In Search of the Best Diet Ever

I don’t eat enough bacon. The thought floats around my head as I move a pound of it from my freezer to the cold cut drawer in the fridge section. I touch my belly, the one whose girth threatens the health of the person attached to it. I need to lose weight for my own well-being, if not for the well-being of my health insurer. After all, it seems that the primary purpose for being in shape, according to everything I read, is that it helps to keep our nation’s healthcare costs down. Hey, I’m up with that, but then somebody over at Blue Cross should invest some effort in making a tasty form of lo-cal pig. Try to be part of the solution, folks, instead of just nagging at us and showing pictures of fat dead people.


Losing weight is our national pastime; we’re just not very good at it. Sure, we’ll lose a few pounds when we’re paying attention to the things we put in our mouths, but most of us don’t have enough incentive to stick with it. I know I don’t. I tried Atkins ten years ago and lost thirty pounds, but that didn’t last. All it took was some white chocolate bark imbedded with pistachio nuts and I was finished. Now, I’m on a green tea kick, but I still drink coffee, too, which defeats the purpose even though I use saccharine and a non-dairy creamer. And that’s the whole movie in a single reel; I do the right thing and follow it up with the wrong thing. For me obesity isn’t a disease, but rather a symptom.


I think about people who stay thin their entire lives and wonder how they achieve such a metabolic nirvana. I want to be like that, without pharmaceutical assistance. I thought I had the perfect idea once. It started out with the revelation that sick people lose weight. Obviously, I didn’t want to consider anything life threatening or overly disruptive or non-reversible. So, a whirlwind tour of nuclear power plants was out, along with anything that required the services of an oncologist. I needed something acutely effective, yet short term. It dawned on me that one disease fit perfectly – dysentery. I couldn’t think of a quicker or easier way to lose weight than to shit it out. All I needed was a fouled water source.


I was surprised at the difficulty in contracting dysentery in the United States. There’s chlorine everywhere. Plus, having eaten regularly in places where the kitchens were filthy disgusting and the food carelessly handled, my body developed incredible resistance to a germ onslaught. Short of flying to India for a weeklong dose of Ganges lemonade, the dysentery angle was dead. More thinking followed and soon brought me to a uniquely American affliction: lactose intolerance.


As with most Boomers, I drank a lot of milk and ate a lot of ice cream as a kid. The flipside to all that dairy consumption comes later, after we discover Jack Daniels and Slim Jims. Our bodies stop producing the lactase enzyme and lose the ability to break down lactose, resulting in a monumental case of the squirts whenever we indulge in dairy products. Bingo. It’s not as glamorous-sounding as dysentery, but amounts to almost the same thing, albeit requiring some caloric input to muster the intended output.


I’m happy to report that it worked, to a degree. I did lose some weight, but when I wrote the requirements above, I included the phrase “overly disruptive” among the things we didn’t want. There are few things more improvisational than a spastic bowel. If you choose this course, do it on a weekend and rent a room. Better to befoul someone else’s plumbing and wallpaper than your own. Pack extra underwear, too … lots of it.


In the end (the figurative one, not the wet and smelly évacuateur), I reached an unintended result. By reintroducing large doses of milk products into my diet, I apparently cured the intolerance problem. God does indeed have a wicked sense of humor. And I, dear friends, am out of bright ideas. Apparently, the diet wags who prescribe reduced caloric intake and high fiber and regular exercise and yadda-yadda and blah-blah-blah are annoyingly correct. I must set my mind on the right track and follow through with the disciplined fervor of a Marine or a Moonie. And yet, somehow still, a thought breaches the mind’s rampart.


I wonder if that bacon is thawed yet.