Fanfare for the Common Man: February brings end to diet | Columnists | Our Gazette

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Fanfare for the Common Man: February brings end to diet

Published Wednesday, February 03, 2010 9:20 AM

By Dan Brown
The Gazette

It’s February.

If you’re like me, the New Year’s resolution to lose weight is about to get chucked. Mine already has.

Sometime last week I got fed up with stupid bathroom scales not giving what I feel is the right weight, and had a day that began with double eggs and double bacon from the breakfast counter at The Pig, paused for lunch for the All You Can Eat Chinese buffet, and ended with one of those $5 large pepperoni pizzas.

The weight isn’t coming off and my New Year’s resolve is folding like a bad poker hand. Valentine’s Day is two weeks away and I have no one to share it with, yet another reason why I should try to drown myself in the egg drop soup at the All You Can Eat Chinese buffet.

Then the other day, the epiphany hit that I can’t distinguish between a spoon and a ladle.

I’m fat.

I’ve starved myself for a month and I’m still fat.

I’m seeing pink and chocolate everywhere I go lately and, and lurking in the shadows are those deliciously hideous Cadberry chocolate eggs.

If I don’t stay out of the stores for the next two weeks I’m going to have one of those meltdowns and just go nuclear on the Valentine’s candy kiosk at Walmart.

I’m trying. But it’s not working.

I even bought these digital scales to help track my weight loss. I’m doing well. I weigh “E.”

I go through this morning ritual where I ceremoniously strip to my shorts and then gingerly climb on the scales as if to do so softly would make me weigh less.

It blinks four or five times then comes up “E.”

So I repeat. Five or six times I repeat until I no longer weigh “E” and a number flashes on the screen. Then I don’t eat until next Tuesday.

I also have a standard set of scales and when I need to generate a breeze I step on those. I keep it in the kitchen to use as an exhaust fan.

Every time I step on it I weigh something different, and depending on how I lean, forward, backward, to the right or left, I could gain five pounds or drop ten.

I know what I’ve been doing wrong. I’m not eating at Taco Bell.

Taco Bell has come out with a commercial campaign saying their food, when used as part of a normal, healthy diet, can promote weight loss, and they actually found someone to agree to come on camera and say so.

This Taco Bell chick said she lost 54 pounds over a two-year period averaging two pounds a month.

That’s a diet?

A diet where you lose just two pounds a month. Shoot, I’ve been on that diet for the last six years.

Two pounds a month, I can’t believe she said that. And put it on TV.

“I followed a normal, healthy, low fat, low cholesterol diet, and substituted my normal fast food visits with Taco Bell’s fresco drive-thru diet,” she said.

I hate to say this, but the words “diet” and “normal fast food visits” shouldn’t be used in the same sentence. Results aren’t typical, they say. No duh. When are they?

“Results aren’t typical,” is the disclaimer’s way of saying we just fed you 30 seconds of garbage where nothing we just told you has a shred of truth to it, and hope you don’t notice.

So I went to Taco Bell and bought six of those diet tacos, a five-layer burrito and some ultimate nachos. If this lady lost two pounds a month eating this stuff, I should lose tons more this way.

My ship had come in. Finally, a diet involving cheese dip and chips.

When I got home, Taco Bell had already posted a retraction online saying their Drive Thru Diet wasn’t really a diet at all, and the lady who lost the 54 pounds, worked out three times a week at the gym and walked two miles every night.

Great. More exercise.

Now they tell me.

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