Sunday Newscape Magazine

As I sat on my couch recently eating a donut and burrowing into my Snuggie – that blanket-with-arms contraption I ridiculed so incessantly that Santa felt compelled to bring me one this year – I was comforted to hear on TV that researchers now believe a bit of fat around the hips and thighs is actually good for the heart. This is marvelous news, especially since a “bit of fat” is one of those purely subjective terms that can be stretched to include quite a few donuts.

That’s the thing I love about researchers. They’re like puppeteers, pulling our strings with good news and then bad news and then, sometimes, good news again about the same darn thing. So now these puppet masters are telling us that having some junk in the trunk is OK. I’m totally fine with that, but I suspect maybe the researchers ate too much during the holidays.

Or maybe, like me, they just returned from a cruise.

My family and a couple thousand of our closest friends set sail on a short cruise in the Caribbean. Normally on a cruise, you’d spend a certain amount of time sunning up on deck in your bathing suit, exposing your donut-enhanced body to warm rays and, at least in my case, snickering stares. This would give you an incentive not to eat everything in sight. But thanks to the record cold, even the Caribbean was chilly during our trip. This meant we were able to cover up the evidence of our gluttony and keep right on eating.

The human psyche is a funny thing. Despite having inhaled enough calories during the holidays to keep Paris Hilton alive into the next millennium, when presented with limitless amounts of food on board ship, we fell to eating as if we were famine victims. We ate and we ate. And when we were bloated and seemingly unable to cram in one more bite, we ate some more. And that was only the first day.

Naturally, we needed drinks to wash down all that “free” food. Fortunately, there were always smiling attendants nearby to bring us round after round of beverages that were definitely not free, in either dollars or calories. Then we poured even more money into the cruise line coffers by visiting the casino and the onboard shopping mall, and by that time, we’d worked up enough of an appetite to devour platefuls of food at the midnight buffet.

The next day, after a hearty breakfast, we donned our sweaters and rolled our globular flesh on to the deck, careful not to fall overboard lest we be mistaken for sea lions. After a few turns around the deck, we were beginning to feel hunger pangs. Fortunately for us, it was time for lunch.

That night, we donned formal wear, leaving the zippers open, and went to meet the captain, a dashing and slender man who gazed upon us the way I imagine Captain Ahab must have looked at his prey, the great white whale in Moby Dick. Then - surprise, surprise - we sat down to a sumptuous dinner.

I’m pretty sure our dinner companions included some well-fed researchers.

© Jackie Papandrew, All Rights Reserved