Still More Regrettable Comments I’ve Left on Weight Loss Blogs

• “Honey, you put the ‘moo’ in ‘mumu’.”
• “Stranger things have happened. Hey, I dated my first cousin for two years.”
• “I’ve going to be honest with you: you’re ugly.”
• “Welcome to Fatville. Population: You.”
• “Do what I do: steal office supplies and sell them on Ebay.”
• “Well, it’s obvious to me your son is gay.”
• “VISA 0045875893838430 Expires 7/10. Security code 424.”
• “Your stupid.”
• “Well, as it says in the Bible, ‘Show me the money!’”
• “Next time, why don’t you try ordering the McCelery?”
• “I’m not going to sugar-coat my comments, because then you’d probably lick the computer screen and short the whole thing out.”
• “Don’t worry about it. Some women find impotence to be a real turn-on.”
• “What you need to do is just calm down, take a deep breath and relax. Plus, shut the f*ck up.”
• “10,000 calories a day sounds about right…”
• “Maybe your husband is just a lot smarter than you.”
• “I’m just gonna type “dumbass x 12” to save myself some typing…”
• “If you feel chest pains while you're working out, you know you're on the right track.”
• “That last comment I made was supposed to be ‘anonymous’.”
• “They say if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. So, about your picture: ___________________________________.”
• “ROTFLMAO at your pain and suffering.”
• “If you can’t beat ‘em, out eat ‘em.”
• “Yes, cannibalism is ‘wrong’, but all I’m saying is I have some really tasty recipes if you want ‘em.”

The Time Dieter's Wife

Monday, October 12, 2009 (Anita is 41, Jack is 43 and 46)

ANITA: Sometimes it feels as though I am married to a man of the sea. He leaves me often, falls out of my world and across time itself. Like a submarine, he travels through unknown places where I cannot go. And there is no way of knowing when and where he will emerge next.

You see, he suffers from Swine Time Flu, a rare and exotic malady that pulls him this way and that across his own timeline, leaving me alone and wistful as a young woman married to a traveling seaman. I miss my Jack when he goes. For one thing, he would have made a hilarious “seamen” joke right there.

Oh he’s not gone right now. Well, not in the technical sense anyway. He’s in the other room, zoning out in front of Monday Night Football. Oh, he doesn’t watch it every Monday night. Only if it’s one of his favorite teams playing. Or one of the rival teams to his favorite teams. Or a team that ever plays one of his favorite teams. Or…

“Anita!” comes a gravelly voice, and you can almost hear the pizza crumbs being spit out of his mouth. “Can you grab me a cold one? My leg’s fallen asleep.”

I sigh pensively. I can understand his appetite little more than I can his chronic time-traveling. What makes a man eat himself into a virtual stupor, to drink alcohol as if it were life-giving water? It is a mystery to me how…

“Anita!” he interrupts my contemplative soul-searching. “Could you bring me some more of that Chex Mix with the beer? You’re wonderfu…owww, my leg! Ow, ow, ow!”

I move toward the kitchen and am surprised by a stranger standing there, turned away so that he does not see me enter. He has a broad back, and his shirt is soaked with sweat. He’s dressed in workout clothes, and his legs are rippled with muscle. My first instinct is to yell for Jack to come from the other room, yet I pause. There is something so familiar about this fit visitor.

“Hey, Anita,” says the stranger. “When am I?”

I rush to him and hold him tight. “Oh Jack, you look terrific. Look at you!”

Future Jack glanced at the newspaper on the table. “Wow, I bet Present-Day Me is a big, fat slob, huh?”

Mmmm” I say, moving closer to him. “You smell good.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t working out at all during this period,” says Future Jack. “I bet you forgot what my sweat smells like.”

“Ummmmm, not exactly,” I tell him. “Present-Day Jack breaks a sweat riding on an escalator. It’s pretty gross actually.”

“Speaking of working up a sweat,” smiled Future Jack. “Why don’t we take this conversation to the bedroom?”

“We’ll need protection,” I tell him, and swinging open the refrigerator door and reaching inside. “A six-pack ought to buy us 45 minutes or so.”

“Grab a twelve-pack,” winked Future Jack.

“Aniiiiiiiiita!” came the hoarse voice from the TV room. “Beer me!”

“By the way, Anita,” said Future Jack, taking my hand and leading me away. “What’s long and smooth and filled with seamen?”

“A submarine,” I laugh. “A submarine.”

x

"Large" And In Charge

Weekly weigh-in: 217.0
Weekly weigh-in: 215.2
Loss: -1.8
Total loss: 76.3 lbs.
Emotion: Large/In Charge

So there I was, in a place completely foreign to me: a fitting room.

As a guy, I’ve always had a pretty simplistic approach to shopping. I saw something I liked, I grabbed my size and made my purchase. Sometimes, it turned out that the size (always either XL or–preferably–XXL) was a little too snug, but usually it was okay. The fashion industry seemed to be embracing my former fat-assedness by making just about everything in double wide-load.

Now it seems all my shirts are too big, and I didn’t know what to go grab. So I actually went shopping and tried sh*t on. “Large” seems to be the size that looks least like a mistake on me right now, and I’m still not completely comfortable with the idea.

Speaking of “large,” I’d like to thank everyone for the XXL-sized reaction to my finally posting some before-and-after photos. I knew that I needed to do it, because I do want readers to take the “weight loss” part of this blog seriously, even if I seldom do. But I wasn’t expecting the outpouring of compliments and well-wishes that I received. Honestly, I was expecting a weight gain this week just from my swollen head.



Speaking of gaining, Chris at Chris’ Challenge thought that I hadn’t won enough feminine weight-loss blogging awards or told enough embarrassing secrets about myself, so he slapped me with the Gorgeous Blogger award, which has the same sort of blah-blah and rules as all the other awards. I’m supposed to tell you six things you don’t know about me, so strap in…

1) I once spent $120 on an antique G.I.Joe doll, even though I’m not a toy collector. It just looked exactly like me. I mean, exactly. It was freaky.

2) The first time I went snow skiing was with Anita and her family, who were all pretty experienced skiers. I took one lesson and then was let loose on the mountain. During the lesson, I just learned “The Snowplow,” which is basically just putting the tips of your skis together in kind of a pizza-slice shape and pressing outwards to slow down to a gentle stop. Easy peasy, huh? Anyway, our condo was at the end of one of the mountain's longest runs, and you had to take a lift to the top to get over to our side. “You sure you can do this?” Anita asked as we sat at the lodge and I drank beer after beer to steel my courage. “You can take the bus around and meet us there.” I shook my head, “I’ve got this.” As we were riding up the lift, I was sitting there in the cold, biting wind and wondering what exactly I had gotten myself into. Things started off okay, with everyone racing down the mountain and me trying to do my back-and-forth snowplow nonsense. But then a funny thing happened. I started picking up speed. I passed the other beginner skiers. I passed the intermediate skiers. I passed Anita and her family, who cheered me on. I passed dudes who were bent over in perfect form, their poles tucked beneath their arms (mine were flailing around like I was even drunker than I was). It wasn’t like I wasn’t trying to slow down; I was in full snow-plow, and blowing snow behind me like… well, a snow blower. I was digging in so hard that I was leaving a trail of bare earth behind me… and still I was gaining speed. And then, out of nowhere, I was airborne. “This isn’t so bad,” I said, and then a split second later, my mouth was full of snow and I was cartwheeling down the mountain, a giant snowball with arms and legs (the skiis and poles went who knows where). Anita said it was the most spectacular thing she’d ever seen. Who knows? It may have been what sealed the deal with us.

3) When I was young, my mother Shirley was a typist for a court reporter, so she had a sleek IBM Selectric typewriter that I learned to type on when I was very young. It was pretty sweet, let me tell you. You just brushed a key and it typed. By the time I was in high school, I was typing over 150 words a minute, so I decided to take Typing for a no-brainer “A”. Two problems: the school had just bricked up all the windows in that classroom because they were converting the building to central air, but the system wasn’t working right yet and (b) it was the last year before the school changed over to electric typewriters. Yes, it was manual typewriters (geez, that makes me feel really old just to type that). Anyway, the very first speed test, I took off and was flying through the assignment, just absolutely tearing it up. When I finished, I looked up and realized that I hadn’t made a single impression on the page. I basically had to re-learn to type in a sweat box. Worst. Class. Ever.

4) One of the most harrowing three months of my life began when I noticed a lump on the side of my neck. I thought I had slept on it funny, so went to the doctor to see about getting a muscle relaxant. “That’s cancer,” the doctor told me. “I’m 80% sure of it.” I made an appointment with an oncologist and they confirmed my worst fears: “It appears to be Hodgkin’s Disease,” he told me. They did a biopsy, and I got the call later in the week from a nurse: “The test came back negative. Please get in touch with the doctor.” With a deep sense of relief, I made the call. “Oh, you misunderstood,” he told me. “The test was negative. We couldn’t get any information from it.” I saw several more doctors and finally went in to have them cut me up and look around. Once they sliced me up, they quickly realized that it was simply an infection that was pushing the muscle up, which explained why the lump was so hard. Everything was A-OK, and I got a tough-guy neck scar that was extremely intimidating (“I got in a knife fight with some gang-bangers.”)

5) In junior high, my formidable juggling skills landed me a roll in the big school play, some crazy circus story. My best friend Van and I had to wear gold sequined Tarzan outfits and stand in front of the stage juggling in the big finale. Van and I had a bet on which one of us was going to mess up first, so we were both working really hard not to let any balls hit the ground. During most of the rehearsals, I was the one who’d flub up, and Van would laugh and laugh. So finally during the big performance before the entire school, there was Van and I out in front of the stage, doing our thing. I glance over for a quick look-see, and spot Van scrambling around. Turns out he dropped a ball and it hit his foot and took a wicked bounce out toward the audience. Well, I busted out laughing, but managed to keep juggling because that's what kind of trooper I am. What I didn’t realize was that I had backed up a couple of steps and was guffawing almost directly into the microphone that was on the piano accompanying the song. Anyway, my laughter basically drowned out thirty people singing on stage, and the entire audience just busted a gut laughing.

6) I’m sitting here watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with my daughter Pisa as I write this, which really isn’t a secret, but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have guessed it (okay, you might have guessed it).

The next part of the deal is that I’m supposed to name 7 other blogs that should get an award.


I’m going to pull the old bait-and-switch here, and instead award seven individuals with my own “Really Sh*tty Weight Loss Blog” award which recognizes those weight loss blogs that have… well, their own special aroma about them.

Mommy2Joe at Did I Just Eat That Out Loud?
Karen at *Fitcetera*
Lucas at Petite Flower
TJ Renee at TJ's Weight or the Highway
Anne at Carb Tripper
Chris at A Deliberate Life
Candice at Life According to Candice

Allow me to quote the rules for the Really Sh*tty Weight Loss Blog Award:

First off, there’s no passing it on to five, ten, fifteen bloggers. You don’t see Kate Winslet get handed an Oscar and then having to go give duplicate statues to Meryl Streep, Charlize Theron and Phyllis Diller. If there’s somebody you really want to recognize for their sh*tty contributions to the weight loss community, please feel free to do so. But it’s not a requirement.

Speaking of requirements, you must (like the Oscars) write an eloquent acceptance speech in which you name five… no ten… no seven things you admire about the person that gave you the award. That may sound self-serving, but… well, now that I think about it, it’s incredibly self-serving. My award, my rules.

Congrats to the worthy recipients, and thanks again one and all for your over-the-top sentiments about the pics. And as Caractacus Pott so eloquently put it in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, "You'll find a slight squeeze on the hooter an excellent safety precaution, Miss Scrumptious."

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Bad Weight

I’ve always thought that “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was a poem that could easily (with a few subtle word changes) be applied to our weight loss journey. Written for his dying father, the message is one of not giving up, even when the odds look insurmountable.

Do not go gentle into that bad weight,
Our blog should burn and rave at close of meal;
Rage, rage against the piling of the plate.
Though wise men know that fat is not our fate,
Because dying large is not part of the deal.
Do not go gentle into that bad weight.

Good men, the last wave by, they do not wait.
Good men, the last wave by, good meals create.
A healthy dinner might have been consumed today.
Rage, rage against the piling of the plate.

Wild men who snacked and watched TV ‘til late,
And learn, at last, they put on pounds this way.
Do not go gentle into that bad weight.

Grave men, obese, yet won’t get their diets straight.
Blind eyes that lead them towards the buffet.
Rage, rage against the piling of the plate.

And you, my friends, there with your fat fate.
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray
Do not go gentle into that bad weight.
Rage, rage against the piling of the plate.

I’m Sorry, Billy Idol

Hey too-big sister, look what you’ve done.

Hey too-big mister, you’ve had your fun.

Hey too-big mister, ease up on supper, man.
Hey too-big sister, you know that you can.
Hey too-big sister, show me!

It's a nice day to start again.
It's a nice day for a “wow” weigh-in.
It's a nice day to lose again.

Hey too-big sister, you're just too wide.
Hey too-big mister, you’re commitin’ suicide.
You’ve wanted this for so long.
You’ve deserved this for so long.
Tell your fat ass: “So long!”
It’s a nice day to start again.
It’s a nice day for a “wow” weigh-in.
It’s a nice day to lose again.

(Pick it up)

Take me down a pound.
There is nothin' fair on this scale.
Just say a prayer on this scale.
And there's nothin' sane on this scale.
And there's nothin' to gain on this scale.
Start again.
Come on.

It's a nice day for a “wow” weigh-in.
It's a nice day to start again.
It's a nice day to lose again.

The Back of the Blog

The Fountain of Youth

Imagine, if you will, that somewhere in this big, wide world, somebody actually discovered an honest-to-God Fountain of Youth, a well that magically restores the youth and vitality of anyone who drinks of its miraculous waters.

How much would that well’s owner be able to charge for a visit? $10,000? $100,000? One million? I can tell you right now that you or I would never be able to afford it, would never get within sniffing distance of being able to afford it. Super-rich sheiks and LA billionaires would snap up the magic waters for their own personal indulgence. For you, it would be worse than the Fountain of Youth never having been found, because you would know that it was out there, yet would never have access to its recuperative gifts.

But today I come bearing remarkable news: you do have access to the Fountain of Youth. In fact, you’re on your way to lapping up those transcendental waters even as you read this, because this weight-loss journey you’re on is also a trip back in time as far as your body goes. You are on your way to luxuriously soaking in that enchanted pool and drinking in its extraordinary power.

Check out the before and after pics of anyone that’s ever dropped a great deal of weight. In almost every instance, besides looking thinner and fitter, those individuals look healthier, happier and years younger. I’ve started getting those comments, too, especially from folks I haven’t seen in quite some time.

“Wow, you look good.”

“You’re lookin’ fit.”

“You look ten years younger.”

My point? It’s simple: if a real Fountain of Youth existed, you would move heaven and earth… beg, borrow and steal in all likelihood… in an attempt to acquire its magical offering, yet you would almost certainly be denied access to its life-changing qualities.

However, you have it within yourself to unlock the gate to your own personal Fountain of Youth. Be successful on this weight loss journey and you will feel years younger. Conquer your battle with the scale and people will tell you that it looks as though Father Time has hit the “rewind” button.

This isn’t an uncertain quest for a mythical monolith; it’s a virtual certainty, and it’s something that each and every one of us has in their power to achieve.

You have the roadmap. You know exactly what it will take in order to be successful. There is nothing or no one holding you back. And the reward… health, youth, vitality… would seem to be worth whatever effort or hardship you must endure to attain it.

The Fountain of Youth.

It’s waiting there for you to uncover.