My friends keep seeing my commercial run here in Tennessee. They (the advertisers) are literally saturating the market with it. I’m getting lots of screen time all of a sudden! It’s a great thing, but it’s led me to one conclusion.
I must lose weight and gain hair.
I’m okay with not being able to do the latter, believe it or not. I’m going to be one of those men who attaches their masculinity to their hair. I believe that Samson was the only one in history who had that little problem and look how he turned out. No, I refuse to fight that battle. My grandfather, who has been bald since I can remember, used to have a sign hanging on the wall that said, “God only created so many perfect heads. The rest he covered with hair!” These are now the words I live by. When the time comes, I will merely shave my head and be done with it.
Believe it or not, being back on a college campus with a horrible parking problem has helped tremendously with the former. See, when I get to campus every morning at 8am, I almost have my pick of the parking places (if, however, I am running late and get to campus between 8:05 and 8:10, I’m completely screwed and have to tie my truck to a hitching post and hope for the best). Once I stake my claim on a great parking place near my office, I’m able to freely roam about campus without any thoughts. And, since my office is on the extreme far edge of campus away from my classroom buildings, it means that my ass is walking a lot more than I used to. Which in turn, means that there’s suddenly a lot less of my ass to haul around campus.
Oh yeah, having an iPod helps, too.
By the way, I’m measuring my success in this weight loss endeavor by the only true measure - the size of the waist of my pants. When I started this semester, I was refusing to make the leap from a 40 to a 42 merely on principle. This morning, I’m pleased to say that I put on a pair of old 38’s and they fit without my having to suck in my gut at all.
Two years ago, my doctor put me on phentermine (I’m sure I’m spelling that wrong) which was one half of the notorious Phen-Fen combination. I’m just assuming that it was the okay half. I’m not going to lie. It was great. I dropped 30 pounds in about a month without having to change my diet or exercise. I just didn’t have an appetite any more. I thought I had finally found the magical solution. The problem is that those little pills cost money…which is something we didn’t have a great deal of at the time (and still don’t).
Not only that, but I felt like I was cheating somehow. And it was one thing to lose the weight, but it was another thing altogether to “get healthy.” I wanted to get healthy. And not just for me: I wanted to make sure I was going to be around for my kids for a long time.
So, getting back on a college campus has changed all that. I know that not everyone can get back on a college campus and some people are actually really okay with that. I do however, recommend that you include some way to force a little walking in your life. It does work.