Vitamita Vegimen

If there's one healthy thing I've done over the past ten years, it's been vitamins. Every morning when I get up, I get a glass of water and I swallow one of those horse pills. I have to push them to the very back of my throat; otherwise, they will be rejected and I gag and heave and that's no way to start the morning. I have found that they go down much eaiser with a thicker substance, like, milk, but in the morning milk doesn't always sound good to me. A couple of times I have taken a vitamin with my Diet Pepsi, but it fizzed weird and I had a notion that the two might be counter active.

When I was a kid, my mom had us take our Flinstones vitamins every morning along with our breakfast. One morning I asked her what would happen if I didn't take my vitamin, and she told me I didn't need to take it if I didn't want to, but that then my bones would get soft and mushy, and my skin would get papery and might peel off. Plus, my hair would lose its shine, my eyes wouldn't be able to see as well, and since my bones would be mush, I could forget about running around outside after school -- I would just have to lay in bed and watch the other kids having fun. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to continue to chew my little Fred or Wilma every day. They were tasty anyway. Personally, I lived for the mornings when I got Dino.

My mother conintued to insist that we take vitamins every morning until I was in high school. By then she was giving me two Flinstones (perfectly acceptable according to label standards), but the vitamins made me feel like a little kid, so I asked to start taking adult vitamins. The first day I saw one of those horse pills sitting next to my breakfast plate, I nearly hurled. How was I going to swallow that?

My mom was sooo satisfied when I balked at swallowing that. "That's the kind of vitamin adults take," she said with her hands on her hips and smile winking at the corners of her mouth. I'd had a similiar problem when I went from baby aspirin to adult aspirin. It had reached a ridiculous point where I was chewing up six or seven of those baby aspirin for a fever, and my mother had had enough. "You have to learn to swallow real aspirin," she'd said. Well, when I coughed up the first one she tried to force feed me, she resorted to crushing them and letting me take them with a spoonful of orange juice. Eventually, we discovered that the gell caps slid down smoothly, so I got those and I've never looked back.

So I wonder, why can't they gell coat vitamins? They'd go down so much better. Anyway, that morning when I faced that huge pill for the first time, I realized it was a showdown, not between the pill and I, but between my mother and I, so I just went ahead and shoved it as far back into my mouth as I could, and quickly gulped down the pill with a glass of water -- it's a technique that hasn't been improved on in a decade, but it gets that fucker down my throat.

Once in college, when it was suddenly cool to revert to kindergarten behavior, I bought some of those Flinstones because I recalled their delicious flavorings and I figured I could just go back to chewing up two of those a day instead of forcing that adult vitamin down my throat. What I discovered is this: Flinstones taste like ass. They're terrible: bitter and chalking and they leave the taste in your teeth and on you tongue all day. I found myself swallowing just as much water with those to rid myself of the flavor as I did to swallow those big vitamins. So, since then I have just resigned myself to the adult vitamins, and every morning I gag a little when I swallow one.