The Subway diet

So this guy lives on two Subway sandwiches a day for a year and loses 245 pounds. He emerges looking like a concentration camp victim – so gaunt he’s nearly transparent, but, in today’s radically lipo-phobic society, fashionable, with a story to sell. He’s a New American Hero. He did it, so can you.

Soon he’ll be doing Viagra commercials and going on reality TV dating shows, won’t he?

In the “after” photographs, he’s holding up a tent-esque pair of his former dungarees, which he could now fit into nearly three times over. Is this a good thing? Sure, for Subway and other hoagie-makers, which must have certainly taken it on the chin from trendy but leaner-and-meaner food-wraps, pita pockets, tacos, and such. Like, why bother to scoop out the roll when you can get … breadless bread, instantaneously. Remember, less is less.

I miss Haystacks Calhoun, don’t you?

Plus – get this – they claim each sandwich has only 500 calories, hold the mayo. That’s nuts. On my planet, you can’t even look at a hoagie less than 1,100 calories. Hey, we’re in the so-called Land of Plenty – gargantuan muffins and bagels so calorific they’d qualify as a week’s nourishment in an underdeveloped foreign country, no naming names.

Meanwhile, my friend “Tatiana,” let’s call her, is worried she’s a size 18 and ballooning. She’s gone from Weight Watchers to taking human growth hormone to one of those possibly risky over-the-counter allegedly herbal diet supplements, but nothing seems to be working.

I have a better idea:

Relax, I tell her, accept yourself, love your body as it is, and cease the self-torture. Instead, why not declare yourself a Big Beautiful Woman. Actually, by their standards, you’re kinda small. It’s a role you can grow into.

Many BBWs I’ve encountered are neither beautiful nor simply big, but they seem to have it happening in the self-esteem department. They believe they are just gaw-juss. They have style, verve, flair and panache. They have embraced corpulence, and made it theirs. Their body is their friend. Plus, they get to have their own fan clubs – those fat freaks and chubby chasers who are positively fetishistic about excess flab, er, flesh.

Ab flab, anyone?

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to make a confession: Personally, I am kind of F-A-T. Too fat to be thin-and-sexy but too thin to be fat-and-sexy. Although my cat likes me just the way I am, there’s always the matter of men who might not.

Uh, Pookie?

To that end, I was envisioning being forced to go on a different sort of Subway diet. In the city of Philadelphia, where I still, alas, reside, the financially ailing (aren’t they all) public transit company, SEPTA, is considering killing the C Bus, the city’s major above-ground transportation route running the entire length of Broad St., for, natch, economic reasons. Despite ruinously high fares, SEPTA can’t seem to make a profit.

You know the drill – decaying infrastructure, declining ridership, shrinking federal, state and city subsidies, yadda, yadda, yadda. Attempting to nip C-Bus rider outcry in the bud, the transit honchos callously urge, Take the subway!

Churls!

And so I am imagining my version of the Subway diet. Wandering underground for hours at a time, twice a day, every day, through those subterranean subway tunnels that Thomas Pynchon adumbrated so vividly in his classic novel, “V.” And, since subways are faster than buses, I will gain time, hence I will … lose wait!