It Takes a Big Man to Say This

I previously filled you in on all the exciting events surrounding my recent visit to the emergency room. I had an opportunity to reflect on the state of my health this weekend, as I subsisted on avocado and peanut butter.
It seems like only yesterday, I was a fat teenager. And, now, look at me. Well, you don’t really have to go that far. But, almost overnight, I’ve become a fat old man. The only difference is my heart and my other organs have pretty much said, “Enough is enough. Stop the madness!”
It really is stupid to abuse one’s body with lard and beef and sugar. When you’re young, you keep assuring yourself that one day you’ll really get proactive (okay, that wasn’t a word when I was young, but you know what I mean) about your health. At one time in my life, I truly believed I’d be a normal-sized human before I hit 50.
Well, that didn’t come true. And, so, now I have high blood pressure, and stents in my arteries, and diabetes…everything but wrinkles, because, as we know, fat don’t wrinkle.
I felt a little embarrassed to be lying in the emergency room bed, letting female doctors and nurses prod and poke my less than perfect-sized body. When you’re fat, you fool yourself into thinking that if you joke about it, it’ll be a little less revolting. So, when the doctor, a pleasant young woman, asked me what was wrong, I told her I had fat man’s disease. She asked me if I had ever been diagnosed with some fancy sounding disease. I told her I didn’t think so. She then said, “Well, I guess not. If you had that, you’d have sausage digits.”
I told her that if I had had sausage digits, I would probably have eaten them. I tell you, there’s no humor like the humor of a fat man who thinks he’s having a stroke. And, there are no tears like the tears of a clown.
Does that earn a little pity from you normal people? I didn’t think so.
But, anywho, I got to thinking this weekend about how I have gotten so out of shape. I asked myself just why I had allowed myself to overeat for nearly half a century. And, I came up with the answer.
I had Depression-era parents. My mother came up during the Depression. Food was scarce. By the time I came along, it was plentiful (within reason). So she fed me. She allowed me to eat myself into a frenzy. I’ve seen pictures of me as a baby. By the time I was two, my mother didn’t need a stroller for me. She could bounce me to the store.
I also ate because the kids in Africa, or China, or wherever couldn’t. My mother used to shame me into eating because I just didn’t know how lucky I was to have enough food to eat.
Now, in all fairness, I think she was talking about eating my vegetables, but, hey, those kids overseas didn’t have Eskimo Pies or chocolate chip cookies either. So, what could I do? I had to show my appreciation. I ate…and ate…and ate some more.
I could make a few more jokes, but somehow it’s not all that funny. Here we are in 2006, and, if I don’t get a handle on this, well, I don’t even want to think about it. The idiotic thing about this is that all it takes is some self control. My doctor says I could get off all medication if I lost weight. He told me that a year and a half ago. I did little or nothing about it.
So, when I promise myself I’m going to change, should I believe me? I wouldn’t, if I were me. But, hey, everyone deserves a 203rd chance. So here I go. Will someone pass the cottage cheese, please?