsely) that it was proof of his reverse racism.  Republicans have sent a clear, unmistakable message. It has been just as unmistakably received. Th

A reader writes to me:   I don't know why it is that grown adults like yourself "cringe" everytime the subject of war comes up.  It reminds me of the rebellious reaction a child displays when asked to wash his hands or take a bath.  It's as is we exist in a vacume where no evil exists and some magic force will automactically protect us from doom.  This attitude is what lead the U.S. and the rest of the globe to downplay the role of Adolph Hitler until he secceeded in murdering 11 million souls.      But if we follow this path in regards to Iran we will face an outcome even more destructive than the fallout from WWII.  And "fallout" is the operative term.  If Ahmed Adinojhad reaches the ability to produce nuclear warheads he will either use them to wipe out Israel or as a threat to our efforts for peace.  And if you don't think he will do these things remember that the same thing was said about Hitler.      In short Mr. Mathis I suggest it's ti

Today at The Philly Post, I urge voters to reject Ballot Question 3 in next Tuesday's election. It guarantees jobs to grandkids. Really: Again, there’s no doubt we owe much to fallen officers and their families. No one doubts that. The fact that Philadelphia voters approved a similar measure in 2006, giving preference to the sons and daughters of police and firefighters killed on duty, makes sense. Those kids were directly affected by the loss of a parent. After that, though, the question is less clear—if we’re going to give grandkids a leg up in city hiring practices, why not great-grandkids, too? How far down the genetic line can we go? Do we ever get to stop providing full-time employment to the descendants of the fallen? If we can never fully repay the debt, does that mean we have to pay it forever?

My final endorsement, at Scripps Howard News Service : Four years ago, I was an enthusiastic Obama voter. Come Tuesday, I'll be a chastened Obama voter -- but an Obama voter nonetheless.  Civil liberties-minded liberals have reason to be disappointed in this president. He has built up the imperial presidency bequeathed him by George W. Bush, adding some new wrinkles of his own. Americans do not leave an electronic footprint that is not collected, in some fashion, by the federal government. Obama has given himself the power to assassinate citizens suspected of terrorism. It's uncertain whether we're more secure; it is likely we're less free.  So why vote for Obama? Because Romney would be worse.  Romney, with his memorable talk of "double Gitmo," would probably continue fortifying the security leviathan Bush and Obama have built since 9/11.  Along the way, it seems more likely that a President Romney would get us in a shooting war with Iran.  It se

Let me offer a quick caveat that Mitt Romney's story about having "binders full of women" to fill out his cabinet might actually be hogwash . And if folks want to attack Romney for telling a tall tale, be my guest. I get it. But I think there's another criticism of Romney and his binders that's not quite right. And it's this: " He should already have known qualified women to fill out his cabinet." And yes, he should've. But he didn't. So what should've happened then? Should he have ignored the binders completely and filled out his administration with men entirely because he hadn't previously cultivated those relationships? I don't think so. The reason liberals like me favor cultivating diversity, and even in using forms affirmative action to get there, is not because we believe in replacing merit with diversity, but because we believe that merit isn't limited to white guys—that it can and should be cultivated throughou

Since I started opining about politics four years ago, I've worked hard not to be a mindless hack. For me, that's meant trying to adhere to a few principles, and to analyze accordingly: If that meant Democrats ended up on the wrong side of the analysis, fine. If (less frequently) Republicans ended up on the right side, well, that was OK too. The important thing was to eschew tribalism and be intellectually honest. And if a few liberal friends rolled their eyes at me when I struggled with whether Barack Obama deserved my vote, I could live with that. Then Tuesday happened. And then George Will explained that the only reason the nation might re-elect Obama is race: We don't want a black man not to succeed. As though the president hadn't actually lost electoral suppor t because of his skin tone.  It was amazingly patronizing, and it had the side benefit of letting Will avoid analyzing other reasons the electorate might not want to see Republicans in the White House, o

I'm glad that Republicans are very, very against "race hustling," or I'd be very concerned about tonight's Fox News video of the president speaking at Hampton University in 2007 . I'm very glad that George Will has explained that the only reason somebody would vote for Obama is because they don't want to oppose a black president. I'm glad that Republicans have found old YouTube videos to prove the president's secret anti-whitey racism, because finding evidence of it in his actual governance is hard! I'm glad that actual black people don't suffer the effects of racism in 21st century America, but I'm sad that the only victims of racism these days are white conservatives. I hope someday, when they're ready and educate themselves a little more, they can rise up and fight that oppression. But even so, they should really be grateful to be Americans anyway! And hey, I'm glad this stuff happens when I'm agonizing over whet

Let me offer a necessary caveat up front: Bill Marimow has done more in and for journalism than I ever will: He's been at the helm of some great journalistic enterprises—the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and even did a stint at NPR—and collected a couple of Pulitzer Prizes along the way. He has decades of experience under his belt, and commands the respect of a lot of people in the news industry, and that includes me. But boy, oh boy: His interview with Nieman Lab about the future of the Inquirer is not an encouraging read. I emerged from it more worried about the state of Philadelphia's most important media institutions than I was before. And that's saying a lot. Let me set the background: A few weeks ago, I wrote a column for The Philly Post offering what I called a "radical" proposal for the future of the Inquirer, the Daily News, and the company that owns them both: Make the Inky an all-digital publication, with a paywall and a Sunday-only

My conservative friends and I argue, from time to time, about the existence of racism in our politics. These conversations are always the most bruising, and they usually come down to the same calculus: I see racism in areas of our public and political life where they don't, and they resent being tarred as racists--or seeing others tarred as racists--for comments and actions that aren't necessarily racist. It's a conversation that happened again today in the aftermath of Mitt Romney's birth certificate joke, and my own cranky reaction to it.   It just so happens that Ta-Nehisi Coates has an essay at The Atlantic called "Fear of a Black President," and the title alone, I think, is guaranteed to irritate and offend my conservative friends. "There liberals go again, blaming the backlash to President Obama on race instead of the real reasons for the intense opposition!" And yes, it comes from a liberal viewpoint. But I still hope it gets a good readin