HEALTH BLOGGER ADDS WEIGHT

Weight loss isn’t a fad. It’s either a mystery that needs solving, or a goal.

If loosing weight is a goal, do you know what to do? From so many ads, neither does anyone else.

On the other hand, if you’re losing weight and don’t know why, get it checked.

Health bloggers, writers, whatever you like calling health experts, trot out the latest sure thing for weight loss.

Lose fast or slow, just start doing whatever they say and mail the check. Sounds easy, too easy.

I know someone who lost a load in a hurry through some kind of surgery deal. They got the physical part, but not the mental.

What is the mental part of weight loss? Keeping it off. That’s where the term yo yo dieting comes from. We go down, then back up. Then down. Then back up.

Call it an American problem if you want, and maybe you’d be right by the looks of the skinny people around the world.

Yes, there’s the French lady diet, the Italian lady diet, both countries bordering the Mediterranean. Then there’s the Mediterranean diet on top of both.

What are the details? Look it up, but the framework is eat more fat and less carbs if I read things right.

Eat the grilled fish, not the fried fish and chips; eat the vegetables, not so much bread. Sounds easy, and it is until you drive by a fast food joint and smell the roasting beast smoke belching out of the chimney.

Why does a Burger King look like a coal powered Navy ship? Success is why. Those burgers don’t eat themselves.

I’ve been watching my weight the past two years. My regular readers know why.

Check the link and leave a comment if this is a new thing to you and you have questions. If I were a new reader on boomerpdx and saw such a thoughtful invitation I’d act on it.

But creating momentum isn’t easy. Take weight loss. Once you change habits for about two weeks you’ll start the drop. If you stay on task you’ll be able to see changes. Just know when enough is enough.

That’s the goal part.

My goal in weight loss when I was a fat man was seeing the needle on the scale land somewhere under 200. I met my goal, but it wasn’t a celebration. Part of my deal was a food aversion. Food, all food, turned on me.

My weight dropped, then kept dropping, then dropped some more. I call it a spiral on reflection. Not a death spiral, but close. Did I want to die? Death seemed likely and it was better than another day of spiral, but that’s not how it works.

At least that’s not how it works in the presence of the right people. Who are the right people and how can you tell? Once you give up and look forward to a nice, peaceful, finish of time on earth, you can relax. You fought the good fight and lost. It happens.

But when I was busy accepting my fate, my loss, my teammates gathered. Did they show up to give me a nice send off, pat my hand and say, “There, there?”

That would have been nice, but they had other plans, like getting nasty about my losing my will to live, my candle blowing out, my chips cashed in.

Three people took turns like a professional wrestling tag team telling me the truth they saw. And it hurt my feelings.

They wanted to hurt my feelings since I couldn’t feel anything anyway. Somehow they convinced me it wasn’t my time, and if I thought it was my time they would ship me out because no one wants a droopy sack of shit hanging around.

They didn’t say sack of shit, but that’s how I felt. This sack was going to the hospital, nursing home, assisted living, somewhere I’d have surveillance on me since that’s what I needed in their view.

I didn’t mind a nice, quiet death, but they were ruining it. I sure as hell didn’t want the flurry of health institutions working on a failing patient like me. That’s where things go wrong, and even if I survived I can’t imagine it all going smooth.

Going out one way seemed okay, but not because of a medical fuck up, so I rallied hard to stay rooted. I narrowed my diet to get better. Here it is:

Food for throat cancer treatment when your neck is on fire and it takes an hour to drink a cup of water includes Malto Meal with butter, canned ham spread on soft hotdog buns, and poached eggs.

Pretty easy to make and it all slides down. That’s all I wanted, an easy slider, and it wasn’t a health thing.

I recovered and saw myself in a different light, a fading light, my fading light. I was the dimmer switch, my home team was a spotlight.

When I carried the full load around, I stopped checking at 260, I didn’t hear much fat boy talk. When I shed sixty or seventy pounds in two months during chemo and radiation I got an earful. Now I’m hearing a different tune.

“You’re putting weight on.”

“You’re adding pounds.”

I’ve had questions on weight loss too, like, “You look different, what did you do?”

Weight loss invites speculation no matter how it happens.

Be prepared with a better health answer than, “Cancer.”