chapter 3

Joanna was one of those people who always had to be busy. Picture the most fidgety person you've ever seen in your entire life. That person would look positively restful next to Joanna. To say that she was easily bored would be the understatement of the year. Even when she was fully employed and deep in the heart of some important project or other, Joanna still looked for something to occupy her mind during whatever infrequent idle moments came her way.

But now she was unemployed. Isolated socially. Physically unable to vent her frustration through exercise. In short, she was bored out of her mind. And the only way she could cope with her boredom was to hobble over to the kitchen, put a bunch of snacky kinds of food on a dining cart, wheel them into her living room, then plop her no longer dainty derriere onto her couch, turn on the television to something, anything and then proceed to empty the entire contents of the cart in nearly record time.

And so it went for two solid months as the torn hamstring took its own sweet time to recover. Intellectually, Joanna knew and understood that her continual grazing had to stop. She knew what the consequences would be. After all, hadn't she managed to slap over thirty pounds of soft, squishy fat on her once lithe and lean figure in a little over four weeks? But with nothing to do but vegetate in front of the television and with an appetite that was growing by leaps and bounds, emotionally, she just couldn't help herself.

It didn't take long before the consequences of her self-indulgence became apparent. About three weeks into her recuperation, she sat down in front of the trusty old TV as usual. She was eating a very large bag of buttered popcorn when she dropped an errant kernel on her lap. As she reached to pick it up, she noticed what looked like a milky white stripe running across her mid-section. She knew it couldn't be her sweat shirt because all her sweat clothes were in sold colors. She thought about it for a while and then came to a horrible conclusion. The milky white stripe didn't belong to any piece of clothing she owned, it was her belly. She had gotten so fat that her once horribly baggy sweat pants had ridden down while her now very tight sweat shirt had ridden up, revealed an VERY flabby, jiggly belly.

In the back of her mind she KNEW this day was coming. She may not have been religiously counting calories, but her ever increasing food bills told her that she was eating enough to feed a family of four. She also knew that you can't work off over four thousand calories a day by watching TV. The combination of the two could only lead to one thing. Joanna Kirshner realized one of her worst fears. She was getting fat. No, that's not entirely true. She wasn't GETTING fat, she WAS fat. The only question was what she intended to do about it.

The plan became crystal clear in her mind. She would go on a rigorous diet. No more junk foods. Snacks would become a thing of the past. Heavy exercise would become the order of the day. And it would all start tomorrow. Right after she finished the box of eclairs in the refrigerator!!