Romance:From Fat To Fatale(19)
Gentle walking, maybe half an hour in the mornings and then the same again in the evenings, drinking lots of pure, fresh water.
Increase the time or distance every week. Get leaner. Get trimmer.
Build a little muscle underneath those layers of blubber. It would get easier and easier and the gentle movement would encourage my body to flush out the toxins.
The raw vegetables were the secret way to re-colonise my digestive tract with the friendly bacteria I'd been missing for most of my life. No drugs. No prescriptions. Just fresh, raw, local veggies.
As my taste buds recovered some semblance of sensitivity, I might just discover how unbelievably delicious all this natural food could be. The lady nutritionist said an old uncle of hers would signal his satisfaction with a great dish by saying it was like having an angel take a leak on his tongue. Right. Obviously another refugee from the old country but, judging from his description of what constituted a great flavour, clearly from a different village to the Bulgaris. And my body would absolutely love the new food, with or without the freshly decanted angel pee condiment.
She drove me back to town in her old pickup truck, rusty suspension creaking and singing as we crested the rises on the highway, bottles of spring water in our hands, and we talked about some of the issues that had surfaced from my questionnaire. She made it clear that being unhappy was pretty much the standard condition for most folks. They just got used to it and found lots of creative ways to hide the pain. Food was an obvious choice. She turned her head towards me, her eyes crinkling in the bright sunlight, smiled and said I'd surely know everything there was to know about using food to ease the emptiness inside. And she wasn't talking about an empty stomach here, was she? No, my friend, she was not.
A lot of the problems grew out of a feeling that we weren't in control of our lives. Folk just end up feeling trapped, she said.
Pressure. Work. Marriage. Kids. Mortgages. Car repayments. An endless cycle of stresses with a bunch of destructive habits to dull the ache and fill the void. Hey! Are you still with me? Let's lighten things up a little here. I certainly didn't mean to bring you down with all this gloom and doom and life full of emptiness, why do I bother to go on living routine. You know I value you too much for that, my worthiest and wisely nodding traveling companion. The conversation in the pickup truck was deep but it was absolutely the right subject for discussion at that precise moment. I was feeling pretty good, spirits were high, I'd just completed a really tough challenge and I'd picked up a new and growing sense of confidence from my amazing lady nutritionist. It was good to lay out all these issues in the light of day, conjure up the ghosts of my own unhappiness and exorcise their influence forever. Seemed like control was more of an issue than I'd ever realised.
In the Bulgari household, we were all firmly stamped, branded and shackled to the will of Mama. She ruled the household with absolute power, undisputed queen of her realm, and she effectively ruled our lives.
She did it because she believed with every ounce of her old country passion that it was her sacred duty to run the household and her family. It was her responsibility. It was her role as a true mother and woman. She did it with every particle of her immense love. She did it with an irresistible spirit of self-sacrifice. She would die for us. But she held us all in the span of her hand because she believed that was where we would always be safe. It was so beautiful, so awful, so wonderful, and so completely crazy. No wonder we all loved her so much.
Chapter 13:
Moving on
One thing was certain, I could never make all these changes to my diet with Mama in charge of the kitchen. And the chances of her being kidnapped by aliens just to give me and my body a much-needed break seemed pretty remote on that beautiful sunny morning as we headed back into town. The lady nutritionist asked me whether it would help if she went to see Mama, maybe talk things through, and get some understanding about my health issues. I thought of my little sister's Bible class friend, the dumpling nutritionist whose efforts had failed so miserably to evangelise the Bulgari household with the new fat-free faith of slimming powders, and I shook my head slowly. Might do a lot more harm than good.
Mama Bulgari would see it as a direct challenge to her authority and just step up the campaign to roll out even more high-fat, sugar-saturated calories. No. We needed something more subtle. An Amazonian blowpipe perhaps and some of those amazing darts that could put a monkey to sleep in a couple of seconds? Chloroform on her delicately perfumed lace handkerchief, the one she always carried to Mass to keep the stench of sin away from her delicate nostrils as the rest of the miserable congregation of condemned souls queued for absolution. No. Maybe not. We needed something a little more effective here. So, smarty pants, you haven't said much for a while, have you? What would you suggest? What's your bright idea to rescue me from the smothering embrace of my own beloved Mama?
While you're busy working out the answer, let me tell you what I came up with.
Or rather what the lady nutritionist came up with. It was true that I was definitely the oldest child in the Bulgari family nest so it would be natural for me to fly the coop at some point in my life and go find my own place to live. Except, in the Bulgari tradition, I was expected to get married first, then live at home for about ten years. And then - and only then - make the break and think about getting a place for myself and for my grossly fat, God-fearing husband and our butterball kids. Independent? Sort of -