The BIG Diet (Or What Happens When You Deprive Yourself of Luscious Delights)--Week 6

First time on “The BIG Diet”? Start here.
Brian. Brian. Brian. What a wonderful name. I swear he’s coming on to me. Happens every time I start to lose weight. Men see me differently.

When he checked my chart and saw that I have lost over 20 pounds since last month, he looked into my eyes with those big liquid, brown eyes and said, “Terrific job, Sam.”

I don’t usually like when people call me Sam, but Brian has such a sexy way of saying it.

There’s something beguiling about Brian--my heart does a flip whenever he walks into the room....

But I’m being silly. I’m an old married woman.

This diet would be more tolerable if I could just eat one small meal a day. I feel so depressed when I come home from school, and I know I can’t eat anything. A gap in my life: there’s something social about eating, breaking bread, and I miss that. My marriage suffers because Shel and I don’t eat together. I run my concoction through the blender and retreat to the living room, and Shel hides in the kitchen. We used to talk at mealtimes, but now that I’m not eating, we don’t talk at all. I hate these goddam shakes.

Shel is acting like a jerk. He eats in front of me and talks about the lunches he eats out. Says he’s tired of cooking all the time, so he’s been scheduling an hour and half for lunch every day; he and his secretary Mona have been hitting the restaurants around town.

Expensive restaurants, like Treasures from the Sea and The Starboard.

“Now there’s a woman who really knows how to eat. She doesn’t worry about what she eats, and she knows when to stop,” Shel said the other day as he slapped together a ham on rye.

I had my eye on the sandwich.

I never knew I liked ham and rye bread so much.

Is Shel having an affair? Mona is quite a looker–honey blonde and built like no one’s business--and Shel’s no slacker himself. Yeah, I could see him sliding between the sheets with her.

God, there’s not much going on in our bed, that’s for sure.


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Source: “The Big Diet,” by Jennifer Semple Siegel, Are You EVER Going to Be Thin? (and other stories), 2004.

Available on Amazon.

© Jennifer Semple Siegel, 2004. This work may not be reprinted or reposted without permission from the author.