Middle Aged Health Issues

You Are What You Eat?


Gosh dang it all Ladies and Gentlemen, but I find myself rapidly sliding down the slippery slope of middle age.

I guess that, like the old saying goes…”another day above ground beats the heck out of the alternative…”

I’m just a few months shy of being Forty Seven Years Old, and I sometimes feel like I’ve already lived to at least One Hundred.

Somebody out there, I forget who, was once quoted as saying “If I knew that I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of myself…”

I totally agree…

I often look at myself in the mirror and yell at the ever graying, ever balding, dumpy imposter that has wrapped himself around the kid that just a few decades ago could run three miles in eighteen minutes.

Seriously, when I was in my late teens and early twenty’s I could walk out my front door, tighten my shoe laces, stretch my legs, and run away from my dorm room or apartment and not stop until I had put ten or twelve miles behind me.

Unlike the old Rodney Dangerfield joke about running five miles a day each week (hey doctor…I’m 35 miles from home), I’d just turn around and jog back home in time for dinner and a couple of beers with my friends.

Then one day back in 1983 when I was throwing Frisbee at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, I started having pains in my right leg, and the rest is history. I have since found out that I have inherited something called “hyper-coagulate blood,” along with a deluxe set of bad veins in my legs.

My condition is the opposite of being a hemophiliac—instead of tending to bleed to death, my blood try’s its’ best to turn to Jello if I don’t pay attention and take my meds regularly.

So any way, I’ve learned to live with the condition in spite of its attempt to kill me about every five years since the initial occurrence, but it has put a serious dent on my athletic endeavors and physical conditioning.

No more Ultimate Frisbee.

No more long distance running.

No more water skiing.

No more snow skiing.

No more scuba diving.

No more flying airplanes.

I could go on and on, but I also realize that I’ve had the opportunity to do so many things that so many people on the planet never have the cash or opportunity to do even if their bodies will allow it, so I’ll just leave that abbreviated list where it stands—I’m quite grateful for the opportunities which I’ve had thus far in my life.

I’m also quite happy to still be alive and still have two legs and feet attached, because if it was 1906 rather than 2006 I’d either be dead else be a double amputee by now, and wheelchairs have come a long way since then also…thank God.

Even though I’m 6’3” tall, my weight over the past six or seven years has ballooned from about 210 to over 250 pounds and, until the past couple of months, I rarely had the strength and energy to manage to drag myself off of the sofa or out of the pool (floating like a giant walrus) to do anything about it.

I’m proud to report that suddenly, out of the clear blue, my energy level has started steadily increasing and as a result, my weight has started sliding back toward the inventory of clothing that I’ve maintained in the back of the closet for the past few years.

Not one, but about three inches in the waist so far. We don’t own scales at our house because of the negative karma associated with “evil instruments of our industrial empire”, but I would have to say at least 20 pounds have disappeared over the past couple of months.

I guar an dam tee you that I’m not taking this all for granted either.

I’ve started swimming laps in the pool each night. Tonight it was five round trips without stopping.

I thought that I was going to die.

My formerly strong legs are so weak now, but I got through it, and a workout in the water is much less stressful than even walking long distances and it involves more muscle groups.

I’ve also always been a little top heavy because I have a large chest, but my arms have atrophied to the point where they look like a couple of twigs coming off of the trunk of a tree stump or something (maybe I can model for my K-street Tree Project).

So any way, I’m afraid that my cooking exercises over at The Redneck Gourmet are going to have to change a bit because my girlfriend Pat’s blood pressure is through the roof and I want to continue to keep my own weight loss and health improvements moving forward.

To that end, I’m looking at further improving the quality of our home cooking and dining adventures, without substituting packaged crap like cheese food products, tofu, and partially hydrogenated blaa blaa blaa products.

Dang it…I like to eat Brown chicken eggs…

Heck…I like to eat brown chickens, if you take the feathers and feet off of them first.

Give me another month or two, and I’ll get my pony tail trimmed a little, toss on some 36 waist jeans and my ostrich skinned cowboy boots, and show all of my female readers a picture of what the Redneck Gourmet really looks like.

Stay tuned to this channel for further developments...