The Lying Scale, And Other Justifications for Deliciously Fatty Food

Marissa (“Swissa”) and I sat on her bed with our laptops other night, waiting patiently for Mari Carmen to announce down the hallway that dinner was on the table. Midway through my rant about how our house’s WiFi is anti-American, (everyone else’s computer gets it but mine) we heard this loud boiling and pouring sound – then Marissa and I looked at each other, and she mimed a dramatic wicked witch of the west-esque melting scene, screeching “the faaaaat, the faaaaaaaaat, it’s booooilingggg.” She was half joking, but after a month of Mari Carmen’s always delicious but very fatty cooking, we’ve learned just to just close our eyes, eat what’s on our plate, and try not to think about a future of weight watchers and airplane seatbelt extenders.

As we sat down at the table eating our amazing and freshly fried calamari, empanadas, and ham and cheese bites, Marissa, Judith and I all looked at each other and started laughing because we were all thinking the same thing. “Que?” asked Mari Carmen with an interested smile, and hesitantly, Marissa explained “es muy rico! …Pero tenemos miedo que vamos a gordar.” (It’s very tasty! But we’re afraid that we’re going to get fat.) Mari Carmen started to laugh, and replied with “no, no es la verdad! Caminais todos los dias, y sois joven” (no, that’s not true! You guys walk every day, and you’re young!) Then she proceeded to get up from the table, and head down the hallway with an apparent mission in mind to prove us all wrong. She came back into the kitchen with an old bathroom scale, and the minute we recognized it, the three of us all yelled “ahhh!! Nooo!” all with equally matched horror, until she made each one of us get up, and stand on the scale to prove that we in fact had not gained as much weight as we thought.

Lucky for me, the scale was in kilograms, so I could easily ignore whatever incomprehensible number appeared on the digital screen. Unfortunately though, I quickly learned that a kilogram is exactly half of a pound, so even being metric-system deprived and in denial, I didn’t have a good enough excuse to stop me from figuring out a simple math equation.

Marissa was first up, and although she was convinced that she had gained at least 6 kilograms, she was about the same, if not a kilogram or two less than her normal weight. (Which is absolutely tiny, by the way.) Judith was second, and although she wasn’t positive of her original weight, she was pretty sure that the scale had sliced off 3 or 4 kilograms from her ballpark number.

I waited until the dire end, and then very reluctantly stepped onto the scale to face the ugly truth of all my pastry and fatty food indulgences. To my shocking surprise, unless I divided by two the wrong way, (which is absolutely possible) the scale told me that I weigh about 8 pounds (16 kilograms) less than I did when I hopped on the plane a month ago. There is no way that can be right.

This being said, we’re all convinced that it’s a conspiracy. Mari Carmen must keep a broken scale in the bathroom near the kitchen, exactly for times like these, when people question the health content of her deliciously fatty cooking.

…Either that, or we’ve all actually lost weight. What would the nutrition specialists have say about that?