More Like Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puffs

I watched the season premiere of VH1's ultra-degrading wonderful "Celebrity Fat Fit Club" Sunday night (like it's not enough to be a has-been in Hollywood taking a job on a reality show -- but a fat has-been to boot?). I mainly tuned in because I heard that Tina Yothers is on it this time around (love my Jennifer Keaton!), but then I noticed gastric-bypass pin-up girl Carnie Wilson is on the show too. Well, it didn't take three minutes before I was completely mortified by how proud the former three-fourths of Wilson Phllips seems to be of herself for managing to get fat again despite having had the life-saving surgery ("I'm a snacker" she boasted.).

Although it's tragic that the only way Carnie -- who has a beautiful singing voice and is a talented songwriter -- can find work these days is seemingly to exploit her own weight issues (this probably says more about the entertainment industry than it does about her), perhaps something good will come of people seeing that gastric bypass is not the miracle that it's been made out to be. Sure, it can help morbidly obese people from imminent death, but ultimately it is STILL about your diet and exercise. (It's the lifestyle, stupid!)

My friend who works in this field pointed me to a passage in Carnie Wilson's 18th tell-all-about-being-fat autobiography ("Gut Feelings"), in which she reminisces about the greatest memory she has of her father from her childhood. Let it suffice to say that this woman really scares me (read at your own risk):

One night he work me up about 11 o'clock and asked me if I wanted to have some cereal. We went down to the kitchen, and Dad poured us two bowls of raisin bran. Then he poured half-and-half over the flakes.

"Raisin bran tastes so much better with half-and-half," he said.

I can almost taste the creamy flavors now -- the crunch flakes and the sweet raisins. It was so good -- it was like food ecstasy -- sitting with my dad, grooving on the fats and sugars and carbohydrates. Nutrition was the last thing on my mind. We were together, the rush was delicious, and that was all that mattered.

Related: Carnie Wilson says that she gets sexually aroused by eating doughnuts.