I weigh one hundred and fifty pounds in a tiny five-foot-two-and-three-eighths body. Yes, I know, fat! This is why I started dieting. Over the past week and a half I've lost five pounds on the Alli [1] plan.

I've always been afraid of weight loss drugs, but I was starting to get desperate, which is why I began the Alli program. At first it worked fine, with no treatment effects.

Treatment effects?

I read the little books that come with the start-up kit to make sure I wouldn't have any side effects. You see, Alli doesn't have "side effects", it has "treatment effects". Basically, if you eat more fat than you're supposed to at any given meal when you've taken a pill, you get "hard-to-control" shit, oily butt leakage, and diarrhea. They give you a meal plan so that you don't risk having treatment effects [2].

Since I love to cook, I said, "Fuck that shit", and developed some low-fat recipes so that I could still eat good food. I've been coming up recipes for whole wheat blueberry muffins, homemade chili, and tomato cream sauces, all of them low-fat so as to stick to my limit of fifteen grams of fat per meal.

Last Thursday was my first check-in day. I went on to the site and reported that I lost four pounds in my first week without any treatment effects. I submitted my results and the little "congratulations" page came up saying I did a good job for my first week. I was SO happy to know that I used my own recipes and still had great results. I felt like I was living the high life, I was so happy!

I did make frequent trips to the bathroom the whole past week, even if I didn't have to go, just to make sure I wouldn't have any uncontrollable shit episodes. But since my first week was successful, I decided that I must be pretty good at fat and calorie counting, so I decided my bathroom frequenting could come to an end.

I waitress at a little restaurant here in Rhode Island. They make excellent desserts and most of their food is really good; in fact, they serve hundreds of items that are extremely hard to resist. On their "healthy" menu are items like turkey on rye and plain baked scrod. Not really my cup of tea, if you know what I mean.

So it was a Saturday morning. I'd eaten one of my blueberry muffins for breakfast and planned on just getting through work without lunch and eating when I got home. It was only going to be about six hours without food, and I'd gone longer before. However, it was a busy day, I was running around, my stomach was HOWLING around 2:30, and my shift wouldn't be over until five. My manager heard my stomach rip-roaring and basically ORDERED me to eat something.

I decided that tuna is pretty healthy for you, so hey, I'll get a tuna club on multi-grain. It can't have that much fat, can it?

When I think of tuna salad, I think of about five grams of fat. I use low-fat mayo, cut-up celery, and tuna. Pretty basic recipe. Well, my little restaurant sees things differently. What I hadn't looked at was the mayo we use: Sysco, Extra Heavy, Extra Creamy. Fifteen grams of fat per tablespoon, and at least three tablespoons per sandwich. I guess that's why their tuna salad always tasted so much better than mine!

I split the sandwich with a friend and went about my business, still not suspecting that my half of the sandwich had around twenty-five grams of fat. Soon, as I was talking to some of my regular ladies who always order the same thing, I suddenly doubled over and clutched my stomach for dear life. I quickly composed myself and squeaked, "Yeah girls... uh... let me go put that order in for you... don't want to keep you waiting..." and did a gold medal Olympian sprint to the ladies room.

I have a very precise operation when I'm forced to shit at work, but I didn't even bother with my usual routine of getting paper towels to put on the seat. I didn't even take off my apron. I locked the door and slammed my ass on the cold ceramic toilet seat, not even thinking of all the creepy crawlies probably teaming on it, awaiting their next host. All I felt was hot liquid squirting out of my asshole and getting onto my cheeks and the inside of that poor, poor toilet bowl.

I didn't feel "done" for at least five minutes. Liquid just kept coming out, followed by one tiny, baby fist-sized chunk.

It took what felt like three rolls of toilet paper to get my asshole clean of the orange oily shit that was in between my cheeks. While the booklets said "oily", I wasn't expecting what I saw. If you've ever drained the fat from pepperoni slices, you'll know what I'm talking about. This was just orange oil, all floating at the top of the toilet, with my little chunklet sunken deep to the bottom. I felt sick to my stomach just looking at the orange liquid fat and toilet water soup that was in that bowl, and sick to know I'd just sat on that toilet seat.

The lesson of this story: if you're on the Alli diet, you REALLY need to know what you're eating. Please, if not for yourself, do it for the poor damn toilet.