A Pound of Flesh

There's a fat chance that I won't weigh in on such a heavy subject as obesity.

So here goes...

I am, like about a gazillion other people, struggling with my weight. I am older now and I'm not as active, nor do I eat properly.  I'm not fat.  I've got "a few extra pounds..."

My favorite foods include every single thing you're not supposed to eat with the exception of bananas, all fish, excluding calamari, brussel sprouts (Is it Brussels Prouts which begs the question... is it a misspelling of Proust, who I thought was French, but could have, ancestrally, been Belgian and loved miniature cabbage, so they named the vegetable after him?  But then it would have been cabbage instead of Madeleines and the history of literature would have been irrevocably changed forever. I have no idea. Comment if you do...I'd love to now the truth...)

I love all cheese, chocolate, bread, pasta, ice cream, M&Ms.  You get the idea.  I'm a junkie.

I try to eat responsibly, I really do.  Tea instead of coffee.  Honey instead of white sugar.  Greek yogurt instead of ice cream.  An apple instead of a cookie. Tuna instead of ham.

But I fall hard off the dietary wagon with regularity.

I'll go weeks, if not months, eating the stuff that's good for me and rejecting the stuff that isn't.

And then I'll be somewhere and there will be a doughnut or a dish of jelly beans or potato chips and onion dip...and I'm finished. Finished I tell ya..!

I justify the indulgence by telling myself that I've been religious over the recent past and I can have one whatever and the world won't come to an end.  What's one GD doughnut within the context of weeks and months of almond milk, Quinoa pasta and carob?

Nothing.  A mere speck of reckless abandon on an, otherwise, unblemished canvas of nutritional purity.

Yeah...right!  If you believe that one I'd like to talk to you about some credit default swaps that I recently heard about.

Can you say crash!

That's what really happened in 1929 and 2007.  We were doing the fiscally responsible thing and then we had one lapse.  Just one little foray into the Wall Street Pastry Emporium.

Poof! Years of weight loss and good behavior gone in the blink of a Boston Crème doughnut.

So...sit back, relax, open another jar of Pringles and weight (sic) for the losing (sic) bell.

And the vocal stylings of Lower Manhattan's singing sensation, Fannie Mae, known the world over as "The Fat Lady."

Oh...and that's the sound of the Treasury's ambulance you hear.  And they're packin' a defib...

"CLEAR...!"