The death of a healthy diet starts with your mind, first. The dedication it takes to stay away from foods high in saturated fats wavers over time, essentially because strawberry shortcake tastes better than plain strawberries. Cheesesteak tastes better than turkey cutlets. The defense you can offer yourself is to only eat at home and keep these foods from entering the confines of your cupboard or fridge. This weekend, I worked four days at the Marin County Fair, at my favorite job of choice, that of a food services specialist for Earthly Delights. I'll keep it plain, our food offerings our unhealthy at best. Garlic fries, philly cheesesteaks, chicken sandwiches marinated with butter, garlic and various sauces, fajita chicken salads in a fried tortilla shell, bbq pork sandwiches, hot links, polish sausages, Italian sausages, and soda. When you work twelve hour days, you have to go through three meal cycles (from breakfast through to dinner). When you love french fries, and you work making and serving french fries all day long, it follows that you will eat some of those french fries. Do you like cheesesteak? Yeah? Well, try to avoid them for forty straight hours of working in front of them. It starts with a fry here and a fry there, and by the end of the weekend you are shoving fries down your throat as soon as they are made. Who gives a shit. The booth next to you is serving soft-serve ice cream wedged in between two freshly-baked cookies, the booths across the river are serving corn dogs and fried zuchinni, and the booth by the ferris wheel is serving fried calamari. You think a booth that offered fresh spinach and carrot juice would sell anything at these fairs? Point is, your options for healthy eating consists of picking the kidney beans out of the taco salad. And that keeps you full for roughly twelve minutes. Then you move on to simply eating the fajita chicken ... Chicken is healthy, right? Next, you try the bbq pork, because, pork is the other white meat, so it cannot be bad for you. You move on to the Italian sausage next, complete with grilled onions and spicy mustard. By the end of the weekend you have so much cheesesteak grease running down your face, your shirt looks like the fryer. And you revel in it. I felt like a fat little cherub with puffy cheeks flying around with my cheesesteak arrows, shooting all the fat people in the ass. I woke up this morning as if from a drunken stupor ... four days of debauchery and indulgence weighing heavily in my gut. Feeling guilty, I sat on the couch to watch CNN to watch an interview with Dr. Atkins, of the famed Atkins diet. Apparantly all the shit I was eating is good for me, (with the exception of the bread around the cheesesteak and the starched potatoes)! So i've never had a healthier four days in my life. Eat cheesesteak all you want, young ones, apparantly you cholesterol and triglycerides will shoot down like sausages into your stomach. Just stay away from the bread ... if only I had known. Then some other doctor comes on CNN to say that although evidence does reveal in the short-term that the Atkins diet provides weight loss and lowered cholesterol diets, the long-term affects are unknown. And it all became painfully clear that doctors don't know what the hell is good and what the hell is bad, and they fight amongst themselves like spoiled little children. Then it quickly occured to me that Beer is a carbohydrate, and as such is not part of the Atkins diet. Beer not part of a healthy diet? That Atkins bitch is a fraud. You heard it here first.