texasmesquite

A lifetime of bad food choices has left me chicken-hearted

Posted By Fedeli. Patty - The North Bay Nugget - Ontario


Posted 16 hours ago

I have never bought a lottery ticket in my life. I believe that each person is given a finite amount of luck at birth, and I choose to use my allotment for things like finding a good parking space when it's raining.
But I am seriously considering gambling what's left of my good fortune in the hopes of winning enough money to hire a personal chef.
There is nothing I wouldn't do to have someone take total control of hubby's and my dietary intake. Left to our own devices we have put our health in a precarious position. I'm not sure what we need more; a live-in cook or a governess.
Because of age and risk factors, we recently had to revamp our eating habits. Not only did I have to relearn how to cook, I had to relearn how to shop.
My heretofore pleasant trips to the grocery store now find me poring over labels trying to discover food that has low sodium, low cholesterol, low unsaturated fat and no transfat at all. On my first foray, after investing two hours of my time and achieving a blinding headache, I reached the checkout counter with a head of lettuce and a bottle of water.
I pored through my cookbooks, called my mother and enlisted my friends to surf the Internet for help. I was so disappointed to find there is not a single recipe anywhere for lettuce soup.
In desperation, I looked to the Food Channel for guidance. After being glued to the TV set for an entire day, watching chefs from all around the globe prepare healthy meals, I concluded that no matter where the dishes originate, the three basic ingredients are tomatoes, garlic and onions.
This is of absolutely no help to me. Hubby hates tomatoes. I can't eat garlic. Neither of us is crazy about onions.
I sat in the kitchen staring at the head of lettuce and the bottle of water.
The literature our doctor gave us emphasizes the importance of grains in a heart-healthy eating plan. To my surprise the staple of our diet - bleached, white flour - has absolutely no relation to grain once it's gone through the manufacturing process. So, I went back to the grocery store and bought a loaf of bread that weighed 15 pounds and was covered in bird seed.
OK. Now we had advanced to a lettuce sandwich and a bottle of water. Protein was the next obstacle. While an important part of any balanced diet, it has to be lean and prepared in a way that does not add any of the world's newly-enlightened, forbidden elements like fat, or salt, or environmental damage, or damage to the animal's self-esteem.
I went back to the store for an earth-friendly chicken that cost so much I was convinced it wasn't organic or free range, but rather had been raised in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria.
Now I had a healthy, balanced meal I could put before hubby; an unadorned, baked chicken breast with pesticide-free lettuce, on 12-grain bread. And a bottle of water. We've been eating like this for eight weeks now, and I don't feel one tiny bit better. In fact, the only two changes I've noticed are the fact that those 12 grains have added 12 pounds to my water-retaining thighs, and hubby and I now get very aroused when we hear The Bird Dance. So, I won't be in the grocery store this week. I'll be putting all of our chicken scratch down on scratch-and-win tickets. With a little luck I'll be able to hire that personal chef. And if I have any luck left after that, I will use it to choose a cook who can make a salt-free, fat-free, free-range, environmentally friendly, mouth-watering chicken that tastes just like a cheezie. And a bottle of water that tastes like gravy.


Patty Fedeli is a career housewife with an overactive imagination.
Article ID# 984526