Things to Do to Lose Weight

The first rule of dieting is that if something doesn't have very many calories, you can have as much as you want of it. There's this place in the Diet Watchers' Guide for instance, where the author talks about how when she gets cravings for bad foods, what she'll do is go get a whole can of Chinese vegetables and eat it with mustard sauce on the top. Or there's this recipe for Unlimited Soup: All it's got in it, is things you can eat as much of as you want, like canned tomato juice, and celery, and cabbage, and bouillon cubes. Conceivably, you could eat a whole recipe of that stuff at one sitting, although all I've ever managed is a couple of bowlfuls.

I've used this weight-loss strategy my whole life, – For instance I used to buy rolls of Trident fruit-flavored mints and eat them one after another until the whole roll was gone. Whatever was in them instead of sugar, really made you fart, by the way. – but it never really started working or me until they invented Nutra-Sweet. Before Nutra-Sweet, diet stuff was sweetened with saccharin. Saccharin is disgusting. No matter what flavor you put in to cover it, it always adds this terrible aftertaste. And it's not even really a sweet flavor, more like some horrible chemical that attempts to simulate sweetness.

Nutra-Sweet on the other hand, actually tasted good. All of a sudden diet soda, and diet Jello, and diet all kinds of other things, were actually worth eating. I started buying these 32-ounce Diet Cokes, because Diet Coke tasted almost as good as regular Coke, and it was something nice, that wouldn't make me fat, that I could get for myself in a mini-mart. I bought Diet Jello. I mixed the berry flavor with plain yogurt and got something that was sort of like cheesecake. I mixed the cherry flavor with sugar-free cocoa mix, and got something kind of Black Forest-tasting. I ate all I wanted, of all of these things, because they had no calories (or very few).

But that is not all I ate so I could lose weight. I ate watermelon. Watermelon was banned on Diet Watchers, but I have no idea why, because it is very low calorie. A cupful has something like 28 calories, so even if you had like 4 cups worth, you'd only be eating about 100 calories. I can make a whole meal off watermelon, and I used to, a lot, because I knew I could afford the calories.

I ate pickles, two, three, or four at a time, so the jars my Mom bought only lasted a day or two. Pickles have practically zero calories, so you can eat them all day long and still not gain weight. I bought jars of Giardinera Mix, which is also called Pickled Vegetables. That stuff is really, really delicious, but you had to be careful with it. It was hard to find, and a lot of times you could only get it in really little bottles, that were mostly celery and peppers, which were the least good vegetables, with only a few cauliflowers, which are the best ones. I trird to eat my Giardinera, one or two pieces a day. I filled up with regular pickles, or huge hunks of cabbage or cantaloupe.

I went to the Italian Swiss Colony at the mall. They sold a sugar-free taffy that was pretty good. You have to watch out for sugar-free chocolate, because with chocolate, most of the calories are in the fat. But taffy doesn't have fat, that I knew of, so I figured I was pretty safe eating it. I'd pick out a pound of my favorite flavors. I ate it on my bed, when I was all by myself listening to records, because my roommates hated me, and I didn't want to go out for fear I would ingest some calories.

I bought lots of artichokes and pomegranates. They are pretty low in calories, but what makes them really good, is how long they take to eat. I can eat three artichokes for dinner, with salt to dip them in instead of mayonnaise, and it only comes out to like 200 calories. Plus my dinner lasts me for almost an hour. A pomegranate lasts even longer, and as long as you only eat one at a time, that's even fewer calories. I ate a lot of pomegranates the year I was losing weight. All the books I read that fall are full of red-stained pages.

About the time I got where I wanted to, weight-wise, I discovered the best junk food ever: ¾ of a cup of Sugar Frosted Flakes is only 150 calories, but it's sweet and delicious, and when you eat them dry, you can make it last over an hour. Later on I found out that Lucky Charms are even better, because you can make a ritual of eating them: First you pick out all the boring oat cereals, then when you eat the marshmallows, you do it one variety at a time. You have to be careful though, because otherwise someone might come along and grab a handful once you're down to nothing but marshmallows.

I also learned to make meals off apples and peanut butter. Three sour green apples, plus one tablespoon of peanut butter, is almost exactly 300 calories. You can make it last and last though. First of all, who can possibly eat three green apples at the same time? Second, maybe you want to eat the apples first: Then you have all that peanut butter to eat when you're finished. I sliced cauliflower thin and quick-fried it with curry powder, or ate big servings of cole slaw made with dill pickle juice. Then I used the calories I'd saved on a big apple fritter from Meijer. I ate it when I could be all by myself, and I made it last at least an hour.

I have chosen a lot of meals based on their calorie count. I have memorized rules about how many calories are in a Whopper Junior-no-mayo, and a small fries, a cupful of cabbage, a cupful of watermelon. I have drank cup after cup of water-with-lemon-juice to keep my mouth from wanting the food in the kitchen. I have pickled cucumbers and green beans and eaten them, and bought bottles full of dill pickles, that I then ate all in one sitting. I have fried vegetables in dry pans and added salt until they tasted good. I've added salty condiments to my food until I was eating more condiment than food. I have chewed delicious things and then spat them out to escape their calories, and I have licked the chocolate off chocolate-peanut M&Ms, and thrown away egg yolks to eat just the low-calorie whites (with lots of mustard and salt on them).

What's funny, is that none of this is anything more than just normal dieter-strategies. Periodically my mother will tell me about ohh, these wonderful noodles she gets: They're made from yam, and they have some ridiculous calorie-count, like 25 calories for the whole package or something. And so what if they don't taste right under pasta sauce? They're low-calorie! My friend Emily, who usually makes more sense than that, will talk about choosing the perfect wiener at the store, which of course means the one with the fewest calories in it. She'll slice these into the perfect soup (also the one with the fewest calories), because her perfect frozen dinner doesn't fill her up at dinnertime. And once again as I try to lose weight again, I find myself doing the same things too. I tolerate really horrible Miller 65 beer (which tastes like off-brand mineral water) based purely on the calorie count. And I fry vegetables in a dry pan with lots of seasonings in hopes that I'll fool my body into thinking I'm feeding it.

I'm really trying not to do that this time. For once I want to eat what's healthy. I'm tired of choosing food based on what's lowest in calorie, or what will take the longest to eat. If I'm not eating right, how do I fix that by overeating on low-calorie stuff instead of high-calorie stuff for a change? How am I doing my body any good if I switch out too much sugar and fat for too much salt and artificial sweeteners? If I'm eating too much, how do I make that better by eating too much of different things?