Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2003 - 5:21 p.m.

Oh I ‘do’ love a puzzle.

There’ve been times in my life when I got caught up in crossword puzzles. I was always fast and accurate with them and arrogantly did them always in ink rather than pencil. I’d rather put a snail in my mouth than erase a word. Like the French. I guess the French must have a LOT of erasing to do, and they must hate it terribly. Because they stuff their mouths full of snails on every corner. But.. I digress.

Logic puzzles too; I love those things. If you haven’t seen one, it’s a little hard to explain. Basically, you get some information that seems useless, like, “If a hen and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, then how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick the seeds out of a dill pickle?’ Then, through the use of logic and logical thinking, you deduce other information until the question is answered.

The greatest puzzle of my life, it seems, is how and why I insist on trying to grow two or three of me in the space where only one of me belongs. Oh, you haven’t been drinking Capt. Morgan’s this early? Then to simplify; I can’t figure out why I stay so fat. Even more interesting, I am learning, is HOW I stay so fat. I’ll never understand why, maybe, but I’m finding out how I do it, and it’s plumb surprising.

I went to the website for Fitness magazine the other day. There I found a little feature that calculates how many calories a person needs to maintain their current weight. Well, not that I was especially interested in maintaining my current weight, but I got curious to see how many calories I must be eating to stay this fat. So I put in my age and weight, and I fudged on the activity level. I chose the lightest level, even though I’ve been working out lately. And then, having clicked on the button, I reeled as I looked at the number it returned.

In order to stay this fat, I have to eat more than four thousand calories each and every day of my life! And that’s if I DON’T exercise. If I exercise, it takes even more calories.

Do you know how much work it is to consume that much food?

According to the CalorieKing, a slice of Dominos medium hand-tossed America’s Feast Pizza is 257 calories. To stay at my current weight, I have to eat the equivalent of sixteen slices every day. GGGBOF, it’s no wonder I gravitate towards the cheeses and other fats. Heck, I would have to eat almost two pounds of Melba Toast, that old dieter’s favorite, to get four thousand calories. And let’s not even talk about lettuce, OK?

I found myself with a kind of renewed respect for me. Clearly, I have been up to the challenge for many years of keeping all this weight on. I’ve managed to meet all the other requirements of daily life and still find the time, money and stamina to consume double the calories of lesser, normal people.

But wait! I don’t WANT to be this fat! I want to be thin so I can wear the clothes I want to wear. I want to be able to make a short flight and be able to fit in the itsy little seat on the airplane. And, OK, let’s be honest…. When I have sex… rare as it may be… I want to be left breathless from passion, not from having the breath squeezed out of me by the almost impossible position. So I must be working this hard to be something I truly don’t want to be because of some faulty logic somewhere. My wooden-legged monkey has lost his direction. My hen and a half is laying an egg and a half for no reason, or a reason so arcane it’s been forgotten.

Alright… I needed more information for this puzzle, so I went to several websites where I learned about the marvelous food pyramid the government has constructed using your money. Actually, I knew about the food pyramid from a skinny little chicky hired by the VA to shove plastic examples of food under my nose and tell me how she was once a “food abuser” like me. I hated that chick. I hated that plastic food too. It smelled funny and had no taste at all.

On my own, I studied the pyramid long enough to see that I did have a few misperceptions about the kinds of food I might consider substituting for all that pizza, and it also occurred to me like a digital flash going off right behind my eyeballs that the concept of three meals a day was invented. Who ever told us we have to eat three times a day?

So here’s what I did:

I invented my own magic number of meals. Actually, I think I really just purloined it from the Europeans. I made a plan to eat Breakfast at or around 0600, Brunch at or around 0900, Lunch at or around 1200, “tea” at 1500, supper and 1800, and a little snack at 2100. That’s six meals a day, but I remembered the old saying about eating like a king in the morning, a merchant at lunch and a pauper at night.. or something like that. Keeping that in mind, I used the pyramid to make a plan toi eat most of my calories by noon. In the evening, I eat much less and at 2100, just a little bit of cracker and some water.

This is day three of my new plan. I’m going nuts here. I can barely eat all the stuff I have planned, yet my totals for each day are between fifteen hundred and two thousand calories. I can never stay this fat on that, yet I feel stuffed all the time, except for a couple of hours in the early morning. And hey, I can always drink some of the dieter’s tea that Barbara gave me and I forgot about.

I’ve lost four pounds in three days. Don’t help me look for them. I hope I never see them again. But if you want to help, then do this:

Don’t live your life like I have, thinking that you have to starve to be healthy… or even thin. Don’t listen to anyone without listening to YOURSELF first. Then if those others have something you can use, use it. If they don’t, then forget about ‘em.

And ask yourself why that monkey’s kicking the seeds out of a dill pickle in the first place.

Happy Thoughts, Deep Breaths,

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