Gonna Have to Face It, I’m Addicted to…CHEESE.
By Joe Miglionico

I’m a big guy. And not in the way that Arnold Shwarzengruber or Andre the Giant are big. I’m fat, overweight, obese, “jolly,” gravitationally challenged, rotund, mashmallowesque, chair threatening, mountainous, chunky…and I need to do something about it. Being fat rots, in ways most people don’t even realize. It makes almost everything you do a little more difficult in subtle and annoying ways. Putting on socks becomes an adventure in finding positions that the Kama Sutra could only dream of illustrating.

Overeating is an addiction as strong as any other, whether it’s drinking, smoking, heroin, American Idol or shoe shopping. Fortunately, if you’re a smoker or a drinker, you can always go cold turkey. If you’re an food addict, going cold turkey means you eat a lot more turkey (with mashed potatoes and gravy, and those biscuits that peel apart in layers and… hang on, I have to go have a donut). I know that I need to do something about it, or I probably won’t be around long enough to die in the coming nuclear holocaust. What to do, though. Dieting works, but for me dieting means no solid food at all. It’s the only thing that works for me. I am simply incapable of eating a normal sized plate of food. Or perhaps I should say I am INCREDIBLY capable of eating a normal sized plate of food, and then three more. So, liquid diets will work for me. A couple of years ago, I did a liquid diet for 7 months and lost a hundred pounds. But a strange thing happens if I eat anything at all while on one of these all-fluid diets. It’s like I have an imaginary bank of switches in my head and as soon as I eat anything ~ even if it’s a single French fry ~ the little French fry switch changes from Off to Om and I suddenly find myself at Ronnie’s, eating Idaho’s entire potato output for the week. Before you know it, I’ve gained back everything I’d lost ~ and at a speed so incredible that I can almost see myself inflating in real time.

Then there’s exercise, but how do you start an exercise program when just walking to the bathroom every morning is like preparing for a marathon. I’ve always hated exercise ~ even when I was in school, I would routinely “forget” my gym clothes. A big part of my issue with gym was being terrified that my sadistic bastard of a gym teacher would make me climb the ropes, but and even bigger part was that exercise always seemed pointless to me. Well, there was one exception. I used to ride my bike all over the place, like from West Boylston to the Grafton Flea Market. This is no small ride. But riding a bike was never something I did for fun, I did it purely for pre-license transportation. And y’know how They say that it’s always easy to get back to riding a bike no matter how it’s been? I’ve got news for you ~ it’s NOT easy to get back on when you’re 3 feet wider than you were and now exceed the bike’s weight limit by a factor of 3?
And yes, before you ask, I have looked into stomach surgery, but the more I looked at it, the less it seemed like something I want to do. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life eating a tablespoon of food for a meal 8 times a day? And what if I put a Ring Ding in the tablespoon? Does that count? And did you notice that they’ve changed the name of Ding Dongs to King Dons? What the hell is that all about? I’ve also noticed that a lot of people who had that surgery a few years ago seem to be getting fat again. Have you seen Al Roker lately? Even with a tenth of a stomach, he seems to be slowly inflating again ~ and it’s the same with Carnie Wilson. The fact that the mortality rate in the first year is something like 10 percent isn’t exactly encouraging either. So to sum it up, if I’m gonna die anyway, I’d rather die with a plateful of pizza than a tablespoonful of broccoli.

What the Hell Have I Been Eating?!
OK, so those of you who know me have been asking that for years, but I just watched an ad for Arby’s and the entire ad was devoted to explaining how they are now using nothing but all natural chicken. Is it just me, or does that statement now beg the question if it’s all natural chicken now, what was it before?! What have I been eating? I don’t eat at Arby’s that much as it is (it’s always been a little pricey), but I did like the Chicken Cordon Bleu. But now I think back on it and wonder if all this time it was just some sort of chicken flavored glop that had been formed into a pattie and fried into “Tastes like Chicken” generic foodstuffs. Perhaps they ground those “Chicken in a Biscuit” crackers into a fine powder and created a kind of psuedo-chicken Plaster of Paris they could mold at will. While I applaud the Arby’s company for deciding that serving chicken in their chicken is the best way to go, I have to say that perhaps their current marketing scheme is NOT. I can’t be the only consumer who now questions exactly what kind of solid protein-apparently unnatural chicken-flavored by-product he was eating before the real-chicken-might-be-best-epiphany struck the gang at Arby’s… And come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard them say that their roast beef comes from all natural cows…Guess that’s why they can slice it so thin…