Diets That Work: Voodoo and Divorce

Two unusual diets I Have Been Made Aware of Recently:

1) The Voodoo Curse Diet: I recently attended a meeting (which got a little side-tracked because of this revelation) where I met a sweet lady who was beside herself with anxiety because she believes herself to be under a curse.

Originally, she simply sought a local doctor's second-opinion about her unusual skin allergies during a visit to her native Phillipines. The local healer gave her fabulously expensive skin ointments and convinced her that a jealous co-worker in Canada who has long hair was maliciously sticking pins in a doll to harm her.

Upon return to Canada, her allergies have not improved with the ointments and she has realized that every single one of her co-workers has long hair.

Weight loss due to voodoo stress: thirty pounds in two months!

2) The Non-Amicable Divorce Kick-Boxing Diet: Another woman I know has dropped almost seventy pounds after a nasty divorce. Six months later, she is a cute little (four foot eight) kick-boxing dynamo, hanging out at martial arts studios for "stress relief". I sense that it's not the big rubber punching bag she's really kicking... I'm rather proud of her!

Here is the diet I am on: The-Eat-Sensibly-and-Exercise-Regularly Diet

Pounds lost in a month: One.......sigh. Why do drastic painful diets always seem to be the ones that produce results?

(Not that I'm considering either of them).

Here's the other Diet I'm working on: The Make Your House Lose Weight By the New Year By Chucking the Junk Out the Door in Frustration Diet

I think my closets and basements could stand to lose a couple hundred pounds.

For instance, for a start, here are four bags of clothes from our closets that are waiting in our garage for the nice charity clothes-drive truck to arrive.

I recently spoke with a friend who implied it would be nice to be able to blithely chuck out junk without a second thought like I did....

A-HA-HA-HA-HA! (If I'd been drinking root-beer when she said that, I'd have been snorting it through my nose).

You see, I do have junk and I do find it hard to get rid of things. It's just not always plain when you walk into my house because it seems fairly tidy. But don't open all the closets, m'kay?

I'm grateful that I have a nice big house with a big basement and lots of closets. She doesn't. I hope I made her feel better that she's not the only pack-rat in her circle of friends.

But room for it or not, the clutter is really bugging me lately, so it's time for a House Diet, no excuses.

The Excuses:

a) I've been collecting things to sell at my flea-market for some years to fund my annual trip to Europe. And I think I've done pretty well after seven years of converting Crap-to Culture.

But I think I'm almost done with that means of income now because free-lance gardening and odd-jobs have the potential to make as much money without the clutter-collecting and I think I might need a break from the flea-market. (Not saying I'll never to it again with Brand-New-Fresh-Junk).

But darn it, it's hard to put an item in a box for the Goodwill when you say to yourself, "This could be worth two dollars at my garage sale!"

b) I've been storing a lot of things from the daycare where I work at my house, but I've decided I'm going to bring most of it back to the storage place there. If it's at my house, the children aren't using the toys/craft supplies anyway. And if we simply have too much stuff at work, then maybe it's time to let some of the broken/non-used things go anyway. Puzzles with missing pieces will never be anything other than frustrating.

Also, I asked around--nobody else is willing to take some of the daycare stuff to their houses either, so I don't feel too guilty. :)

So really, with those two excuses gone, I should be able to blithely chuck the junk from at least those two areas. Hopefully.

What was it that my friend Tai called it? Ah yes, maybe I've been suffering from CHUCKAPHOBIA !