Some while ago, I introduced to my myriad readers Lady Peacock, a friend who’s “interesting”, one might say quirky life views make for fascinating storytelling. In this recent installment, I present to you, my faithful, the Lady Peacock diet. By way of backstory, she is constantly dieting to reach her ideal goal weight, typically reinforced by a new garment purchase that is hopelessly snug. Her “target weight” looms on the distant horizon, well out of reach much like an oasis to a desperate traveler crawling in the desert. She mentioned casually the other day, and with a straight face no less, that she was planning to have her usual yogurt for her lunch, but she decided on an alternative – an ice cream cone! Thus sums up her nutritional vision, one not likely to be embraced by dietary programs or experts any time soon.
Lady P’s primary food groups include: 1) Snacks – typically crackers, chips, peanuts, anything with salt as a subgroup; 2) Desserts, which are healthy because many of her favorites include fruits and nuts; 3) Dairy – any and all creams including ice cream, butter in profusion, cheeses, yogurts – with a token nod to healthy nutrition, and sour cream with salsa mixed in (a crossover to the “snack” food group); 4) fruits and vegetables, the health benefits of which are not be overlooked but only when combined with most of the above, merely offset, and finally 5) meats. She does love red meats, along with turkey and chicken. It should be pointed out that these food groups are listed in order of preference and thus, priority. Eggs are off the table – she had a bad experience with a hardboiled egg as a child and that emotional scar has never healed. Anything of a water variety – fish and all seafoods are anathema. Consequently, she will never darken the door of a restaurant that has even vague references to something “seafoody” in its name. On a visit here, we informed her that dinner was casual – take out from Lobster Trap, a local establishment. Lady Peacock, with a look of utter amazement, asked if that was even a real name. Why on earth would any sensible restauranteur discourage her business like that?
Every morning, Lady P steps faithfully and obsessively on the scales. It is a rare morning when the scales tell her what she wants to hear. This is followed by another intricate Lady P emotional process: anger, denial, resolve, temptation, overindulgence, anger, . . . . . – the “Five Stages of Dieting”. In a lamenting phone call one morning, with a touch of the ironic, she was complaining about that morning’s weigh in – up half a pound. At the time, she was at a bakery picking up some muffin tops. It is that blissful inability to “connect the dots” that makes her eating patterns so, well, intriguing.
In a typical day, Lady P’s overall eating plan represents a “what not to do” by almost every organized nutrition program. She starts with the best of intentions – a small glass of orange juice (but not too much because, as she informed us, once again with a straight face, that this was a major cause of her weight gain). For lunch, a bit of yogurt – not the fat-free, low sugar kind but the ones with all the tasty, crunchy, sugar-coated bits. On days where she simply has no time for lunch, there will be several afternoon episodes of binge-snacking, either at home or from the convenience store in the back seat of her car. Dinner is an interesting affair that takes any number of twists and turns. For a while, she was known to cook herself some healthy vegetables. So far, so good. Then she’d be irresistibly drawn to whatever was available leading to “just a taste”, usually a small plate of something else. After a discreet amount of time, a small bowl of ice cream becomes the dessert course. In a short aside, Lady P’s freezer contains an infinite variety of ice cream. This is a collection culled from the freezers of the great supermarkets and specialty stores in a thirty-mile radius of her home. Every so often, after a spoonful or two, a flavor displeases, but would it be thrown out? Nay, nay. That would be wasteful. It will stay in its frozen graveyard along with random muffins or doughnuts from breakfasts past. Lady Peacock could be described, in the current vernacular as a “food hoarder”. She has no problem cleaning out possessions that no longer suit. Her refrigerator, however, contains take-away boxes of petrified, calcified food remnants, odd bits of leftover coffee, seltzer bottles with maybe half a teaspoon left. A trained professional might suggest food deprivation as a child, but that wasn’t the case with her. Back on track here, the reader is probably thinking at this point, ok, not bad. Vegetables, a spot of ice cream. But no. A “bit of salt” is called for to offset the sweet. Out comes the chips and salsa dip as Lady P crunches her way to nirvana. (The salsa, of course, is perfectly healthy as it’s vegetables, and how many calories can there be in cream cheese?) The euphoria will last roughly until the next morning’s weigh-in, when the cycle of disbelief and anguish begins again. Most likely, she ate too late. Ah, yes – that must be the culprit. Anything consumed after 5:30 goes right to the body bulges. That’s another of Lady Peacock’s Laws of Consumption. She is convinced that eating earlier in the evening, say the fashionable dinner hour at a retirement home, significantly reduces caloric intake, while after 6 PM, those same calories puff out like hot air balloons. She insists that she has “evidence” that this happens to her. One would think that inhabitants of warmer, equatorial climates, who traditionally have late evening meals to avoid the heat of the day, would tend to be some of the stouter humans on the planet, but in fact they aren’t. They live longer, healthier lives. Perhaps they don’t mix cream cheese into their salsa? It is a perplexing question, and it’s odder still that nutritionists around the world have been slow to fully embrace the doctrine of “it’s not what you eat, it’s when you eat”, or as it’s more familiarly known around here, the “Pig-out Before 6” strategy.
For those wishing to have a more complete reference guide to Lady Peacock’s principles of nutrition, it is being prepared for publication soon. It will appear with the subtitle, “I’m Thinking . . . . . .NO.”
I'm Thinking...No! 