To Eat Or Not To Eat

Like everyone else in the US, I want to lose some weight. That really should be our national pastime. Baseball is a great game, but seriously, do you know more people who play baseball or who diet? I rest my case.

Food didn't always run my life. There was a time when I was a regular Captain Kirk, taking my shirt off every chance I got. Now, I'm more like the Priceline Negotiator. If only I could negotiate a 200-calorie discount on pizza....

Southern California is an unfortunate place to be chunky. Aside from maybe southern Florida, nowhere else inundates you with as many examples of what you should look like. You can't throw a stick without hitting ... well ... a stick.

I suppose the people in these places are more patriotic in their eating habits than, say, the Deep South, where anything that can't be fried isn't worth eating, or the Midwest, where eating is actually a hobby. The people of the South and the Heartland just prefer baseball, that's all.

But the choice of baseball over diet also leads to high incidences of Dunlap disease (a deformity in which one's stomach done lap over his belt). I find myself in the early stages of this disease, my efforts to treat it with malted barley having proven unsuccessful. It appears that I may have to resort to more extreme measures like exercise and -- horror of horrors -- abandoning my vending machine diet.

I don't have anything against exercise. Back during my Captain Kirk days, I exercised all the time, and I even enjoyed it. But now, I've found that exercise is really, really painful. Not only does it hurt, but it hurts for days on end. After a brutal work-out, when you're sucking air like Darth Vader, sweating like a broken sprinkler head, smelling like a flatulent wildebeest, and wondering how you could feel like this after 8 minutes, how could you be expected to deny yourself the solace of a hot fudge sundae?

I confess. I've left the gym and headed straight to McDonald's for an ice cream cone. (Who puts a gym walking distance from a McDonald's anyway?) By the same token, I've stopped at that same McDonald's on my way to the gym to grab some fries. I need energy for my workout, you know. But, I can honestly say that I have never stopped there both before and after the gym. I do have my limits...sometimes.

My real problem isn't exercise, though. It's food. I like to eat. I really like to eat. I get amused by dietary supplements that are designed to keep you from being hungry. The problem we Chunks have isn't that we're always eating because we're hungry; it's that we're always eating when we're not hungry.

If there were nothing to stop me, I would eat all the time. Have you ever seen someone blow up a rubber glove like a balloon? That would be me, a big round ball with stubby little arms and legs sticking out of it. It wouldn't matter that I couldn't fit into a car, because I would just roll my body from fast food joint to fast food joint, stuffing my body with food that has a shelf life of 8000 years.

Fortunately, I am saved from that fate by my other great love, sleep. As much as I love to eat, I do manage to stop for several hours at a time...every day! This is only because I have not yet found a way to combine my two great passions and enjoy them both simultaneously. But bear with me, True Believers! I've put in a request for a government grant to do some research into the matter.

If you ask me, we are doing something wrong. How is it that the French and the Italians, both known for great food, are consistently thin, while we Americans, who boast the hot dog as our culinary contribution to the world, can't stop eating long enough to get on a scale? This observation has led to my next plan for regaining svelteness. I'm going to go on a French food diet. I'll let you know how that goes.