Rather than doing something productive with my weekend, I went through hundreds of pages of cookbooks and nearly three years’ worth of Vegetarian Times magazines to create a repertoire of Skinny Man’s favorite recipes (read: food I cook and he eats). I ended up with four pages of recipes, which I enshrined in plastic paper protectors. Yes, this is how much I hate myself.

As you can imagine, this new campaign has been the source of a lot of controversy among the obese.

We all know Emaciated Lady has issues and now I know why. Upon landing in California last week for a visit, I was taken to her parents’ house where a veritable feast awaited me. Emaciated Lady’s parents are immigrants and hospitality in their culture is apparently measured by how much you can make a guest binge eat. So I did my best to indulge them, taking a little bit of everything that was vegetarian.

It was sweet of her mom to accommodate me, especially considering her dad’s attitude toward meat, which became clear about halfway through the meal. He looked at me and in a thick accent asked, “Why you don’t eat meat? Don’t you know God put the animals on the earth for us to kill and eat and barbeque them? That must be why you so skinny.” Of course, I took this latter statement as a great compliment. But I also wanted to correct him with, “No, the reason I’m so skinny is because I starve.”

My dear best friend and partner in this madness has recently and finally decided to become a civilized person vegetarian. So to help her maintain her new vegetarian lifestyle as well as her anorexic figure, I’ve come up with the following 5 tips:

1. Take supplements — The least you can do is feed your starved body a few vitamins now and then. They’re zero calories. And don’t forget the flax oil. It has 15 calories per serving, but that’s the price you have to pay for a healthy heart.
2. Drink lots of water & caffeine — This is a no-brainer. All diets call for lots of water, and the caffeine will give you that extra boost you’re not getting from calories.
3. Eat spinach – Anyone who’s ever watched Popeye knows that spinach gave him the big guns. Of course no anorexic wants arms that size, but the point is it’s good for you.
4. &   5.   Say your goodbyes –  Ok, so I really only have  3 tips. But that’s because your options are already limited as an anorexic. When you add vegetarianism to the equation, you’ve pretty much got nothing. You may as well say your goodbyes now.

Whenever my dad starts to criticize my body, he cloaks the criticism in the beauty of our native language. That way, it not only sounds more pleasant, but my monolingual husband can’t defend me. This is what happened when I broke the news to my meat-eating father that I was going vegetarian. The rough translation is as follows:

“You are not normal. You are half the size you used to be. Your curves are all gone. You’re wasting away. You look old and ugly.”

Mind you, this was day 3 of my vegetarianism. Then he tried to force-feed me a piece of barbecued kebob.

I can forgive someone for not knowing I’m an anorexic. I do a pretty amazing job at keeping my disorder a secret, primarily because it boosts my ego to think that others might mistake me as naturally skinny. So I’ll eat like a normal person in front of you, but trust me, that meal is a rarity.

What I cannot forgive, however, is complete and utter ignorance over what it means to be a vegetarian. So let me break it down: Vege = vegetables, tarian = that’s all I eat (when I eat, of course). Maybe this is a slight exaggeration, since I eat cake on occasion too and cake technically isn’t a vegetable. But the point is THERE IS NO MEAT IN VEGETARIAN. So please don’t take it personally when I decline your invite to Longhorn Steakhouse with, “You can take your steak and shove it up your ass.”

I just discovered Burger King’s Meat Haiku website, where meat eaters can go to share their sensitive side. Even though I’m an anorexic and a vegetarian, I found the site inspirational and wrote a haiku of my own:

Fuck you Burger King
And your fatty ass whoppers
For butchering Life