I Am Mathematically Challenged

What it means when one goes on a diet where every stinkin' calorie counts is that one must... count every stinkin' calorie.

We have been doing this for more than 3 years now. It has certainly worked -- we have both lost a lot of weight -- but at times it gets rather tedious, especially when one happens to be making something from scratch - like soup, for instance - and calorie counts for all the ingredients must be calculated and then summed and then divided by how many serving sizes there are or how much it weighs.

And then it gets rather interesting when the one doing all that calculating has trouble arriving at 4 when presented with 2 + 2, well.... case in point...

I made my version of hamburger buns the other morning, using 3 cups of flour at 400 calories each and 1 tsp of sugar at 15 calories.

When I took the buns out of the oven, I weighed them and the total weight was 1 pound 6.25 ounces.

To find out the calorie count for each ounce, I divided the total calories by the weight in ounces.

Everybody with me so far? G-o-o-o-o-d.

So I got out the handy dandy calculator and came up with 1215 calories for the ingredients (3 x 400 + 15) and 18.25 ounces for the total weight of the buns, which works out to about 66 calories an ounce.

The LOML says, "Wait a minute! That cannot possibly be right. Last time you made these you added oil and it was 61 calories an ounce. You're telling me you left out the oil and it is now 66 calories an ounce? Something is not right. Figure it again."

I figured it again and got the same answer.

I stood there and thought about it for a minute and... and... then I felt like an idiot. Of course 1 pound and 6.25 ounces is 22.25 ounces, not 18.25....

So we all breathed a sign of relief that each ounce of bun is now about 55 calories and the world is once again running in well-greased grooves.

And to think that during my brief stint as a schoolteacher, I enjoyed teaching math the most.