Tip For Dieting: Get Angry At Your Food

by Mr. Knowalot

Okay, now I'm mad. Food is trying to kill me and it's making me very angry. I haven't been this riled at food for quite some time now. Not since a quart of milk tried to kill me. So I'm hoping you will understand if I let loose with some words that normally I would swallow, because right now I don't feel like swallowing anything. Yeah, take that, food.

What happened to get me all upset? Well, I've been trying to diet now for about, oh, eleven years. Although I've had some success, dropping ten or twenty pounds here and there, I always put it back on again and a half dozen pairs of pants get stuck in a drawer where they will rest until, alas, I am able to shed enough weight to wear them again.

Not that I'm fat, mind you. On my 5'11" frame I carry about 200 pounds. I wear it well. This is because I'm really a thin person, and much of my fat just gets me to what would appear normal. Still, I feel fat and I have the pants to prove it. So I've got to lose those pounds. It's just that dieting is an on-again, off-again proposition.

However, I think I'm going to succeed now, because, as I said, food has me enraged. You see, I nearly choked on an egg a while ago. This was your typical hard-boiled egg. I took it from the bowl in the refrigerator, tore off a paper towel and spread it out on the counter, then tapped the egg firmly on the towel and rolled it around with my hand, crunching the shell into fine pieces. I flecked off the egg pieces and balled up the paper towel, tossing it in the trash. Still, there were some flashes of peel and skin on the egg, so I gently washed it.

Then I took a bite. When I tried to chew the piece I bit off, it slipped from between my teeth, too wet perhaps, and shot back into my gullet. My windpipe was clogged. Keeping a cool head, and knowing that the next few seconds were critical or I would be permanently dead, I expelled what air I had in my lungs in one sharp burst. The piece of egg dislodged. Carefully I chewed it up and swallowed it correctly, trying not to make too much of the incident.

When I walked into the living room, my young son was looking at me curiously, wondering what that harking sound had been. "I almost choked on an egg," I said. Satisfied with this answer, and seeing his father still basically alive, he turned back to his television program.

Try as I might, though, I cannot get this near-death moment out of my mind. But I must. After all, it's not as if I haven't been attacked by food in the past. About 25 years ago, when I was a single college student, I dropped a quart of milk and it literally exploded on the kitchen floor. The spot where I stood became a slippery slog. I lost my footing and fell against a counter. When I tried to stand, the milk seemed to pull my feet out from under me, causing me to crash into the appliances. The stove put dents in my back. The refrigerator blackened an eye. The cabinets clapped against my arms and shoulders. Since I lived alone, there was nobody to help me. Eventually I struggled to the safety of the dining room rug, but I was a bruised, beaten man.

So ... I've had it up to here [picture my hand, palm down, held at my throat] with food.

• I'm sick of the way red meat lingers in my colon for days. I can feel it rasping away in there, inciting little polyps of resistance that will eventually metastasize and take my life.
  
  
• I hate the way any green vegetable, especially broccoli, festers into swampy gas and comes seeping out the next day at the most inopportune moments, usually at a staff meeting.
  
  
• I'm annoyed by the agonizing heartburn that starts an hour or so after I've eaten the most wonderful pizza, with everything (hold the anchovies).
  
  
• I'm fed up (sorry, it had to be said) with the way fruits and vegetables, as well as bran, are so doggedly determined to expunge the effects of other foods that they scour my insides to the point of liquefaction.
  
  
• And I'm dead tired of the way turkey lulls me, with its injection of tryptophan, into a false sense of well being, all the while settling itself into my arteries and heart chambers.

No, enough is enough. There will be no more of this. I'm not a slave to food. Food can't control me. I'm in charge now. From now on, my chant is:

"I am mad as hell and I'm not going to eat it anymore!"

Say it with me:

"I am mad as hell and I'm not going to eat it anymore!"

Now diet with me. Put down that hot dog! Drop that chicken leg! Dispose of that sandwich! Throw away that bowl of ice cream ... well, not there. Get healthy! Drink juices. Drink water. Walk around a little. Don't let that turkey get you down. All right! We can do this. The trick is, just get angry. If you want, I've got some quarts of milk here I can lob your way.

Mr. Knowalot shares a glass of prune juice now and then with Brad Ryder, a guy he knows in Keene, New Hampshire.

Other articles by Mr. Knowalot can be found at http://www.knowalot.com.

Your feedback is appreciated. Please email your comments to .

• Mr. Knowalot's Humor • Search This Site • Downbear Music • Nova Assignments •