Broccoli Is Nature’s Appetite Suppressant

You can’t handle pizza or the truth in 2024

I know the secret to weight loss and for a long time, I published a pamphlet for $1.99 called “The Real Secret to Weight Loss,” which sold like hotcakes until someone came along with a catchier title.

Some flim-flam man purloined my idea into “The #1 Trick to Reduce Belly Fat” with a picture of a fat belly and I sobbed. I knew it was over for me.

The secret to weight loss has always been broccoli, except for on holidays and during total eclipses when it becomes cauliflower.

In addition to the rainbow of cruciferous vegetables, you have to accept who you are.

It’s that simple. Dieting involves spiritual transcendence, which explains why about 5% of people lose weight permenantly and about 5% become Enlightened. It is generally speaking, the same 5%.

If you are dieting it’s because you will never be able to eat freely, like a raccoon out of a dumpster. Ever.

Instead, your life will amount to a series of forced restrictions, and various rules. Without these, every time you lose a few pounds, your mind instantly turns to mush.

I’ve reached my goal weight — I think I’ll celebrate!

What do I deserve?

Since I lost weight, I should have anything I want. I know!

Pizza!!

That first slice is new yet your old friend, best friend, and most trusted advisor. It will serenade you with old times, buy you a beer, and act like it has never turned against you a thousand times before.

The secret to losing weight is remembering that no one “eats normally.’

Nobody eats normally except the 31% of people identified by science who can’t get addicted to food and by that I mean, pizza.

The Non-Addicts and Their Smarmy Superiority

Can you believe such people exist? They can eat Ben & Jerry’s in moderation.

It’s bad enough being tortured by food, but the knowledge that some people don’t turn into degenerate addicts with one bite of pepperoni thick crust is too much to bear.

Non-addicts think addicts are weak while we, the addicts, know they are both profoundly clueless and infuriatingly lucky.

At the same time, their lack of comprehension and self-congratulatory drivel about “willpower” is completely understandable.

If I wasn’t an addict, I would think addicts are weak-willed and dumber than a box of rocks. I often cannot believe I fell for Substance X again, taking me on a harrowing journey into insanity and overeating and only having two pairs of jeans I can wear comfortably because I refuse to buy more clothes.

Addiction is baffling.

So every year, we who cannot resist the second donut, the third piece of pizza, or the fourth serving of lasagne because someone cut the squares too small — every damn January we have to climb back on the dietary carousel.

Last January

I’ve put on 20 pounds in the last year, and I’m not tall.

It started last January when I went out of town for a month. In the big city, we ate fast food, ethnic food, convenience food, and Costco hot dogs.

So we both dove off the low-carb wagon. I convinced myself it wasn’t a dive, but a brief dalliance with the life I’ve always wanted, and I would easily and breezily return to sane eating soon.

At the end of January, we drove home, and somewhere west of Albuquerque, I ate cheap and delicious Mexican food and shed all pretenses I was ever going to stop chowing down on whatever tortilla chip or enchilada sauce came my way.

When I saw Oklahoma in the rearview mirror and drove into the forests of Arkansas, I celebrated with a 16-oz bottle of our state beverage: Mountain Dew.

I chalked it all up to “being on vacation,” but the vacation never came to an end.

I Have to Eat This Way — I’m Stressed

I’ve been dieting since I was 12. If I’m not on a plan, my weight nudges up, up, and up, with an eerie familiarity.

In April, we bought another house, on an impulse that turned out swimmingly but killed any chance of constraint with food.

While buying the house, we had days of decisions, small victories, and moderate disappointments, all of which led to the same conversation:

“Maybe we should go to the Mexican restaurant and review our options?”

“Um, okay.”

It’s bad Mexican food, but it was always open on Sundays.

Then we discovered Debra’s food truck, which has the best Patty Melt this side of the Rio Grande, and also corn nuggets which are a poor man’s corn fritter.

We both became fans of fried food as if we’d never eaten it before and we were just visiting from Italy.

We ate lunches from the food truck throughout May.

Now’s a Bad Time — the Food is Free

Then I got a job at the police station and for the uninitiated, all police stations have a room.

It might be full of vending machines, or maybe bowls of candy, or quite probably boxes of donuts but I guarantee in that room you’ll find the most demonic of all calorie sources: FREE FOOD.

At our station, it was brought in by The Community, who smiled to our faces but wanted us all dead from diabetes.

Chips, candies, cupcakes, snacks, full cakes, sausage balls, and much, much more.

I never saw a pie, however, nor any actual donuts.

Learning my 911 Dispatcher job was extremely stressful, my schedule changed constantly, I hardly slept at all, and the food was free.

I ate freely, and then I quit.

I quit because I was sleep-deprived, but I told myself I would never clean up my diet if I kept working there.

Four more months passed.

At a Christmas party, I ate four molasses cookies and wasn’t even hungry. New Year’s came and I ate two brownies, and assorted other sweet treats, and kept telling myself it was way past my bedtime, so I needed sustenance.

I knew I was lying.

Only a year before, I hadn’t let a granule of sugar cross my lips and I weighed 110 pounds. Now, I was tipping the scale at 131.

The Lies of a Sugary Mind

After so many diets, I know the drill. It’s hard to start another one because I’ve “failed” so many times, but in my old age, I see it differently.

I’ve also succeeded plenty of times.

The successes were always derailed by the same delusional thinking: weight control is optional.

It was me believing I could be someone I’m not.

I will never be a normal eater. I will also never be six feet tall, or ever play cornerback in the NFL.

You would think downhill of 50, I’d know this — but there is something about that first pointy bite of pizza that feels like no bite at all, and it causes instant amnesia.

So I am back to steaming broccoli, which is an aggressive color of green and when I gaze upon it, instead of craving it, I know the truth.

It is nature’s more glorious appetite suppressant.

I pour the mini-marshmallows from the bag and take them to the stair landing for the raccoons, and I envy their ignorance. Their lives are brutal and short because so much in the forest can kill them, but they enjoy food with such puritanical lust.

I’d be willing to trade places with them.

I’d be willing to live in a tree.

And if someone brought me steamed broccoli, I’d waddle off with my nose high in the air.

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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years and recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress. She is serializing the first part of her second book, City of Lies, on Substack.