The Husband Diet (A Romantic Comedy) (7 page)

BOOK: The Husband Diet (A Romantic Comedy)
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Chapter 8:

Dieting Disasters?

I
t was like there was this big pink elephant in the room all these years and everyone saw it but me. I was the pink elephant that needed to go on a diet pronto.

It was never going to be fun but I started on Monday. And religiously broke it by the time Wednesday rolled around despite the fact I spent most of my free time with Paul, who was lighter than me, ate properly, and in small quantities—not like me, the garbage incinerator. I could eat anyone under the table. Figured I’d run into someone like him.

“You need to do it for yourself, not for Marcy’s approval or for a man. Think of a sexy dress,” Paul urged. “Think of Elaine Richman’s dress.”

I snorted. “That was thirteen years and four dress sizes ago.”

“But remember how beautiful you were? Remember how it made you feel?”

I thought about it. “Pinchy? Pricked?” He’d borrowed the dress from the Wilbur Theater and put a couple of pins in it so my boobs wouldn’t spill out just in time for my end-of-date-one kiss with Ira. And I had to admit the dress had been my pass. I sighed. If I ever wanted to be a size fourteen again, and I was going to do this properly, it would have to be for a better quality of life in general. To finally look in the mirror and say to myself,
My, aren’t you pretty? Where have you been all these years?
But how did people manage to do it?

Resigned to learn more about skinny people, like fascinated ufologists studying the possibility of extraterrestrial life out there, I subscribed to an online dieting service. Now, I’d heard of online dating services, but online
dieting
?

There was so much information on the Net—most of it discordant—and cartloads of (again) contrasting rules: don’t drink (water) anywhere near your meals; drink
lots
of water during your meals; drink only
before
your meals; drink only
after
your meals; and finally, don’t drink
at all
. The same went for fruit: eat fruit only two hours
after
your meal as it will otherwise ferment in your stomach; stock up on vitamins before your meal so your body won’t need much more; eat mostly fruit.

Get out
on your skateboard (huh?) the minute you finish your meal and
burn
those calories right off!

Rest
for twenty minutes after your meal so your blood will go straight to your digestive system and perform better.

Chill out
with your family before a meal so you don’t pounce on your plate the minute it’s set before you!

First of all,
nobody
has ever set my plate before me. And by the time I’ve fed everybody else (they do the pouncing) mine’s frozen solid again. So don’t tell
me
to chill out.

Who was a gal to turn to?

And then one day, to make things clear, I received an email with The Golden Decalogue to Being Slim:

Always plan meals.
That was easy. I always planned very rich meals worth living for.

Cut quantities by 50%.
Yeah, and because you’re still starving, have a chocolate bar to fill the void and eat 200% more at dinner.

Drink water a half hour before, not with your meal.
Glad someone’s made up their mind.

Drink water in the mornings and before going to bed
(I can’t; I’ve got a bladder like a sieve and I can’t keep getting up in the middle of the night—I need my beauty sleep).

Sit at a laid table.
Haven’t you been listening to me?

Chew everything 30-50 times.
This actually works, because once you’ve managed that, you don’t want to swallow it anymore.

Wine only with meals.
No problem—I’ll have pizza along with my glass of Chianti between lunch and dinner.

No eating between meals
. Scratch out above.

Eat everything in moderation.
That simple, huh?

Put knife and fork down between mouthfuls.
That’ll be interesting to watch when you have two kids at the same table playing tennis with their food. It’s a question of when I can
pick up
knife and fork.

So there they were—the ten things I had never, ever thought of and neither had any other woman on earth.
Really
, if I cut my intake by 50% I’d swallow fewer calories? The asshole that wrote this Decalogue was full of it, and certainly had never had to starve himself (a woman, even a thin one, would never have written such bullshit). What was he on, la-la drugs? Where did he live, down the rabbit hole?

Determined to have a better understanding, I began to observe what thin people ate. Did they really eat less than me? Then how come everywhere I turned in the street there were slim Jims gobbling down hotdogs, ice-cream sundaes, nachos—
with salsa
—chicken curries, and all the food you could possibly imagine? And at every hour of the day? Once I had had to run to the pharmacy in the middle of the night and had bumped into a man wolfing down something that looked disgusting but smelled absolutely delicious. I almost asked him where he got it.

How was I expected to ignore the food that literally swirled around my head, filling my nostrils, day in, day out, from the doughnuts I found at work in the mornings, to the snack trays that passed me on their way up to the suites? Not to mention the dining hall laden with delicious, fancy foods.

My boss, good old Harold Farthington and owner of Farthington Hotels, had given me access to the same food our guests were treated to. And everywhere else I went there was great grub—carts with hotdogs on the streets, pasties in window shops, mouthwatering fragrances wafting out of restaurants and cafés. Making it home clean and empty-stomached was impossible after being ambushed by drive-thru signs or plazas teeming with diners, bakeries and restaurants. This was, after all, the United States, land of plenty too much.

Thus you can understand how grocery shopping was a real torture-treat for me. Since Paul was preparing snacks for the kids at my place, having picked them up from school, I almost always shopped alone. One word of advice if you’re on a diet: never shop alone. Food will ambush you. So bring your trusty backup, someone who will still love you after you’ve verbally assaulted them for not minding their own goddamn business. And
always
shop on a full stomach. Otherwise you’ll get all sorts of food fantasies and end up buying the whole supermarket.

Once I had a dream that I got locked in this shopping center for a ten-week period of closure. They were the happiest ten weeks of my life. Aisles and aisles of everything I always (and constantly) wanted. Hot chocolate? Choose your brand. Reese’s Pieces? All you can eat. Don’t worry, the Plus Size department is on the third floor.

So this new me, I’d decided, was going to eat properly. Not to attract Ira, but to look better and feel better about myself. No more caramel-coated popcorn, no more chocolate (I know it sounds heinous and unnecessarily cruel, but that’s how I did it the first time), no more bread and butter, no more mayo, no more fried stuff, no more desserts—no more nothing. Just good, wholesome food. Half the quantities I used to eat (see Golden Rule Number One). And a trip to the gym every other day. There was one in the hotel and I’d been given an honorary membership years ago when I went back to work after Maddy’s birth. Yeah, as if I had the time.

Maybe someone should invent a washer-dryer that is pedal-powered, or maybe build a pedal-while-you-do-the-dishes thingie. That would break the world record of most bought and less used piece of shit ever.

I squeezed my Kia van into a space big enough for a Mini Cooper right opposite Food World, debating whether to get a shopping cart. If I was going to buy myself some diet food and eat half as much (was I really sure I wanted to go through with this?) surely I didn’t need a shopping cart? But you know me—soon I’d be standing at the checkout, breaking my bladder for a pee and craning my neck looking for a basket, juggling my low- to no-fat items in my arms and evil-eyeing the usual old lady who had bought half the store and wouldn’t leave me an inch of space on the conveyor belt.

I decided to do a dummy-run diet first. So I grabbed a small basket and picked my way through the Healthy Foods section which, in my local supermarket, was way at the back. In fact, I’d never even noticed it before. Right. Here I was. So. Low-fat cream cheese. Rice cakes for when I was sick of melba toast. Melba toast when I got sick of rice cakes. Parma ham? Are you kidding me—and pay twenty-seven dollars a pound when I could get it for free off my own dad? Yoghurt. Low-fat, of course. Cereal? Muesli, to help the digestive system, if you know what I mean. Which reminded me: skim milk. Fruit, lettuce, tomatoes (no mayo, no bacon). What else? Not much, apparently. I turned the corner and—ooh—low-calorie jam? Tucked inside low-calorie
doughnuts
? And, further down, low-fat muffins! Unbelievable!

There were shelves and shelves of low-calorie desserts, from
tiramisù
to apple pie. How was this even possible? And in the freezer, low-calorie
lasagna.
And
cannelloni
. Shepherd’s
pie?
Chocolate ice cream?
Surely I had died and gone to diet heaven? How could it be possible to eat all these fantastic, mouth-watering foods and still lose weight?
And why did it have to come out of a box if I could make my own?

Why was good food fattening? Why couldn’t we just live an easy life eating what we wanted, like animals? Have you ever seen a fat tiger? Or a fat fly? I did everything I could to avoid delving inside me. I ate because I was sad. I always had been. The brief gorgeous stint in my early twenties had simply been a commercial break in the long miserable movie of my life.

Accepting I needed to change wasn’t a gung-ho idea or a knee-jerk reaction to Ira’s infidelity, like it may seem. It was a painful process—a daily ordeal with just me and my shortcomings. Me and my weaknesses. And my goddamn fear of failing again and again. I was sick of failing, sick of trying to lose weight all my life. So in the end I’d given it up.

Skinny women had absolutely no idea what we were going through, every single day of our lives. Therapists made me laugh, especially thin ones. Granted, they were balanced. But I’d be balanced too if I’d had a normal life, possibly in someone else’s skin.

My mouth already watering, I juggled all my stuff – and there was loads of it—to the checkout, paid and went home. Paul was going on a date and waiting for me at the door. “I thought you’d gone
diet
shopping,” he sighed, peeking into the bags.

“I have,” I answered, hustling by him in my haste to sit myself down to a succulent dinner and not feel guilty about it for once.

And so after I’d fed, washed and put the kids to bed, I rubbed my hands together and reached for my succulent, guilt-free foods.

Guilt was not the right word.
Disappointed
was more like it. The shepherd’s pie, which I’d had a major hankering for, was about as big as the palm of my hand. All that big, big box and cellophane to protect
this
? I opened the
lasagne
as well, just to make sure I hadn’t been gypped twice. There it was: Golden Rule Number One. This was less than fifty percent of what I was expecting. Much less. It wasn’t fair, considering I’d paid double the price for it. If I’d made my own, it would’ve been even cheaper. Ah, but my
own
, I argued with myself, wouldn’t have been low-fat. So chin up and dig in!

Sighing, I nuked the
lasagne
and shepherd’s pie. There was no point in lying to myself by saying that the
lasagne
would be enough. I mean, look at it. I could hide it with my hand cupped over it. At least I was being honest with myself. I know people who would have defrosted one thing at a time, pretending to have good intentions when they very well knew they were going back into the kitchen to nuke the second box as well. At least I was straightforward and I knew what I wanted. And right now all I wanted was to swing by
Le Tre Donne
and have my
Zia
Maria cook me all my favorites in
my
helping sizes—not this microscopic, processed bullshit.

I poured myself a glass of
Nero d’Avola
red wine and reached for my prettiest place mat, the one with the linen fringes. As per all the weight-loss websites, if you set the table nicely, with maybe a candle or a rose and some pretty crystal glasses, you could fool yourself into actually enjoying your meal. Sighing, I set my place with small plates and cutlery. From Maddy’s old plastic toddler set, to be exact, which was the smallest I could find. And
still
it didn’t look like much.

Gathering my provisions on a tray, I went into the living room and flicked on the TV just in time for the BBC America program, Fantasy Homes by the Sea. People wrote in the requirements of their dream home and every week searching families would be featured. This week was a British couple looking to move to Tuscany. The host of the show had found them a lovely farmhouse in Chianti, with acres of vineyards, outbuildings for guests and even a pool. I instantly sat up, ignoring my measly meal. Now
that
was something I’d swap a
tiramisù
for.

The host walked us around the property and I found I was hanging from her lips. It had everything I wanted, including my annexes. But when she revealed the price I winced, thinking that at least once in her life Marcy had been right. She’d always told me to marry as rich as possible, average-income guys being, according to her, cheaper and much
meaner
than the rest. Not that she spoke from experience, having been raised in the lap of luxury, with a silver spoon stuck down her throat, etc.

My parents both came from high-income Italian families. My paternal grandparents—the Cantellis—owned a successful citrus conserve factory in Sicily, while Marcy’s—the Bettarinis—had olive groves and vineyards in Tuscany, very much like this one on TV, and shrewdly marketed their own brands of olive oil and wine. Then in the fifties, for reasons beyond me, both families emigrated to Boston. I wish I had been born and raised in Italy. I wish my
Nonna
Silvia hadn’t sold up and invested in the U.S. Why the hell would someone want to leave beautiful climes, a simple life and happy faces? I’ll never understand. Here in the States it was always rush, run, rush, hurry, hurry, hurry. The silence and slow-paced life in Italy was more appropriate to my solitary nature.

BOOK: The Husband Diet (A Romantic Comedy)
7.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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