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The Man Who Invented Weight Loss

We have had a most unusual situation in our home these past few weeks..the husband decided to lose weight.
He didn't tell me so of course..he is not one for talking to his wife..but I noticed the decrease in the demolishment of my pantry supplies and the fact that he no longer sent staff scurrying to the coffee shop for his substantial lunch courses.

And it was time. To be quite truthful, he , a true ectomorph, was beginning to look gross in his clothes, and nothing in the kitchen store cupboards was safe. I had lost count of the times I had left him to graze alone at the kitchen table after midnight. Not to forget how he demolished the $100 of candy the daughter gave him for his midMay birthday, alone and unaided, by the end of the month. I had taken to hiding any goodies I was saving for grandchildren, unsuccessfully, usually,to the point that cookies kept for them were stored in the freezer of the outside drinks 'frig.
Anyway, something about his ballooning silhouette must have gotten to him- or maybe someone said something to him, but he suddenly stopped eating nonstop. Began to restrict himself to three meals a day and the occasional snack, instead of the perpetual grazing we had become used to, and which had become something of a family joke. And it worked, of course, as one's first attempts to lose weight usually do, to the extent that he has lost 12 kilos in 6 weeks..which tells you how much he was eating BEFORE
But instead of being, therefore, sympathetic to others attempting to lose weight, he has become rather pompous and self-righteous, especially when dealing with customers looking for a "quick fix" to the weight problem, or "dietary aids" or "curb your hunger" pills; customers who have come to him for advice.
"There is only one way to lose weight" he tells them curtly, "and that is to just stop eating".

That is, of course, all very well for HIM, who still eats three meals a day including a well-cooked dinner at night- his weight gain having been the result of an increasing preoccupation with food- a kind of compensation, I suspect, for other physical pleasures now denied him. Not so easy to tell a woman whose weight has increased over long years, or a diabetic patient, for example, to just "stop eating".

It was a while before I realised all men are not like that.
In 2000, I arranged to spend some time in Adelaide, part of which time I would play host to an internet friend from Sydney.
I arrived three days ahead of him, and spent most of that time cooking, assuming he would be as preoccupied with eating as my husband was. After all, I figured, that was the way to a man' s heart, was it not? Or so I had been conditioned.
I cooked , on the strange stove, in the holiday apartment, in an Adelaide heatwave, rather less than the husband would have expected served to him in the same time, but enough to impress, I thought.
But the Sydney friend was somewhat less moved than I had expected.
Oh, he enjoyed his meals, but he wasn't interested in eating through all his waking hours and suprised me by seeming more interested in ME, and in making conversation at the dining table, which was a novelty for me, used to a husband whose first dinnertime activity was to place the day's newspapers beside his plate, and who expected to engross himself in the Age wordpuzzle, whatever was on TV, and the radio as well, as he ate. Conversation with his wife over dinner has never been something to which my husband expected to have to submit. Even on our honeymoon, he would mark the place in his book with a finger if I interrupted his reading.

So I am quite used to vacating the table when I am finished my meal, and leaving him there. And there he would stay, quite often till the wee small hours, as the biscuit packs, candy and cheese wrappers and nibbly boxes mounted up around him. Often, he would go to sleep still sitting there at the table, but more often he would sleep in his layback chair in the lounge, food alongside, nodding off as soon as he had gotten comfortable. Later, much later, he might stagger to bed.


Well, the not talking to his wife hasn't changed and he still likes to have the TV on, and to read as well, no matter how much effort I have put into the cooking of his meal. But now he mostly stops eating after the main course. And he has lost 12 kilos. And he has, of course, invented weight loss and become the first person ever to lose kilos by reducing their food intake.
And he still goes to sleep in his chair, and snores through TV, so that noone else can watch but I have my own little TV set in the computer study now, so I need not miss out on the end of anything I was watching.
But now I have no food wrappers to clear away next morning, and now he is master of the weight loss brigade, and boasts of his new silhouette and of HIS invention..!!

What is it they say? Rien change? Plus change?
Men? They don't just OWN the world, they INVENTED it!

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