Like the majority of the population, I spent the month of December cramming Christmas cookies down my gullet as if afraid a gang of pterodactyls would swoop down out of nowhere and snatch them away from me before I could get them safely in my mouth. So I am now faced, in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, with the challenge of losing those extra five pounds so my boyfriend will find me sexy and alluring enough to buy me a refrigerator-sized box of chocolates - which will slap those five pounds right back where they were.
But like every other woman I don’t want to actually go on a diet. So I spend a lot of time seeking alternative methods of weight-loss that do not a) cost thousands of dollars or b) have side-effects resulting in a tiny layer of hair growing all over my body. But then what?
Exercise? Don’t be silly. For one thing, the gym is too crowded with all the New Year’s Resolutioners. Plus, if you’re like me, you make only a half-hearted attempt at a “work-out” involving a treadmill you wouldn’t touch any other time of the year with a toilet bowl plunger. You have to claw your way through the crowds and fight for the machine in order to proceed with your 30 minute walk at the pace of, approximately, 0.017 miles per hour, before treating yourself to a McFlurry on the way home as a reward for your efforts. So forget the gym, because that kind of weight-loss regimen will only make your pants tighter.
Those miracle weight-loss pills they advertise on TV seem like a great idea, but you know if you’ve tried them that the effect is not so much turning you into a svelte supermodel, as turning you into an overweight psychotic on speed. Although I would not recommend them for weight-loss, I would recommend them if you have an urgent need to paint your entire house in one evening, or if you feel your moods are just too darn smooth and predictable for your taste.
So this year I tried, albeit not on purpose, a new form of weight-loss guaranteed to work: the stomach flu. The stomach flu serves two unintentional purposes: one, it causes you to violently remove from your body everything you have ever eaten, or thought about eating, in an efficient twenty-four-hour period; and, two, it tests, just before Valentine’s Day when you really need to know, how much your boyfriend really does love you.
Forget a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover’s. Any guy can do that. But will he hold your hair while you puke with great gusto into a trash can, even getting a little on his socks, and then, instead of crying “OH MY GOD THAT’S GROSS!” and fleeing from the room with his hand over his mouth (which is what I would have done), reach over and tenderly wipe a string of vomit from your chin? I mean, that is love, my friends.
And who needs a dozen roses when you’re lying in a pool of fevered sweat and sobbing because you’re, frankly, just a big fat baby when it comes to being sick, and he pokes his head in and says, “Can the towels go in with the sheets?” Because he is actually, unprovoked and out of respect for your inability to move even your pinky finger, tackling tasks that heretofore he has always categorized as Needless Chores Women Make Up Just to Torture Themselves.
But the best thing, better than a fancy dinner or a piece of jewelry, is when you are finally able to crawl out of bed, just in time for Valentine’s Day, and hobble weakly straight to the scale to discover that the trauma of the past few days was not for nothing: you have lost five pounds. And you tremble your way back to the bedroom and cry with a watery smile, “I’ve lost five pounds!” and he looks at you, the memories of fever and chills and throwing up and passing out with your head half in the toilet still fresh in his mind and says, “You were already perfect.”
What better Valentine is there?
Happy Valentine’s Day, SC! And thanks for washing out the trash can. That had to be pretty disgusting.
© Karen Bertiger 2005. No changes may be made without permission from the author.
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