*Which doesn’t mean I’ve eaten them yet.

I’m starting a new eating plan, called “Lose Weight.” It will not be fun. Tonight I made sugar-free Jello. Disgusting. I made it because my mom used to make it in all sorts of flavors when I was little. I remember now that the boxes she made were blue instead of white, which is the sugary kind. Now I know she was trying to make us all thinner! Duh.

I bought cherry, because whenever we had it at home, I remember feeling disappointed if it wasn’t cherry. Eventually I wouldn’t even eat it if it wasn’t cherry. Keep in mind I was about 16. And apparently still a little brat.

Look at how unnatural the Jello appears in my refrigerator. There’s barely room for it next to all of my six-packs of beer and lonely container of lowfat cottage cheese. Don’t worry, beer is not part of my new eating plan. There’s just nowhere else to put it. I don’t want it to skunk.

Why do I choose only nasty foods for The Plan? Also on the shopping list: apples, cottage cheese (?!), and iceberg lettuce. Iceberg lettuce! Am I kidding? I’m guessing this also harks back to my teenage years, when I’d refuse to eat salads with any dressing whatsoever. It wasn’t because of the fat — fuck that. I think it must have been something else psychological, because I was completely averse to even the kindliest of dressings. I needed the iceberg lettuce to be really wet, and I’d sprinkle enough salt on it so that I may as well have just dipped every dripping shred of lettuce into a bowl of salt. The only other thing I’d allow in the salad were tomatoes. And I just ate this disgusting mixture an hour ago, right here in the desk chair K.A. and I stole from the Heights office in college. It was Gross Salad That’s Not Even Really A Salad: Redux. WTF?

It makes no sense to me that I should start eating things I ate in high school if I want to Lose Weight. I suppose the family-size Home Run Inn frozen sausage pizzas, consumed in their entireties by me and me alone in the basement at 3 a.m. in those joyous few weeks of 1997 right after the Barrett family got AOL… should not be included. Bummer.

There’s really no need to comment that I’m not fat. I didn’t say I was. The goal here is to feel like a normal citizen again after my 10-day gnocchi binge in Italy. What’s worse, I’ve been back from Italy for a week now and I’ve made four successive huge GLAD plastic containers full of different pasta concoctions. The first one was cooked five minutes after I walked into my apartment, jet-lagged and confused. The pastas have varied in form, and have been tossed with pine nuts, pesto, eggplant, diced onions, zucchini, basil, chicken, gobletfuls of oil, etc. It’s sick. I have this one GLAD container that I just keep reusing. I get jittery when the pasta supply’s running low, so while I’m eating the last of it, I start cooking the next batch. One time I didn’t even bother washing the last round’s sauce from the container. (It’s huge, by the way, much bigger than the Jello bowl.) The sauce on the sides wasn’t crusty yet, so I just haphazardly ran a paper towel along the interior and decided it was good enough. That might have been my low point.

Hence, new eating plan, new workout plan, NEW LIFE! A Better Version of Me, coming right up. And don’t think I won’t chart my failure rate on this here site. Here we go!

Currently loving: Salt. I’ll love it forever.
Currently hating: The Real World. It’s so freaking awful. Seriously.