I was on a plane to Phoenix yesterday, reading magazines because if we had turned on our iPads to do any 21st-century-method reading we might have brought the whole plane down in a fiery crash - and no one wanted that, not even the guy sitting next to the 14-month-old with a head cold - when my husband handed me his Psychology Today and said, "Read this."
I normally hate that. I was doing my own take-off/landing ancient ritual of doing a Sudoku puzzle with a primitive writing device called a "pen." When you're involved in your own thing and someone says, "Read this" it's typically not something that is going to improve your mood or even take your mind off of the fact that you're flying in the air in a big metal machine. Most likely it's something that's going to make me go, "What? They want to do what?"or something about our taxes or the value of our house or some related bullshit.
But I'm a good and decent wife so I took the article and read it and now I'm going to Matt's Big Breakfast today. Yes, Matt's Big Breakfast, Phoenix's early morning hotspot with the world's most delicious and most buttery bacony menu.
The article was about how people should ignore Dolly Parton and all the other people who lost weight by eating 6-8 tiny meals a day instead of three regular meals. Dolly said in an article that I read a long time ago that by eating a lot of small meals you are tricking your body into sitting back and letting the fat burners burn away without fear that you're starving to death. When you go a long time between meals, Dolly said, your body might go into red alert, thinking that you're stranded somewhere without food and you need to hold onto all that fat for life preservation until a rescue plane can find you.
But some Salk Institute biologists said in Psychology Today that's BS. Now we're supposed to start with a big breakfast and then fast and then eat a decent lunch and then fast and then a light dinner and then fast some more and then go straight to bed and no Cheez-Its. Actually the article said "not even a bite of cookie" which I thought was kind of mean, but they were getting their point across. (It can't be easy competing with Dolly Parton when you're a biologist with the Salk Institute. How can anyone take you seriously when you don't have two huge knockers and some big hair?) By fasting throughout the day, you're tricking your body in a different way, a better way than all those skinny Hollywood and Dollywood types. All the fasting allows you to do what's really important and that is to go to Matt's Big Breakfast and eat bacon and butter.
"What time do they open?" I asked my husband this morning. "Because I think it's important that we get started on this new health plan right away."
We had originally planned a day of museums, maybe going to Tucson, maybe a drive through the desert. We also had planned for a year of healthier living, which inevitably includes eating less.
But go figure; I can be on a health plan - an actual health plan from Psychology Today for crying out loud - and still walk guilt-free into Matt's Big Breakfast and order the Salami Scramble or the Chop & Chick, which has an actual pork chop in it.
Don't come back at me with "But you shouldn't have all that fat" or "You should eat more sensibly" or "That Psychology Today thing doesn't sound quite right. Are you sure you read the whole thing and not just the info-graphics like you usually do?" or "The lines are so long at Matt's Big Breakfast." I'm on a health plan and I'm going with it. See you at my decent lunch.
