Meals

He isn’t heavy, he’s on redux

I am not a beauty, but I’m not particularly obese - maybe 20 lbs (9 kg) overweight, most of it centred in my centre. I’ve sweated on a Stair-Master, gorged on cabbage soup, crunched trainers until my sides ached. Still, nothing suppressed those late-night hunger pangs. Willpower alone couldn’t end my urge for chocolate.

Then I heard about Redux, the latest revolution in weight control. I’d never taken pills like that before. But Redux isn’t an amphetamine, isn’t addictive, and has limited side effects. I knew I wasn’t the ideal candidate for the drug - it’s supposed to be used by true fatties, not guys with little potbellies. Still, I was determined to give it a whirl. I went to one of the new pill mills that have sprung up around Los Angeles, but was instantly turned off by the high-pressure jive. So I asked my cardiologist for a prescription. He reluctantly wrote one out and offered some nutritional guidance.

Swallowing the first capsule, I wondered how exactly it would kick in. Within minutes my mouth dried up, as if I had swallowed a handful of cotton balls. Water and chewing gum soon solved that problem. Then halfway through the Letterman show, something peculiar happened. I zoomed in on a bowl of green apples, fixating on their aesthetic beauty more than their sweet taste. I stared at them intensely, then decided I wasn’t hungry after all. Instead, I sipped some cranberry juice and somehow felt satisfied.

My doc had said Redux might inspire vivid dreams, and was he ever right! As I was sleeping, I saw myself driving around in a Volkswagen Beetle. Suddenly I looked back, and there was Godzilla lifting the car and violently throwing away. It took a walk around the house and another glass of juice to shake the jitters.

The next day I noticed two Hershey’s Kisses wrappers on a colleague’s desk. Ordinarily I might have asked to have one now I merely gazed at the silvery foil and moved on.

That’s how my first week on Redux went. Though I didn’t exercise much, I sensibly ate lots of chopped salads and grilled vegetables and avoided French fries and pasta. Midnight binges were limited to munching a few potato chips rather than pigging out on the usual half-bag. I didn’t suffer any short-term memory loss. There were occasional headaches and a tingly, spaced-out sensation, as if my skull were tightening around my brain. By the end of that first week I had dropped about 5 lbs. The catch is that my doctor prescribed only a month’s supply of Redux. When I run out, I can’t wait to order a cheese pizza smothered with pepperoni - just to see if I can still look at it lovingly, then push it away.

from “Time” magazine

Exercise 1.Do you remember? Answer these questions:

What kind of pills was this man prescribed?
Why was he prescribed to use REDUX?
Did he really need these pills?
How did he get the pills?
What did he sense after swallowing a pill?
What other strange things happened to him later on?
Did he notice any changes in his appetite?
What kind of dishes did he eat during the course of treatment?
What are the side effects of this medical preparation?
Did he achieve any result after treatment?

Exercise 2. Explain the meaning of the underlined phrases. Give Ukrainian equivalents to these phrases.

Exercise 3. Find synonyms in the text to the following words:

a drugstore

to appear

a fat man

to calm down

to work, to affect

to try

to do exercises

to eat a lot

to sprinkle

to look at smth intensely

to concentrate

Exercise 4. Write a page from your diary. It’s the fifteenth day that you have been on a really strict diet!

Exercise 5. Make a conversation between a dietician and a patient about what foods would suit him/her to lose weight.

Exercise 6

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