Weightless for the Holidays

I once conjured up this brilliant plan to exercise and eat healthfully long enough to get me underweight so I could (don’t worry I’m not anorexic) eat myself out of house and home for the holidays. Gain 10 lbs. in December? No big deal. I needed it anyhow.

Photo courtesy of gettyimages.com

I still hold firmly to the fact that I find this to be a nearly flawless plan. It would make for a pretty lousy summer and fall (what with all the exercising — I hate exercising — and eating healthfully — I hate eating healthfully), but then I could traipse around, eating an entire turkey and several helpings of buttered mashed potatoes all day long. I could single-handedly eat a cherry pie with little to no ramification.

If there’s one thing I could grow to love in life, it would certainly be eating an entire pie without consequence.

Photo courtesy of gettyimages.com

Unfortunately (isn’t there always an unfortunately), I have never actually succeeded in this plan. I’ve learned the discomforting lesson that, after turning about 23, one’s metabolism rate plummets down into the core of the Earth, disallowing that person to, you know, eat an entire bag of Doritos at 10:00 pm and then only workout once a week, for a few minutes to maintain a healthy weight.

That’s total crap, if you ask me. That metabolism rate should last till a person’s ability to use the restroom alone gives up.

So, alas and alack, my disdain for exercise and superfoods means I enter this year’s holiday season with a few more pounds than last year’s, and I am fairly certain (unless I were to happen upon an international parasite) I won’t manage to get underweight between now and Thursday.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try.

Smooth and Blended

A friend recently introduced me to the world of green smoothies. I should have prefaced this with the fact that I have never been and never will be a healthy eater. I tried counting calories once and found myself counting out how many cookies I could eat before considering myself a total failure.

I used to eat chocolate cake for breakfast growing up.

And I’ll say I was extremely skeptical. Anything that should be entirely fruit-based and instead has random leafy greens is probably going to taste really wretched. Because … random leafy greens. Should be fruit-based. I don’t even particularly care for V8 V-Fusion and I never add boosts to my Jamba Juice [as an aside: do people still go to Jamba Juice? Is that still a thing?]. But, as it turns out, green smoothies are really delicious.

YEAH YOU HEARD ME, CHOCOLATE CAKE, REALLY DELICIOUS. (No seriously – don’t be worried at all. I nearly always follow my green smoothie with some sort of dessert.)

So when Mom and Dad came to town, I naturally had to introduce my father to green smoothies (Mom had no interest, and that’s fine because let’s be honest, they look like baby vomit).

But I have issues sometimes with my blender. It’s a Kitchenaid, and it’s pretty powerful, but frozen fruit in mass quantities kind of gets it all freaked out and confused and then it just makes noise without actually liquefying. So I unscrewed the little part of the lid that allows you to pour things in or, as I did, shove a plastic spoon in there to break things up, and then it really got going. It was making some really excellent grinding noises and I was certain we’d end up with a lot of really smooth pureed fruit.

The Low Point

He lived a good life.