[genghisfawn]

So...

This guy on my project team at work is a buddy of mine. His wife taught me Christian Ethics in my grade 9 year and she is a complete sweetheart - I won him over by sincerely saying so. He plays soccer and really tries to keep fit and all the rest.

He says to me the other day, "I'm trying this new diet cleanse. Basically all you eat for about a week is bananas, raw almonds and cruciferous vegetables. Greek yogurt is good too if you can't eat that many almonds. Want to try it with me?"

So yeah, I'm not rail thin like the other woman on our project team. I'm a curvy kind of baby deer and I affectionately refer to the podge on my belly and bum as "puppy fat" even though I'm a little past the age where it could still be true. But he's always got his foot in his mouth up to his knee anyhow and I like him, so I want to give this thing a go. Nothing he mentioned will poison me, and I'm a big girl and I'll either do it or give it up as I so choose...

... until I remembered how tenacious he is. So the determined streak in me began to show when I said, "Sure, let's do it," and I bloody meant it. He e-mailed me this diet sheet and all I could think was that it'll just give me gas and make me grumpy because you can't have cheese on ANYTHING, which to me is tantamount to misery.

See, when I was 9 my Baba offered me something to eat (which she did every 20 minutes, I swear to God, and now I am the same freaking way.) I said, "No thanks, I'm on a diet." SMACK up one side of the head and SMACK down the other, then she's yelling, "You must not diet! You will grow too thin and no man will ever want you!" Then of course I relented and she made me a snack, because at age 9 the idea of no man ever wanting you is so very empirical and absolute yet so grown up that you can't even wrap your head around it, so best not to diet... just to simplify matters so that worrying about men - or boys, even, for pete's sake - can come later.

So even when I adjusted my diet to suit living with celiac disease after my diagnosis, it didn't change that much. I still ate bread - just different bread. I still chow down on the pasta... just different pasta. And potato chips, Cheezies (Americans, do you know what you're missing there??) and Tostitos are gluten-free...

Thus I've never dieted to lose weight or feel better or anything. My diet is balanced but I can and sometimes do eat like a workhorse. I am sturdy and healthy and happy... but this little challenge stirred something a little odd in me. Maybe it's because I'm proving myself at work, or maybe it's because I was the kind of person in university who would do speed or coke or shrooms just once for the sake of knowing what it was like to be really screwed up. I'm going to put a positive spin on it, though... I think it's for the sake of team-building and because I want to try something I wouldn't ordinarily do that's a little more ethically neutral.

So here I sit, determined to see this thing out if only to see what kind of stuff an extreme diet will do to your body. I'm eating a bell pepper (which I've cored and pithed) like an apple and feeling more and more pissed off and hungry by the minute.

I want some cheese on this thing. Lots of it.