She Sins at Midnight (31 page)

As soon as my food arrives, I pull over on a side street and inhale the heavenly aroma of danger. The fries call to me, the double cheeseburger begs to be devoured in two bites, but the bun screams loudest, “I have no redeeming nutritional value at all!” So I start with it. And it’s pure pleasure. Soft and white, clean and bright… it looks at me and sings, “You look happy to meet me.” But wait, this isn’t Edelweiss, this is a hamburger bun.

After the bun I eat a bag of fries, then the burger, then the other bag of fries, all the while slurping down my non-diet root beer. My tummy is cheering me on, “You go girl! That’s right, keep it coming…mmm hmm…faster…more.” From the floor boards I hear a small squeak, “Stop, you’re killing me!” It’s my bunion. I decide its voice isn’t nearly as powerful as my stomach’s. While I’m masticating away I start to think about the word bunion. It’s kind of like bun and onion. B-U-N-I-O-N. That’s when I realize I’ve just eaten a bun and a burger with onion. I start to feel nauseous. If you squish the words together, I’ve just eaten a bunion. Oh, no. I think that this may have possibly put me off Burger City forever.

I have a long history of going off my food for various and sundry reasons. For instance in high school, Robby Blinken had the worst case of acne I’d ever seen. It was so bad that his whole face looked like an open, inflamed sore. I felt really sorry for him too because he was shy and awkward to begin with. Having bad skin did nothing for his popularity. Then one day, Mike Pinker shouts across algebra to Robby, “Hey pizza face, that’s lots of pepperoni you’ve got!”

I cringed in disgust, looked over at poor Robby whose face turned an even brighter shade of red due to the public humiliation and bam, I was off pizza for a whole year. And pizza was one of my favorite foods too. It’s just that every time I looked at it or smelled it, I thought about Robby’s complexion and there was no going back.

Then there was the time I went off onions in college. A girl in my dorm was blind in one eye and there was this white kind of film covering her iris. Whenever I talked to her, I couldn’t help but stare right into the blind eye. I was drawn to it by a strange magnetic pull. Then one day it hits me, Ellen’s pupil looks like a small piece of onion. I went off onions for three years.

Now at thirty-four, years since I’ve had a food repulsion, I realize that after my first bun in months I may have gone off them. The onions aren’t such a loss as I already have a history there, but buns? I love buns!

Around the second bag of fries, I unbutton my jeans to let my stomach pop out of its confines. Sitting in my red Honda with my belly hanging out, sick at the thought that I just ate a bunion, I do what any reasonable person would do. I drive to the strip mall where the Weight Watchers sign flashes encouraging subliminal cheers to the masses. “Be thin, we’ll help!” “We love you!” “You can do it, you can do it…”

So like the little engine that could, I squeeze into a compact spot and walk through the front door before I can come out of my trance. Twelve dollars later, I’ve received an information package and a weigh-in book. Marge, my group leader, takes me in the back to weigh me. “One seventy-two,” she declares. I want to tell her I was just one seventy at the doctor’s office but then I remember the bunion I just ate. Marge continues, “You know, you are right inside the acceptable weight for your height.

Are you sure you want to lose twenty pounds?”

I’m sure. After all, I’m single with a bunion. It feels like it’s time for some drastic measures. As I have shown up in between meeting times, Marge gives me the basics of the Weight Watchers program and encourages me to come to at least one meeting a week. She also suggests I get weighed at the same time every week as the weight of the human body can vacillate up to six pounds during a twenty-four-hour period. “Consistency of weigh-in times,” she claims, “is the answer.” I briefly wonder if Doctor Foster would have told me to lose weight if I was only one hundred and sixty-four pounds.

While attending The University of Illinois, in Chicago, Whitney Dineen, began a career as a plus-size model. After modeling in New York City, she and her husband, Jimmy, moved to Los Angeles. In addition to modeling, Whitney spent the Los Angeles years supplying some of Hollywood’s biggest stars with her delicious cookies and candies (see more at
www.WhitneysGoodies.com
.) Whitney and her husband currently live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest where they spend their time raising their daughters, free-range chickens and organic vegetables.

Whitney loves to hear from her readers! You can contact her via her website at WhitneyDineen.com.