I am eating a banana when what I really want to be eating is pastry. I call that progress.
Ever since starting my new to me office type job with business type people I have gained weight. Not a lot of weight but enough weight to be alarming. This caught me off guard because I really thought business and type people were too busy to eat.
Aren’t they always jetting off to meeting and having important conference calls and burning the midnight oil with their noses to the grindstones? In my experience this is all true, and would think they would burn major calories just bustling through the hallways with their busy faces on, but I have to say that business and officey type people also like to get their snack on. Frequently.
Cake, cake and more cake
In my second week here we had cake every day. Every. Day. By the following week when I reported, like a gleeful preschooler, “we had cupcakes today!” Girlwonder turned to me and said, dryly, ‘when DON’T you have cake?” She’s right. We have yet to have a committee, board, meeting or just general gathering of more than three people that doesn’t involve food.
We also celebrate everything. Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, birthdays. Apparently our company founder is Marie Antoinette. “Let them eat cake!” Granted I may be part of the problem on this one since I myself brought in a cake just to celebrate Friday. We have had such a brutal winter that the first week without a major weather related event seemed to cry out for cake. I had the bakery add “5 days” to the cake and we wolfed it down.
More
What’s weird is that even as they eat a lot they also leave a lot left over. It’s a quandary. You want to solve world hunger. Send all the food through a conference room first. Somehow you can end up with MORE FOOD THAN YOU STARTED OUT WITH. I don’t know how that is possible but it is. Well meaning (and much appreciated) colleagues are always coming through with boxes of doughnuts, baked goods, and the like saying “these are left over from the meeting, take one!”
All this celebration and breaking of bread is great for morale – and bad for my thighs.
Less
Fortunately I have amassed an arsenal of fat fighting clothing. Now if I want to look like a grownup in a cute new wrap dress for a Very Important Meeting, albeit a slightly less lumpy one, I succumb to the allure of a body shaper.
A body shaper for those not in the know (and blissfully so) is the modern day version of the girdle, corset, or any other medieval torture device designed to squish a female’s internal organs in an effort to be “slimming.”
This based on the supposition that your average fashion model doesn’t actually have internal organs at all. They exist purely on Photoshop and air.
In our grandmothers’ day they were called girdles and everyone wore them. Check out “Mad Men” if you doubt me. Then everyone got together and burned them or something and let it all hang out. This is all fine and dandy until the word “hang” becomes more than a metaphor.
Squeezing into a body shaper feels cunning at first. You have fooled nature and your metabolism!
You can and WILL button those pants or zip that skirt. Who needs to work out when you’ve got a chemically based stretchy fabric on your side (and front, back, and derriere?)
Then the anaconda of fabric squeezing your body slowly begins to cut off circulation and things get a little bit fuzzy. Suddenly it all boils down to the ability to take a decent deep breath or a chocolate eclair.
Eventually you (I) come to the realization that all the fabric in the world can’t fight the impact of the cupcake-a-day diet and all the brisk walks to the copy machine aren’t going to burn those calories.
This, then, explains the banana. I am part of the great doughnut resistance of 2014 and so far, the doughnuts are winning.
(Kymberly Foster Seabolt loves carbs, sweets, and the ability to button her pants. She welcomes comments c/o LifeOutLoud@Comcast.net; P.O. Box 38, Salem, Ohio 44460 or www.KymberlyFosterSeabolt.com.)
