I am pleased to report that despite three pregnancies and a middle-age threat to my waistline, I still wear a size 8.
Okay, I’m talking about shoe size.
I haven’t worn a size 8 dress since elementary school. Even then, my school uniform looked like a plaid tent. I have never been thin in my life. I was always the last person team captains picked for baseball games, unless they needed bases. After years of not only listening to fat jokes but being one, you’d think I’d be used to my ever-expansive shape by now and just learn to love myself, no matter how many wicker chairs I break or how many fires I start while strolling in corduroy slacks. But there are too many living, breathing stick people walking around, pointing their bony bodies in my face and prodding my guilt to the surface.
Take my neighbor, for instance. She is the poster child for eating disorders. Her size 2 jeans hang on her like clown pants. Last year, her kids used her bony body as a Halloween decoration. The woman has to wear cement shoes just to keep from blowing away on a breezy summer day.
I know the time has come for me to swap excuses for action. I must face the plain truths that my girdle always seems to run screaming from the bedroom when I come near it, that my neck has more chins than an oriental phone book, and that my flabby underarms resemble a condor’s wingspan.
Today, I pledged to never surrender to the battle of the bulge. In fact, I’m so sure that I will go to my grave wearing a spandex leotard, with a rice cake in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other, I had “Here Lies Skinny” engraved on my pre-purchased tombstone. I have burned my Pudge Club membership card and have resolved to take yet another dieting plunge.
D-Day morning begins with the all-important weigh-in. All bathroom scales lie. Every woman knows this is true. Therefore, prior to mounting, I adjust its inadequacies by calibrating the device at least five pounds less than where it started. I feel better already, until my loud talking scale fibs again and announces my weight in all its glory for the entire neighborhood to hear. I take its punishment into my own hands and promptly whack it into submission with a sledgehammer. Figuring I probably burned 200 calories by doing that aerobic activity, I happily head downstairs for some fortification.
Breakfast. The most important meal of the day, say nutritional experts. Lots of high fiber food opportunities in this meal, they say. Yeah, right. If God had meant for us to consume five portions of fiber daily, he would have made cardboard edible. Fiber sure tastes like corrugated paper, to be sure. Forget it, I say, as I whip out the somewhat fibrous Frooty Loops and the sugar bowl. Scanning the cereal box for vitamin content, and realizing that my choice of breakfast cereal is woefully lacking, I decide to increase my daily requirement of Vitamin T (for “Taste”) and dollop some Cool Whip Lite (after all, I’m dieting) on top of the colorful fiber. Add a glass of chocolate milk for calcium, and my day is off to a healthy start.
Okay, now for some exercise. I decide to make up my own version of “Sweatin’ With The Oldies” and start huffing and puffing to the tunes of every Disney video The Toddler watches today.
I’m amazed at how much clearer my mind has become since starting this regimen of blood-pumping exertion. While doing deep knee bends, I began to realize that Gepetto wasn’t the greatest dad to have allowed Pinocchio to walk to school during his first day as a real boy. Snow White was definitely a pervert with a fetish for vertically challenged men. Cruella DeVille would have been one helluva college drinking buddy. And The Little Mermaid’s hair will one day fall out from the constant exposure to salt water.
With every clock in the house programmed so I won’t miss a meal, I eject the videos and run to the kitchen as the cuckoo clock chirps its delightful tone, reminding me that lunch approaches. It seems like eternity since breakfast. The Toddler’s hungry, too, so I sprinkle some chicken nuggets and fries on a cookie sheet and wait for them to bake. In the meantime, the guilt over my breakfast fiasco starts to get the better of me, so I make up for it by consuming only a slice of unbuttered toast and half a diet soda.
This bird-sized meal in my stomach feels like a thrown snowball against a brick wall. My hunger pains are still rumbling so loudly that I almost missed hearing the stove timer sound the alert to prepare The Toddler’s noontime feast. Setting the plate down in front of her, she informs me that she’s no longer hungry and opts for an apple instead. Not one to waste food when there’s starving children in Africa who could eat for a week on this small offering, I make the sacrifice and polish off six nuggets and all of the fries. I then smugly jot down a notation in my food diary: “Today, I saved Ethiopia.”
With the lunch plates cleared and naptime near, I am so exhausted from fighting with my appetite that I lay down with The Toddler in her bed. While she sleeps peacefully, I peer around her room at her Barbie doll collection. If Barbie were a real woman, scientists say her body measurements would border on the abnormal, something along the lines of 56-18-32. If Barbie were a real woman, say I, she would have three bratty kids and a butt the size of her Dream House. She’d also have nipples and a boyfriend who was not only anatomically correct but employed, too.
Now painfully aware of my food deprivation-induced delirium, I tiptoe from The Toddler’s room for a well-deserved mid-afternoon snack, not wanting to add to my hallucinations any further. I set up the blender to make a smoothie of bananas, yogurt, and skim milk. Finding the drink a tad on the chalky side, I add some ice cream just for texture. After all, there are no calories in anything that includes fruit.
By the time the kids come home from school, I am busily chopping and dicing the evening dinner: a huge, garden-fresh veggie salad. One look at the bowl and the kids lament, “Awww, Mom, are you on another one of your infernal diets again?” Sympathetic to their whines, I add a few hunks of salami, ham, and pepperoni to the mix. The salad still looking a tad nude, I toss in some garlic croutons, fry up a steak and some bacon to crumble into the bowl, and grate in some Parmesan cheese.
Hubs walks in the door from work and grimaces, too, so I add some Greek feta and chunks of cheddar, a spray of sliced black olives, a slathering of ranch dressing, and voila! A 200-calorie diet meal suddenly becomes a 2,000-calorie “coronary special.”
If it weren’t for kids and husbands, middle-aged women would each weigh 90 lbs. I swear they’re out to sabotage me just so I will keep the pantry forever stocked like a bowling alley snack bar.