Living and dieting update: A new quest
The good news is I won’t have to be wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt to church Saturday when Miss Lara Savitskie walks down the aisle to become Mrs. Lara Stachler.
The bad news is my suit is going to have to stay in the closet until I drop some more weight. Lots more weight.
Here’s a quick recap for those who missed my earlier blogs: I was 260 magnificent pounds of loving uncle when I started my quest 11 weeks ago to slim down for my niece’s wedding. I needed to lose 30 pounds for any chance to fit into the suit I own. I didn’t. But I lost enough to fit into clothes nice enough to keep me from drawing attention away from the bride.
I went from real fat to a reasonably fat 243 pounds. Twenty more pounds and I’ll just be fat. Forty more pounds and I’ll be what I weighed in high school 35 years ago – which was about 15 more than my ideal weight. The quest continues.
Living and dieting has been my life. It was Aug. 30, 1957 when I was last at my ideal weight for my height – which was actually measured in length because newborns have trouble going vertical. I think I was something like 18-inches-long and 8 pounds 7 ounces.
That picture of perfect proportion went poof shortly thereafter. There was no looking back once I was old enough to eat real food.
I quickly ballooned into a boy who had to shop the “husky” section of the pants department because the friction of my thighs rubbing together would ruin regular jeans within a week. (“Husky” was the forerunner of “relaxed fit” and the start of the movement that led to stores having “big and tall” departments to serve their fat and squat customers.)
Fat was a problem for me when I started playing football in the Catholic Youth Organization league in sixth grade and had to be under a certain weight – wearing all my equipment – at game time.
To do that, I would replace my heavy shoulder pads with crumpled newspaper for the weigh-in. Such cheating probably would have been condemned if I was playing in a Baptist league in the Deep South. But Catholics have the confessional booth to fall back on after sinning. I never missed a game.
As I grew from a boy to a man, I didn’t have to do much but get taller to maintain my status as overweight but not real fat. That free pass was good for about 20 years.
I didn’t start the fat to real fat to fat to real fat rollercoaster ride until I was 30 or so. It’s been the last couple of decades where dieting was required to keep the coaster rolling downnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn after it went up, up up, up, up each time.
My diet plan has always been pretty simple: Eat less and quit drinking beer.
The second part of that is especially key. It’s not because of any scientific reasoning that beer is full of “empty calories” that turn to sugar that turn to fat and make you waddle. It’s because three or four beers make pizza or chips or chicken wings at midnight seem like a good idea. And that’s what sends the rollercoaster heading toward the summit.
This last ride took me to the highest point I’ve ever been ... and brought me down to the weight where I should have started dieting in the first place. Oh, yippee.
Now I am only 55 pounds away from my ideal weight ... and about 20 away from getting into that suit of mine. That’s not going to happen by Lara’s wedding.
It is time for a new quest. I vow to slim down enough to wear that suit by the time Lara’s younger brother, Kevin, gets married. The good news is my 24-year-old nephew isn’t even engaged.
I may have a shot at this one if he doesn’t wait too long to pop the question. That rollercoaster is bound to start going up again at some point ... and I really would like a beer.
