The secret weight loss world of menopausal Mary

Looking closely at my body, I wonder how a person ends up becoming a particular shape in life. I think I have half a brain, and I know if you eat sensibly you lose weight. So how come that for 60 odd years every diet in the universe has been attempted and only a few pounds have fallen off? Is there something blocking a fat cell somewhere, or is my lack of diet success just hereditary? My mother was tall and slender like Rita Hayworth, and my father, who I am the spitting image of, was the shape of a box like his mother. There you have it; no wonder as the years have passed, people say I look just like my grandmother. I have become the junior version of Mary Louise Deller Knight and have followed her quack diet ideas like ducks flock to water. Mary was a pretty British gal when my grandfather met her on the seashore in Devon, England in the early 1900s. She was no “skinny minnie” and had quite the caboose going, but Fred loved her no matter what she looked like. Mary always worried about her size and wore slimming navy blue dresses with her belt strategically located inches below her bust. I never saw her with a full plate of food, and considering how little we saw her eat in public, it was amazing that she did not look like a stick figure.

Mary always began her morning with a cup of “slimming tea” followed by a piece of dry toast. Lunch was the same, and dinner was a small portion of whatever we ate, with the addition of fresh sliced tomatoes. I only saw her eat a piece of chocolate on Saturday nights, when my grandfather would go across the street and buy a bar for them to have with their weekly glass of sherry.

When the slimming tea did not work, my grandmother read a magazine ad that advised her to take up smoking if she craved sweets. So instead of brewing her tea grammy reached for a Lucky Strike instead. Seeing no one smoked in the family she did it on the sly amongst the fresh mint that grew on the side of the barn. Every time she served mint on her leg of lamb, I swear all I could taste were ashes and wondered when my grandfather would catch on. Actually, it did not take grampy long to find out and he insisted she stop smoking so she would not get hemorrhoids. I had no clue what that was, but I just nodded in agreement.

For a long period of time I noticed strange things in the drawers of the white bureau in her kitchen. They were $1.00 trial boxes of candy guaranteed to make you slimmer, called Kelpadine, and bottles of Ballard’s Liniment that was guaranteed to rub the fat off you.

One day she read an ad in her Ladies Home Jouranl for a weight-loss miracle ‘candy’ called Ayds. It was the worst name ever to be associated with any weight loss product, or anything else for that matter. I found cartons of the “vitamin enriched” stuff in chocolate and vanilla flavours tucked away among her folded towels. Mary had finally given in and gave up her grapefruit diets and the plates of cottage cheese. She truly believed that if she ate Ayds before meals they would become her final diet salvation. In the last few years of her life she finally gave up on her weight loss quest as she realized what really matters is what's in the inside-- just like the fridge.