... for tomorrow we diet
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
Post-Easter, post-Easter eggs, post-putting a four-wheel drive
backwards and forwards across the bathroom scales a few times while
screaming ``WHY, God, WHY?'', I sense a few people may be
contemplating the D-word again.
First up, note a new diet should never be tackled on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays or Saturdays, between 6am and midnight, or on an empty stomach.
Actually there's a large school of thought that diets aren't the way to go any more. There's even a woman in the United States who has written a book on the subject, which includes the chapter “My Personal Trainer Can Beat Up Your Personal Trainer”.
Now I like her philosophy. I think we should go one better and invest in full-option personal trainers who would do our gym workouts for us. This trainer could also run the Boston Marathon in our name (doing a time under 2.5 hours if it killed them) and phone in regularly to update us on how many twisty upside-down sit-ups we have apparently just done.
She would also gladly take on board any guilt we may experience in our day. We could ring her and say, “Sharni, you're feeling really guilty right about now, thanks to that mega-cheeseburger, fries and chocolate biscuit at lunch.”
And she'd agree: “Uh … (pause) … yeah. I feel really bad. I better go jog it off for us.”
For some reason, it just doesn't work this way. If it did, I wouldn't have grown up watching a mum on more yoyo diets than Oprah Winfrey.
Some of Mum’s yoyoic efforts were more surreal than others.
One day she asked me to tag along for moral support when she decided to lose weight at a diet centre.
In we traipsed and many thin people in the whitest of white lab coats were there to greet her and tuck pens authoritatively into their pockets and nod slowly at her, as though her query on the weather required enormous concentration.
One man even carried a clipboard.
I took a peek when he wasn't looking and discovered he had his dry-cleaning chit attached.
He consulted with Mum and, finally, announced she was overweight. No, really?
He delivered this shock verdict with such gravity that I think he must
have confused her with the woman he had to tell she had only three
weeks left to live. At this point, it was probably wrong of me to ask
what his professional qualifications were, because he then gawked at
me askance as if to say, “What? Are you blind? I'm wearing The
Coat”.
This argument was compelling. Mum signed up immediately. Alas, her
flirtation with Clipboard Man's thinning ways did not last and, so she
informs me, it's diet time once more.
I have offered to send her the ultimate in diet helpers: a red pen.
All you do is re-mark the 15kg line on your scales as zero. It
works. And, from a humanitarian perspective, I am informed no personal trainers are hurt, maimed or forced into marathons in the process.
© The Advertiser & Sheryl-Lee Kerr 13 APR 1999.