The Calorie Chronicles: Slim-Fast

If you're not a fan of Oprah, if you've never seen a show, you still know about her size 10 Calvin Klein jeans, the Radio Flyer wagon and garbage bag of fat. 67 pounds of fat, equivalent to the amount Oprah had lost in record time to fit into those jeans. The secret to her success? Powdered shakes.

The year was 1988. Benazir Bhutto becamse Islam's first female leader, and the Ford Escort was a top selling car. The powdered shake meal replacement program wasn't new but the phenomenon was taking over: a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, a healthy dinner and voila. You are slim. Fast.

A few months after Oprah's fabulous coming out, I started the ninth grade at a Catholic high school. Uniforms weren't new to me but the kilt was, and the concept of looking as slutty as possible. Rule of thumb for the Catholic high school girl: purchase kilt at least a week before school starts to ensure time for alterations, and therefore proper ass-hangage. See, your kilt is longest on the day that you get it, three inches below the knee fresh out of the box. Keep it that way and wind up in a locker or at the cafeteria dork table.

I'm convinced that the school girl look becoming candy for fetishists and porn started at my school. Priests and nuns won't like this, but a lot of those girls were the trampiest around, and their kilts said it all. After hemming my kilt was about three to six inches above my knee, properly innocent and pure compared to the 90% of "young ladies" who transformed theirs into belts and ruffles. No gust of wind needed to see some butt cheek, it was all there from the get go.

Ah, peer pressure. I'm already nostalgic. Nerdy l'il me with a hip full of books, navigating around scores of girls with stick legs and heavy eyeliner flouncing "barely there" kilts and tonguing gino boyfriends. I hadn't even kissed a boy yet, never mind dry hump in the chapel, so you can see how all this was a bit unnerving for me. Especially when girls my age were joining right on in, like Carlotta Antonioli.

Carlotta Antonioli, legs to die for and spite to spare. With the exception of her honking Calabrese nose, Carlotta was a gorgeous girl with a gorgeous body, and the heart of a snake. She'd blown every cool boy in the ninth grade, and had been caught with plenty of them in broom closets. More than once I saw Carlotta whispering amongst her follower skanks, casting glances and smiling mockingly my way. I didn't let it bother me, I figured she'd end up in night school someday, but I wanted those stick legs. I was 14 and don't remember what the scale was reading, but I thought that 15, 20 pounds less would do me and my kilt a world of good.

Slim-Fast was easy enough to get, since it's sold in every grocery and convenience store in the universe. And it wasn't a hard plan to follow, remember, shake for breakfast, shake for lunch, then a light dinner. Sure enough, before long, I did see a difference.

Some time after Oprah had shown off her Calvins, I remember reading a letter a woman had written to some magazine about how she herself had lost 90 pounds on the powdered shake miracle. More than Oprah. She'd also gained it back, and then some. Her letter's parting lines were something like, "I gained all my weight back, and Oprah will too."

Oprah did gain her weight back. And so did I. Very quickly. No surprise really, of course you're going to lose weight when you starve, and of course the numbers will rack up the minute you start to eat again. Maybe we should have known better.

Oprah has called that incident her "biggest, fattest mistake." Which was the mistake, the wagon of fat or the entire diet? If I ever talk to Oprah about this, I'd tell her that the fat wagon wasn't a mistake. Ratings went through the roof and probably contributed to her being a household name today.

As for the entire diet, I like to think it wasn't so much a mistake as the lesson that needed to be learned. Whatever your neurosis, it can't be sunk in a powdered shake.

As for Carlotta Antonioli, I saw her a few months ago. She works at the Photo Hut.