Are You Gonna Eat That?

Well it’s mid-January once again, and time for my annual self-flagellation as I ponder the great cosmic mystery of why I am so damned fat.

This ritual is usually set off by some seemingly innocuous event, such as walking naked past one of the two mirrors that hang in my home and actually looking at what I’ve done to what was, in the best of times, a sub par body. Staring with utter revulsion at the image before me, I’d leap into action by slathering some creamy (all natural of course) peanut butter onto a vanilla sandwich cookie and begin to think about losing weight. After all, bikini season is coming and I don’t want to look bad sitting on the beach in my mu-mu, hating the girls whose bodies have the ability to stir thoughts of a brief May/December lesbian fling in the minds and hearts of America’s grandmas. So for all of you who consider Scooter-Pies to be the perfect dietary substitute for needless fiber, love, affection and fruit, I offer you Mama Julia’s Three-Step, Sure Fire Plan for Weight. Class, open your books and let’s begin!

Step One: Thinking about it.

According to the experts at the Kardashian School of Wreckonomics at Botox University in Saline, Wisconsin, thinking is highly overrated in today’s modern I-Society. More and more humans are finding that in the post- Michelle Bachmann era, thinking can actually be a hindrance to the quality of life. Yet, an exhaustive study done by Le’ Institute de Pommes Frites clearly shows that thinking burns 1/10 of a calorie per minute. And if you really want those pounds to melt off, try thinking hard. That will burn a whopping 1.5 calories per minute! Who needs Pilates with this kind of extreme workout?     

Some examples of thinking hard would include the question, what exactly does she want me to think about? This is a great place to start because it immediately moves you into the thinking hard category and upping your burn rate. If you don’t know what to think about, then think about thinking about what you don’t know what to think about. Confusing? Sure. Maddening? Absolutely! But soon, you’ll begin to feel those pounds dripping away as you think about thinking. This, along with the valium drip the psychiatric nurse will be administering to you to calm you down will give you a sense of calm and peace as you drift away with your imaginary dead cat, Chuckles by your side. And if you thought conscious thinking was frightening, wait until you get a load of twilight sleep thoughts!   

Whenever I begin Step One (which I do each Monday), a great deal of my careful analysis always has to include the ‘reasons’ I haven’t been able to lose weight. The novice may find this difficult at first, but with careful practice it gets easier and easier. After nearly sixty years of cognizance, my expertise in this practice can pinpoint with 99% inaccuracy the actual non-scientific, non-facts over my inability to shed tonnage. Let me share some with you

I am sure, for example, that my daily intake of  just 2mg of estrogen is really just a highly concentrated form of hot dogs, cake and pie, Fettuccine Alfredo, pizza, and of course, my beloved chocolate. Also listed as ‘reasons’, are my exercise allergy, still recovering from the sprained ankle I had in sixth grade, and the fact that I’ve reached an age where letting go of my looks is a constitutional right endowed by my Creator. I strongly recommend that you sit down at the kitchen table tomorrow morning with a cup of coffee and a buttered Twinkie and begin to list your ‘reasons’. Try it, it’s fun and educational!

If you’ve done Step One properly (and I’m sure you have), you are probably exhausted from your workout. Plop yourself in the Lazy Boy, turn on the TV and cool down by slowly flipping the channel changer button to see ½ second of every channel your cable system has to offer. Then, before you drift asleep, ask yourself, why am I paying two hundred dollars a month for this crap? This encourages some additional hard thinking and more calories burned! While you sleep, no less!  

Now we are about to move onto the subject of exercise, and Step Two of the plan.

Step Two: Find a piece of exercise equipment to pin all your weight-loss hopes on and buy it NOW!!!!!

NOTE: If this is your first attempt at Mama Julia’s Sure Fire Plan for Weight, I need to offer you a quick cautionary tale on the subject of exercise equipment. Veterans, you can skip this part. There’s cold pizza in the fridge; go and get a slice.

My chubby newbie friends, please be aware that in your zealous fervor to sculpt the perfect body, which everyone tells you that you need, you might want to rush out to your local sporting goods store to purchase a piece of exercise equipment. DON’T DO IT! These medieval torture devices are expensive, and because of their size, often need to be housed in a separate structure from your home. The downside of course, is that you will actually have to walk to the piece of equipment, and I guarantee you that on the first rainy day, you’ll find every reason in the world not to go. Eventually, it will just become a place to hang paint rags, nasty gym sweats, and automotive repair tools until you finally get so disgusted with tripping over it that you wind up selling it at a garage sale for twenty dollars or best offer.  

Through my vast weight experience, I have discovered that all the exercise equipment you will ever need can be purchased on television. No matter what your problem area(s) are, there is a product on that magic box that will claim to cure it. And, unlike expensive home gym equipment, you do not need a premature withdrawal from your 401k to purchase one. Nearly everything on TV is only $19.95! (Plus tax, shipping and handling)

You might be asking yourself right now, okay Mama Julia, with so many wonderful exercise products out there, how do I know which one is right for me? Glad you asked! Here again, experience has shown me that you should not even look at any product infomercial that has the words “Iron Man”, or the phrase, “of Steel” in its name. Those products actually require you to sweat and do physical exercise. My advice is that it is best to rely on those that have the word “Abs” or “Flex” in them. Generally, these products are effortlessly easy when actually used, and can often be folded and tucked under the bed, never to be seen again.

Once your equipment has arrived, assemble it directly in front of the television as an incentive to use it. You will feel a sense of excitement as you unpack it. This is caused by the adrenaline rush you get from thinking of your gorgeous self in just six short weeks. Adrenaline, as you many know, speeds up the heart, which causes you to burn more calories. Plus, as you simply think hard about locating all the little nuts and bolts that exploded out of the baggie all over the floor when you pulled it open, you will get a calorie burning BONUS jolt of adrenaline. Feel the burn baby!

Step three is about to come up and I’ve developed this method to dovetail nicely with your exercise regimen.  Don’t stop, you’re doing great so far!    

Step three: ­Develop a sensible eating plan by spending outrageous amounts of money on pre-packaged, infant-portioned food products.

You thinny-thins are very fortunate to have fat people in this country, I’ll have you know. Without us, there would be no multi-billion dollar diet food industry, which employs thousands of hard-working Americans. Unemployment would skyrocket, and the nation would once again be plunged into a deep, nasty recession. You don’t have to thank us. We do it for the love of God, country, and Entenmann’s. But enough with the accolades already! Let’s talk about eating right.

 I’ve heard a lot of talk about the glycemic index. Developed by Dr. David J. Jenkins in 1980, the index is a number which measures the effects of carbohydrates on blood sugar levels. Personally, I don’t need this, thank you. I prefer to use IHOP’s Rutti-Tutti, Fresh and Fruity Pancake method to achieve the same result. All you need to do is order one of these meals, pour on the syrup, chow down, and wait about five minutes for the process to begin... and it will. In no time at all, your sugar will be spiking so badly that seismologists will be registering it on their undersea sensors. You’ll be breaking out in a cold sweat and begging one of your friends to get you outside before you pass out.  But at least you will have had the pancakes along with a healthy lesson learned regarding how you process carbs.

If you do have a low tolerance to carbs, you might try the all protein plan. This one allows you to eat all the cheese omelets and sausage that you want. I can vouch for this plan personally, but only if I can offer some advice. Be creative and tweek it a little; try adding more variety to the meal by adding home fries and buttered toast 

Meal replacement ‘shakes’ are another popular item but generally don’t taste very well. Oh sure, they are thick and creamy like a chocolate shake, but no amount of beloved chocolate can hide the taste of whatever chemicals they put in them. So in order to make them more palatable, let me suggest adding a scoop (or two) of your favorite ice cream. Just toss the shake and ice cream in a blender for thirty seconds and voila! A wholesome, nearly healthy meal is yours for the drinking!     

Your last port of call on the “good eatin” express is of course, television-where all things are possible. Here you will find two major purveyors of prepared foods that will be delivered to your door for the paltry sum of about two hundred dollars a month. I don’t want to spend too much time on this method because it is self explanatory, and to be honest, I have an unexplainable fear of Marie Osmond’s commercials. I was fine with the Valerie Bertinelli ones, but Marie just makes me run from the room and cower under my comforter.

So there you have it folks. I can guarantee that if you commit to Mama Julia’s Three-Step, Sure Fire Plan for Weight or your own customized version of it, you can rest assured that you will join the millions of Americans who have weight! Now, how much would you expect to pay for a plan like this? Four hundred dollars? Three hundred? Two? Okay. Whatever you want to pay me is just fine.

But wait, there’s more! If you order right now, you will get a free sheet of glow-in-the-dark stick-on ‘X’s to put on your  wardrobe. Each time you grow another size you just peel them off and stick them on your clothing to let the world see how you've grown!. This normally sells for $19.95, but if you order right now they are yours.... Absolutely free! Just pay shipping and handling.

In closing, I’d like to remind you that it wasn’t always a social crime to be big in this country.  I can point to many works of Victorian literature where corpulence among females was considered sexy and desirable. And just as soon as Sears begins to offer budget-priced time machines, I plan to purchase one, and retro-retire back to 1893 where I will live out my life being worshipped as a goddess. But until then, I am just going to do the best I can, try to lose some of this weight, and not worry about it too much. The one thing I am not going to do however, is let myself be bullied into thinking that I should subscribe to some movie star or magazine’s image of what beauty is. I am beautiful just the way I am. If I choose to commit to looking better for my own self, that’s one thing. But if I cave in to social pressure to bolster someone else’s self esteem, it would make me the Biggest Loser EVER.  

That’s it. I’m done bitching. Everybody hug, everybody eat! (Reasonably) Abbondanza!

Donuts Make My Brown Eyes Blue

9:57 pm, Christmas night. I just got off the phone with Nick, my ex-roommate and one of my closest friends. He is enroute to New Jersey from Chicago and was calling me from Indiana. We have not seen each other in about twelve years and as you might imagine, I’m a little nervous. It is stupid to feel that way, I know, because we speak on the phone three to four times a week, so he knows what I sound like and has seen my picture. In theory, at least, there shouldn’t be any surprises.

Why then, am I am scouring the Internet to see if Acai berries or industrial strength diuretics will help me lose forty pounds by tomorrow? Because I haven't seen him in twelve years. Because I am vain and I really wanted to look good..

It is pointless, I know, considering it would take me until Opening Day of baseball season just to work off the immense quantities of crap that I have consumed over these last three holiday-bacchanalia days, much less twelve years worth of processed, useless food . I am like David Crockett at the Alamo; well-intentioned, but doomed to failure. 

I have always had this ‘thing’ with food. Not the good, wholesome stuff that is packed with essential vitamins and minerals, which  help build strong bodies twelve ways, but rather the types of sustenance that could never do me any nutritional good unless I were trapped in an atomic bomb shelter  after a nuclear holocaust.

Just to illustrate how twisted my relationship with food is, today I posted ON MY FACEBOOK PAGE,  and with great fanfare, mind you, that after nearly a year of deliberation, I have added CHEESECAKE to the list of Ten Foods I Would Take to a Deserted Island. Not sensible things like fruit, meat, eggs or vegetables, but Cheesecake.  What's worse, in a world full of starving people, where a meal for some is a bowl of flies and grasshoppers, I have the audacity to proudly proclaim that after giving it a total of THREE years of careful thought, the list now only stands at FOUR, with the lame justification is that it IS a deserted island, after all, with little chance of a 7-11 existing there. When I am in my frenzy, it is perfectly reasonable to think this way, reasoning that one must be extremely cautious in one's culinary choices since the duration of my island strand-ation is unknown. Didn't any of you see the movie Castaway? By the way, the others lucky list makers are chocolate, peanut butter (natural creamy), and pizza.

The thing of it is, I KNOW that I’m doing myself harm. I am a reasonably intelligent adult with a college degree, for crying out loud! I can play a musical instrument, understand enough of one or two languages to know if I’m being sworn at or not, and I’ve got my private pilot’s license. I AM AN OVERALL DISCIPLINED BEING!!! Yet, when it comes to passing up a package of Tasty-Cake sugar sandwich wafer cookies in a convenience store, I am Wimpy, the Spineless Cookie Junkie. God, how I can relate to Cookie Monster’s addiction! I wish that we could meet one day. Perhaps he and I can be of support to one another and succeed in crumbling this cookie insanity that holds us helplessly in her vise-like grip.    

Oh, I’ve analyzed the problem six ways to Sunday and for the life of me, I am no closer to breaking these doughy, gluten-filled chains now than when I was six. For me food is comfort and joy, a sensual romp in the hay with a lover that rarely leaves me unsatisfied. It is a friend, a foe, and a fiend; but at the very same moment, it also has the ability to induce the euphoria of Mommy Time, those moments where I can imagine my fantasy mother, the late actress Anne Bancroft,  cradling my infant body in her arms and singing a sweet lullaby to me while I, toothless and oblivious to the horrors that await me in adulthood, happily gum on a Hostess Ding Dong.

It’s sick, I know, and don’t think I haven’t tried to mend my dietary ways. As recorded by the United States Department of Fat Statistics, I have gained and lost enough weight to build several adult human beings and an extremely obese, one-armed Capuchin monkey.

The term for this nuttiness is aptly named; I am what is known as a yo-yo person. My tonnage will balloon up to the point where I start getting the stink-eye from people whose job it is to determine if I am within the weight limits for amusement park rides, MRI machines, and airplane seats. However, once I actually realize the extent of my adipose excesses, I then undertake an extreme plan to lose it, which generally consists of taking four, two-hundred dollar a month  miracle fat-burning pills per day (order now and get a second month FREE!), along with three vanilla Oreos and a glass of soy milk (the soy is for appearances only).

 I usually know when I’ve hit the top of the Fatometer, when there is an event I must go to that requires me to buy a new outfit, something I dread even more than having to spend my afterlife listening to Liza Minnelli caterwaul for all eternity.

To begin with, I have never been a woman who  might be referred to by the general public as petite, with the exception of pro wrestling legend Andre the Giant, who delighted in calling me Shorty.  Come to think of it, that was his pet name for everyone. Hmmph ... Figures. But no matter. Eons ago, through the universal crap shoot that is genetics, it was determined, and subsequently carved in granite on a Tibetan mountaintop, that the closest I will ever get to seeing a ‘2’ on my size label is if there are two “Xs” after it. The very idea of being able to shop in trendy stores with sexy firecracker names like the “Wild Side”, “Blazin’ Hot Bitches”, or “Smokin”, in this or any other galaxy is so remote that it would take the Hubble Telescope to find it within the realm of possibility. No, for me and women like me, we have the “Plus” stores. These places have names like Lane and Bryant, and the Dress Barn, the latter implying that we bigger ladies are incapable of shopping in normal stores because we are big, like cows.

“Herd em’ up Curly, get these heifers into the dressing rooms! Hey lady, no Cinnabons in the store, savvy?”

What’s worse is that the plus stores seem to have an unnatural aversion to pants with buttons and zippers. Instead, they seem to have single-handedly managed to keep the elastic waist-band business going. Listen up, bigger woman clothing industry fat cats;  I have NO ass here to hold up your elastic pants!. I NEED buttons and belt loops to avert a all-out pants down emergency!

The thing that pisses me off the most is that men can have the physique of a woman in the late third trimester of a pregnancy and not care a whit. For them, it is a badge of honor to shop at the BIG AND TALL MEN’S stores. Wait ... Did you see the difference? Their fat store sounds like lumberjacks and he-men shop there; no shame, right? Now compare that to the Dress Barn ... big difference isn’t it? I never really noticed it when I traveled with the other tribe. Men, as I understood it, were supposed  to get old, bald, and fat. But women are expected to look like goddesses 24/7, to which I say, SCREW THAT!

Let’s just get this straight buddy boy.... I am old, and I have earned the right to relax a bit in my goldens. If I gain a few pounds, BACK OFF, okay?  Sure I’ll try and lose it, even work out a bit. But if I ever hear the words, Pilates, Zumba, Yoga  or Dance Party again .... if you so much as make a peep about those pounds, I will pummel you so badly that you will be swigging beer through your wired jaw via a flexi-straw!

So Nick, I hope we enjoy our long-postponed visit as you wend your way across Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania toward New Jersey. But when you see me, the first words out of your mouth had better be ... “You looked damned good for an old broad!”

That’s it. I’m done bitching. Everybody hug, everybody eat. Abbondanza!