I Wanna Be Thin(ner)

I put myself on phase one of the South Beach diet two and a half weeks ago, to lose the pounds I packed on before my daughter’s July wedding. Maybe this is why I no longer have as much energy as I usually do to walk, talk, or write. What I now have is a serious case of active inactivity. 

Being inactive is my way of surviving round one of my dieting marathon, because these days I have to conserve my energy so I can prepare the four hundred and sixty million meals I need to eat each day to keep myself from plunging into the intense fruit and carbohydrate withdrawal I've been experiencing. 


If you could see (and many of you have) how similar to a linebacker I appeared in the random already-downloaded wedding pictures my daughter’s friends posted, you’d understand why I have chosen to diet. Just imagine, now, how much more awful I'm going to look in the professional pictures (which aren’t ready yet, thank God), where I’ll be professionally caught looking like a porker - for posterity. 


I know - no one will be looking at how fat the mother of the bride looks in the wedding album, but this mother sure as heck will. 


You see, when I look at those frozen-in-time wedding pictures, I'm going to only remember how I gained so much weight I couldn't zip up the lovely espresso-colored dress I bought so I’d look happy and peppy and bursting with love. (I didn’t anticipate the literal aspect of bursting, though, which is what happened when I tried to force my body into the dress a few days before the wedding.) In the future, each and every time we celebrate my daughter’s anniversary, I’m going to have to force myself not to make negative comments about how I'm wearing the wrong dress (I wore a black thing that was hanging around the closet, waiting for its chance to shine), or how my wattle and body look tripled in size. 


The good thing about dieting, is that as of today I have lost enough weight so that the original dress now fits me perfectly. In fact, I came up with what I think is a brilliant idea (but is actually a harebrained one, I know) to celebrate this miracle: I will call the wedding photographer and ask him if he’ll come to the house and take a few more pictures of me in the correct dress, which he can then unobtrusively slip into the wedding album. I realize that anyone who looks at the final album might think it’s a little strange that I am wearing two different dresses, but I figure that only I will notice, since everyone else will be focusing on the bride and groom. 


My husband told me I should start eating fruit again to get my brain back. I whined and wheedled, trying to get him to agree with my idea, but he wouldn’t budge. I tried to convince him it made sense by telling him that the fat me in wedding pictures isn’t the real me, since I was formerly such a skinny child my cousin called me Bony Sharoney (like the song – minus the Maroney). He laughed. Then, I told him he should call the photographer for me, so our future grandchildren would see pictures of their grandmother as she should be seen – thinner. I reminded him that I was once so underweight I wrote to Ann Landers to ask her advice on gaining weight. (She, or one of her minions, wrote back that I should drink milkshakes each night before going to bed.) He still refused to agree.

He reminded me that I have lost a total of six pounds (even though, as of this morning, a pound found its way back home). I told him that being on this diet is making it even more difficult than usual to be positive (well, I always find it difficult to be positive) about staying the course. He emphatically told me that there can’t be a wedding picture do-ever, and I know he’s right – but boy I wish he wasn't.