Romance:From Fat To Fatale(7)
A fumbled, hesitant kiss on the porch, nearly slicing open my lip on his damn braces. Ah, the joys of youthful love. And then the end of semester science club party where some budding chemist or future backyard drug manufacturer spiked the fruit punch with something that could certainly stop your engine from freezing at 40 below zero and things got, well, a little more interesting. Three glasses of rocket-fuel punch later and my boyfriend suddenly revealed a more passionate and previously suppressed side to his nature that took both of us by surprise.
We found ourselves outside on a warm summer's evening rolling around in the tall grass, his skinny jeans round his knees and my generously proportioned under-garment wrapped around one chubby ankle and flailing in the gentle evening breeze, locked in a fierce embrace with him whooping like a fledging rodeo rider let loose on his first mount. It was brief. It was intense. It was over way too quickly and probably wasn't the most ecstatic experience of my life but it really, genuinely happened and with a real live human being who suddenly stopped hollering, looked down at his half-naked torso, sighed wistfully and promptly passed out on top of me. Yes, my friend. True, true romance.
To be honest, I hadn't been expecting anything like this to happen so I wasn't exactly prepared for the event. And neither was he. In the days that followed, my suddenly less-than-friendly boyfriend seemed very distracted and nervous around me and I had to spell out to him in a whispered voice exactly what had happened. And even had to repeat the message on three separate occasions. Apart from throwing up on his neighbour's lawn, he claimed he couldn't remember too much about that night.
Then the truth seemed to dawn in his nerdy, pre-frontal cortex and the awful realisation of a possible pregnancy brought him out in a really nasty and highly visible rash. Wow. I could've been pregnant. How dumb was that? We didn't talk about teenage marriage and raising a clutch of rug rats but he did send me lots of emails about backyard do-it-yourself abortion techniques that took some of the shine off our rapidly wilting romance. When I calmly announced to him one morning that everything was OK and that I wasn't pregnant, he looked at me strangely through those massively thick lenses that he wore and asked how I could be sure. Yep. It was a close escape for me.
Guy probably had a brain the size of a planet but was dumber than a pile of lumber. Like I said, close escape. Years later I heard that he'd actually succeeded in joining NASA. He became a valued member of their elite night-time janitorial team and some said the corridors had never been so well mopped since the organisation was created.
On a positive note, I'd accidentally stumbled on the same method of seduction that would deliver my hormonally-charged and desperate little sister into the welcoming arms of countless sweaty pickup truck drivers every Friday night. Without fail. We're talking about the devil's very own patented love potion: booze, my friend, booze.
Alcohol could play a vital role in the game of love and once some dumb guy was blinking at life through his beer goggles, even a lady of my extravagant proportions was in with a chance. It was all about timing. Too soon and the guy was not in the mood to play.
Too late and the booze would switch off the passion poker like a light switch.
You had to get the timing right and then, well, things could work out just fine. It wasn't a case of finding Mr Right. More like a case of Mr Right-Now. And, at the time, it was good enough. Or so I thought. Are you shaking your head at me, pretending you don't know what I'm talking about here? Hey! We're supposed to be friends, aren't we? Don't get all judgemental on me now. You know what it's like to be filled with doubt and loneliness. You must know how it feels to be left out when everyone else seems to be in some kind of a relationship.
Girls just snapping their fingers and guys running to heel like well-trained hound-dogs. I'm telling it like it is. I might've dropped my standards a little back then but I sure didn't have too many standards to drop in the first place. Can't believe you're judging me here. Damn! Let's have a little solidarity here. It seems like a long time ago now because a lot has happened since those goofy old, desperate days of fumbled love in the arms of strangers. OK. So you didn't mean to judge. It's alright. But enough of my sordid confessions. You wanted to know how my titanic struggles with my weight and health issues were progressing, didn't you? You can't fool me. I could see the look of boredom in your eyes. I've seen it a few times before as some guy grunts and rolls off you and wonders where he's left his drinking buddies.
Chapter 6:
Enter the Nutritionist
Nutrition, as you probably know all too well, is the new kid on the block in the world of scientific endeavour. Wasn't too long ago when most people were more worried about starvation than having the right mix of nutrients in their diet. It's really bizarre when you think about it. Famine has been a recurring theme throughout the long history of human experience and it's taken its toll of billions and billions of lives. But if you take a look around you right now, there probably won't be too many folks in your neighbourhood who are dying of starvation. Am I right? So we've gone from one life-threatening extreme to the other.
From constantly trying to avoid starvation to killing ourselves with too much food. I know. I sometimes struggle to understand it myself.
And here I was, scheduled to meet a nutritionist, one of those modern day witch doctors who would shake and rattle the bones and exorcise the evil calories from my body. To be honest, my faith in these latter-day snake-oil salesmen wasn't exactly at an all-time high. One fateful evening, my chubby little sister had brought along a friend from her old Bible class who wanted to offer some guidance to the Bulgaris on how to eat properly.