With no intentional self-indulgence, I have occasionally glanced at myself when walking by a mirror. This simple act offers explanation as to why my pants are slipping over my hips and shirts that were once small seem to have stretched over the years of storage. I’ve lost weight. No denying it. And I can’t say that this has been intentional, but rather, a direct consequence of “The Diet.” But, let’s not refer to it as “the diet” anymore, since the word, diet, is in this modern time, suggestive of a concerted and deliberate effort to lose weight. This has simply been a change in the way of eating, or more specifically, a change in the types of foods eaten.
I am always eating something, spurred on by an insatiable emptiness in my gut. Carrots are my “go to” snack food, followed by yogurt, whey, cheese, and any leftovers that I can find in the fridge. I eat eggs daily and in quantities that my body has never experienced. There are fried potato cakes daily, and often sausage or bacon added to the breakfast menu. Every evening we have meat or fish or pork, along with an accompaniment of assorted vegetables.
There is no shortage of food. And the food is good. The veggies taste great, just as they are. The milk is decidedly sweet. All the local protein is nourishing and seemingly endless in quantity. And has anyone tried the dehydrated yogurt? It is like sour candy—something unique, special, and quite pleasing to the palate.
And the other day, for my birthday, Suzanne pulled out an ice-cream cake, lathered with a birch syrup/cream concoction of sheer decadence. That large platter went in one sitting. But yet, the weight is falling off.
And the only disappointment of all this is the realization of the power of my delusion, the delusion that I was not over-burdened, that I was not harboring such flab, that my physical package of power was unchanged, just a little padded over these past years. But the mirror and clothes are not lying; over the years my body has been relentlessly replacing muscle mass with fat. And for that revelation, I am grateful to “The Diet.”