I am close to sixty years old. I realize that’s not considered old by today’s standards, but if I were living during the rule of Charlemagne, I’d be a highly respected village elder. Peasants would come from miles around to ask my advice about planting crops and dealing with their ailments. In the 21st Century, I’m just another one of a million baby boomers popping his Lipitor every morning. And nobody asks for my advice, though I give it in my blog anyway.
Still it’s not easy getting old, no matter what century you live in. Getting out of bed in the morning becomes an arthritic ballet in which you dare not make a false move. The stiffness in the joints and the ache in the muscles must be worked out gradually or you pull or twist something and suffer the consequences with days of debilitating pain. In a few years, it will get even worse and the stiffness and pain will last all day long. I can tell by the way very old people move.
Then there’s the state of my internal organs. Like most men my age, my prostate is enlarged, causing problems with urination. I usually have to get up twice during the night to go to the bathroom. This is especially annoying when I’m in the midst of a pleasant dream and I don’t want it to end. Sometimes I dream that I have to go to the bathroom, but there isn’t one around. I take two different pills every morning that are supposed to help treat the prostate and aid in urination. I also take a plant extract that the Mayans used to urinate better. The Mayan priests practiced human sacrifice, but at least they didn’t have to run to bathroom all the time. I really don’t know if it works, but so far I haven’t gotten prostate cancer, so I don’t dare discontinue it.
Then there’s my heart. Both my parents had bypass operations, which is a big genetic strike against me. I had a heart scan done a few years ago when the procedure was barely out of the experimental stage and they found plaque beginning to form in my arteries. It shows up on the heart scan as little white scratches against the black vessel walls. Ever since then, my doctor has had me on statin drugs to reduce my cholesterol. Today, I’m on the maximum dosage so the doctor had to augment the statin with another pill. My cholesterol is under control, but my triglycerides are 190, which is 90 points over what they should be. I don’t even know what triglycerides are, but the doctor says 190 is way too high for someone with risk factors like mine.
So I finally decided that I should eat healthier and lose a few pounds. My wife just found out her cholesterol was high, so we decided to diet together. The first thing we did was to order a large pizza with extra cheese. This was our farewell bad meal, crispy crust, spongy mozzarella, pools of fat and oil staining the box. I’m sure that the four slices I had raised my triglycerides to an even 200.
The next day we went shopping for diet foods. It turns out that diet foods today are not the foods we were told were good for us in the past. Bread, rice, and pasta, for example, are now considered bad for you. They put on pounds, which I always suspected but was afraid to say in public. The official government food pyramid was gospel and grains were at the base of the pyramid. Now we know that carbs are good for you if you’re going to run a marathon the next day because carbohydrates give you quick energy, but if all you do for exercise is walk the dog and carry the laundry up the stairs, then carbs are out.
The diet mantra today is “get lean with protein.” Lots of drastic diets today consist of mostly protein drinks, which taste like frothy wallpaper paste, but real foods, like meat, chicken, fish and eggs are good-tasting protein sources that help put muscle in place of fat. Fruits and veggies, of course, are still considered healthy and, since they are low in calories, you can eat lots of them at a time. So my wife and I, in our diet frenzy, bought tons of fruits and vegetables.
Almost every big diet no-no begins with the letter “c”: carbs, candy, cookies, cake, and (ice) cream. Chocolate is my particular weakness, but I know it’s bad for me because it begins with a “c”, just like cholesterol. In the past, I was always able to justify eating an extra-large Chunky Chocolate bar because soldiers are given chocolate in their field rations. If soldiers eat chocolate to fight better, it can’t be that bad.
I love my Chunky Chocolate bar and I love bread, especially the crunchy end piece of a hot, slightly well-done Italian bread, but I know that if I am going to halve that triglyceride number, I’ll have to give up these pleasures. What I simply can’t give up are my Blow Pop lollipops.
I don’t care what the experts say about sugary treats and weight gain and diabetes. I know from experience that Blow Pops help me lose weight. I don’t know how many calories there are in each one (I’m afraid to look), but I can go through ten Blow Pops while reading or watching a baseball game and I gain no weight. They assuage hunger, satisfy my oral craving, and make me happy. A Blow Pop for me is like a cigarette to a smoker. And like nicotine, it helps in dieting.
I haven’t done any research on why Blow Pops cause weight loss, but I do have an hypothesis. I think it has to do with the considerable energy one expends in the ingestion of the Blow Pop. First, the Blow Pop is globular in shape, so that one is forced to use the entire mouth to suck on it, rather than just the tongue, as you would in licking a normal disc-shaped lollipop. The combined licking and sucking action burns more calories than just licking. Then, of course, once you have sucked away all the candy coating, you are left with the gum, which you can chew without losing taste for as long as another fifteen minutes. Again, a considerable number of calories are expended in the mastication process. (Note that the major adverse side-effect of Blow Pop use is loss of fillings in the teeth, especially if the candy coating is bitten into before it has been completely sucked away.)
So while my wife wasn’t looking, I grabbed a bag of Blow Pops and hid them beneath the apples in the shopping cart. The big problem with Blow Pops is that they come in an opaque white bag and you can’t see which flavors you’re getting. I like strawberry and cherry the best and sour apple the least, but I invariably pick out a bag with more sour apple than strawberry. However, I recently discovered that if you hold the bag up to the fluorescent light of the supermarket, you can see the different colored lollipop wrappers through the bag. If I see pink-colored wrappers, I know I’ll get at least a few strawberry lollipops. So if you see a 59 year old guy in the supermarket aisle holding a bag of Blow Ups over his head and squinting, don’t panic and call Homeland Security.
Anyway, we’ve been on the diet for the past three days and we’ve both lost five pounds each. The Blow Pops make it easier for me, but I still have intense cravings for bread and chocolate. This afternoon, I was so desperate for something crunchy, besides a celery or carrot stick, that I cracked and ate a walnut that had been sitting for months on our pantry shelf. Somehow it tasted like the crust of a fresh Italian bread.
