Angry Birds

Me and food have a wrestling match going on. It's a tired  saga that goes round and round, with no end in sight. There's a big ole story, full of woes and reasons and substantiations for why I'm on the wrong end of the scale right now, but either way, I am once again on the mats. Some of it is medication, some of it is my propensity for all things sweet. Around October, I went to our son, Daniel, and asked him what to do. He's a Jiu Jitsu beast, a Flames firefighter, and has the ability to push himself to do pretty much anything he decides needs doing. He's been called The Lumberjack, The Viking, The Bulldog, and I'm sure his defeated foes call him things this Mama doesn't want to know about. I figured he could give me some advice. I've asked him before, and he always says the same thing: "Get your diet under control first. Worry about exercise later, when you've mastered that." I'm trying to figure out when the fun kicks in. This time, he said, "Mama, get your plan under way before the holidays or just wait it on out until January, because it's too hard to change course in the middle when everybody's having a party." So you see, I didn't do that. There was a lot of distraction and sickness and too much ADOS (Attention Deficit Ooooh Shiny), and probably some sin in there. It's mid-January now, with no kale in sight. 

Way back in the 70s, when I was athletic and still had a thyroid, everybody was skinny. All us girls thought we were fat, but we weren't. Look at any picture of people at Woodstock (no, I wasn't there..I was in elementary school) and try to find one overweight person. There aren't any. And that's the way it was everywhere. I think we had one lady in our church that was husky. I heard it said, "She has problems with her glands." That's what people would say back then, if you ever happened to see a corpulent person: "See that chubby boy? He has bad glands." It was rare to be bigger, and nobody was going to the gym. We didn't have computers, cellphones, or a whole lot of air conditioning. Things didn't smell as good as they do now, but we were all outside playing or working, so it didn't matter.

Now that I'm on the other side of 50, well, 60... I honestly believe I could subsist on a few crackers and a boiled egg or two. A few months ago, my husband decided to do a novel thing: eat one meal a day. Now it has a fancy term: intermittent fasting. Everybody's doing it these days. Sometimes I hate men. They get a random thought in their head: "Hey, I think I'll go on a diet" or "Hey, I'll eat 5000 calories, but I'll just do it all in one meal." The weight falls off like autumn leaves. In short order, Ken lost 45 pounds. People started coming up to me, ooohing and aaahhhing about his svelte figure and asking me the secret. I tell them, he just thought about losing weight and it stimulated some brain cells and apparently he's burning the fat off like kerosene or something. I've been doing the same thing (minus 3000 or 4000 calories) and you guessed it, nary a pound has shifted from this dear frame. In fact, it might be going the other way...

I was talking to a couple of my friends, who suffer with my same malady. We all agreed that we hate food now. Why can't they just give us a big food pill and then we wouldn't have to eat? All the fun is gone, now that we eat like finches but look like Southern Cassowaries. Look it up...tiny head, big body, lots of waddling going on. All those years of counting, chopping, guessing, planning, grocery shopping. We're old and sick of it. And nothing tastes good anyway.

Now that we all seem to be past most of the winter plagues, I'm thinking about going on walkabout. I think I'd like to hole up somewhere where there's a beach or lake...read books, drink mineral water and sleep for a few days. No cooking, no restaurants, no protein bars. At my current rate, I might have enough stores to hold out until 2024.