Maximum Help in a Maxed Out World

It seems contradictory that the Food Network is advertising for Dexitrim and other diet pills. Is it fair to wave all that gorgeous looking food in someone's face and then tell them that they need to be thinner and that they should eat less? Especially since I've been watching this Italian cooking show that I like (can't recall the name of it) with this big -- has a keg for a belly -- cook; apparently he doesn't buy into the six ads for diet pills that I've seen during the course of his hour long show. Which, by the way, airs at lunch time every day.

I actually used to take diet pills when I was in high school and for the first year I was in college. I was totally freaked out my freshman year of college that I would gain the "freshman fifteen" so I worked out like a maniac and took those diet pills, but I still found that I gained the dreaded weight. Probably because I consumed thousands of calories in beer every week and after the beer orgy, my roommate and I would always come back to our cramped little room and order pizza or Chinese or subs coated in mayo. Sometimes when it was too late to order anything, I would just bury myself face deep in my box of Lucky Charms.

I had an unnatural love for Lucky Charms growing up but my mother never let me have them because they were too sugury and we weren't allowed sugury cereals. So when I got to college, I ate cereal for every meal for about three straight months -- it was delicious. In the dining hall, they actually had a Lucky charms dispenser; I should have taken that home. But once you've barfed up those magical shapes, and you've witnessed how how those marshmallows transform in your stomach, the cereal becomes less appetizing. I can't touch the stuff now.

It's not hard, therefore, to understand that despite munching down speed (that's all those diet pills are anyway; they have a shitload of caffeine in them) I still managed to gain a little weight that first year of college. In my sophomore year, when I was still depending on those pills to help me stay up and study, my boyfirend at the time discovered that I was chewing them like baby aspirin and found my behavior dispicable -- he also didn't approve of many other things I felt were harmless, i.e., shoplifting, drugs, and alcohol abuse -- what a stickler! Anyway, he convinced me to give them up, and I have to admit that the shaky, anxious feeling I constantly had in my stomach eventually went away and it was glorious! However, I did go ahead and pack on the rest of my destined tubbiness: Weight I didn't lose for years after that.

Anyway, my Italian show is over and I don't know what the show is that follows, but I just heard "two cups of lard" in the ingredients, and I have to see if the Dexitrim commercials air during this program. So far, nothing, but they have had three commercials for reducing cholesterol: Makes since if your viewers are scooping up the lard.