The Time of Darkness, Sciatica, and Samuel L. Jackson

The Time of Darkness, Sciatica, and Samuel L. Jackson

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are now in that darkest time of year that runs between Halloween and St. Valentine’s Day. It’s bookended between holidays that are strongly connected to candy. It between we have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of the pumpkin spice and parties associated with each of them.  We eat to ward off depression, we eat to soften our fear of Death...and...

And I have gone on a diet.

There is a telephone app associated with it, but it’s basically counting calories.  I am currently on 2000 calories a day.  From the day that I started, November 3, until this writing, November 27, I have lost 15 pounds.

I feel better, my clothes fit better.

Those of you who follow this space know that I’ve been down this road before. 

I’d been having trouble with my back.  The cortisone shots weren’t working.  My back doctor said that we could get in there and “trim off that bone spur” and make my sciatica all better.  But another doctor had told me, “If you are having trouble with your back, look at your front.”

I can be dense sometimes, but I knew he was indicating my stomach.  I’d ignored his advice for a long time, but at that point--caught between sciatic and a surgeon’s knife--I chose to lose weight.  From that point in November 2019 until March 15, 2020, I lost 44 pounds.

That end date is very important.  Those of you who have been around during the last couple of years will recognize that as the first lockdown.  

At the time, I didn’t notice that I was putting weight back on.  It happened so slowly that I never caught on to the fact that I was sliding back (or back-sliding as Baptists are wont to call it) into bad habits.

So by November 3, 2021, I’d put back on 27 of the pounds I’d taken off before.

I’ve lost and regained hundreds of pounds over the course of my lifetime.  Quite frankly, even though I’ve always been fat (I was going to say “a bit on the husky side,” but I might as well own it), it’s always been easy for me to lose weight: I simply stop eating.  I just lock-in that crazy, obsessive-compulsive part of myself that I used to get my doctoral degree, and I pushed on through.  

In short, I made myself crazy.

Those who’ve been closest to me will testify to the truth of that last sentence.

My hope--and it is just a hope--that this time I will be able to avoid insanity.  I’ve got an app.  It has put me on a 2000 calorie a day budget.  I log everything I put into my mouth, and it has a nice library of foods with their calories that makes it easy to log.

On Thanksgiving, I was able to eat everything I wanted to, some of it in incredibly tiny amounts.

I weigh myself every day.  This might be the one lasting bit of knowledge that I brought out of my stint as chair of the university assessment committee: You have a target, you put your measures in place, and when you are off your target you do something.

I’m almost 60 years old.  I’ve been heavy my whole life.  I have no illusions.  By this time I know what my tendencies are.

The app asked me to set a goal.  Initially, it was to avoid surgery, and I think that’s a good one.  If the EMT folks ever come to get me, I’d like to make it easier on them.  And I suppose the final goal will be to make it easier on the pallbearers. 

But I have no illusions.  

Losing weight (and gaining weight for that matter) is easier than maintaining it. Statistically, you are either going up or coming down; there is no maintaining.

Anyway,if you offer me a cookie, and I start channelling Samuel L. Jackson, this is the reason.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )