Loopholes, Queso, and Forced Personal Growth
When the Universe Takes the Reins
Laura Finney
5/22/2026
I’ve never been good at dieting. Fortunately, for most of my life, this wasn’t really a problem. Maybe that’s why deprivation has never been my skill set. I never had to practice. If anything, I was too skinny.
And then I hit a certain age and just looking at a buffet caused my body to whisper, Store it. Store all of it. I was starting to look less like myself and more like bread dough someone forgot to punch down. And I did try to lose it. Repeatedly. But I’m just not built to deprive myself for long. I do not possess that particular superpower.
I’d start a diet and then immediately begin searching for loopholes.
No carbs… except on rainy days. Those are hard enough without the emotional support of a baguette.
No wine… except when out with friends, which suddenly had me speed-dialing people for “ladies’ night” with the urgency of someone assembling a disaster response team.
No cheese… although I did briefly convince myself that the health benefits of cheese far outweighed the negative impact on my waistline. Calcium. Protein. Emotional stability. Frankly, cheese was carrying a lot of weight in my overall wellness plan.
And yet here I am today, 35 pounds down, largely because the universe decided to stick a fork in the road. Though to be fair, I can’t lay all of this at the feet of alpha-gal. For reasons no one can explain, over the last decade I’ve developed a complete aversion to sweets. Not “I’m cutting back” — I mean the thought of dessert makes me physically ill. Writing the word dessert is honestly a little dicey.
Apparently, there’s no medical explanation for this, which leads me to believe I may have accidentally stepped into an alternate reality somewhere around 2017. And given all the other bizarre plot twists lately, I’m only half kidding.
So, I was already down 20 pounds from abandoning sugar and feeling pretty smug about my otherwise catastrophic culinary decisions. Which is where the universe really started teaching me the wrong lessons, because I could eat absolutely anything and never gain weight. Bacon cheeseburgers. Cheesesteak subs. BLTs in heavy rotation. Honestly, my lunch menu looked like it was curated by a 15-year-old boy left unattended at a food truck.
The universe had cleared a path before me, and nothing could come between me and my queso. Then the Lone Star tick cracked its knuckles and said, “Hold my beer.”
It turns out that when death is on the table — or at least serious malaise — discipline and deprivation don’t seem quite so challenging anymore. Day one I emptied my kitchen of mammal and never looked back.
I learned through my support groups that there are apps you can use to scan foods for safety. Which made life exponentially easier. The funny thing about the food industry, and by funny, I mean as frustrating as trying to negotiate a Trader Joe’s parking lot, is that they like to invent words to hide other words. Packaging doesn’t say cow or pig, it says stearic acid, or Mono- and diglycerides and they absolutely love, love, love the term “natural flavors.” They slapped that one on everything and it covers a multitude of sins.
Hence guidance was necessary. The app I chose, Fig, worked like a stoplight. Green meant good to go. Yellow meant “are you feeling lucky, punk?” Red meant, “beyond this point, there be dragons.”
Which, honestly, was tremendously helpful but also deeply time-consuming. Those first few months I could easily lose an hour creeping down grocery store aisles in desperate pursuit of a safe pasta.
I know what you’re thinking.
Pasta?
Yes! Remember the asterisk?
Super brief and lacking any actual scientific proof, here is my pasta theory. At some point long ago, “they” — and I remain intentionally vague on who “they” are because I do not know — decided soft white flour and shelf-stable pasta were preferable. So they stripped out the parts of wheat containing much of the nutritional value.
Then everyone started getting sick because, as it turns out, nutrients were actually serving an important purpose. Which meant they now had to put some of them back before half the country’s tongues fell off. And thus enriched flour was born.
Here’s the AGS problem: some of those synthetic vitamin blends could contain mammal-derived stabilizers and carriers. Which is how we arrived at: “Pasta can be green, but it is very often yellow.” There are alpha-galleons roaming the grocery aisles, humming along to “Bette Davis Eyes” as they compile lists of “yellow” products and pursue clarification through company emails. I am not that person. My newfound discipline only stretches so far.
So yes, the learning curve on this was steep. However, I’m proud to say that I’ve streamlined the process and can now move through the grocery store with the precision of the Swiss. I will inevitably neglect to purchase the one item I went for, but isn’t that what we do at this age?
In the end, I’d love to tell you that I finally embraced wellness through discipline, mindfulness, and personal growth. But realistically, the universe looked down, realized I had absolutely no intention of making responsible choices on my own, and sent in a tick as a last resort. I can’t say that I agree with that decision — free will and whatnot — but life has a strange way of forcing growth on the people most committed to avoiding it.
In the months since the universe made this deeply questionable decision on my behalf, I’ve lost another fifteen pounds — but gained a surprising confidence in my ability to adapt, endure, and figure things out… provided I don’t have a choice.