Romance:From Fat To Fatale(14)

I'd signed a waiver and realised I was volunteering to subject myself to three long days and three long nights - we opted for a Friday and the weekend - in a trailer, somewhere in the wilds outside of town, with the lady nutritionist firmly in command, the camp commandantesse who would make sure I couldn't get over the wall or tunnel my way out of captivity and hit the nearest candy store at full speed with terminal sugar-cramming velocity.

Three whole days. One teeny, tiny lapse and we'd have to start all over again. From scratch. I was facing three days of organic vegetable broth, raw vegetables, steamed vegetables, vegetables all day long. And all the freshly-drawn spring water I could drink.

Let's take a breather here. I get exhausted just thinking about the enforced retreat. So let's talk about you for a change, my friend. Have you ever been on a diet? Uh-huh? And how did it go? Did you have a target for weight loss or was there some other reason for cutting back on the calories? I'm curious because pretty much everyone tries dieting at some time or another. And the world is awash with dieting fads, fashion foods, fat-busting pills, gut-wrangling exercises. It's mostly just bu......I was going to say something unkind but what I really mean is it's mostly just business. Ways to make money.

Playing on the fears and frustrations of fat folk everywhere who want to eat whatever they want to eat and still lose weight. It's a kind of mass neurosis because - and I truly don't want to shatter any of your precious illusions here - those diets and fads just don't work. You drop a few pounds. Yay! Then you hit the two-gallon carton of Haagen-Dazs to celebrate! And then, even a few weeks into the diet, your body trips over into fat-preserving starvation mode and the weight stops falling off and the pounds start creeping right back on.

So you lose hope of ever being slimmer, trimmer, healthier and happier because the multi-billion dollar diet industry has fooled you and let you down. Happens every day. The lady nutritionist was adamant. You had to re-set your metabolism and get the insulin levels back to normal first. Had to. No question. No choice. Had to. That meant three days of Hell on a strictly-controlled, totally sugar-free regime before the real work could begin. Now, my dear friend, when I say something as innocent as 'no sugar', we're not just talking about candy, cookies and donuts. We're even excluding fruit from the recipe.

We're excluding everything that might have a hint of sugar in it and that included bread. They add sugar to bread? Yep. One of the reasons it tastes so good. One of the reasons why it's so hard to give up.

When you take a moment to think about it, we're an entire nation of addicts! Hooked from cradle to wide-berthed, economy-size-casketed grave. Candy-craving, bloated and miserable. I was beginning to wonder if a lot of my anger was really aimed at me. Whatever stories I might like to use to explain away my size, deep down it looked more and more as if I was just punishing myself. You're nodding like you already knew, aren't you? Like you knew all along?

Thought so. Trust me to hook up with a

certifiable smarty-pants like you!

The slightly tainted white lie that I shared with Mama was that I was going away for a long weekend with the PC posse from college on a study exercise to spot potential perverts on the Internet. She approved wholeheartedly and emphasised her encouragement by whittling the air with a bone-handled, razor-sharp carving knife to indicate exactly what she'd do to any pervert who tried to spy on her via the Internet.

You could take the Bulgaris out of the old country but you couldn't take the old country - and its sociopathic approach to strangers - out of the Bulgaris. Anyway, my college work was pretty much uncharted territory for the family. They weren't exactly enthusiastic about my enrolment in the first place. And since you couldn't cook or prepare food with a laptop, computers weren't really their main area of interest in life. The only byte in the Bulgari lexicon was something you took repeatedly out of a cake. The minor exception to the rule, of course, was Miclav. That was one overweight young man who spent long, solitary hours in his bedroom with only his computer for company. He always said he was playing games. Sure he was. He once asked me to demonstrate my computer virtuosity and upgrade his sclerotic PC memory.

So, like a good sister of mercy and computer-qualified intelligence, I happily dived in. The material that was clogging his PC's antiquated chips was, according to the canons of the Church, somewhere on the dark and grim side of the depths of depravity and I had to be very strong and self-disciplined to limit myself to only two hours a day of private viewing as I pretended to road test the new and upgraded system. It's absolutely amazing what you can learn from the Internet. Oh, yes, my wise and knowing friend, education is certainly a wonderful thing and I soon began to wonder to myself if it would be possible to hog-tie one of my slightly inebriated assignations one evening and reverse roles for a while. So to speak.

A little episode of dressing up, maybe switching on a handy, battery-powered appliance? A generous-hearted squirt of lubricant and a leather-clad bout of complete domination with matching studded collars and restraints. A gag might be a useful precaution too. But would it constitute kidnap? Would it possibly be mis-interpreted by an unenlightened judge? Would I get to like it a little too much?

Ah! You've thought of it too, haven't you? I knew it. Is your heart beating a little faster at the prospect? Potent stuff, indeed, my friend. Potent stuff, indeed. But don't worry. I won't tell a soul.