So it’s official. I’ve gained ten pounds since last summer when I started working for KFC.

It was free. It was food. I couldn’t help myself. Week after week, I gorged on the Colonel’s oily goodness with gleeful abandon. But now, now along with knowing what goes in Sander’s secret recipes, I also look like one of his relatives.

Okay. I exaggerate. Unless you take a measuring tape and strangle my belly, I somehow managed to still look the same. I think.

But of course, the scale says otherwise. And who am I to argue with sound numbers. In fact, I haven’t weighed myself for months. Imagine my surprise when I see the digits choke up a notch.

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt baby, and that’s what I’ve been doing for almost a year. I knew the consequences. Just didn’t want to admit them. But when a new coworker and I were having lunch together the other day, she resolutely decided not to eat anything unhealthy because she was going to stick to her diet.

Working in fast food and not eating it? Now that’s willpower.

Anyway, I’m on a diet too. An official diet. By the way, I hate that word. Because conventional diets are yo-yo like. You go on them for a couple of month, intense, sweat-swimming workouts that leave you two sizes too small. Then, you gorge. Gluttonously glue yourself to the fridge and two months later come out two sizes too big.

By the time you’re fifty, your skin will be like a tree trunk; it will conveniently document your diet history with uneven layers of shrivel-marks.

I don’t want that. No. My diet is going to last. Hey, a good word would be lifestyle. I’m going to change my eating lifestyle. And to tell the truth, I’m so satiated with saturates that a change is actually welcoming.

What gets me are the people who want to lose weight but buy into all the commercialized crap. Tummy-tuckers and diet pills, guaranteed to make you lose half the weight in half the time. Those diets are desperations taken at any price. Literal money and physical harm.

I guess you can’t blame them though. We’re all looking for shortcuts in life. Things that sound too good to be true, well, what if? What if we hit the jackpot this time. And so we try and try with futile fantasies and abortive attempts.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned through experience, it’s that there is no easy way out. And even if you think you got away this time, there’s always a price paid later on.