mardecides

Newsflash! It turns out Food is bad for me. Carbs, specifically. So I’m “On the Beach”, which is a cute little marketing slogan required to try to help you forget that this diet is not even close to being on a beach. Oh wait; it’s not a diet, but a lifestyle choice. They probably should have thought of that little nugget prior to calling it the “South Beach Diet”.  I think the SBD marketing team needs to do a focus group. I doubt tuna, beans and fat-free cottage cheese are what people think about when they hear “beach”.   You know what I want to make tonight for dinner? A heap of pasta with garlic bread. But instead, I’ll eat my lettuce with chicken and cottage cheese and pretend it’s soooo filling and good. Because I have this cute skirt I want to buy and wear before I’m too old to pull it off. Well, any skirt really, even an ugly one. And South Beach, for all my bitching, seems the most logical for my body and my body’s various quirks.  But, it turns out that sugar is bad too. And sugar doesn’t just reside in chocolate, cake (put those two together and there’s a ménage trios I’d be in to), candy and pop. Don’t forget fruit. Grapes and bananas are the new junk food in my life.  

So why am I fat? Is it the sugar? The carbs? The fat? The calories? The lack of consensus among nutritionists is confusing and irritating. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but this all seems to be a huge profitable marketing scheme. There’s a diet to support any eating habit or lack thereof. And don’t forget all the handy tools needed to get the full effects of these “lifestyle” changes that can be all mine for the low price of $$$ucker. Books, pedometers, calorie counters, journals, pre-packaged meals and “candy” (ha!), little digital mechanisms designed to come in handy at the grocery store until you realize you left it at home but even if you had remembered it, you still wouldn’t be able to figure out what numbers to plug in where.   But this is just me beating around the fat bush (ew, that sounds dirty). The logical and obvious answer is I am fat because of my lover.  My on-going love affair with Bad Food has made me fat. And I absolutely love Bad Food in large quantities. Chips, pizza, pop, chili dogs…mmm, so good. And Bad Food loves me so much that he wants to hang out with me All. The. Time. He has bonded to my chin, belly, upper arms, and thighs. Quite frankly, he’s getting annoyingly clingy.  So, I’m trying to break off my sordid affair with Bad Food and start a healthy relationship with his twin, Good Food, and maybe even fool around a little with his cousins, Exercise and Portion Control to keep it spicy. But, this love affair is so hard to let go. I have to stop thinking of all the good times we had!  Maybe if I play a bunch of Chicago (You’re the Inspiration, Hard Habit to Break, etc.) and think of all the times Bad Food let me down and pissed me off, it will help me move on…