Death By Carbs by Paige Nick Page B

new personas. Even though her first one was Gus inside and out, right down to his stubborn refusal to try even one tiny mouthful of rocket, despite how she cooked it or tried to disguise it in spinach, she didn’t want to call him Gus. It felt too close to the bone. He also couldn’t be named after anyone she already knew or had been at school with. What if they were on Facebook and stumbled across their namesake and saw her commenting on and liking their posts, and put two and two together? No, it was too risky.
    At first she was concerned that whatever names she came up with sounded contrived. She considered using the name of a character from whatever book she was reading at the time, but who on earth was called Heathcliff these days? Eventually, she settled on Herman De Laat for her Gus character.
    Some months later, when ‘Herman’ started to bore and even annoy her (as Gus often had in real life), and when interest in him on the page started to wane (especially after he’d admitted to cheating with dried fruit, garnering a number of passive-aggressive comments and ranty lectures), Maureen had created her second persona, Lydia Steenberg.
    Here Maureen had simply cobbled together the names of two people she’d been at school with: the first name of a girl in her class she had always envied, together with the surname of a boy she’d fancied. Lydia, a sweet young blonde, was the kind of woman Maureen thought she might be close friends with herself, if she were twenty or thirty years younger.
    Another trick she discovered was to find or create friends for these people so that if anyone followed them, they would appear to be legitimate human beings. It was an elaborate process that took time and required a lot of ‘friending’ of strangers on Facebook. But time was the one thing Maureen had plenty of – long days stretching ahead of her with nothing much to fill them. And it turned out there were lots of other people out there who also had time on their hands, and no problems accepting a friend request from a perfect stranger with no mutual friends, or any other visible connections, other than a shared favourite recipe, or both enjoying the same sort of music.
    A few months after Lydia, came Sizwe Madonda, who was
Maureen’s most a mbitious and challenging persona yet. She decided to really push herself out of her comfort zone.
    Sizwe was a thirty-seven-year-old black man who liked his pap and beer. He was going through a divorce, and learning to cook for himself, which he was finding a great challenge. Sizwe would burn water if you gave him half a chance. Maureen scanned her notes on Sizwe, which were tacked to the pinboard. He was a Kaizer Chiefs supporter who was coming along nicely weight-wise, slowly inching closer to his goal every month. Coming up with these characters and figuring out their lives was a little like writing a book, Maureen imagined. And she’d always wanted to do that.
    It was shortly after Maureen had created Sizwe that she came up with the idea of developing and selling Banting meal plans to other members of the group. All self-help books said that the most successful people were those who turned their hobbies into their jobs, so why not her? She’d seen someone else doing it on the Banting for Life page, offering professional LCHF meal plans for cash. How hard could it be? She loved cooking and experimenting in the kitchen, and she was an ardent Banting convert who’d read the book four times. Plus, she already had three dedicated customers who would be happy to give her little meal plans free advertising on the Banting for Life Facebook Page. Good old Herman, Lydia and Sizwe would be her first clients.
    Unfortunately the meal plan business hadn’t taken off as well as Maureen had hoped, but now that she could at last claim that her meal plans were ENDORSED by the Professor himself, she had a feeling they were going to be a huge