The Cheeto Diet

While men have spent centuries beating the crap out of each other on the battlefield, women have spent centuries beating the crap out of themselves about their weight. Neither sex has the genetic disposition to understand why the other pursues their particular chosen battle. Women don’t give a damn who won what war so long as nobody they love died, and men boast a positive self-image even if they sport a belly that looks like they’re about to give birth to a keg.

It is one of life’s ironies that men, who don’t notice if they are eating filet mignon or shaving cream so long as they can do it in front of the television, can lose weight with ease, while women undergo a personality transformation and support a multi-billion dollar industry to lose two pounds in six months. As we women continue to pursue our centuries-old Battle of the Bulge, our men continue to baffle us with their irreverent attitude towards food.

My fiancé shovels upwards of 6,800 calories into his face opening at lunchtime, via Whoppers and French fries and ice cream sundaes, without paying any attention to the taste. Meanwhile I have not had a hamburger in over three years and if I ever do, I will promptly gain 5 pounds. Despite his regular diet of fried grease, my fiancé never puts on weight.

A friend of mine is trying the South

Beach diet. She carefully weighs, inspects and dissects every morsel of food before putting it to her lips. She serves her husband chocolate ice cream and sits down with a bowl of sugar-free Jello for herself. (Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think “watch it jiggle” is a particularly strong selling point for a dessert.) She has been overly generous making sure that her restricted diet does not affect her naturally slender husband in any way. And yet the other day when she proudly announced to him that she’d lost 4 pounds he responded, “Really? I lost six.”

“But you’re not even on the diet,” she managed to sputter, while mocking images of him eating potatoes, carrot cake and Cheetos flittered across her vision.

“Yes I am,” he responded, surprised. Hadn’t he gotten a single bacon cheeseburger instead of a double at lunch yesterday? Actually he’d ordered the double but was too lazy to return it. The point being that: a) he had not noticed that he consumed different foods from her at mealtimes and b) he did not notice that his meals were exactly the same as they’d always been, thinking he was automatically on a diet because she was. Just the assumption of a diet was enough to cause him to lose 6 pounds. Which proves theory x: Men lose weight just by being in close proximity to someone (usually a woman) who is on a diet.

But even if men do have to go on an actual diet, it is of little consequence to them, because they never cared that much about what they were eating in the first place. My father says things like, “I don’t think I want any breakfast. I’m still full from last night’s dinner.” What does yesterday’s food have to do with today’s? Today is a clean slate, and I’m not about to cheat myself out of a socially acceptable meal. Or he’ll say, “Hm, I’ve put on a couple pounds. I think I’ll lose some weight.” And then for the next two weeks he’ll just not eat dinner. It is inconceivable to me to skip a meal when it is all I can do to restrain myself from having extra food.

Just the thought of having to go on a diet will send me into a depression so severe that I start to lose my eyesight and hearing. I spend several weeks being so depressed that I eat even more, until I finally hit rock bottom when the scale no longer has the scope to accurately determine my weight. Then I will drag myself out of bed and with a heavy heart pull the much-used portion control measurements out of the cupboard. Normally portion control, to me, means I am done eating when the item is gone. This applies to a bowl of cereal, a chicken breast, or a one-pound bag of M&Ms. Then I start writing up a grocery list of things like “low-fat cottage cheese” and “fat-free sugar-free ice cream” and “low-carb whole-grain bread with extra fiber.” The list will be fuzzy from my tears, like a much-read letter from a loved one killed in war.

Then I embark on a battle that lasts approximately three weeks, which is how long it takes for my snail-like metabolism to catch on that I am on a diet, put the word out to the rest of my body, and start thinking about using some of those extra stores of fat it has socked away in various places, namely my ass, for a rainy day. For those first three weeks getting on the scale is a dangerous business. Both my fiancé and the dog have learned to keep their distance because it is very likely the scale will come hurtling through the air after my morning weigh-in. For those first three weeks I eat nothing but things that taste like sand, and I don’t see any results.

But right around the beginning of week four the scale will start to play with the idea of inching toward the left. It will toy with me for a few days. You lost 1 pound! No, two pounds! No, I changed my mind – you haven’t lost a damn thing! No, wait, just kidding – you really did lose two pounds. I mean four! Four pounds!

“Four pounds!” I will shout jubilantly to my fiancé and the dog, who are hiding under the bed. “I lost four pounds!” I will scream and cry, running around the house like a character from Chariots of Fire after the big race.

“This deserves a reward!” I will tell myself. Positive reinforcement is the best way to maintain a diet! “Everybody in the car! We’re going to Krispy Kreme!”

I may have won the battle, but the war has just begun.

Slip Bridin' Away

An unmarried woman over the age of twenty-one is such a rare circumstance in Alabama that it could be an X-Files episode on the Turner South Network. One of those really disturbing ones because the premise is almost realistic enough that you could imagine such a thing actually happening. As a thirty-something single woman, I have received a lot of unwanted attention from overly concerned, well-intentioned strangers. To avoid inappropriately lashing out at them, I’ve had to come up with a few creative ways to amuse myself when confronted with their distress.

For example there’s this fun little game that I play with the guy in my office who delivers our mail. It’s called “Why Aren’t You Married Yet?” The way the game is played is, every day he asks me a question, which he thinks is subtle enough that I will not understand its origin. He has narrowed his focus down to two possibilities: either I am not really as old as I say I am, or I have an indiscernible communicable disease. “How is it you’re not married yet?” is the main question, of which there are many variations, to which I respond depending on my mood: “Haven’t found the right guy!” or “Oh, just lucky I guess!” (that one really stumps him) and I’d been saving, “Because lesbians aren’t permitted to marry in Alabama!” for a particularly dull day.

My favorite question so far is, “Have you always looked like this?” No, I want to say. The reason nobody has married me is because up until just last year I weighed 350 pounds and had a problem with facial warts.

But alas my amusing little game is going to come to an end. I’ve got a surprise for the mail guy that will probably save him a lot of sleepless nights: I got engaged.

While my being engaged has caused the better part of

Alabama to let out their breath in a collective sigh of relief, it hasn’t really saved me any grief. Because now I get to be humiliated by an entirely new set of people: wedding vendors. For example, in the middle of a telephone conversation with a potential disc jockey the man asked, “Wait - are you the bride?” “Yes,” I replied, for some reason feeling as if I had done something wrong, and he clarified, “Oh, I wasn’t sure, since you sound so… mature.”

As if at the ripe age of thirty-two I will require a walker to assist me down the aisle.

To avoid this latest type of unwanted attention, I have developed a new game in which I adopt the personality of what I imagine to be the typical 19-year-old bride planning her wedding:

“Um? Hello? Is this, like, the caterer? Okay, like, I want only pink foods? So they’ll match my colors? Blush and roseate?”

Wedding vendors seem much more comfortable taking unreasonable demands from a girl just barely out of braces than discussing rational expectations with a mature, practical thirty-two-year-old. But that’s okay, because I can really have some fun with this.

“Do you know, like, the slip n’ slide? Okay because what I want is, like, a slip n’ slide down the aisle, and then, like, the bridesmaids will slide down it on their stomachs? Holding up the bouquets? Oh! And the slip n’ slide HAS to be pink or I will totally freak.”

So while getting engaged may have only increased the spotlight on my graying bridal head, it has at least provided me with a couple of interesting new hobbies. Another one is staring at my engagement ring, although that can be dangerous, particularly in heavy traffic. But the sunlight coming through my dirty windshield creates some really eye-catching effects that you’d have to be dead – or male – not to appreciate.

Any place we frequently visit has now been categorized as having “good sparkly lights” or “bad sparkly lights” and this can weigh heavily on decisions, such as where we will go for dinner. “Look!” I stage-whispered the other night in a tightly packed restaurant while flailing my left hand around over my head, “I’m making rainbows on that guy’s shirt!”

The combination of engagement giddiness, frustration with vendors, my resulting adaptation of an obnoxious nineteen-year-old’s persona, and the distracting sparkly of my ring has rendered me pretty much insufferable to most people. But ask me if I care. I’m engaged! I’m engaged! Like, totally!