How not to return to your pre-pandemic figure

Getting ready to go out of the house and realizing that your sweatpants are the only pants that fit anymore after staying home for months on end? Eying the "diet" foods on grocery store shelves (or apps) and wishing they looked more tempting? Well, The Slim Gourmet (Barbara Gibbons, 1976) is here to make you feel better that you're not trying to diet in the '70s.

Let's try out a day on the slim gourmet diet. What's for breakfast?

If you guessed eggs, you were right! I'll bet you didn't guess the eggs would be cooked with an entire fruit salad-- grapes, tangerines, bananas, and all-- then topped with diet cheese. The best part may be that the fruits can change depending on the season, so if you want to wake up to warm watermelon scrambled into your banana-and-egg omelet with "low-fat Cheddar-type 'diet' cheese," then that's an option too. Yay?

The omelet serves as a warning that Gibbons is really serious about dieters getting their fruit. Lunch asks dieters to give up their normal sandwich for an Apple-a-Day Salad.

Yeah, if you don't want to get bored, just chop up an apple, add some celery and a "creamy low-calorie dressing," and your favorite sandwich ingredients. I mean, wouldn't it be more exciting to have an apple-and-canned seafood salad than a nice crab cake or shrimp roll?

Or if you're not a seafood fan, there's always a reuben.

Granted, you won't get your Russian dressing or rye bread, and the sauerkraut is traded out for shredded cabbage for some reason, but it's still a chance to eat corned beef and a whole tablespoon of shredded Swiss on mayonnaise-y apples. Sorry, low-calorie mayonnaise-y apples. Yay?

Maybe we should just skip ahead to dinner. How about some lasagna? I mean lasagne? Diet lasagnae (Yes, the -ae ending is how I'm comically making it plural.) are pretty popular, so what is the trick to this one?

It's the old trick of making lasagna "noodles" out of eggs, but this one shocked me because it allowed for some actual flour! So decadent. (And such "fun" to spend the afternoon making "noodle" sheets out of eggs....)

And to round out the day, let's have a little indulgence. How about a cookie? We can have some fun and make pinwheels!

Sorry-- I meant "Prunewheels." What's more fun than cookies that should offer a delicious swirl of chocolate but instead threaten to make you poop? The good news is you can cut off only a few, bake them, and then store the rest of the wax-paper-wrapped dough in the freezer until you notice it a year and a half later, long after you've given up on fitting into those pre-pandemic pants, and then you can throw it away. (Or, if we're on the darkest timeline, you can give thanks that you still have something semi-edible stored away and cry while you eat the somewhat-defrosted dough with a spoon.)

Here's hoping we're not on the darkest timeline!