House-sitting for a friend of mine recently I discovered the notion of 100 calorie snack packs, where basically any junk food in the world is pre-portioned out for you into 100 calorie packs.

I will spare you the obvious commentary on how that’s essentially paying more for less, the extra packaging ruining the environment, or how one may then just apply Garfield’s theory (yes, the cat) that eating a whole pie one slice at a time actually has far less calories than consuming said pie en masse.

What struck me was the notion of how embarrassingly ideal these 100 calorie packs are to me, as someone who has trouble with control and portion when it comes to food. And how I wish it could be applied to other areas of life.

How about a Vodka pack that only gives you 100 minutes of a hang over?

Or a smoking pack that may risk only 100 hours of cancer?  Okay, that still doesn’t seem worth it.  But I’ve never been a smoker.  I can’t fathom paying money for something that goes into your mouth that you can’t swallow.

What about a 100 kisses pack that garuntees the exact right amount of fun without any heartbreak?

 I’d buy those in bulk.   Wait….

Pictured here are the 100 calorie packs of Doritos.  I figured since they were the sponsor of the “The Hail to the Cheese Stephen Colbert Nacho Cheese Doritos’ 2008 Presidential Campaign”  their portioned controlled product might champion me on my new endeavor.

I’ve been scoping out sites and narrowing in on the overall goal of my blog.  Next entry will include a current weigh-in (I really just realized the other day the cold horror of the fact that everyone knows what I weigh now- because honestly I’ve been told, and realize that I don’t look nearly that heavy as the number.) 

And I will also reveal my “White Girl with a Fat Ass 2008 Help my F.A. End Hunger Campaign” 

does anyone know anyone at Doritos? OMD? tell them I would be happy to give them the same deal as Steven Colbert did to sponsor my campaign?

http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/

Bread.org states:

“But we CAN end hunger.

We have the means. The financial costs to end hunger are relatively slight. The United Nations Development Program estimates that the basic health and nutrition needs of the world’s poorest people could be met for an additional $13 billion a year. Animal lovers in the United States and Europe spend more than that on pet food each year.

What makes the difference between millions of hungry people and a world where all are fed?

Only a change in priorities. Only the will to end hunger.”

I could get all cynical and soapboxathon to you about the evils of a world where 850 million people go hungry and F.A.’s like myself are paying for 100 calorie packs.  But even that, that help redefining what is a proper portion, is a change in priorities. Becoming aware and enabling control over your own issues, that awareness can and will spread.

 (see that Doritos, I’m someone you want to champion)

I want to change my priorities for good.  God, how much do I wish there was a 100 Calorie pack for that! 

Post Thanksgiving weigh-in is 196 lbs.  Which is the same as before Thanksgiving.  Which considering the nature of the holiday seems to be a minor miracle.  My friend sent me this website:
http://www.freerice.com/index.php

And I obsessively played all weekend.  Basics are for each word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated through the United nations to help end world hunger.  I got up to vocab level 44- how ’bout you?

Thinking about how much I would need to play in order to equal out the amount of food I consumed makes me dizzy.  The mere fact that finding it impossible to not shove everything I see into my face is my big miserable ‘After school special’ life problem. That I struggle with this everyday, when others don’t have anything is continued source of shame.  

When I shared my blog with friends and family along with my quest to finally overcome issues with food. Which presents itself as an obvious result from my second pre-Holiday dumping, more than one friend joked.

 ”Hey look at it this way, you’ve already lost 160lbs.”  Why they all decided that was my Ex’s weight is beyond me.

I read somewhere that the average human is 206,250 calories.  And since, for various reasons, I consider my Ex below average presently, I’ve decided he is approximately 186,250 calories.

So to sum up my life at this post Thanksgiving, oh-dear-lords-of-kobol-here-comes-Christmas time, in a positive manor:

This Thanksgiving I gained 0 lbs. 

This Thanksgiving I was able to cut 186,250 calories.

This Thanksgiving my tiny brain learnt enough words to have over 700 grains of rice donated to those who will never know the joys (or artery clogging effects) of Pataki Potatoes. 

This made me wonder, what exactly do I want to do with this blog?  I want to get over my crap when it comes to food.  I would like to do it in a positive way that helps hunger relief causes and motivates me to reach my ideal healthy weight by helping people who are hungry.  But what is the best and most effective way to do that?  And how can I rally my ten readers to help my FA save the world? 

So go to this website and try to donate back some of the mounds of food you consumed this weekend. And help think of way to sponsor me towards my goal while giving back to those who are in need.

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

I’ll start you off with my new favorite word.

de·fen·es·tra·tion  [dee-fen-uh-strey-shuhn]

–noun

the act of throwing a thing or esp. a person out of a window

So I weighed myself this morning and I am 196 lbs.  Which is obviously better than 199.  And worse than if one of the Olsen twins ate the other one.  

I want to thank everyone that wrote me personally to say what a beautiful woman I am.  And especially to my friend EM who donated a flock of chickens in my name, out of support of my Blog launch, through this website.

 www.heifer.org

Of course, when you are feeling really insecure about yourself and how you look receiving anything that contains the words HEIFER is hard. 

Heifer may refer to:

• A young cow (as in female cattle) before she has had her first calf

Which looking at this picture (even though I know it is a particularly unflattering one of me- which is sort of why I picked it) is exactly how I feel.   And makes me wonder, what’s the word for a not-so-young cow who’s nowhere near having her first calf?

The picture below is from my Best Friend’s Wedding rehearsal, which was just under three weeks ago.  I like to call her wedding ‘the last time I was ever happy’  but that is only mostly true. I am the WGWTFA in the purple shirt.  I thought this picture was very fitting because besides being a “Before” picture of sorts, it visually shows how I feel about her and her new husband.

That I am standing on the edge of their happiness.  Which I know is ridiculous. But how come the most self-wallowing emotions are the ones that feel the most true?

Last night as numerous food delivery boxes showed up at my house that my friend had ordered from CT to precede her arrival today, I panicked at the thought of spending this holiday as their third wheel when only a couple of weeks ago I had such different plans.  And as I sat there on the kitchen floor, crying with a 15 lb turkey in my lap, as my roommate’s cat Meowed constantly, I thought I can’t do this.

So tomorrow when I am surrounded by food all day long.  I will think of the flock of chickens my good friend already donated in my name to people who have no food.  Because of reading my Blog.  And be thankful my friends are traveling from CT to come and be with me. And include me in their happiness, in any way.

Hopefully that will keep me from eating my weight in Pataki Potatoes.  Which we all now know would mean eating 196 lbs of Pataki Potatoes.  What on earth are Pataki Potatoes you say??

Here is a piece of Thanksgiving Trivia for you.  My lovely newly married friend (seen below)  makes a sweet potato dish that one year got the nickname Pataki Potatoes after you guessed it Governor George Pataki, because her visiting family just enjoyed saying the name Pataki.

Try saying it: PatakiPotatoes, PatakiPotatoes, PatakiPotatoes, PatakiPotatoes, PatakiPotatoes.

 It’s fun!  After awhile the name got shortened even further down to Pataks!  so that for the longest time when I shoveled that sweet potato-y goodness into my mouth I didn’t realize that these particular bad carbs were Republican.  Oh well, better than Spitzer anything. 

Anyone know George Pataki?  Tell him about his yummy Potatoes which have contributed to my fat ass.  Tell him to go to

www.heifer.org

And donate something in my name.  Since we already honor him each Thanksgiving by making PATAK’s !

One of my first memories of New York City is getting up really early one morning to go be an extra for the worst indie movie of all time.  At the time I lived in the back of a hair salon on 45th& 8th.  That’s right a hair salon, the cool spinning chair, the big alien looking blow drier that comes over your head.  As I walked through Time’s Square at 5 a.m. – I realized THIS was the worst time to be out.  Because every body around me were not early risers,  they were still up from the night before. 

 As I walked along, so hopeful in my New Life in the City.  My hair freshly groomed with products stolen from my apartment/hair salon. I was in that total hat-throwing-I’m-gonna-make-it-after-all moment when from behind me I heard low faint chants.

‘white girl with a fat ass, white girl with a fat ass, white girl with a FAT ass’ 

What can only be described as a your classic 80’s movie drunken homeless wino, was following me chanting.  And as I walked faster, hoping to God he wasn’t following me, my hurried movement only emphasized the jiggling momentum of said ASS and his chant reached a fevered pitch.

‘WHITE GIRL with a fat ass WHITE girl with a FAT ASS white girl WITH a FaaaTTTT ASSSSSSSS’

And no matter how fast I hauled my now infamous ass, I could not escape those words. I have continued to run but those words have followed me. 

Here I am on the precipice of a Holiday season.  My second adult relationship has crumbled around me without warning (or at least one that I would pay attention to) and I have once again been unceremoniously dumped right before the Christmas season.   At the same time, I am coming to terms with the fact that I am the heaviest I have ever been.  199 lbs.

Refusing to give in to this, and refusing to ever be 200 lbs.  I have to do something. 

Today was my company’s annual Thanksgiving feast and I dreaded going.  All that food. All that waste.  And if I don’t eat it, will it just get thrown away?  I have thought about food every day for as long as I can remember.  I can’t stand when things are wasted.  I dread holiday parties.  And I have made relationships more complicated with my food issues, guilty bad moods, and sugar crashes.  It has to stop.   

But what would make it different this time?  And when I watch food go to waste, what would help me take a pass? We all know there are starving children in ‘insert impoverished country here’

I read this fact on the America’s Second Harvest Website.

In a country of abundance, it’s hard to believe that Americans waste over 96 billion pounds of food in just one year while 25 million Americans go hungry.

So today, I decided that I would let go of whatever happened to all that food sitting in our company’s conference room.  I would enjoy my small portion of what I wanted to eat.  And instead of buying the afternoon Coffee Delight loaded with sugar and calories that perks me up and helps me to forget that I had 3 more hours in this stuffy office, today I will donate that $5 I would have spent to this site.

http://www.secondharvest.org/donate/one-dollar-equals-16-meals

I will do this instead of thinking about the Christmas I was going to spend with the family I thought might someday be my in-laws.

I will do this instead of worry about going down and snagging some of the Thanksgiving leftovers for lunch tomorrow.  Even though a part of me still does firmly believe that free food inherently has less calories.

I will do this instead of eating an entire tub of ice cream to avoid thinking about how the same friends (that just got married) who I spent a third-wheel Christmas with 3 years ago when I got dumped, are coming in tomorrow for what now will be a third-wheel Thanksgiving.

Tomorrow on the Wed before Thanksgiving – the kick off to the holiday season, I will weigh myself.  And post it here.  And I will keep posting it here, and figure out how my Fat Ass can save the world.

P.S. – I know the girl on the graphic doesn’t have a fat ass.  But who wants to see that, really?