South Beach, The Beginning

I have to apologize in advance to you for telling this story out of order. Because last week, Husbandrinka made me so insane that I had to tell you about the South Beach diet, instead of introducing you to it gradually. That’s his fault. Many things are.

Earlier this month in West Virginia, I was sitting at breakfast with my friend Ana, discussing our friend’s wedding that we’d just attended the night before and eating some fine West Virginia artery-clogging cuisine.

We decided that we needed to lose weight. Ana thought that we could stand to lose 15 pounds by Christmas. Because I don’t celebrate Christmas, I decided that I have to lose it by New Year’s. So that I could greet the New Year all svelte and shit.

Two other women joined us for breakfast and we immediately shared our new life plan with them.

Turns out they were familiar with dieting, too. It’s like a sign from God or something. I mean, what are the chances that you run into two women and find out that they’ve also dieted? Hello, burning bush!

Their diet of choice was the South Beach.

“The food’s really good,” they told us. (By the way, when I say they, I mean, one of them, so please don’t think that they spoke chorus-like. And they definitely have names, but since they just have cameos in this post, I don’t want to go through the trouble of introducing them. Welcome to the wonderful world of lazy blogging.)

And with that ringing endorsement, Ana was sold. “Sounds great!” she said.

This is not how I diet.

I believe that it’s important to spend a few weeks emotionally preparing for a diet, while reading up on it and discussing it with friends and people who have not yet obtained a restraining order against me. Although in some circles this is considered procrastination, I prefer to think of it as laying the groundwork to health and fitness. How else would I know what foods are unlimited and which are the forbidden fruit (spoiler alert! On South Beach Phase One all fruit is forbidden) and also how to make sure that I eat enough so that my body doesn’t go into starvation mode and eat itself.

Because the last thing I need right now is flesh eating disease.

I tried to signal this to Ana with a mixture of eyebrow waggling and kicking her under the table.

“It’s definitely something to consider,” I conceded, biting into a fried sausage bullet that seemed to be covered in syrup and looking meaningfully and gluttously at Ana.

“I’m starting it tomorrow,” she ignored my hints.

“There’s no alcohol at all during the first two weeks of South Beach,” one of the unnamed warned, remembering perhaps me and Ana not being wine-averse the night before.

“Did you hear that?” I opened my eyes wide for extra-expansive emphasis, hoping to demonstrate how completely dehydrated and unbearably sober we would become.

“Yes, but just for two weeks, the sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be done,” Ana chirped. I was starting to suspect that she was still drunk from the night before.

“Fools rush in,” I mumbled. But it was too late.
I could see that Ana was already donning her mental South Beach bikini.

The next morning, I got an email from Ana.

“I’m on the Beach!” the subject line read and inside there was a link and an explanation that if I joined by following her link, she’d get a prize.

She also told me that on this Beach I’d be allowed to have two cups of coffee a day and that ninety nine virgins would be waiting for me at the end of the two weeks.

And so I did. Because who doesn’t like coffee?

One year ago ...

• Werbose Wednesday - 2008