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Him & Her:
Hourglass Figure?
The Sands Have Shifted
by Nancy and Dan Sapir

HE SAYS: Move over world, it’s diet time again. I have to endure her dieting stages about every three months. I always know the tell tale signs; yogurt, cottage cheese and diet soda appear on my shopping lists. Even before that I instinctively know, she begins to grow irritable and says I must be included in her latest assault on the waistline. She blames me for any of her extra pounds claiming that I don’t help her by bringing home cookies muffins, ice cream and those wonderful things they sell at Stop & Shop called Wandy’s. One of her friends gave her a recipe for some kind of high fiber vegetable soup that was supposed to be a miracle diet food. It was so disgusting that even she couldn’t eat it. Rather then waste it she pawned it off on the dogs who both turned up their noses on it.

She heads down the cellar where we have a treadmill set up. Fifteen minutes she emerges from the depths, sweating, opens a devil dog and washes it down with a coke. I’ve actually seen her do a 30 minute workout, then step on the scale to see the results. She’ll eat a grapefruit for supper then go try on an outfit that she hasn’t fit into for 10 years. She gets angry because the results aren’t instant. I admit, she once had an hourglass figure, but now the sands have shifted.

I hate it when she stands at the mirror (always sideways) and asks me if I can tell the difference. What am I supposed to say to he? Naturally, I fib and say "sure, you must have lost 5-10 pounds, it shows”. "Liar!” she retorts, "I gained two pounds, you’re just trying to make me feel better.” Now when she asks, I just tell her that I notice quite a difference. She can take that any way she wants.

Why is it that women always need a friend to diet with? She and a chum started a diet together one time. They had a bet going as to who would lose the most weight. After three weeks they each gained eight pounds, called off the charade, and went out to dinner. I ended up eating all the yogurt and cottage cheese and lost 3 pounds myself that week.

Men never seem to worry about how they look. Guys are accepting. Food and drink are meant to be enjoyed. So what if you don’t exercise and what’s a few extra pounds. How often have you read about athletes, in the prime of their life, being struck down. Men have a realistic view of the world and don’t let pounds get in the way. Women, by contrast are fanatical. They are also way too critical of each other. Have you ever seen the way women check each other out. You wanna talk about deadly. Nothing can create frost on a summer day then the disapproving looks women give one another. . If the truth be known, women want to lose weight for us men. They think we like them better when they are skinny. Not so. We pledged to love "for better or worse”. We know that as the years go by, we gain weight. It’s a fact of life. Why not go with the flow, save all that money and effort and accept what we are.

There is too much emphasis on building the perfect body. I, on the other hand spend time on firming up my fat and trying to keep it evenly distributed. I realize that, as a man, I am able to lose weight whenever I want to. I quit smoking years ago and a few extra pounds are a consequence of that. I tell her that there is just more of us to love these days. I thought this was a wonderful sentiment, but she just stares at me with a blank, disgusted look.

I could go on with this topic all day but I’ve got to get out of the house. It’s shaking from the jumping jacks she’s doing in the next room.

SHE SAYS: The reason I diet is for my health. Who is he kidding? If I had the figure of a runway model, what could he do about it? He’s an old guy. It’s also necessary for me to diet so I can fit into my old clothes, because he’s so cheap he won’t let me buy any new ones. He’ll say something like, "Whatever happened to that cute black dress you had?” "Oh,” I say, "you mean the one I wore to our first child’s christening?”

If I didn’t diet, it would mean that I’m giving up on myself, and that’s not about to happen. Even if I fail, what have I lost? It’s not like I take up two seats on a plane. At my age, you diet to be healthy and fit not to try to transform yourself into some object of lust.

He says men are accepting of their wives’ figures. Oh sure they are. That’s why they stick their necks out the car window at every young chick they see, and it’s also why they watch really stupid tv shows featuring young, dumb women with very large breasts. Oh yeah, they’re accepting. The thing that has always amazed me, however, is that a man can be dumb as a stump, ugly as sin, and still feel he’s entitled to a goddess.

I marvel when dumb, ugly men see a woman walk by whom they consider to be unattractive. They’ll poke one another in the inner tube and say out of the sides of their mouths, "What a dog!” If even one woman agreed to go out with one of those cretins, it would look like a beached whale met up with a flower.

Yes, I’m going to run on my treadmill and commit to a healthier lifestyle, and if he eats the cottage cheese in the fridge, the money will have been well spent since he’s always needed to diet more than I do. But it must be an odd sensation for him when he finishes a snack without getting grease on his shirt.

I really wish men could bear children. Wouldn’t that be fabulous! They could watch their bodies blow up so big that they couldn’t see their feet. And when they did manage to see their feet, they’d be bloated, too. Then they could ponder their stretch marks trying to find shapes in them like you do with clouds, except that unlike clouds, stretch marks stay. Imagine them trying to push themselves out of their Lazy-Boys at nine months. And then imagine them in labor, first the excruciating pain, and then the shock of watching your middle collapse and roll around like Jell-O. Then I would like to see them trying to reclaim their figures. Take any supermodel, any actress, get her pregnant four times, and you know what she’ll look like?-any mother in this town. We were all thin once.

I don’t want to go overboard with this diet thing. Here it is autumn, a time for hot apple pie, steaming soup, freshly baked bread with butter, hot cocoa in front of the fire, roasted chestnuts, and caramel apples. Maybe I’ll wait until spring. The food isn’t as good then.

by Nancy and Dan Sapir

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