Death By Carbs by Paige Nick Page A

10:42am
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    Maureen scheduled the seven meal-plan orders that had already come flying into her inbox via direct message that morning (seven more than she’d had in the last three weeks). Then she boiled the kettle and took a cup of tea (with cream) back to the dining-room table, which she liked to think of as Facebook Headquarters.
    Some months ago she’d moved the chairs from one side of the dining-room table into the spare room, then she’d pushed the table up against the wall. It was now permanently covered in all her papers, books and notes. There was also a large pinboard, which she’d propped on the table and leaned against the dining-room wall.
    The pinboard had been a great purchase; she’d picked it up at
CNA shortly after she’d started posting, but now she was starting to run out of space, as well as pins. The thought that she might have to
buy another pinboard excited her. Or maybe she would tile the entire one wall of the dining room with cork, it’s not like she threw dinner parties anymore.
    The board was carefully divided into columns, using packaging string. Each column contained one of her personas, their user name and passwords for their respective Facebook and email accounts, as well as some of their basic vital statistics, including height, hair colour
and other outstanding features. It also contained scribbled notes that covered some of their individual quirks (for example, in Herman’s column was a small scrap of paper with ‘he prefers beer to spirits’ on it), as well as the times and dates of each persona’s individual postings on the Banting for Life Facebook page, and so on. There was also a c arefully logged chart plotting each persona’s weight loss in detail. It was Maureen’s master plan, and it was essential in helping her keep all her stories straight.
    Her habit of posting as other personas had all started with Herman. Once her own weight loss had slowed and ultimately plateaued at her goal weight, she found she had less and less reason to post on the group’s page, and the responses to her posts started to dwindle too. She still commented on other people’s posts, but it wasn’t the same. She missed the kick of adrenalin she got at seeing that dozens of people had liked one of her comments, then logging in a few hours later to see that the likes had gone up into the hundreds. The day she had posted her most dramatic before-and-after photographs, her likes had rocketed into the thousands. It made her bubble with excitement just to remember it. Not to mention the hundreds of comments, thumbs-up stickers, friend requests and votes of confidence she regularly received as a result of the page.
    It was then that she’d realised something had been missing from her life since Gus had died. For the first time, she hadn’t felt the cold ache of loneliness. She finally had the network of support she’d been craving; perhaps she could even consider all these new internet voices her friends?
    After that, it wasn’t a huge leap for her to come up with the idea
of starting all over again, and that was when she invented Herman. All she had to do was come up with a name and a persona for him; in her mind, he was a simplified version of Gus. She’d lived with him for nearly forty years: she knew him inside and out and all around. Plus, recreating him on a Facebook page made her feel more connected to him, as if he was still there, Banting right alongside her.
    Creating a Facebook profile for Herman/Gus was easy-peasy. Once she’d figured out Facebook, she had discovered that all you needed to create a new profile was an email address, which was a piece of (wheat-free) cake, thanks to Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.
    It was tricky remembering all the different passwords and user log-ins, but that’s what the pinboard was for, stabbed with dozens of notes. Another hard part had been coming up with names for all her