by JS O’Brien
I’m in the doghouse today. I decided to lose ten pounds about three days ago, cut out eating between meals, and am now ten pounds lighter. Asking around, I find I’m not alone. Many men can do this. Most of them are divorced. Here’s a conversation from yesterday.
Wife: Wow. Those pants look really good on you!
Me: They do? They’re the same jeans I wore yesterday.
Puzzled wife: They are? They didn’t look this good yester …
Me: Ahm. Er. I’ve probably cinched up my belt a little more. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the ticket. I cinched up my belt.
Medea: How about some lunch? I’m thinking nachos with lots of sour cream and guacamole, extra cheese, and … oh … I just baked some chocolate chip cookies! Want some now? How about a baker’s dozen? Then, we’ll have nachos. I’ll just have this little plate, and you can have this TURKEY PLATTER!!!!!
Naturally, all wives want slim and trim husbands. We make good accessories. But it’s not enough just to be fit. It’s important to them that we suffer for it. So, for those of you who find losing and keeping off weight a little too easy, here’s a guide to marital relations. (For those of you who want to use your steely new bodies to trade in wife 1.0 for the upgrade, I’ll publish a different guide later on the philandering husband protection program.)
- Keep a full complement of ace bandages on hand. As you lose weight, you can wrap these suckers around the places the fat used to be, fooling her until you can fit into that 20-year-old tuxedo and she can say, “Wow. That’s really slimming on you.”
- Rice cakes are very handy devices for hiding cookies, candy bars, and the like. Just put the tasteless thing over whatever you’re really eating and make a big show of gustatory martyrdom. She’s probably eaten a lot of rice cakes, and misery loves company.
- Buy one six-pack of light beer and force it down. You can pour real beer into the light bottles later, and she’ll never be the wiser. The same goes with a bag of baked chips. You can put the nice, greasy, fried ones in the baked bag. Simple!
- Tell her you have cancer. This will not only explain the easy weight loss, but also give you an excuse to go down to the local bar, watch football, and pig out on beer and breaded cheese sticks when you’re supposed to be getting your chemo.
Following these simple steps ensures a lifetime of wedded bliss, assuming you avoid the always popular does-this-make-me-look-fat trap. But if you’ve managed to stay married more than five minutes, you’ve already sidestepped that one.
Categories: Family/Marriage, Funny, Race/Gender
Progressive Culture | Scholars & Rogues 
My dear wife has it made. I recently ran afoul of my doctor (actually, there are now two doctors messing with my diet). As a result, I was compelled to give up soda and most things with sugar (Pepsi is my favorite liquid in the world) and beef (my favorite food in the world); dramatically curtail my booze intake (guess how I feel about beer?); and now I’m being advised to trim my sodium intake (which wasn’t bad to start with).
So, I quit soda cold turkey maybe six weeks ago (and that has implications for my caffeine levels, as well). I went a month without beef and am now allowed one serving per week. I haven’t had a beer in six weeks (and have had very little in the way of wine or hard likker, either).
My quality of life sucketh. It’s easy to know what to have, though. Basically, if I like it, I can’t have it.
Angela is working very hard to take care of me, though.
Yep. Pity is always useful in deflecting attention from a shrinking waistine.
Good on ya!
I haven’t noticed anything so far that I’d classify as “pity.”
Much as they don’t want to be overweight, most women, especially as they age, want to exercise even less. They can diet all they want, but unless they start and stick with an exercise program, the weight is not gonna stay off.
My wife and I started one of those “eat protein bars and drink protein shakes every morning” diets about 6 months ago. I dropped 25+ pounds; she dropped 22 pounds. We both developed good workout regimens that tautened us up and made us both feel great.
6 months later, I’m still eating bars and drinking shakes, still down the 25+ pounds and still working out every day. She’s regained 17 pounds and works out maybe twice a week. She vacillates between grudging admiration and angry recrimination.
She rationalizes that it’s a man thing to be so disciplined and, because I’m old enough to know what I should do when I hear such rationalization, I commiserate….
As Edward Lear observed in that masterpiece of British poetry, “Cold are the Crabs” – “such, such is life….”
Yeah, Jim, even though I’m thin and fairly fit at age 57, I have the utmost sympathy for middle-aged people who put on weight, especially women. I know how easy it is to gain and hard to lose.
Wrong about the cancer and weight loss thing. My husband gained weight during chemo therapy for lymphoma. A new drug literally canceled the nausea most patients have with it and he had no mouth sores to prevent him from eating or drinking about anything he wanted. Now he has to lose those 15 extra pounds he has gained so he can get back to his normal weight.
I did the same thing with my wife we went to the diet for six months and now both we are in good shape.