Skip to main content

A Word to the Wise

   Well it finally happened. That thing that happens after you've spent 40 years eating Doritos and mint chocolate chip ice cream. We have to go on a house diet. I mean everybody. And when your husband has the sugar and you're afraid you're on track to be a caregiver before your time, it's time to adjust the grocery list.
    Oh, don't get me wrong. None of us are ready for this. If you catch me on a bad day I'll tell you I'd rather die with my hand in a potato chip bag than eat another lettuce leaf. And you don't even want to know how my husband is taking this. He prefers to consider it some kind of Russian conspiracy with the Communists  manipulating his blood sugar.
    My son is no fan of this either. Dollars to donuts he's just waiting until we cave and start buying Little Debbies again. He'll bide his time. This isn't his first rodeo.
    When you get to our age though, you start to take this business seriously. Doctors get involved and you have to go get the "blood work." You consider buying measuring cups and eating off of saucers, maybe even buying some diet jello cups or one of those hot-air popcorn poppers we used the 1970s for treat night. I've taken to watching juicer infomercials and even reached for my credit card before I stopped myself, remembering how I used that Tony Little Gazelle for a clothes rack and went into debt paying off NutriSystem when I was in my early 30s.
    I'm hoping this time around I am so old that I finally have a little sense.   
    Someplace along the way, it has occurred to me that all the people I know who have lost significant amounts of weight have done it by using this really strange method: they eat a lot less than I do and they move around a lot more than I do. Go figure. Who knew?
    Oh, I'm nowhere near ready to take up Pilates. I'll starve myself before I go that crazy.
    I am, however, contemplating walking down the stairs a couple more times a day to check in on my husband while he's working. Who else will bring him his diet jello?
    I never thought it would come to this. I remember "old" people I knew measuring their food and putting their pills in those little plastic compartment thingies. They went to the doctor a lot and cut down to half a fried pork chop.
    Let this be a warning to you young ones: start eating kale now before someone with a stethoscope makes the suggestion. Grab a handful of flax seeds and down them with some cucumber water. Turn your car in and get some roller blades or something. You don't want some 28-year-old telling you to stop eating Big Macs when you're 50.
    Now I've got to go start supper. Those chia seeds aren't going to grind themselves.

    Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young. — Theodore Roosevelt





   
   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

He sells sea shells, I wish

   So now rather than being obsessed with fake fingernails I can’t afford, I’m becoming obsessed with checking this blog. I’m pretty sure all 52 views were made by either me or my husband.   That leads me right into the current situation at hand. We need friends. We’re desperate for them. I’ve started handing out my telephone number to people I meet while doing my meager freelance work. They think it’s for the story I’m writing but really it’s in hope that someday they’ll find a reason to call and then I can hit them with, “By the way, do you play cards? Bingo? Gin Rummy?” If I wasn’t so arthritic I’d throw Twister in there.    It’s not so much for me, it’s my husband who likes to have people around. I have become hermit-like since moving here while he has become convinced we could die here and not be found for months. He had friends back in Syracuse but he chose to stay home at night with his loving wife. Now all of a sudden I get the impression he’d h...
6 comments
Read more

I Like to Call Them Ow-Bows

   It’s a toss-up. Do I write about the fact that if you search “jobless goddess” in Google the dairy goddess and the library goddess come way ahead of me, or do I write about the fact that my husband is incapacitated due to a broken elbow? I guess I’ll go with the broken elbow. Besides, who the hell breaks their elbow anyway? My husband of course.    It started out innocently enough. I, in my desire to lose weight and become the wrinkly, thinner woman I was meant to be, decided we should start up the morning walks again. I prodded him while he was still under the covers. “Come on, let’s do it. You know we have to do this,” I said while tugging on my really sexy yoga pants (which, by the way, never get used for yoga).    To his credit, he got up, pulled on his pajama pants and went with me. We got about a 16 th of a mile past the driveway before he landed in the gravel. I’m talking a bed of gravel. Gravel embedded in the palm of your hand. Gravel ...
2 comments
Read more

Parish the Thought

     I love small towns. When I lived in Parish, New York, there was no end to the reverie, not to mention the constant parades.      We had a Halloween parade through town featuring people of all ages marching in costume along a rather abbreviated parade route. It all culminated at the fire barn where a couple of old draft horses would pull along a hay wagon. Most all town festivities featured the fire barn.       Monday night bingo held there. The caller was a volunteer firefighter prone to bringing on fits of laughter when he drew N 44…which he pronounced as "N farty-far," whereby producing great gales of cackling from the middle-aged women who showed up every week, I think maybe just to flirt with the caller and the other male volunteers who collected their money. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun. I spent more than a few Monday nights there myself.      The gas stations served as restaurants in Parish. You...
2 comments
Read more