When I was in middle school I still sucked my thumb (in private) and ABC’s Nightline News was my favorite show. So, understandably, I didn’t have friends (except for Mariela, the girl who’d recently immigrated from Argentina, and didn’t know any better). Within no time, Mariela and I were best friends who did everything together, including school projects like the history fair. One year we wrote a play called… Nightline! I dressed up as Ted Koppel. Mariela was a very freckled Thomas Jefferson with excellent posture. She wore my dad’s velvet blazer, and answered my questions about the Declaration of Independence with dignity, unabashedly rolling her Argentinian R’s.
Another year Mariela and I wrote a history fair play called The Moon And Its Superstitions (totally her idea!). We went to the Rice University library to do our research. I still remember one of the superstitions I found in an old book: Lie on your back and look at the moon, good luck will come to you very soon. In our play, those were the lines I said before I, as Joan, served Mariela, as Jack, dinner. Because we wanted our performance to be realistic, we decided that we would actually eat dinner during the play. Our idea to bring a fully-cooked meal to school was immediately shot down by our parents. Instead we settled on cheese puffs (or balls, or curls, or whatever you like to call the food product that gives you a crunchy-melty cheese-flavored experience). We ate our puffs with a fork and knife beneath a big papier mache moon.
Mariela and I practiced our play a lot, putting away a bag of cheese puffs at each rehearsal. As Mariela said her lines, I would forgo the cutlery and eat straight out of the bag. I licked cheese puff pollen off my fingertips before I talked about what happens if you cut your hair under a full moon… But now you must want to know what all this has to do with low-carbing. It’s obvious. The moon is made of cheese. So is my diet.
15 Things I Learned From My Low Carb Diet
1. Eating too much cheese is not a thing.
2. Cheese can be a pastry dough.
3. Cheese can be purchased by the wheel.
4. 70% dark chocolate can taste sweet.
5. Cauliflower can masquerade as anything.
6. Eating too much cauliflower is very much a thing.
7. Carbs are the perfect scapegoat for mood swings. (i.e. You can act like a bitch and blame the flour no one told you was in the soup.)
8. It’s possible to eat without a blood sugar spike.
9. No one will believe you (not even yourself!) if you say you don’t miss sugar.
10. No one will believe you when you say you lost weight eating wheels of cheese.
11. No matter how you cook eggs, they still taste like eggs.
12. People will always say you have to eat fruit to be healthy.
13. People will also always say you won’t have energy without carbs.
14. If you ingest maltitol, it will be your inner demon.
15. There really is life after bagels. (It’s called lox with cream cheese.)
You are reading my mind! I LOVE BAGELS. I’ve never liked eggs. After my breakfast count, I inhale cheese. I am so glad I can still have coffee and peanut butter.
Love the way you write. Wanted so much more.