A great diet I don't recommend

I’ve always thought that I was one bout of botulism away from my ideal weight. I now know that I’m one-half of a bout of botulism away.
I feel certain my recent stomach woes came from a can of tuna salad. You know - the kind that’s already mixed together with mayo and junk so that you can eat it in your cubicle with crackers?
I ate it for lunch the other day, and every bite further confirmed my suspicion about its grossness. But I ate it anyway.
The queasiness began immediately. I had rinsed out the can and placed it on the counter so that I could recycle it, but every time I looked at it I was nearly overcome with nausea. So I threw it in the trash. But then every time I opened the trash I imagined the bad tuna fumes reaching up like long green fingers to shove more grossness down my throat.
By evening I was having hot flashes and cold sweats, which made me decide that all of my symptoms were due to hormone withdrawal. I had forgotten to refill my prescription two days earlier. So I called Husband and, again, hot firefighter to the rescue. He showed up in the ladder truck to deliver my hormones.
But it wasn’t the hormones. By evening I was puking violently while the Diva watched “iCarly,” occasionally yelling out to me “You okay, Mom?” and me yelling back, “Don’t come in here, honey!” and all I could think about was that fucking tuna salad can.
It’s possible, I guess, that I picked up some sort of stomach bug, but we are leaving for a vacation with my side of the family in three days and my mother is obsessively paranoid about stomach ailments. Even the mention of an upset stomach has my mom reaching for the Immodium or at least for the Pepto-Bismal. So I’m steadfastly sticking to my botulism theory, in part because it’s too late to arrange for my rented condo to be contained in sterile bubble wrap.
I am happy, though, that I’ve managed to drop three or four of the 30 pounds I’ll gain simply by being in the same zip code as my family. You know what I mean. Nothing says “family vacation” like the complete reversion to childhood paranoia and pettiness, and my adolescent obsession was being the fattest one in the family. Which I wasn't! Well, okay, I was. But now, here at home, I’m fit and healthy and comfortable in my skin. On family vacations, I am a raging wart hog with toilet paper stuck to my shoe. It’s nearly impossible, without a full-time therapist and serious psychotropic drugs, to overcome this innate transformation, though I’ll take any help I can get.
And with this in mind, I’ve got one thing to say about botulism. Bring it on.