Came back home the other night and started stripping down my Christmas decorations. The holidays are over, my three-week long stay at Irish Coffee's place is done, college has reopened, classes have resumed, and there seems to be a sudden lack of romance. Well, till I make my midnight phone call to Irish Coffee, that is. :)
There's a veritable mountain of work and academic papers to be written just waiting for me, and yet the largest, arguably most important project on my plate this semester is literally that - on my plate. The Happy Holidays are gone, and the pounds I put on during those fabulous times have to be chased away too. Re-enter, the PHAT (Pretty Hot and Tempting) Plan.
Of course, being a college student in the US of A, you're almost expected to put on weight. A friend of mine here calls it "the freshman fifteen". After all, when you're running from class to class, and from paper to paper, it's all you can do to grab a piece of artificially cheesy pizza, or extra-greasy burger with fatty fries, and some fizzy soda pop... And when you don't know how to cook and don't have the patience for it either, like me, you're pretty much doomed to put on those excess calories. And then, of course, it was Holiday time. Loads of great food in Chicago, lots of eating with the Irish brood, and before I knew it, I stood on the weight to realize I'd gained (gasp) ten pounds.
So, the other day, Irish Coffee and I sat on the love seat and pored through this diet book, looking at the loooooong list of banned foods - all the while, munching on low-fat brownies. (Yes, such an unearthly thing actually exists!) Turns out, the genius who wrote the book says that diets should be determined by blood groups, and so an O+ guy like me should stay away from lentils, corn, wheat, bread, pork, cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes, cheese and a whole host of other foods that formed my staple diet a week back. Now, even though I don't completely buy that blood-diet logic, and am scouting around for copies of the South Beach diet, a lot of those aforementioned foods probably are bad for me! *sigh*
So, this evening for dinner, I popped over to the dining room and helped myself to salad. Not the yummy decadent Bombay salad with its dripping meats and pasta and corn, but a rudimentary American-style one: lots of lettuce, beets, carrots, spinach and broccoli, with some lean turkey strips on top, and low-fat balsamic dressing. O, and yes, Diet Coke.
Some time back when I called up Irish Coffee for our nightly conversation and told him about my evening meal, he chuckled and said I shouldn't worry...
My reply? "Thank God, he made boyfriends to say stuff like that!"
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