How to eat too much on a cruise

Food is one of the main focuses on a cruise and from my observations, some people are there just for that. You may envision a typical buffet with overcooked beef boiling away in the glare of a heat lamp, but the cruise food was far different from that. First of all, yes, there was the typical buffets with the trays of food cooking under super powered bulbs, but there was oh so much more. There was the 24 hour pizzeria, there was the grill (hamburgers, fries, hot dogs), there was the NY deli (excellent pastrami on rye), there was also a sushi place (ate many salmon skin rolls), an "Asian" stop (I say Asian in quotes because they changed menus everyday as well as themes, so it was sometimes Chinese, sometimes Japanese, one day Vietnamese), there is a coffee house, a supper club, and then the main dining room. We only had dinner in the main dining room, but that's all we needed -- five courses every night is more than any normal person needs. Plus, there is complimentary room service, so I ordered a BLT one night. It was delicious!

At first, I tried to restrain myself because it seemed a bit contradictory to stuff myself and then go and lay by the pool in my bikini (and order beers out there as well), but after looking around at my fellow passengers, I decided to let my inhibitions go. This is what I can tell you: There are a lot of fat people out there. At first I thought they were mostly tubby Americans, but after a closer look, I discovered that this wasn't entirely true. The passengers were very diverse, and while Americans certainly dominated the population, there were also a lot of Canucks, French, and Hispanic people, and the fatness knew no boundary (who says French women don't get fat? that's a lie!).

True, there were a handful of skinny-minnys, but I slowly realized I wasn't in Florida anymore, and it was apparent that most of those bodies were the natural work of God, so they were flawed, and I felt much better about my little pouch. This allowed me to get in line at the midnight buffet and get plated up without a guilty conscience. And I thought for sure that I had gained a pound or two from all the eating, but this morning I stepped on the scale to see the damage, and miraculously I found that I hadn't gained a pound! Someone must be looking out for me, an angel of some sort.