One More Pound

I went to see my doctor the other day and she told me I could only afford to gain one more pound—for the rest of my life. One more pound. For the rest of my life. That’s a lot of pressure.

So, I said to my doctor, “You can’t be serious.”

“No, no, it’s not that bad,” she said. “It’s not totally disastrous.”

That’s when I knew it was on the verge of being totally disastrous. Most of my life, I hadn’t really worried about weight. In my teens and twenties, I had a high metabolism. Throughout most of my 30s, I had a series of very, very bad boyfriends. Not that they said anything to me about my weight or tried to make me go on any diets. It’s just that the stress of having very, very bad boyfriends made me too upset to eat most of the time, which is why I was able to stay so stick thin for so long. When I made my decision to give up very, very bad boyfriends, it was a little bit like someone giving up cigarettes. I started getting my appetite back. (Nicotine, like bad boyfriends, as everyone knows, tends to suppress the appetite.) So, naturally I gained a few pounds, which was ok, because I probably needed it. But now, here I am at the ungodly place in my life where my doctor is telling me I can only gain one more pound.

I mostly come from a family of relatively thin people. My dad, who is 65 years old and wears embarrassingly skimpy Speedos in public, is probably in the best shape out of all of us. Without fail, he’s been running three to four miles a day four or five days a week, for the past 35 years. Every year on his birthday, he makes a big family event of going down to the racetrack and timing himself as he runs a six-mile race against himself.  He says that if he can’t finish the race in 60 minutes or less, than we should just drive away and leave him behind at the track to die, the same way the Eskimos allegedly set their elderly parents afloat on drifting ice bergs when they get too old to contribute to the tribe anymore.

Of course, no one in my family would do that to my dad, which is not to say that he wouldn’t do it to himself. That’s why he keeps a 9 mm in the front drawer of his desk—in case he gets too old or too overweight. In light of my recent doctor’s visit, I’m trying not to get that extreme. But now I’m starting to get worried. My doctor said that most people think about food on average 70 percent of the day, which is mind boggling. I never think about food that much. I hardly think about food at all, which might be one of the reasons I need to start thinking about it.

I’m the kind of person who is usually in so much of a hurry that I don’t have time to eat, so I’ll have a Snickers bar and a bag of popcorn for lunch and then a whole head of broccoli the next day to make up for it. Now, I have to think about balancing my diet, although, I think that trading off chocolate with broccoli is a pretty fair balance. I’ll probably have to start exercising more, too. But that’s going to be pretty hard, because my dog, who’s been my personal trainer for years, is getting old, and doesn’t want to walk more than five minutes at a time in any one direction This makes getting vigorous exercise a little challenging. I guess I could always revert back to bad boyfriends or take up cigarettes, but that’s probably not a good idea. I’m really not sure what to do.

I think I’ll just stock up on broccoli and chocolate and see what happens.