Month: September 2020

Slim Down And Drink Up

I have to admit that right now the missus and I are struggling with what seems like our never-ending on-again, off-again diet.  

I do not consider myself to be grossly overweight, but neither do I have the svelte, sculpted athletic body that I dreamed I had in my youth. Thus, periodic dieting is needed to hold the bulges in and the pounds down.

The good news is that I’ve pinpointed the issue that makes it so hard for us to lose weight: We like to eat and drink.

It’s not that we eat that much “bad” food (although I could never turn down a slice of pizza); we in fact cook most of our meals from scratch and avoid processed food and try to eat as much high-quality, fresh, healthy food as we can.

We’ve been doing okay on our latest diet for a while now what with all the fresh veggies we’ve eaten in abundance all summer, even though I realize that not all vegetables are necessarily diet food (I’m looking at you, three ears of corn on the cob with melted butter seeping in between the kernels, not to mention F’s famous corn-meal fried okra) but now summer has slipped away and it’s getting uncomfortably close to comfort food time. 

You know what comfort food is, also known as pack-on-the-pounds vittles to prepare the body for the rigors of winter, when at least you get to wear lots of layers of clothing to try and disguise the fact that you spent the fall larding on some extra pounds because you haven’t had any chicken ‘n dumplings or pot pie or baked mac and cheese since the last vestiges of cold weather in the spring.

And let’s face it: It’s hard to diet in the fall. You’ve got all kinds of holidays where you are supposed to eat candy and goodies and mounds of turkey and fixings and sweets and treats and on and on. It would be downright un-American not to eat and eat and eat for weeks on end.

And then there’s winter. Winter is a gloomier time than summer, which means it is easier to be depressed or feel sorry for yourself, which means yes, I think I will have a cocktail or two and who cares that it is a Monday night. (Not that a Monday evening margarita or three on the deck in the summer is not enticing, too, but that’s a rationalization for another day.)

So of course it all comes down to willpower, a quality that is, alas, sadly lacking in the Smith household. 

Plus F has a stressful job that requires her to work long hours, so she naturally wants to unwind when she gets home and I, thoughtful and faithful husband that I am, insist on not letting her drink a couple of cocktails by herself. I know, I know, gracious selflessness is thy middle name.

I used to think that alcoholic beverages could not be a cause of weight gain, but then we tried counting calories as a diet plan. This is when Google is not your friend, since it rudely informs you that a shot of the good stuff packs about 100 or so calories, not counting any mixer. 

My solution to that bit of unsettling news was to cut back on the mixer.

We’ve tried all the diet fads and plans through the years and you know what? They all work pretty well if you follow them. And that’s the problem; some of them are pretty hard to follow. For instance, I liked the idea of eating bacon every day – until I didn’t, which says something about a diet that makes you turn your back on bacon.

(As an aside and apropos of nothing, I once was at an all-inclusive resort where they have those all-you-can-eat buffets and I watched one gentleman load up his entire plate with bacon at breakfast one morning. I mean, he must have had 20 or 25 pieces of bacon piled on there. I thought at the time that the poor soul must be from some backwoods bacon-deprived country, but now I realize he was probably just trying to accelerate his diet plan so he could move on to another one where he could eat a slice of bread.)

So these days, what with our lack of willpower and desire not to collapse the nutritional pyramid by having to avoid whole food groups, we usually diet by just trying to cut back on everything and count calories. It’s harder in some ways what with all that math, but it allows us to eat whatever we want as long as we only eat our prescribed allotment of calories. Or drink them, as the case may be.

As I said, we’ve lost a few pounds and now the going is getting tougher. I know, that is when the tough are supposed to get going. But life is tough enough, I think, and too short to boot, and you have to pick your pleasures when you can and find your fun where you can and just try to do it all with a bit of moderation.

So, bon appétit. And, of course, cheers!

Far Out, Man

I came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s and, while I wasn’t exactly a hippy, I certainly embraced the concept of the whole hippy movement.

When I was in college the hippy era had pretty much peaked, but its legacy lingered. There was a great diversity in the student population, but those at the polar opposite of us latter-day hippies were the frat boys and sorority girls. They tended to be, I presumed at the time – and I admit I may be freely engaging in stereotyping here – people from a more privileged and entitled background than the rest of us, and they certainly had wilder parties. We thought they were a little too preppy, a little too pretentious. We laughed at them for their attitudes, their toga parties, their way of dressing, their quaint rules and secret initiations and snobby inclusiveness. 

Little did we know that they would grow up and slide right in to take over the businesses and corporations and politics that rule us all with their quaint rules and secret initiations and snobby inclusiveness.

The hippy movement has been the subject of much ridicule over the years, with the popular notion now depicting hippies as zonked out, drugged up naive flower children acting like a bunch of nitwits which, since we were in our teens and early twenties, we of course were. 

But that doesn’t diminish what we espoused. 

We were, obviously, against war. Facing the very real prospect of being sent to the other side of the world into some bloody meat grinder for no good reason sharpens one’s attitudes about the nobility of killing people in their own country. 

We were for racial equality and against bigotry and profiling and mistreating people because of their skin color or ethnicity. We were for sexual equality and believed wholeheartedly in women’s rights.

We were against the establishment, which we viewed as too authoritarian and too far removed from serving the real needs of the people. We were proud environmentalists, fighting to save the air and the rivers and oceans from pollution that was killing and sickening humans and animals and plants, trying to convince people that acid in the rain and toxins in our air and mercury in fish and asbestos in our houses were not the natural order of things.

We were against big corporations which put profit ahead of people.

We were for going back to nature and growing our own food. We were for music that had meaning and that spoke to our souls.

We were for non-conformity and expressing ourselves as unique and reveling in our differences. If sometimes the only ways we could do this was by having long hair and wearing ridiculous clothes, then so be it.

We were against a society we found too constricting, preferring a free society that let people make choices for themselves. We were into trying new things, new ideas, new ways to make life better. We were for giving and sharing, not taking and hoarding.

We were for tolerance and equality. We were for peace and love and living and let live. We were for having fun and laughing and refusing to let anyone take away our childish delight in the wonderful world around us.

Yeah, pretty radical stuff, I know.

Looking back all these years later, I don’t know why we would laugh at that naïveté and those heartfelt protests and the pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams. Looking at where we are now in the world, at what we have allowed ourselves to become, it just makes me want to cry.