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Above/Below: Shoney's Big Boy, Eastwood Mall, Birmingham, AL

I’m definitely, positively, going to
stop eating in my car . . .

by JUDITH HANEY

USNewsLink/April 25, 2002

The other day while sitting in my car, as the last mustard and ketchup soaked morsel of my lunch fell upon my white blouse, I began to think about how it is that I’ve become a ‘grab-it ‘n growl, munch a lunch’ type of girl. I wasn't born that way, I just evolved into being what I am today, A Fast Food Fattie who swallows food faster than greased lightening.

Of course this has been coming on for sometime now, ever since I first discovered Shoney’s "Big Boys" back in prehistoric times. A "Big Boy" was the forerunner of the "Big Mac". And, for me, It was an acquired taste. 

I remember the first Big Boy I ever ate. I ate it in a car at Shoney's Big Boy in Birmingham, AL - see photo at left. It had mustard, small chopped onions, ketchup, dill pickles, sesame seeds on the bun, and a thin, flat, piece of hamburger. It came with homemade onion rings and a coke. The combination was unique and tasted really good. Before this life changing experience, the only hamburger I had eaten was at home or in a school lunchroom.

At my peak I could put away two of the things in a sitting by throwing away the bread of one of the sandwiches and stacking the insides into the other sandwich which resulted in something about 3 inches high, with four meat patties, and very sloppy to eat.

When I moved to Arkansas in 1988 and heard the University of Arkansas chant, "woooooo-PIG-soooeee," I KNEW I had come home!

Along the way, as I became a full-fledged Arkie, I acquired a learned response to "GO HAWGS" by immediately jumping up and yelling, "WHERE"?

And now, I am a full tilt boogie fat, oink, oink, of a person who has simply given up on being a sensible, thin person.

My name is Judi H. and I am a sugar-holic.

On any given day I must have at least one fix of some sort of ice cream - not a bowl full, but a whole half gallon of the industrial strength kind. None of that fat free, sugar free, reduced fat, kind of stuff for moi. No, I want the full monty!

And right about now you are wondering, "is there a point to this story"?

Well, actually there is.

I want to change my lifestyle in the following ways:

1. stop cooking;
2. eat out only;
3. don’t buy groceries and put them in the fridge where I can grab something in the middle of the night;
4. never go inside of another convenience store for the rest of my life;
5. don’t eat after 1:00 in the afternoon;
6. stop eating ice cream;
7. walk three miles everyday;
8. stop eating in my car.

If I do all of the above, maybe I can break the cycle I’m in and change my eating habits and start feeling better and looking better.

Well that’s about all this story has to offer, but I feel skinny already for having written it!