Weighty Issues

It’s no secret to me that I have been putting on a few pounds. It’s been pretty apparent in the mirror for a few years. About four years ago, my wife joined FamousWeightLossProgram (FWLP) and I followed along and lost nearly thirty pounds. Since then I have put back on forty. Not a good trend.

I’ve been avoiding my doctor because he is a runner and very fit and a bit of a nag. Nonetheless, since I have a history of prostate cancer in my family, I’m supposed to get my innards tickled every couple of years.

Sure enough, I nearly tipped the scale at two bills. My doctor gave me the eat less/exercise more lecture and said he would send on the cholesterol report from my blood test, but he wasn’t expecting good news since those numbers track weight.

In reality, despite my ballooning weight, I have never felt more fit. I recently added jogging to my exercise mix of bicycling and walking. I can now jog at least three-quarters of the one mile lap around the local pool. On the weekends I will often bicycle twenty miles (or more if the route includes a bagel shop).

And as best I can tell, the numbers from my blood test, while not great, were far from cataclysmic. My blood pressure is 116 over 72. Even when I was about as active as a sofa cushion my blood pressure has always made doctors think I was a triathlete. My cholesterol was a respectable 167. The only category I was out of tolerance on was the LDL/HDL ratio which was 4.5, just a smidgen lower than the 5.0 ratio recommended. I guess I need more fiber or something, but I’m not about to go on prescription meds over that.

It seems everybody I know is on Lipitor or some other statin-type medicine. I’m very suspicious of Big Pharma and the continued trend of defining risk down to the point that nobody is healthy. When diabetes meant a lifetime of precisely timed insulin injections, it was a diagnosis doctors made reluctantly. Now that there are oral medications available, everybody goes on the meds at the drop of a blood sugar hat.

This is not to take lightly the people out there with serious health issues or risks. In fact, it is the opposite. When everybody is at risk, it's easy for the people that really need help to get swept aside.

Nonetheless, I could drop a few pounds and be even healthier. Several of our friends joined FWLP and my wife bowed to peer pressure and went along with them. Now I’m back to being the walking SillyPoints™ calculator since I reverse engineered the formula a few years back. While the SillyPoints™ algorithm is some patented trade secret all I’m going to say is calories divided by fifty plus fat grams divided by twelve. You’re on your own for figuring out the fiber grams bonus.

I make it a point of pride to not pay somebody to put me on a scale, I did go out and buy a FWLP endorsed scale that measures down to the tenth of a point. It costs about the same as five weigh-ins at FWLP, so I have to hold out from joining for another two months to recoup my investment. My last scale only did one pound increments and was rather prone to going out of calibration. This new scale claims to be able measure body fat, body mass index, blood alcohol level, and IQ score. So far I’ve just watched my weight bounce around a couple of pounds based on time of day and proximity to my morning constitutional.

One of the features that makes FWLP the market leader in weight management is its focus on accountability and public humiliation when you pack the pounds back on. But that is what the internet is for. More details to come.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is anybody ever happy with their body?