How the “O” word shocked me into dieting

I wasn’t fat.

Tall men don’t get fat, no matter how much weight we gain. We’re husky, bulky, beefy. “A mountain of a man” is a phrase applied half-admiringly and solely to men over 6 feet tall.

It didn’t bother me that I hadn’t seen my toes in years. I assumed I still had ten. Who cares what they looked like?

After gradually sizing up my Hawaiian shirts from L to XL to XXL, I started to have some health issues that had absolutely nothing to do with my weight.

I couldn’t shovel our driveway without taking several breaks because I got short of breath and dizzy. But frigid winter air will do that to you. Had to mow our lawn in pieces, too, but that was the heat.

My right calf turned purple and I had to have a vein surgically removed from my leg. But the doctor said this kind of thing happens to people who are overweight or sedentary. And I sat at a desk all day. HA!

Then COVID struck. Looking over the federal rules for early vaccinations, my wife brightened and said, “Hey, you’ll qualify as ‘high risk’ because you’re obese!”

I just stared at her, speechless. OBESE??

In a split second, my self image completely changed. I wasn’t a mountain of a man. I was a barrel of lard.

I got to my feet, suddenly wondering if maybe the groaning noises I made when I pushed myself up out of a chair were NOT because I had Jewish grandparents.

I walked into our bathroom and did something I hadn’t done in years: I got on the scale. Its needle seem to have some kind of seizure, then gradually settled on 250 lbs.

This number meant nothing to me. My entire adult life, I had paid so little attention to my weight that I had no sense of how much a 6’1″ man with glasses and a goatee should weigh.

But the look on my wife’s face when I told her the number gave me a clue.

Well, this was simply unacceptable. Obese? No. There was no way in hell I was going to be “obese.” That’s a word for people in trailer parks and on scooters at Walmart and reality TV shows.

Thank God I’m such an over-educated, privileged, elitist snob. My terror of being mistaken for a Trump supporter probably saved my life, because if I hadn’t stopped gaining weight, I’d be in a diabetic coma or a 6×6 (x6) foot hole in the ground by now.

OK, so… How to get skinny? Diet and exercise, right? Exercise was already taken care of, though it had cost me dearly.

For months, I had been reserving a spot in my home office while I searched for the perfect couch: robust, dark brown, full-grain leather upholstery with brass nailhead trim. 

Then the surgeon who took that vein out of my leg handed me a pair of “old granny” compression stockings and said I had to wear them for the rest of my life.

Fuck that.

So, with tears in my eyes, I rolled a Schwinn stationary bike into the spot I’d been saving in my office. Instead of lounging on that couch and smoking Cuban cigars, I began furiously peddling on a pretend bicycle, feeling like Jane Fonda in a leotard.

Exercise: check.

Diet. What’s a diet? How do you diet? You eat less food. So, when you’re hungry, instead of munching on a giant pretzel and a whole brick of Colby Jack, you just stay hungry?

Fuck that.

No, I would find a way to diet and never be hungry. I would somehow find a magical snack food with no calories at all so I could stuff my face around the clock and still lose weight.

And I did.

Read Part II: Big Round Jars of Big Fat Pickles