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PastaQueen

You'll laugh you ass off. (I did.)

A chat by the light of the fridge with Charlie Hills

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Today I interview Charlie Hills of Back to the Fridge as part of his blog tour for his book Why Your Last Diet Failed You and How This Book Won’t Help You on Your Next One.

Book Cover

Where did the idea for “Back to the Fridge” come from? Is it because Marty McFly tries to order a Tab soda in “Back to the Future” and you recount in your book that you hate Tab soda?

Wow, that’s a connection I don’t think even James Burke could have made. Well, done! Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. To be honest, I initially wanted to call it “Tales from the Fridge” but that was already taken. Serves me right for not starting my blog back in 2002.

It actually turned out to be a good name, though. One thing I never saw coming was the shear number of movie references I make in my posts. I’d love to say I planned this all out to tie in with the movie allusion in the blog title, but then I’d be lying.

Early in the book you tell of a day you stepped on the scale and the number rolled over 200 pounds. This is a touchstone moment in many people’s lives. Why did this number motivate you?

The number itself, of course, is completely arbitrary. If I were weighing myself in kilos, stones, or even peanut butter jars, then some other completely arbitrary number would have taken on mystical significance.

But that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Whatever that mystical boundary is for you, crossing it is that slap in the face— the realization that you’re no longer what you thought you were. It’s a “Moses moment”: you know, where you feel like you’ve been pulled out of denial. Har har.

In the book, you recount the time you walked the Chicago marathon. You also say if given the choice between a marathon or a cheeseburger, you should pick the cheeseburger. What if they put the cheeseburgers at the end of the marathon? What would you do then?

That’s actually an easy question. You see, the place where the marathon ends is generally announced beforehand and is easily accessible by car.

Seriously though, what was it like to walk a marathon?

Relatively insane. For one, you go a lot slower than even the slowest runners. And for me, I went slower than most of the other walkers. It took me about seven and a half hours of non-stop plodding to cross that line. My legs and butt hurt for days afterwards.

But the experience! I may have complained about it at the time, but I can only look back on it with amazement. I mean, at what other point in one’s life can one eat nearly unlimited bowls of Honeycomb cereal and fresh strawberries, for months on end, without any guilt?

Do you draw smiley faces and frowning faces on your weight charts at home too? They add flare.

Nope. I just save that for my adoring public. I got the idea early on after I dropped a couple dry graphs in there. I thought the data was important, but unfortunately, it just looked like data. Nobody wants to look at that. It immediately hit me: these graphs need some life. I’ve gotten more comments on the graphs (both in the book and on my blog) than I ever expected.

What do you hope people get from your book? Is there a certain message or feeling you want to convey to people?

My greatest hope is this. When people read the book, they get an overwhelming sense to tell ten friends to buy it too. The message is, “Charlie needs some incentive to write more.”

But seriously—and yes, I do get serious once in a while—the message I want to send is in two parts. The first part is in the subtitle of the book itself, and How This Book Won’t Help You on Your Next One. My book won’t because no book will. I think far, far too often we’re counting on the rest of the world to solve our problems. We’re looking for silver bullets, miracle ab machines, and cases Acai berries to mend our souls. The second part is simple: you’re not alone. It’s easy to feel alone in this game. It’s easy to feel like you’re the only one battling this nemesis, or the only one who gives up too quickly, or the only one who can’t tie your shoes without a struggle. I combine the two best medicines out there: laughter and commiseration. How can you beat that?

Thanks, Charlie! To win a free copy of Back to the Fridge, leave a comment on this post by 11:59pm on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 telling me the weirdest thing that is in your fridge right now.

You can also catch up on yesterday’s tour stop at Lynn’s Weigh, and don’t miss Monday’s stop at Biggest Diabetic Loser

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  3. Well I too have insulin, but that’s for me!

    Loved the interview – but I love him anyway because he’s my brother! :D

    Happy Friday!

  4. How weird could it be if I’d eat it? But I’ll tell you my favorite thing: homemade balsamic syrup. It’s thick, sort of sweet and sort of tangy and delicious on green beans, asparagus and the tip of my finger. I hope I still have a chance to win the book. Off to the treadmill!

    Have a good day.

  5. Blue painter’s tape. My mother-in-law says chilling the tape keeps it sticky, but I think it just makes it gummy. Anyway, who am I to fight the power? The tape stays.

  7. Rose water in a spritz bottle to spray all over my face on a hot day. Hey, it cools you down and smells great!

  8. A bowl of acorns. My husband wants to try to grow an oak tree, and he put the acorns from last fall in the fridge to “keep them fresh” to plant in the spring.

  9. I have batteries in my fridge. My husband claims that keeping batteries in the fridge makes them last (out of the gadget) longer. The only reason *I* continue to allow this is because this way it makes the dang batteries easy to find when I want them…

  10. I currently have one of my shoes in the fridge. The sole fell off and I’m attempting to glue it back together. My brother told me the glue will set better if it’s chilled and these were expensive shoes, so I figured it was worth a shot.

  11. I loved the interview too! And not just because he’s my brother!

    The weirdest thing in my fridge right now….nail polish.. have you ever heard that your nail polish lasts longer if you keep it refrigerated? I don’t know if that’s true, but I do it anyway!

  12. I guess this isn’t so weird, after all — a box of any creams or ointments that I might ever use again, to keep them fresh!

  13. Well this is sad. I only have food in my fridge, and the above posters have some pretty weird stuff.

    I do, however, have TWO (count ’em) three pound tubs of sour cream in my fridge, left over from an anniversary party I threw my daughter last weekend. (Sour cream in the base of the enchilada sauce, and for the taco bar…)

    as well as two open containers of chipotle chiles in adobo. And a year-old package of dried figs. And a meyer lemon with the zest removed.

  14. I’m trying to think, but I really can’t think of anything too strange in my fridge right now. I just cleaned it out a couple of days ago.

  16. That was a nice interview..i want to read his book now.

    In my fridge, there is a bottle of red mushroom tea…and it’s alive.

  18. I wonder where that nail polish in the fridge thing started? I’ve never tried it but then I’d need a whole *other* fridge to fit all my nail polish in!

    Strangest things in my fridge are one of those gel filled eye masks (branded with my company name) and some cream for an infection that has to be kept refrigerated (weird)

  19. Underpants. My air conditioner wasn’t working last night and I’d had a couple of rum-and-diet-cokes, and decided that putting my undies in the fridge would help cool me off. Naturally I forgot about it, so this morning, hungover and sleepy, I discovered a pair of Lane Bryant blue briefs with a pattern of black Scottie dogs crammed in the crisper drawer. I wish I could say that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever done either drunk or sober.

    But I was right, the undies felt GREAT. :)

  20. I have seeds for carnivorous plants that my daughter is growing. They need to be chill for 6 weeks to simulate winter.

    I half fear them and I half envy them only having 6 weeks of winter before being plunked into a nice warm terrarium.

  21. Aw, man! I usually have lots of unique foods in my fridge, but it looks pretty normal at the moment. I finished of the Turkey Sausage with Kale & Chickpeas yesterday… So I guess the weirdest thing I have in my fridge is a tub of brown rice fragments from where I tried to make my baby’s rice cereal, but my blender wasn’t good enough to blend the rice… It’s been in there so long that my baby is eating whole rice now… Uhhh, maybe I should throw it away??

  22. I absolutely love his blogs, they are great.

    The weirdest thing I can think of that is in my fridge would have to be soybean paste. It definitely looks nasty but tastes great. =)

  23. Just dropping in to try to win one of Charlie’s books.

    The weirdest thing I have in my fridge is oyter sauce. I don’t think that is a very weird thing, but its the best I can do. It was for some stir fry recipe I tried a long time ago.

  25. just tried my first oikos greek yogurt and loved it! honey flavored..honey was on the bottom..in an attempt to save calories i left the honey on the bottom since the yogurt by it self tasted fine…now that honey from the bottom of the oikos is in my fridge awaiting something to be dunked in it..,

  26. The weirdest thing in my fridge?

    Umm, it’s either the bottles of colostrum for feeding babies or the goat blood waiting to be sent to the lab :)

    I bet no one else has goat blood in the fridge, LOL!

  28. PQ, I have your book in my fridge to remind me of my goal everytime I open it. I’d love to win this book so I could stick it in there too when I an done reading it!

    OK, I’m lying, but I looked and there is nothing odd in the fridge right now. I’m seriously considering the book idea though.

  32. I have whoppers that are still left over from Halloween. That’s right, they’ve been in there for almost 6 months.

  33. colored easter eggs from this year & last& the one before

    my 7-year old wants to keep them forever & take them out to look at once in a while

    tess

  34. My cheese slicer is in the fridge in the same baggie as the cheese. I was being lazy and didn’t want to wash it every time.

  35. Lots of empty food containers. We keep them in the fridge until recycling day to avoid bugs.

  36. A lot of things that are growing their own civilizations. I suck at cleaning out the fridge. But I love Charlie’s site (and yours of course too)! :)

  38. Moldy old goat cheese. The only reason I haven’t tossed it is that I’m hoping the other people in my family will start taking a turn to clean out the fridge!

  39. In my refrigerator, I have chopped citrus peels, used coffee grounds, and shredded toilet paper tubes, ready to be taken out to the compost bin.

  40. I have a bottle of vodka in case of an emergency and coffee beans. I suppose that isn’t too strange. I did have my husbands shoes in there because he had gum stuck to them. Other than the occasional cure for cancer via mold that is about as exotic as it gets.

  41. Sadly, I can’t compete — nothing is particularly weird in my fridge. However, on my fridge is a magnetic poem that reads “Beneath his enormous smooth pink butt she drooled”, and you’ve got admit it, that’s pretty weird.

  42. Hmmm, weirdest thing in my frig would have to be a whole bin full of dressings and dips from fast food restaurants. Which I guess is not that weird, except for the sheer volume of them. I’m not even sure why i keep them, since we never use them. Come to think of it, we don’t even like some of them. Hey, maybe I’ll clean the frig!

  44. The weirdest thing in my fridge right now is probably the bottle of parrot allergy medicine. It’s because my parrot has allergies, not because I am allergic to parrots.

  45. I have pumpkin butter — which isn’t weird except my pumpkin butter has been growing mold for 5 months now. I keep meaning to throw it out but, I never get around to it….I think in the time it took me to write this I could have just tossed it. Oh well.

  46. I have electrode sticky-thingies in my frig. My PT clinic sent them after I finished up last summer and said to put them in my frig for storage, in case I needed more PT in the future.

  47. The weirdest thing in my fridge right now would be head cheese. Made from the head and innards of a pig. Been a family favorite (not of mine) for longer than I have been alive.

    Good interview.

    Karen

  48. In the butter compartment: Dried antibiotics to be reconstituted when necessary – for my cat.

    And with the condiments: acidophillus for me

  49. Ha ha! We don’t have any goats blood in our fridge but we do have a few syringes of medication for our buck goat who is losing his hair :)

    That said, I don’t think this compares to cold undies!

  52. I have a tube of Aloe Vera/Cucumber toner/gel. I have sensitive skin that can get red and flushed (in hot weather, cold weather, if someone looks at me wrong, or for no apparent reason). Putting some of that on my face, ice-cold, is quite soothing. But, it’s kind of weird to keep facial products in your fridge, I suppose.

  53. I thought this was weird but after reading the comment about the shoe maybe not. My husband keep in our fridge extra strength glue (this i can’t understand), plus everything else, like our cats medicine, photo film, his vitamin B, etc. I just have homemade sweet tomato jelly (a gift from a friend because i never knew about it).

  54. I don’t really have anything too weird in my fridge. I attempted to “lick the produce” myself and bought a mango a few weeks ago that I forgot about, and it got all gross and moldy… Oops!

  56. Some dried out dried apricots…and some slim fast that has been in there forever, but really saved me one day when I had a stomach bug and couldn’t keep anything else down. I guess this is not a weird item in itself, but weird in quantity/variety. I have like 4-5 varieties of salsa/hot sauce in there. I like things spicy.

  58. Ooh pick me, Pick meee!! :D

    The wierdest thing in my fridge is my sister’s Seven Layer Sin Dip.. Its like a traditional seven layer dip, with all the wrong layers.

    From bottom to top:

    peanut butter

    oreo crumbles

    marshmallow creme

    mini m&ms

    fudge something or another

    cool whip

    slivered almonds.

    I have NO idea what she eats it with, but she’s visiting from college and “HAD to make it!” … All I know is, I’m not touching the stuff! I can only guess how many calories are in it! hahaha..

  59. 6 covered cans of different flavored dog food (with covers!) because my Dachshund is a picky eater and didn’t like them. Just haven’t gotten around to throwing them away.

    I am also a condiment whore. I would say 60-70% of storage space is taken up by condiments. I have 10 bottles of different flavored Balsamic vinegars 5 different cooking wines (like Lemon). I have tubes of all sorts of Italian stuff like tomato paste, basil, sundried tomato, pesto, and garlic. You name it….I most likely have it in the fridge. Because of that….good luck trying to find the thing you name! lol.

    I also have two jars of Onion juice and Garlic juice. For those days that I don’t want to chop the stuff.

    I live to collect neat food stuffs. I like to have all of the newest food additions possible.

  60. I’d say the weirdest thing in there is cranberry apple chutney from Trader Joe’s. It’s not weird in and of itself, but I’ve been told by friends that my love for its spiced goodness spread with peanut butter on toast is.

  61. Weirdest thing in my fridge: old concentrated cold-brew coffee.

    Ok maybe not so much weird as funky

  63. The weirdest thing I have in the fridge is Zymol car wax. It’s made of fruit and has to be refrigerated or it will go bad, so my husband says. This little jar of it cost him $50! When he waxed the car, we had a cloud of fruit flies over to investigate.

    Also, I have cod liver oil – lemon mint flavor – doesn’t really make it palatable though.

  64. A completely empty pitcher. I guess I’m planning to make more and didn’t want to bother to wash it first. Is that gross? Sorry.

  65. Well, I have Harlan Teklad rat chow in my freezer for my pet rats. But my main reason for commenting is because I was thrilled to see a James Burke mention by Mr. Hills. Man, I love James Burke and just an hour ago was griping about TLC and how the channel used to be educational and lived up to its name when it had “The Day the Universe Changed” on instead of “Wedding Disasters” Gah.

  66. Okay I don’t think I can beat the underwear-in-the-fridge lady, but I’ve got a snowball in my freezer.

  67. Hi! Some of these are hysterical. I am obsessed with keeping my fridge clean, I mean obsessed to the point that it ruins my diet because I have to eat whatever is in there to finish the jar or container even if I am not hungry.

    So the weirdest thing in my fridge is, unfortunately, just a jar of Trader Joe’s Sweet Chili Sauce with a sell by date from 2002.

    My boyfriend was joking about other things I could say that I keep in my fridge to win the contest. Here are two of his best:

    – Condoms and lube to cool you down in those hot sexy moments

    – Farts trapped in tupperware to condense- TOTAL DISNEY ALADIN FLASHBACK, oh my god Robin Williams!

  68. @AJS – I am so with you on that one. I have NO idea what happened to the so-called “learning” channel. I’ve since switched to watching the History channel almost exclusively, but that’s got me worried as well. Truckers and loggers and crabbers and gangs…? Okay, technically the fact that I’m watching it means it happened in the past, but come on.

  69. The strangest thing in my fridge is a seriously neglected sour dough starter. I haven’t fed it in a few months…and I’m scared to open the container. I think that it can probably be saved…but it is a lot of responsibility to nurture! (I don’t have any plants, pets, or kids, so the sour dough starter is my only ‘baby’–aside from my husband–and it might be too much work for me right now :) )

  70. I have an aluminum foil covered plate of leftovers from Easter lunch that I didn’t eat. That’s as weird as it gets for me today.

  71. Mother and Child Reunion, to quote a paul simon song. Chicken n’ Eggs

    I have a naked chicken (I really only like to eat the skin) with a bowl full of Easter Eggs decorated by the kids in my class that never made it to their homes….

  72. The book sounds great! The weirdest thing in my fridge is probably the ten year old bottle of champagne. It’s left-over from my first book launch party and waiting for my next book to sell. :(

  74. Honestly? My cat. Apparently my brother left it open, and our cat loves to crawl into the fridge, or the dryer or anything that she can, since she’s crazy.

    So I just found a very cold cat :)

  75. @Lynn C – I also have batteries — still haven’t figured out if that works or not. I also have sharpie markers — which I use to mark jars of baby food. Still, I think the strangest thing is the jar of chutney. I use it to make a single recipe. It is tasty, but c’mon, *chutney*? It even sounds weird!

  76. @Anna – Funny, I once put my textbooks in the fridge. I guess I had just taken a final exam, and I was still thinking about it. Anyway, the fridge does make a cool bookshelf.

  77. I have four trays of slithering blackworms in my fridge for feeding my picky-eating fish. The good news is that I have NO desire to eat them and less desire to eat anything else after I have rinsed them

  78. home-made cinnamon hot sauce – I didn’t make it and have no idea why it lives in my home….

  82. Syringes of topical phenergan (an anti-nausea drug) cream leftover from my almost-three-year-old’s bout of rotovirus.

  83. I’ve got a quart of fresh goats milk and a half of a Dragonfuit hanging out in my fridge right now.

  84. bee pollen, just got it at the farmers market and am told its supposed to help with allergies

  85. weird fridge things:

    box of 48 crayons- left in the car last week and put in the fridge in hopes they didn’t melt too much to be used again

    eye wrinkle gel roller ball- great for sinus headache relief

    shelf stable 2% milk for emergencies- really doesn’t need to be refrigerated but if there is a 2% emergency, who wants HOT milk?

  87. I don’t have anything really weird but I do have a big ol’ bottle of Strawberry tequilla and 32 packets of McD’s and Chic fila barbeque sauce. My husband thinks almond milk is weird but he does like the taste of it.

  89. These are in my freezer, but I think that still counts…when my friend and I were young, we made some homemade “play doh,” played with it a time or two, and put it in the freezer to see if it’d be okay to use again later. Fast-forward 15 or so years, and it is still there. We just can’t seem to toss it. Also, dried flowers from a friend’s funeral.

  92. I’m totally to late to win the contest and I totally respect the rules of the contest, but I wanna share anyway.

    Okay, currently, I have anise-hyssop, borage, and marigold seeds suspended in plain geletin (yes, straight up horses hooves) in order to get them to sprout (apparently horses hooves/jello is almost all nitrogen), but in my mad scientist attempt to perform this miracle, I did it a week early, so I’m suspending them via the cold of the fridge, to allow them to sprout next weekend, to then plant on time with everything else to serve as companion plants for my garden veggies. Anyway, its really weired and I deserve to win, but yeah, the rules.

    Peace

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