Monday, July 05, 2004

My Cackling Metabolism Thingy (The Column Version)

[Below is the column version of my recent essay on my weight gain. I hope you enjoy it.]

It started shortly after my forty-ninth birthday. Until then, I’d been able to eat baked goods with impunity. I “breakfasted” each day on four slices of wheat toast, along with OJ and a banana. Sandwiches were a usual part of my diet. I loved occasionally stuffing slices of dry bread into my mouth. Cookies, sweet rolls, specialty breads, and other baked goodies have all been perennial favorites.

I was able to eat this stuff and keep my weight under control. I never even thought about how much I weighed. From age thirty, I stayed at about 159-pounds.

Then my brain issued orders to my metabolism thingy---that’s the technical term I use for it. The order: Get older; slow the process by which you break down and process all those baked items. My metabolism thingy obeyed.

At first, I didn’t notice because just as this order was issued, my wife came home from work with news. She and her fellow employees and their families had been offered a special deal for membership at a local gym. I was enthusiastic about the idea of joining. We checked the gym out and got a membership. Being a cheapskate, I decided not to pay the extra money for a few sessions with a personal trainer. Later, I realized that the sessions would have helped familiarize me with the torture devices there and ultimately, prevented problems. But I didn’t know that then. The music videos playing in the gym kept me from hearing my metabolism-thingy laughing at my ignorance. I’ve come to recognize its cackle since.

Because I’d never really worked out regularly, I knew that I needed to ramp my exercising up slowly. That’s why one month into hitting the gym for an average of four days a week, I was only doing 200 crunches a session.

“That’s Britney country!” my doctor’s assistant told me the day I went in for my appointment, complaining of some “mysterious” pain in my groin. It shouldn’t have been a mystery: I had herniated myself. That’s when I first noticed the cackling.

It was a mild hernia. The doctor said that I should lay off lower-body exercises for awhile. I focused on my upper body. But I would take it slow!

I thought I did. One night though, using weights, I felt a crunching in my neck and shoulder. I ignored it. I shouldn’t have; I was damaging my neck and rotator cuff. I’ve been in physical therapy ever since. For the first few months of that process, I wasn’t allowed any exercise.

That’s when the cackling got really loud. It came because my metabolism thingy saw an opening to full implementation of its orders. It came because another habit I’d developed in the months I’d been working out was devouring every baked good in sight after I returned, famished, from the gym. No longer engaging in the habit of exercise, I nonetheless kept on with the habit ot eating to excess. I ballooned. One morning, I weighed myself and found that I was now 179 pounds! Half my pants no longer fit and the other half are a stretch.

I’m still in physical therapy, improving. But I weigh too much. I walk a lot and I’m going to the gym about three times a week to work on the elliptical walker. I’m cutting down on the baked stuff. One week into this new regimen, I’ve lost a two-pounds-and-a-half.

I figure I owe it to God to get into better shape. The Bible says that our bodies are temples of God, not dumping grounds for cinnamon bread and Ho-Ho’s. I owe it to my family, too; I want them to be able to stand looking at me. And I owe it to my pants, straining under the added pressure from my midsection.

Those are good reasons for losing weight. But mostly, I want to stop that incessant cackling from my metabolism thingy.

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