Chapter 44
We live in a diet-oriented world these days. You go to the doctor with an ingrown toenail or to have a mole on your ankle checked and what does he do? He puts you on a scale (which is set to always over weigh a person) and gives you a thousand calorie diet sheet to follow.
A thousand calories doesn’t SOUND so bad and the portions do seem almost reasonable.
The Idea of using a small plate makes sense.
So WHY doesn’t six green peas, on well-measured tablespoon of cottage cheese, and half a head of lettuce—with no salad dressing—make your stomach stop yelling for a candy bar and coke?
Maybe our grumbling stomach is what turns our thoughts and conversations to different types of diets.
We hear about low carbohydrate diets where you eat meat, cheese and eggs ’til it all begins to taste the same.
And then one night you wake up sitting on the floor in front of the ’fridge to find you’ve eaten your way through two chocolate layer cakes, a banana pie, four dozen doughnuts, and polished off the whole to do with two liters of COKE! !!
There’s the grapefruit diet, the fruit cocktail diet, and the banana diet. They do look good on paper—but then so does my family budget each month. And they usually end up the same… blown to bits!
Then there is the “no-will-power” diet pills the doctor might provide when all else fails. Several years ago, my doctor gave me these gorgeous little psychedelic-colored pills. Take one at ten in the a.m. to curb appetite, the directions said.
By eleven o’clock in the a.m. I was beginning to get the jitters, by noon I was on my third pot of coffee and the second package of chewing gum and by 1:00 p.m. I could tell anything to anybody at 750 w.p.m. (words per minute).
At bedtime when the whole family was beginning to grind down, I was waxing the kitchen floor for the second time that day. At midnight I cleaned closets. By 3:30 a.m. I had the living room walls washed down.
Usually sleep decided to pounce upon me about 8:30 a.m. So, I set the alarm for 10:00 when it was time to take my “no-will-power” again.
Lately I’ve decided there’s only one diet that really works. The one where you eat anything you want, anytime you want—EXCEPT food. That stuff is fattening. So, you may have ice, water, fingernails and sizeable chunks of the inside of your mouth to chew on.
And at the end of six weeks when you go back to the doctor you will have lost at least eight ounces. The ingrown toenail and the mole on your ankle will still be there but your diet is working!!!
Did you ever stop to count the letters in the word D-I-E-T? That’s right!! It IS a four-letter word!!