Sodieting

Right now, I'm "enjoying" a twenty fluid ounce bottle of Diet Pepsi with Vanilla instead of the four-hundred or so chocolates I usually eat in the afternoon. It is surprisingly delicious despite its lack of palpable nourishment. It gives the impression of well-being, for I'm getting energy from the caffeine and gas from the carbonation, so physically it feels the same as eating healthy. It's the best diet ever.

Some folks are taken aback by the way diet soda tastes, but they are just missing the key to true diet soda enjoyment. The secret to making diet soda taste yummy is to avoid eating other sweet foods, or any food at all for that matter. Self-deprivation makes it taste like ambrosia. On an empty stomach, it's particularly delectable because it burns on the way down, much like a shot of whiskey (making it more appealing for alcoholics, former alcoholics, and alcoholics in training). It's sort of like treating yourself to a fudgy creamy dessert brownie with sprinkles, except it comes in a bottle and contains none of those threatening calories. It's spillable and it makes you pee. It stains your teeth and leaves a funny coating on your tongue. It makes you feel like you're in a commercial. It’s available in a can or a bottle. It's an addicting beverage experience.

I am on this diet because the holidays have made my ass rotund. Well, I guess the holidays didn't do it, but the fact that I ate my way through them did. Abundant food plus my characteristic lack of self-control equals big ass disease. I have one pair of pants in particular that keeps making my underwear insert itself into my crack. It feels like someone is trying to violently floss my crack with a scarf. The reality is that my crack hasn't been fed lately so there couldn't possibly be anything to clean out.

One unexpected bonus to dieting is that drinking is soooo much more rewarding. There's no food in the intestines to get in the way of a stiff buzz, and you can drink all you want and still feel thin the next morning (or after you get back to work from your lunch break). One must be careful, though, because drinking on an empty digestive system puts one at higher risk of obtaining a hangover, but when the buzz arrives so much more quickly there's less of a need to binge drink. So you drink less, feel drunker, and maintain the compulsory thinness factor.

However, the true risk of drinking while dieting is gorging oneself while in a drunken stupor. Many an inebriated eve I have balanced myself on the refrigerator door, probing the fridge for something fatty and inappropriate to chow. One of my favorite drunkie treats is cold General Tso's Chicken. Another is cottage cheese. I have even been known to visit a grocery store during this state, unraveling vast opportunities for no-no eating.

The best, however, is the food you're not supposed to eat...like the kind that belongs to your roommate, spouse, sibling, etc. Food crime is the shit, and I should definitely be arrested. You can always use the excuse, "I'm sorry...I know you were saving that...but I was soooo drunk..." It doesn't even have to taste good. It's like watching your obese neighbors have oral sex. You get to step into an intimate part of their lives. Instead of the food going inside them as intended, it goes inside you. It's almost like adultery. Adultery of the pantry. Patradultery.

It's fucking fantastic.