Gluttons & The People Who Envy Them

That scowling cat was just too cute to pass up yesterday but you have to realize what happens inside your head when everyone around you is heaping thirds onto their plates and you can’t have a second tiny glass of wine. You just feel like pinching them hard on the fat of their thighs, these people with their Sweet and Spicy Doritos and their special darn beers and those shiny marconi almonds that come all slippery with oil right? I mean, right?

Eh. Not really. All that passes pretty quickly, to be replaced by immense delight that just for today as people in recovery say, you are patrolling your borders and not tipping whole refrigerator shelves into your giant maw of a mouth.

I started Weight Watchers when I first started to date Old Dave “Dude, your hair’s out of style” I told him about a month in, when it seemed safe to offer a little constructive criticism.

“Yeah well you’re a little FAT!” he said back with a merry smile and maybe that’s why I liked him. While there has never been any cruelty, there has never been any of the old BS either. The man doesn’t lie.

SO ….. I began on Weight Watchers and went from 146 to 125 and that lasted until after my first baby, when I went down to 118. After my third baby I hit 112, if only briefly and these many decades later have evened out at around 132 - though of course now much of the muscle has gone to that something like you see in those bags of fluff you buy to stuff pillows with. And of course here in the waiting room that is Osteopenia, my bones are like Sponge Bob’s bones.

 It’s OK with me. The men in my life eat their fried egg and bacon. I eat my banana on plain Shredded Wheat. They have a Coke with their meal. I have sparkling water, pepped up with my special mixture of mint tea and no-cal lemonade. And yes sometimes I get to put a splash of red wine into this mix and boom! Sangria! And sometimes I put in a splash of whiskey and boom again! A whiskey sour!

But mostly I am able to abstain from these little extras because of the great satisfaction I get out of the fact that JUST FOR TODAY I am not ending the day by strapping on a feed bag drooly with Ben & Jerry's best.

And that, ladies and gentleworms, is a victory all by itself.

Darn DIET!

This is how I feel lately.

I have a giant boy living  here who can sit down in front of a bird like this and have most of it gone in 30minutes.

I also have a man excellent at batting cleanup.

I'm the cat in the picture, always on a diet, always scowling sourly away at what others are feasting on.

Maybe I'll just stab it with one bacteria -laden claw and hope they both fall sick.

Secret Eating

This is me having my afternoon snack yesterday. It sure is hard to get back on the old weight-loss plan until you get to the place when there's NO bad food in the house at all!We’re just about getting there now, on the 14th of January.Our trouble is, we get these tins of nuts through the mail at the holidays. They’re gifts from people who want us to die young: greasy cashews, super-salty almonds, macadamia nuts even, which have more fat than you find on the thigh of a pig.Then there’s the whole array of specialty chocolates people bring.And the bottles of wine.It’s all part of the holiday haul which takes longer than you think to dissipate.Lucky for me. Old Dave plays cards once a week his grizzly scotch-drinking pals. That's when I trot out all this hi-cal stuff and put it right near to where they’re playing.It works pretty well unless this one guy brings his famous pan of chocolate chip brownies studded with walnuts that I want to get under the covers with and eat every crumb of.Instead, I make Dave take care of it. “Hide this from me and never tell me where it is no matter how much I beg!” I tell him."Jeez! Show a little discipline!” he says but he hides them yes he does because he’s no fool. He knows if he wants to feel that butter-and sugar-and-dark-chocolate combo on his own tongue he’ll have to hide them.He’s pretty mean to me come to think of it, teasing me, calling me "fatty" and all and making "boom! boom! boom!" sounds when I walk across the bedroom floor - when in fact I weigh 20 pounds less than I did when we met - And he weighs AT LEAST 20 pounds more than he used to. Ok I've gained 15 pounds since the millennium but that just brings me to 135, and he’s calling ME fat?That’s the thing with men though: they don’t look fat. Dave has a big deep chest and legs that weigh like 75 pounds each as I learned when I was moonlighting as a massage therapist and he never looks fat.So there it is: your man looks awesome and manly with this white hair that the ladies all swoon over while YOU, no matter how trim you get with Weight Watchers, are still just this aging chick with cellulite.Well whaddya gonna do? At least I got this cute new haircut. :-)

Packin'

I went back to Weight Watcher’s because I started looking like Homer Simpson in my underpants but here was the problem: The last time I'd tried going back they turned me away. They said given my height I wasn’t overweight enough.  “A person would have to have a weight someplace within this range to qualify, CAROLINE” they said, using my real name  which always makes me feel like, Help it’s the nuns again. I couldn’t take the chance of being turned away again so  I started lying the second I walked in the door. I said I was two inches shorter than I really am in the hope that I would seem heavier in relation to height, and I also did another thing: I stuck a couple of five-pound weights into my pants and went to the weigh-in like that; stepped onto the scales and boom, I was in.

Every week after that I slid those dense little packets into my pants and sure they made me walk a little funny but they worked. The 1st week I lost some actual weight through careful eating. The 2nd week I plateau'd.  The 3rd week I overate a tad, so just took one of the weights out  before going there. “Down five pounds!” the lady sang. And the 4th week I ate everything in sight and so took out the other one. “Another five!” she rejoiced and pasted a little gold star into my booklet.

Sadly, when I stopped 'carrying' I also stopped 'losing.'  Some weeks I even gained, and the nice lady would try to comfort me: “But look how much weight you’ve lost since you began here! A whole ten pounds!” Sigh. So I guess I feel better confessing here but if doing so in such a public forum gets me kicked out, well then what will I do, if they bar the door and take away my Points Tracker?

Well. Recovery is over-rated I can always tell myself - and couldn’t I just pack my car full of Ding Dings and Ho-Ho's quicker than you could say Jack Robinson! Plus hey there's always alcohol. And anyway think about it: Who wants to be a skinny grandma ?

Hello. Can I Bite Your Head?

Back on the diet. All it took was going up four pants sizes in 18 months. Oh and having a doctor say my stomach would never again be flat (you childbearing sow you) unless I had a hair-raising procedure whose recuperation involves not just the wearing of a corset with the squeeze-powers of a boa constrictor but also actual drains dangling down like a lady’s garters in the Naughty But Nice catalogs. S-o-o-o-o-o back on the diet.Now I’ve been going to Weight Watchers off and on for centuries but never did write down what I ate. Big mistake, as it seems the only way to lose the weight it is to make a full confession every day of every single thing that has passed your lips.Last Wednesday was my first day and I did great. Ate an almond; recorded it. Ate 4 tablespoons of powdered milk; recorded it. Drank the juice squeezed out of this morning’s half grapefruit: recorded that. I‘ve eaten 10,000 green beans in six days’ time because Glory Hallelujah green beans have no points at all.I was doing great for a while there. Then I went to the celebration of our grandbaby’s birthday party for which his cheery Aunt Annie made a cake shaped like a monkey’s head with jug ears and a big smiley mouth and Junior Mints for eyes. She said she was going to serve it on a platter like the head of John the Baptist and sure enough: she did.“What kind of cake IS this Annie?” I moaned, tasting a tiny morsel and drooling down my chin. “Banana, get it?" she said. "With my special chocolate frosting of course.”When she graduated from Boston’s best culinary school a few years after college she won the Julia Child Award which she claims is like being named Miss Congeniality but come on: Julia Child is Julia Child. Suffice to say I had three giant pieces and had to use the next FIVE DAYS in the Weight Watcher food diary to list all my points.But I’m hungry again now and frankly I’m turning a little mean. The diary has a place where you’re supposed to record Other Victories This Week I wrote “I didn’t kill anyone - yet” but tell ya what I make no promises.