I'm not fat, I'm just big boned and other lies we tell ourselves

My first diet was one they secretly drafted me into. Needless to say, it failed, but it was kind of fun. My father, who at the time was studying to be a Buddhist Monk (did I mention that I grew up in the seventies?) came home one day and announced to the family that he was going to cleanse his system by ingesting nothing but water for three days. It would, he told us, purify his body and open up his mind to accept spirituality. Upon hearing that at the end of his three-day fast my father lost ten pounds, Grandma Blackie and Aunt Mary decided this was just the thing they needed to drop some weight so they would look good for an upcoming wedding. (Since I was staying with my grandmother for a few days I was sucked into their little plan.) After much consideration the diet gurus decided that the “Water Diet” as they called it, would work better if it included exercise. They devised a routine whereby we would run (I hobbled) up the stairs then into the bedroom jiggling our fat until we worked up a good sweat. We did this every half hour or so. They also decided that the key to the diet’s success was to monitor our water intake. You see, we didn’t want to consume more water than we sweated out because this, they concluded, would cause us to gain “water weight”. One needed to be very conscious of “water weight” because it could strike when least expected and possibly stand in the way of the stunning figures we were sure to obtain at the end of this 72-hour program. Exactly three hours into the diet, starvation set in. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t take my mind off the fact that I needed something to eat. Apparently the diet gurus felt the same way because each time they passed the refrigerator they got a bit closer to it. “I need some water,” Grandma Blackie barked. “Anybody want some?” “I’ll have a glass,” Aunt Mary said as she gave into temptation and unwittingly opened the refrigerator door. “Shut the fridge and come over here,” Grandma snapped. “You can’t have anything to eat!” “I know, I know,” Mary replied. “Then what were you doing? Letting all the cold air out?” “I was just looking,” Mary said as she took a seat in between Grandma and me at the kitchen table. There was a long silence and suddenly I felt very uncomfortable. This wasn’t the Grandma Blackie’s house that I knew where everyone spoke at once while the smell of frying garlic wafted through the air. Instead it was a sad, quite place like my friend Joanie McCarthy’s house where everyone’s manners were as polished as the furniture and the fruit on the table was only for looking because it was made of wax.