I am such a simple
guy. My thoughts are not on wars, or political
struggles on Capitol Hill, or even bad weather events that seem to dominate our
lives. No, my attention is squarely on calories,
and, most recently, what I consume at night and why I falter in the late night hours
just prior to going to bed. It seems to
me, my binging in the face of my daily struggle over my diet and the endless
evenings of aerobic exercise is truly a “quantum enigma.”
I
discovered the term “quantum enigma” in a book on physics, and I decided it
describes my situation to a tee. A spectacular conundrum!
That’s me.
I heard it said, if you
take a tablespoon of honey, it will help your muscles recover from a hard workout
and, at the same time, burn fat too. I
am not a big fan of honey, but tonight, prior to sitting in my easy chair,
I ate two large tablespoons of the sweet stuff to burn off a ton of my fat, and
now I am crashing…
…It’s
like I drank three glasses of scotch. I
am so groggy. I can't decide if it’s
from the long week of workouts or the large tablespoons of honey. Either
too much sugar is surging through me to be healthy, or I am exhausted from all
the exercises. Either my body is burned
out or my brain is boiling over.
– Now that’s a quantum enigma!
This
idea of gulping down direct shots of honey I blame on an old, runner friend of mine.
I bumped into this guy at my gym – literally, he is out of my distant past.
Back when we both were younger – I guess, I am about seven years older
than him – we used to run together when we would meet, by chance, on the local cross
country trail. The other night, it had been so long since I had seen him I
had to ask him his name again.
Shaun. That’s right. We ran well together back then. Our pace was similar, only he had more
stamina than me. Like no hill or course
could stop him. The advice he gave me on
my running technique and even on how to stretch, I remember, was
invaluable. I was shocked at how little
I knew. I thought running was simply a
matter of going out and doing it, but, really, like an informal coach, Shaun
made me think about how to get the most out of my runs and, to be frank, much of
what he taught me I have retained ever since.
So it
was fun seeing him again. The other
night the moment our eyes met, we recognized each other and laughed at bumping
into one another twenty years later at – of all places – the Health and Fitness
Center – you know, the gym for broken down, old, athletic has-beens and now, way-over-weight
wan-a-bees – you know, people like me.
Shaun,
on the other hand, who is about 5-8 or 9, I guess, looked to be in good shape,
maybe 140 -150 pounds. He has the same
wiry build as I remembered him. Though
his brown hair is greyer, he now sports a cool goatee. That’s what I want if only I could grow one!
When I
asked Shaun if he still was running, feeling guilty for having stopped so long
ago and now only recently getting back into it, he shrugged his head ‘no’ and,
then, admitted with a slight smile and a roll of the eyes that he had had a
heart attack a few years back.
Wow! Shaun had a heart attack!
Turns
out, before his heart attack, during the period when I was living the slovenly
life slumbering on my couch, he had progressed from cross-country to mountain
climbing. He even went to Europe to
climb mountains there. He laughed at my
reaction, but said the mountains he climbed were the ones that most serious climbers
ignored.
Well, out
of the blue, back at home, Shaun has this massive heart attack and can't figure
out why – he’s in great shape, no history of heart attacks in his family, and
no warnings from his doctor. He fully
recovers, of course, and, now, several years later, he’s at the Health and
Fitness Center under the watchful eyes of the trained physical therapists. He says, in fact, he doesn’t have to be here, but he likes working out with older people.
As you
can imagine, Shaun says he now is super thoughtful in what he does – not only
with which aerobic machines he uses and how much weight he lifts but also, most
importantly, in what foods he puts into his body.
So here
is the point of this story: Shaun says because his doctors were at a loss as to
why this happened to him, he decides on his own to search the Internet for an
explanation. One night he discovers a
website that finally makes sense to him – the site says foreign “oils” in the
body can be a leading culprit of heart attacks; if you had a heart attack, it
strongly advocates removing all oils from the body to negate the risk of a second
one.
Shaun
says, no one, and I repeat, NO ONE who has eliminated oil from his or her body
has ever had a second heart attack – now, get this, IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND!
I am
impressed.
While
Shaun continues on and on about the bad attributes of oil, my mind contemplates
the history of mankind, going back to the Stone Age, and where one would find such
a dataset. Next to the Rosetta Stone? On a cave wall in southern France? To me, it is amazing even that statisticians were
around back then. How would they know
what a heart attack was, let alone a second one? Now that’s a quantum enigma!
Shaun interrupts
my thoughts.
‘Jonathan,
the bottom line is, all oils are fats, and you don’t want to eat fat, do you?’
Okay. Okay. Forget the Cro-Magnon or Mesopotamian statisticians
– ‘You’re right, oil is nothing more than liquefied, mummified, glorified fat.’
Listen,
I am the Pudge Man – as much a novice at this
stuff as can be found anywhere and still be alive to tell the tale. I am an innocent struggling in a sea of ghastly
germs and wiggly amoebas and gross tiny things, like fat cells and calories
sleeping slug-like under the skin. Now
I’m told, the sea consists of billions and billions of bubbly oil globules!
Ugh!
Hey, hear me, I never
said I knew anything about the human body.
My only encounter with
Health was back in eighth grade, and I would have flunked it if the high school
football coach, you know, Coach Asshole, hadn’t passed me.
Coach What-the-Fuck hated
me for being a screwball – “screwball,” in particular, was the word he used
when he kicked me out of class one afternoon and knocked me senseless against
the row of lockers along the school hallway.
“Do we understand each
other, Screwball,” he said to be sure I got his point.
When he hit me the first time, I was so surprised and so caught up in sucking for air, I
suspect I didn’t say anything, but I swear, after the second time, I totally
got his point. Still, he smacked me a
third time for emphasis – to which, by this point, I felt like passing out, desperate
for anyone who might save me from my health teacher.
Coach Crazy-as-a-Loon, obviously
hated verbal, pudgy kids who couldn’t listen to complex directions, like “Hey,
you in the back, shut the hell up!”
Nevertheless, at the end of the year, he passed
me. In truth, though, I still couldn’t tell a
thighbone from a hambone, even being handed a chart comparing the human
body to a pig.
My point is, forty-eight
years later (give or take what age I was back then), I simply don't know anything about
oil, never thought about it, good or evil.
However, that night, on Shaun’s advice, I decide to cut “oil” from my
diet.
Well, when I arrive home
that night, to prove my new commitment to my wife, I pull out the salad that
has been sitting for a week in the refrigerator and rather than reaching for
the ranch dressing, I pour on it balsamic vinegar, which has been sitting next
to the stove for, like, forever. Most
noticeably, as far as my wife is concerned, I put no oil onto the salad at all
– no olive oil, no vegetable oil, no motor oil – no oil what-so-ever! I am so proud of myself; I can see she is
impressed too! That is, until I discover
– balsamic vinegar by itself is horrible – on top of the bitter taste, it
stinks! This must be what a kitchen smells like in Istanbul!
Consequently, I swear
off salads! No oils. No salads – that’s it!
Okay. Okay. This story is not about salad dressing. Another quantum enigma!
My story is about this:
PEANUT BUTTER, god's very own nectar.
That night, after
throwing out the salad, I resolve to cut peanut butter from my life.
Shaun emphatically
points out that peanut butter, the very same stuff that I have eaten and loved every
day of my life, is stuffed full of oil – and oil equates to fat – peanut butter,
therefore, to be blunt, is nothing more than peanut-disguised fat!
Suddenly, at the gym I
have an epiphany, I realize, given my age, peanut butter fat must be
everywhere my body! Like a layer of
skin: dermis, epidermis, peanut butter – Oh… my… god! If we knew this throughout the HISTORY OF
MANKIND, why didn’t someone tell me?
Maybe it’s in the Old
Testament. I don’t know. I haven’t read the Bible, so shoot me.
Eliminating peanut
butter is a major change in my life, a personal quantum enigma through
and through!
I have lived the
greatest moments of my life with peanut butter:
when I first met my wife, I swear, I had been running my finger through
a jar at the time. When we
were married, brown peanut butter residue was under my fingernails. When my daughter, Helen, was born, I was pulling
crunchy peanut butter nuggets out of my teeth even while personally sweating
though my wife’s twenty-four hours of labor.
AND, besides, it’s not
just about me. I know for a fact, I am
the only one keeping George Washington Carver's bones from turning into dust! Yes, the very same man who discovered two
billion uses for the peanut just so I could have a happy childhood and a oil-filled,
high-caloried lifestyle most of my life.
This, then, is the
ultimate quantum enigma: if peanut butter is so bad for you, why did George
Washington Carver find so many uses for mankind, and now, even more significantly,
now what do I eat?
Shaun says he eats lots
of honey. He says he takes a tablespoon
every night. He says I would be smart to
start eating honey too!
I hate honey. What is honey but a syrupy, gooey, messy,
sugary, liquidity substance that is like nature’s very own Elmer’s Glue. When honey gets on something, that “thing”
becomes sticky and hard to deal with and often you discover that, on its own, that
little bit of honey, which you thought you had under control, has gotten onto -
and into - other stuff too, all sorts of
stuff. Stuff that your wife says, “Why
is this stuff so sticky?”
It’s like being found
out after being alone in the kitchen!
Honey, in reality, I
swear, is not a sugar at all. It’s only
bee-discharge. Why would I want to eat
bee discharge?
So, here I am, “Mister Quantum
Enigma" in the flesh.
Between the debate over
the value of my aerobic exercise classes, the struggle with my weight gain, the
realization that oil is lurking around out there giving cool guys like Shaun
heart attacks, and now the ongoing argument over peanut butter, which I have
known and loved, versus honey, which I have not, I am setting up for a massive heart
attack myself, or, rather, a brain aneurism. Jeez, this health stuff
is killing me.
Thank god, I go to the
Health and Fitness Center. Get the
jumper cables ready!
Karen listens to my
argument and says I can't espouse/embrace the
"oil-free" lifestyle as I am totally out of my league. She says I have no idea of what I’m
doing. I can’t even list my favorite
foods that are horribly bad for me, let alone identify what substance has oil in
it and what doesn’t. She wants to know
if I have ever read a nutrition label? She says, I’ve never seen a ‘sell by date’ that didn’t seem like a good
time to buy, so why should she expect I would know anything about trans-fats
and no fats and fatty fats and fats that follow you home handed to you by enthusiastic
little girls in brownie outfits…
Anyhow,
my wife! She’s got me to thinking – who knows
anything anymore.
Maybe,
in fact, Shaun is caught up in a quack program on the Internet designed to give
heart attack victims hope that they still can climb mountains.
Maybe,
Shaun needs to live his own life ‘– and butt out of your’s.’ – so says my wife.
Maybe, just
in case he is right, I’ll continue my resolve not to eat peanut butter.
Maybe,
to keep my brain from bursting, I’ll stop with the tablespoons of honey.
Maybe, finally
– now that I’m approaching sixty – Pudgy Me is on the move to better health.
Maybe,
even, I’ll read a book on human anatomy.
Ack!
On second thought… maybe not.
Ah, there's
that quantum enigma again!
****
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