Guaranteed Weight Loss: Airplane Food

As the steward handed me two plastic-wrapped cookies, each the size of a postage stamp, I calculated maybe 100 calories for a 5-hour flight between Washington and Tucson. A steady diet of flying would put me in a size 6 in no time.

I thought back to my very first airplane flight. When I was 3 years old, my father was on a 3-month assignment in Washington. I was so excited about going to visit him, but even more excited about flying on an airplane for the first time. We dressed in our Sunday clothes for the occasion of flying, just as the air hostesses wore their trim navy blue suits with their little pillbox hats and their white gloves. My father had told us to expect the same steak dinner that he had on the trip up. We climbed up those stairs onto the plane with big appetites for the trip north from Panama City, Florida.

Much to my mother’s dismay, the attending hostess told us that the steak dinners had been discontinued the week before and that there was no longer a meal on the flight. “But can probably find something for the little girl,” she said. So I sat there with my long blond curls in my smocked dress eating a stale brownie and drinking OJ as we headed north on our noisy prop jet.

Since then we have seen food on planes come and mostly go. There were little plastic compartmentalized dishes of doll-size portions. There were lunch bags of sandwiches. There were bagels and muffins. There were peanuts. But even the peanuts are now gone and we are back again at close to nothing.

Think about it -- you could just get on a plane and get off when you have reached the size you want to be. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take long.