Friday, August 24, 2012

Food Police

I'm eating a York ice cream bar.  It's my newest favorite thing...I'm kinda like Oprah that way...I have many favorite things.  Except I don't have the $$$ to share my favorite things with a whole studio audience full of strangers who love me.  Wouldn't it be great to be Oprah for a day and give shit away to people?  Not shit literally, only someone with a freakish psychological disorder would literally want shit, but stuff, you know, they'd love?  I think Oprah should start a new show like the old "Queen For A Day" ...I know I'm dating myself...and call it "Oprah For A Day".  Might boost ratings on that new network of hers. I'd watch it.

The York ice cream bars are wonderful, but they should have a stick.  They're round, and you have to hold them in the wrapper when you eat them so the chocolate doesn't melt all over your hands, so you kind  of have to keep turning them around in the wrapper so you can get an edge to bite off.  Not a well thought out design if you ask me, which obviously they didn't, but they're soooo good I struggle through.

I'm eating after The Husband has gone to bed.  I've become a closet eater...not that I'm actually eating a closet, I mean, how could someone eat a closet???  It's just an empty space for putting stuff...mostly stuff you throw in and close the door so it looks like the rest of the room is neat and orderly. No, I'm hiding in the dark so The Husband doesn't see what I'm eating.  I waited until he went to bed before I started chowing down.  I feel guilty but I'm really not doing anything wrong, so I don't know why I feel guilty.  I guess I feel guilty because I'm eating all the things The Husband can't eat...ice cream, M&M's, cookies...the good stuff.

The Husband’s doctor put him on a diet.   I am now the Food Police.  It's not a job that I asked for. I don’t want to think about what I eat let alone monitor the food intake of another human. I now find myself measuring a quarter cups of trail mix into baggies for The Husband to take in his lunch. I  have to buy whole grain bread instead of the soft white of my childhood that sticks to the roof of your mouth. Labels now have to be checked for calorie, fat, and sodium content...and the print is so small that it's really hard to read.  All through the grocery store, I have to put glasses on and off, on and off...all in an effort to make The Husband's road to Skinnyville as painless as possible...for him at least.

The older we get, the easier the weight goes on...and the harder it is to take off. Lately I’ve actually been thinking about trying to shed some lbs, but I haven’t really got past the thinking part to the doing part. So maybe this is a good thing for both of us. I mean, if I have to fix him healthful things to eat, maybe a little healthy lifestyle will rub off on me and with little or no effort on my part I’ll magically lose lbs too. It could happen.

Old men, for some reason, refuse to acknowledge they’re getting old and keep trying to do things they used to be able to do when they were younger. Like work outside in the sweltering heat digging ditches. I know it’s probably wrong to generalize, and I’m sure there are some men out there who acknowledge that old age is wreaking havoc on their bodies and act accordingly, but I’ve just never met one. I’m sure there was a time when The Husband would be able to spend the one day off from his sedentary job digging ditches in triple digit heat without nearly suffering heatstroke and keeling over, which he did weekend before last,...but those days are gone... forever.

Fortunately, The Husband had a regularly scheduled checkup with the doc the very next day. So I called the doc’s wife who just so happens to work in her husband’s office and told her about The Husband’s little heatstroke episode...thinking that the Good Doctor, who’s the same age as The Husband by the way, would tell The Husband “don’t do that”. Wrongo bongo...Becky, that’s the doc’s wife, said “my husband did the exact same thing”. Great, I’m thinkin’...the Good Doctor, despite being a highly educated and trained health care professional, has no more common sense than my goober of a husband. What is it with these old men?????

The whole diet thing’s been a long time coming. For a while now, I’ve been threatening to buy The Husband suspenders to keep his pants up. He doesn’t want to wear suspenders because that’s what old men wear. Hello???...Dude, you’re old...and I don’t want to see you embarrass yourself in public with a bad case of plumbers butt..(this is what I say to myself...). Every time I threaten to buy suspenders, The Husband tells me that the older he gets, the more his butt shrinks. I just don’t have the heart to tell him that no, your butt isn’t shrinking, your stomach is growing...but the butt is still the same size as it always was.  The only reason you can still wear the pants is that you button them up under your stomach.  I've said this to myself many, many times.  Why is it anyway, that men's butts don't grow like women's butts do?  You don't see too many men around with fat asses unless their body is morbidly obese, but there's plenty of small to average size women out there with gigantic asses.  They like to call it "pear" shaped.  Sounds much more pleasant, but all it really means is that you have a gigantic ass in proportion to the rest of your body.

The Husband is having a much easier time with the whole diet thing than I am...probably since I’m the one counting the calories, sodium, and fat content of everything he eats. All he has to do is eat. Or not eat, as the case may be. “Don’t eat that much” I’ll say when he gets out the strawberries and a plate to put them on. “You can have a cup of strawberries...not a platter of strawberries”...I get a scrunchy face in reply.

Yesterday I found the zip lock bag holding the Nilla Wafers unzipped. Since I never, I mean never, leave zip lock bags unzipped...and since there’s only the two of us living in the house...I didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to figure out who the culprit was.

“How many Nilla Wafers did you eat?” I asked...because inquiring minds want to know...along with the Food Police.

I got a scrunchy face look from The Husband before he said “five”.

“Why? Did you count ‘em?” he continues accusingly...making me wonder if I should have taken on this job of Food Police and...leading me to believe he had way more Nilla Wafers than the admitted five.  Just a hunch...

“No” I snap back at him...a little testier than I intended “you never zip the damn bags up when you get stuff out of them”.

My hope now is that even if he doesn’t lose a pound he’ll finally learn how to close a zip lock bag properly... if only to hide his snackage sneaking ways. Of course, there’s probably as much chance of this happening as there is of my lbs magically disappearing because The Husband is on a diet...it's the stoopidist thing...