The angry diet.
As some of you (all six of you) know, I have been on a diet for the past five weeks. And by diet, I mean WeightWatchers, that bastion of middle aged female fatness. It's a sign that I have completely left my youth behind and am approaching the age of saggy pantyhose and inspirational GIF email forwards. You can't be on Weightwatchers and still be cool, no matter how awesome your Myspace page is (disclaimer: my Myspace page is not awesome. It's neglected and under-adorned. I just never got around to putting up kitten wallpaper or whatever the hell.)
The thing is, Weightwatchers has been working. I've lost around 8 pounds in the last month, which makes me feel happy, considering that I was letting my weight start to creep up again after getting back from Asia, where thinness is apparently contagious and I caught some. My jeans are too baggy, I can wear my favorite plaid pants again, and my arms have gone from looking like German barmaid to normal, healthy 20 something female. Oh yes, and my blood pressure dropped 25 points. So those are the benefits of being on a diet. I actually plan to continue on it until I get down another 10 to 12 pounds or so.
But the cons are that I can't eat what I want anymore. Instead of eating jumbo slice, I eat 2 little pieces of whole wheat pizza with feta, olives and tomatoes -- delicious, but lacking in lovely greasy mouth feel. Instead of eating a granola bar, I eat carrots. Instead of eating candy, I eat an apple. Instead of steak, three ounces of chicken breast. And so on.
All of this is generally fine, but occasionally I just want to eat something unbelievably horrible, like fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, which probably contains something like a week's worth of calories. It's made worse by the fact that I live with a man who is 6'2", 190 pounds, and is a human garbage can. He can eat with abandon for weeks, gain a few pounds, and then go play racquetball at the gym a few times and the weight disappears like magic. My other roommate,
draile, can eat an entire cheese pizza by himself with no weight consequences. Being surrounded by non dieters makes dieters like me bitter and angry. I hate thin people now, not just because they are thin, but because they can eat noodles! with sesame oil! I hate non dieting fat people for the same reason -- they can eat the fettuccine alfredo because they just don't give a shit if they gain a few pounds. Right now I just hate everyone who is not on a diet, who does not, like me, have to think about how many calories are in an animal cracker and how many I can eat and still have enough of the 1200 calories I get per day to eat dinner with.
I'm looking forward to the end of dieting so I can stop thinking about food so much. I want to go back to being angry because people are bad spellers or habitually misuse quotation marks, or because they are bad drivers or vote for Ron Paul, not because they get to eat candy bar and I don't.