You can only eat so many cupcakes. Granted, they’re diet doctor-prescribed cupcakes, fortified with protein, vitamins and minerals. Granted they come in several flavors, your favorites being chocolate, pumpkin, spiced carrot cake, and lemon. Granted, you eat seven a day, one every two hours from seven A.M. to 9 P.M. Granted your calorie consumption was drastically cut from over 5,000 a day to 1,050. Granted, your food preparation and clean-up has been all but eliminated giving you more time for hourly treadmill sessions, twice a day, at the gym. Granted, you started out at 294 pounds and ten weeks later you now tip the scales at 259. But like I said, you can only eat so many cupcakes before you begin to dread your day, before you begin to feel that lifting each cupcake to your mouth is akin to lifting a bowling ball and the thought of eating it is akin to poisoning yourself. Something in your body is warning you that you’ve hit your threshold. Your personal nutritionist says this is all nonsense, as does all the other members of your Cupcake Diet Support Group. It’s all in your head. It’s your unconscious fear of success. It’s your unconscious need to stay fat and to avoid intimacy. It’s your unconscious guilt, which says you must be fat and ugly and therefore be denied the love of others. It’s your unconscious fear of being attractive and being treated as an object instead of the real you. It’s your fear of rejection. It’s your fear of exiting your cave where you’ve learned to make peace with your fat, lonely self. But you know that none of this is true. You know your fellow cupcake eaters are simply reading from a script provided by the Cupcake Diet Facilitator and that the more they harangue you the more they can distract themselves from their own self-doubts.
You know for a fact that your body simply cannot handle the cupcakes anymore. You’re breaking out in hives, you have diarrhea, you have nightmares that you’re being suffocated in a giant mixing bowl of cupcake mix. You would rather be dead than eat another cupcake. Funny, the thing you resent most is that you’ll never again be able to enjoy a real cupcake because it will be forever tarnished with its association with the phony, crappy ball of flour and food byproducts that you were brainwashed into believing was a genuine cupcake when in fact it is a revolting concoction of oat flour, whey protein, and sugar substitute. And eating seven of these little crappy food balls a day was supposed to provide you with blissful satiation, a faster metabolism, and a sense of belonging with your fellow diet cupcake eaters, but instead you feel as if you’ve joined a malignant cult, which requires something far more serious than weight-loss. It requires the abnegation of your critical faculties and blind faith that they Diet Cupcake’s founder, a doctor with a dubious background, possesses the One Way to the Promised Land.
You have found others like you on a variety of Internet chat sites. People who are disgusted with the cupcakes. People who have snuck into the cupcake factory and witnessed rats and cockroaches defecating in the so-called “organic” mix. People who have learned that many who go under the title “personal nutritionists” are in fact multi-level marketers promoting the cupcakes to enrich their own pocket books. People who have suffered from similar symptoms since going on the diet. You’ve learned since chatting with these “cupcake survivors” that it’s not the cupcakes per se that are making all of you so sick. It’s a combination of inflated expectations, the guilt that comes with not enjoying the cupcakes, and the fact that it’s just plain human nature to want to eat a diversity of foods. In other words, the Cupcake Cult is demanding that you violate your human nature in order to become one of them.
You learn something else about human nature: Deny it for too long and it will rebel with an uncontrollable intensity. In a rage, you dump your cupcakes into the dumpster outside your apartment and then proceed to eat fifty dollars of fast-food: bacon cheeseburgers, onion rings, milk shakes, fruit pies. Your initial euphoria is followed by suicidal despair and the need for a new diet that will lift you from your sense of failure and anguish. There’s the Hollywood Diet, the Beverly Hills Diet, the Fruit Diet, the Atkins, the Pritikin, the this diet, the that diet. Finally, you settle on the I Don’t Give a Shit Diet.
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