My New Diet Aid

Pending the results of my blood work, I have been instructed to take an Uber Dose of Tylenol Arthritis Pain two to three times a day to keep the symptoms under control. Which it does rather admirably, actually – while I’m not getting the eight hours semi-promised on the label (in their defense, it does say ‘up to eight hours’, not ‘we absolutely guarantee that after taking this you will be completely free of whatever ails you for eight solid hours’), I do get about four hours of ‘wouldn’t know anything was wrong’ freedom, and another two hours of ‘I can totally deal with this’ discomfort.

And I’ll take it, thank you, because I am a huge wuss and pain is not my friend and besides – I am way too busy for this kind of crap.

But I digress.

I am having the most fascinating side effect from the Tylenol. This is a much larger dose than I have ever taken before; and besides, I’m usually more of an Advil/Motrin consumer. So it really caught me off-guard when I realized: I don’t want to eat.

Not only am I not hungry, I flat-out don’t want it. Yesterday it was almost 3:00 before I suddenly thought to myself, “Hey. Have I eaten anything today?”

No, no I hadn’t. And I wasn’t hungry, and nothing in this world sounded good. Not even California Brittle sounded good. Pretzels? Naw. Ice cream? Eh. Big Mac? Ewwwww.

But of course, I’m not going to let me get away with that kind of crap. So I marched out and grabbed a Lean Cuisine and heated it up and told myself, sternly, that I was going to eat the Lean Cuisine, and I was going to like it.

I ate about half of it and then pushed the other half around for a while, forced myself to eat all the vegetables and rice and tossed away most of the beef. And I felt stuffed. I felt like I had just competed in a hot dog eating contest – and won. Bloated, uncomfortably full, and tired – the kind of tired you are after snorking down Thanksgiving dinner.

I looked it up, and sure enough: Loss of appetite is one of the stated potential side-effects of acetaminophen.

I never thought I’d get so…lucky. Give me a list of potential side-effects, and the ones I’m most likely to get are insomnia, nausea, vomiting, ‘may cause you to plant yourself face-first into the Golden Skillet buffet table even though technically you despise barely warm buffet-style food of dubious origin’.

But something that might help me stay on a diet? Never.

*sniff* I’m so happy…