The Best Time to Diet

When is the best time to diet during the year?

NEVER!

Look, I'm sorry if I bait and switched you with the lead-in, but quite simply, the best time of the year to diet is never. This answer has been formulated using the best, most up-to-date scientific data and analysis formulation.

Let's take the seasons one by one, shall we? We'll start with Summer, since that's what we're currently suffering.

Summer is a time for outdoor fun in the sun. Along with that fun in the sun comes...what? That's right...barbeque! Summer's when you go nuts at the store, fire up the grill and toss on all sorts of fattening, red-blooded, testosterone-driven, artery heartening meats! Yeah! Okay, okay, there's always some guy who brings a healthy chopped salad to these gatherings, but never mind him. Just set him away from the meat-eaters, pat his head, and chow down. And what would fun in the sun be without beer? Of course, I'm not talking about "a" beer, either. What are we, a buncha amateurs? So...Summer's disqualified from dieting.

Leading us into Fall. The leaves turn and drop. So does the temperature. And moods. We move inside, taking the edge off the chill in the air. Wait...chill...hmm, what does that remind me of? Chill, chill, chill...Hot damn, it's chili season! As soon as that first chilly weekend hits, I dash to the store for a huge heaping of chili fixings! And you gotta have cornbread with that chili or it just wouldn't be right. Fall is also a time for everything pumpkin, of course: pie and more pie. Looks like Fall's out from the dieting plan.

Now, before we proceed with the final two seasons, you might think this post is purely food based. Au contraire! What do you need to do in addition to dieting to lose weight? Ugh...exercise. Which brings me to what I call, The Exercise Quandary. Who needs to exercise the most? Fat people like me, natch. The problem is, with my weight gain, my back and knees hurt. I can't punish that treadmill like I used to. Whereas I used to be able to knock out four miles daily on the dreaded treadmill, now I'm lucky if I can eke out one to two. Then my knees and back give out. With bad knees, that deposits me back onto the sofa. And what does one do on the sofa? Chow time!

So, The Exercise Quandary gives you a Sophie's Choice: remain fat or live with damaged knees. No contest.

Back to the seasons, rudely pushing us into my least favorite, Winter. I mean...who wants to get out in two feet of snow and freezing ice? Nope, not me, not even to get chili fixings. And when it's inhumanly, miserably cold, you need to plug gas into your body to stay warm. You ain't gonna keep warm by gnawing on carrot sticks and yummy kale. Winter's immediately knocked outta the running for dieting.

Finally, Spring! Spring is a time for thawing and renewal and moving back outside again and eyeing that grill that's been dormant for so long and...and...man, burgers with all the trim sounds really, really good. 

As you can see, top scientists agree, then, that there is simply no good season to diet. There are alternatives to losing weight, of course. My wife and I try to have a "dry" month or two every year. No alcohol. This has advantages. It's not a three month period of suffering after all. That's why I usually choose February. It's the shortest month. (Of course, any fool who tells you they're going to have a dry November or December is lying to you, not with those holidays.)

Another solution is to "juice (No, you fiends! It's not when you wear gloves that don't fit and stab your ex-wife and lover! It's fasting with juice.)." This agony goes on for only two to three days. That's what I'm doing now. The first couple hours of day one, I was all, "Hey, this is a tenable diet! No problem!" By lunchtime, my stomach's playing the blues. On day two, I mowed the yard. After a couple of rows, I started seeing stars and Ed McMahon coming back from the dead to tell me I'm a Reader's Digest sweepstakes winner. Mercifully, I accidentally swallowed three bugs which gave me a little protein boost.

So, all methods have pluses and minuses (mostly minuses). I suggest you just go get your stomach stapled and call it pretty.

Speaking of untenable situations, poor young Dibby Caldwell, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Hangwell, Kansas's mortician, is caught up in some strange doings.Witches lurk in the shadows. A menacing creature haunts the skies. And the dead refuse to stay dead. Come visit quaint Peculiar County, available right here!

 

Naked? WHAT was God thinking?

"Do these clothes make me look fat?"

A question I asked my wife recently.

Of course the real answer would be, "No, your clothes don't make you look fat. You are fat." Thank God my wife knows how to choose her words carefully.

I don't know how it happened. Or when it happened. But, last year, I came across a photo that showed me stuffed into a sweater like a tightly packed sausage. Yow!

YAH! That CAN'T be me! Right? RIGHT?

The scales lied, claiming I rang in just under 300 pounds. No way! How come I never saw this in the mirror? Surely, we bought our mirror from the local carnival fun-house!

So, my wife stuck me on a hellish diet. Thus far I've lost sixty pounds with another twenty-five to go. Ye gads.

There's good news and there's bad news. 

I've been exercising like crazy. So crazy one of my knees wants to pack it in and my back hates the act of standing and walking now. 

Clothes no longer fit. "Look, honey," I said to my wife while parading around in an old sweater, "this sweater somehow got longer."

"Yeah, that's not what happened."  (Okay, sometimes my wife does ignore her inner censor.)

The other down side to losing weight is I have to go clothes shopping. I'd rather have root canal surgery than try on clothes. In the past, I'd just pick something up off the rack I thought might fit and go with it.

"And that's why none of your clothes fit right," says my wise wife. "Ever."

The problem is I'm still a work in progress. So we can't get a ton of clothes that currently fit. Which sucks because in three more months it's back to trying clothes on. Ugh. Still, it'll be nice to have jeans that don't, you know, fall down around my ankles when I walk.

So I've lost sixty pounds. That's good. The clothes we bought look pretty snazzy. That's great. When I get nekkid, though, I still look fat.

"Honey! I look fat when I'm nekkid!" I screamed to my wife. "I look better with clothes on!"

"We all do, dear. That's why clothes were invented."

"No, they were invented because Adam and Eve botched it. They really screwed the pooch on that one. Stupid Adam and Eve," I groused.

Which got me to thinking about the state of being clothed. If Adam and Eve had never taken a bite out of the infamous apple, would we be a civilization running around nekkid? I'm having a hard time thinking what public transit would be like. The health issues alone boggle, absolutely boggle!

What about restaurant servers? I'd probably rather not have soup brought out by some guy with his junk hanging out. 

In Winter, would coats be acceptable? Or would we be so accustomed to nudity, coat-wearers would be seen as aberrant streakers and we'd just accept freezing as natural. 

God's original plan for mankind's natural state of nudity definitely had some potholes in it.

On the other hand, if nudity was the norm, would there ever have been such a thing as body shaming? Would people even understand which bodies were pleasant to behold and which crossed the line? Would we be a nicer society, one where anorexic super models weren't the "norm" people aspire to?

Maybe. But every day I thank God for clothes. Um, even if that wasn't the original plan.

Speaking of nudity, pity poor Wendell, protagonist of my comic thriller, Chili Run. He spends the book in his tighty-whities due to an encounter with some bad hombres. It's too complicated to get into now so just read the book.

Clickety-click-click for nearly nekkid thrills and laughs.

Ladies and Gentlemennnn...the Amazing Mr. Balloono!

I'm dieting right now. And it's sheer agonizing hell.

Not too long ago, while dressing, I called out to my wife, "Honey, my clothes are shrinking! Did you change the detergent or something?"

All of my life I've had a history of ballooning, then deflating again. I've gone from one extreme to the other more times than I can remember. Once, when I was younger, I lost close to 100 pounds.

That's a lotta weight to carry around and lose. But I did it. In a short span of time, too.

But apparently, I was a lot younger then. Hmph. The pounds don't seem to be shedding as quickly now. 

For seven long weeks or so, I've pretty much starved myself. I've forced myself to eat kale salads (does anyone truly like kale? Tastes like cardboard, but not nearly as good.), and other things a rabbit wouldn't touch. Every day I get on the treadmill and walk anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour, kicking into high speeds 'till my bad knee starts squelching and catching in the back. By the time I fall off the treadmill, I'm drenched in sweat, smelling worse than a men's locker room. I can't even make it to the sofa, panting and wheezing like bagpipes.

Worst of all, I've had to give up beer! (Well, at least in the fashion I used to enjoy it.) The horror! Can you imagine? What's next? Giving up oxygen?

All of this hard work and sacrifice for a lousy eleven pounds.

Frustrated, I asked my wife why I'm not dumping weight like I used to.

"Because it's harder to lose weight when you get older."

Huh. Of course. My shelf life for fast weight loss had expired. 

The other day my wife asks, "So, when you lose all of your weight, what kind of clothes do you want to get?"

"Well, since I'm an old man now," I snapped, "I may as well start dressing like one. Lessee...I need trousers long enough to reach my armpits, yet crawling up the ankles. Suspenders, maybe. Nice, sensible shirts. Black socks pulled up to the knees, with sandals on top. Ready? Let's go to Sears."