Weight Watcher's Diaries Seventeen
By Carol Daelemans

The Wedding Cake Diet

You'll never guess what happened after the wedding! It was on a Sunday and lasted well into the evening. Okay, the wee hours of the morning. Goldilocks saw to that. Both my girls danced all night and in fact closed the joint down. The DJ had to pack up and go home before my 3 year old was ready to quit dancing.

This did not sit well with her but I promised we would play records and dance at home. As it was, she danced with everyone in the wedding party and wore them all out. They probably woke up sore and tired around noon. Goldilocks hit the floor running at 6:54 am with a fistful of My Little Ponies in one hand and an empty milk cup in the other. First came the handful of ponies, then a pile of blankets followed by a head of curls with two giant brown eyes filled with smiles and mischief. She got all of her ponies arranged in "Mama's bed" at the precise moment Matt Lauer was launching into the lead stories on the Today show.

Pony Girl heard the commotion and with far less fanfare and no poky plastic animals climbed into bed too. "Let's watch kid shows, Mama," Goldilocks purred in a voice so angelic I gave up, got out of bed and left Daddy and his girls to lounge around. I excused myself, climbed into my use-it-and-lose-it workout garb and went to my usual gym appointment.

Monday is weigh-in day. I'd show up to the gym bald and void of clunky jewelry in a silky light polyester nightgown minus the slippers if I could get away with it. Driving in, I contemplated how much wedding cake could really add to one's figure. The cake itself was practically weightless. It was certainly tasteless. Tasteless foods should automatically show up as pounds lost. If something is bland or boring, the needle can't go up. If something is outrageously delicious the needle can boing to Bolivia and back. It'll have been worth it but I can barely find the strength to get motivated to work off yellow cake and rock hard white icing rosettes.

I geared up to see a 3 pound gain and climbed on the scale. I knew I'd be at least two pounds up over last week's wedding food and wedding cake but I was wrong! I had actually lost weight on a week with not one but two weddings with guest lists that mandated binge eating to hinder binge backhanding out of line in-laws.

I've hit an all time low, weight wise! Wow! That doesn't happen very often. First of all, I've been stuck at the same weight for so long I think that more than navigating an annoying plateau I've been crossing the Sahara on foot without a camel.

Conquering my plateau called for celebration. I was feeling good. I had a date with my much younger sister to do some shopping. None of my sisters or myself have very much in the way of self control but without a doubt I have to say my youngest sister has the least. She's still in her 20s and gravity has not found her yet. Eating like a teenager has worked for her for years. Just because age, gravity and metabolism had caught up with the older women in the family was no reason for her to change. At least not yet. I am sure she sees the writing on the wall and knows that her time will come. But for now she does not need to worry half as much as the rest of us. My long way of saying shopping with my youngest sister includes sampling

Breast Cancer Awareness Pink M&M Ham Hocks
After snacking our way through the fruit market we went to Kmart. Wouldn't you know it they were offering temptation that day? They were selling M & Ms in pink to raise Breast Cancer Awareness. Goldilocks was in tow and she loves pink! She's also fond of M & Ms. Of course we had to get them for her. We bought them in plain and peanut even though she hates peanuts. They were for a cause, after all. What could be better than chocolate for charity? While Goldilocks snacked on her fair share, my sister and I ate our share. Truthfully, I ate much more than my fair share. I was feeling good and apparently invincible as well.

What was I thinking? Losing a few pounds over wedding cake week did not mean chocolate would never find its way to my thighs again. What a fool. Sure enough, a week later my weigh in was not so kind to me. Not only had I found the pounds I lost, I found bonus pounds too. So much for celebrating.

I suppose the moral of the story is don't celebrate weight loss with chocolate. Boo! Hiss! Who wants to hear that? I'm quite sure I will continue to celebrate things with food for the rest of my life; birthday parties, holidays, girls night out etc...

I added "balance" to my list of things to master before my first grey hair comes in. (Editor's Note: It's in. And there's no truth to the myth that if you pluck one, six more come to it's funeral. It's more like a 100 in her case.)

The process of learning balance will require math. As in precisely how many minutes of cardio it takes to work off a bag of M&Ms and exactly how many sit ups it takes to tighten chocolate filled abs. I'll have plenty of time to work on this. I'm adding 20 minutes of treadmill walking to my routine this week.