Eat. Essen. Monger. Ehhol. Fres. Mangiare. Yest.
If any of these sound familiar because your granny or great-grandmother came from Germany, France, Israel, Italy or Russia, she was probably like my Russian grandmother.
Grandma Pearl thought if you weren't pleasantly rounded, you weren't healthy. She wasn't alone, because many of my friends at the time also complained that visits to their grandmothers' houses were eating orgies.
Don't we all wish they were still around to whip up all those delicious recipes they brought over here on the boat with them? Because no matter how hard we try, we can't duplicate them. And to think, most of the time we turned down their offers of gluttony for the sake of vanity.
Then wow - this comes along just in time for the holidays!
We no longer have to begrudge ourselves a little fudge that adds some pudge, because a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says so.
It's OK; it's even good for your health to be as much as 30 pounds overweight. According to the study, it may in fact, be healthier for those who are a little overweight than it is for their thinner counterparts. The added heft seems to help stave off diseases, such as cancer and heart disease.
Conversely, the study says that those same extra pounds are not so good if diabetes or kidney disease is involved. So, before taking the study too much to our waistlines, we should know what our basic health is.
But if you are a normal healthy, average Jane or Joe who's been trying to shed that extra 10 or 15 pounds, the study is welcome news, especially at this time of year.
And, for me, there's an extra added boon. Going by weight/height charts in doctors' offices, over the years I've been consistently 20 to 30 pounds underweight!
The charts for a woman who is 5-foot-3 of medium bone structure should weigh between 135 and 145 pounds. My average weight over the years has never varied more than a pound or two from 115 pounds, so I'm already 20 to 30 pounds ahead of the game.
Allowing for the fact that I can now add 30 pounds to the equation, I can get my weight up to 175 pounds, and still be within the 30 pound safety zone!
Pudgy sludge is good, and for all of you who might be like me, the holidays are going to be a blast.
Yes! During Thanksgiving you could have forget the green-bean and onion-ring casseroles you never liked, and eaten all the turkey with rich gravy you wanted. Extra helpings of tooth-melting candied yams and pumpkin pie with mile-high mountains of whipped cream didn't have to give you the guilts for a year.
For Christmas and all the holiday parties there will be hors d'oeuvres, honey-baked ham, mashed potatoes, chocolate santas, candies, cookies and cake to be washed down with rich, creamy eggnog that we won't have to pass on.
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