exercising my demons

Like Willie Nelson, I am on the road again.

Several of you picked up on a clue I embedded in thread three of stirring the pot. In July, my doctor diagnosed one of those medical conditions that can be serious if not taken seriously. And when taken seriously, it is just plain annoying.

I say "annoying," because the cure is something we know we should all be doing. All of the time. Eating healthy and getting out of the house to exercise (or, often in my case, going upstairs).

Everyone loves taking pot shots at the American diet. It is easy to see why. As a people, we make fat targets.

You may think the OECD is just a nosy parker when it comes to education (taking AMLO to school). But the group is watching you in ways you never imagined. The 36 member richer-country organization keeps track of our cumulative weight. Its 2017 "Obesity Update" is larded with interesting morsels.

The United States easily tips the scales as the fatty rich nation. But it is closely followed by Mexico, New Zealand, Hungary, Australia the United Kingdom, and Canada. It almost makes you wonder if speaking English may have something to do with causing the scale numbers to spin like a slot machine.

But, the United States better not rest on its couch. Mexico is right on its slow-moving heels, and its rate of increasing girth is faster than that north of the border.

If you put the OECD list of obesity next to a list of diabetes prevalence, an interesting correlation appears.

That sentence is what a professor of rhetoric would call a distortion of numbers. The top 23 countries on the diabetes prevalence list are not OECD members, but they do have eye-watering rates of diabetes. It is not until we get to number 24 that the first OECD country appears.

And that country is Mexico -- with the United States in 43rd place.

No one should be surprised. The connection between obesity, diabetes, and the ingestion of a diet grouped around carbohydrates and other sugars has long been known -- for Mexico, think tortillas, for the United States think dinner rolls.

As long as I can remember, my doctors have told me to cut back on carbohydrates to improve my health. Of course, I chose not to listen. The pretzels and bizarrely-flavored potato chips were far too tempting.

Even though I knew intellectually that eating those carbohydrates would come to no good, the pleasure outweighed some future bad consequence. Yeah. I know. That is exactly what an alcoholic or methamphetamine addict would say. I heard that justification a lot in professional and personal conversations. But I never applied that common sense to my own life.

Several years ago, I was sitting on a couch with my mother at my brother's ranch watching a movie. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her glance at me and then look back at the screen. The next time she looked over, I asked: "What?"

In an eerily unmodulated voice, she recited in iambic pentameter like one of Macbeth's witches: "If you do not lose sixty pounds soon, you will die a terrible death."

I was somewhat taken aback as she swiveled her head back to the movie. "Oh, gypsy woman," said I, "Do you see anything else in your crystal ball?"

I tell that story not because my mother was correct (she was), but to illustrate a point about me. There is something in me that relates to the monarch in House of Cards: "I do not react well to bullying."

The most obvious example was the nurse Ratched in a Bend emergency room several years ago. I had gone to the hospital for unusually high blood pressure.

For eight hours, I was hooked up to all sorts of medical equipment while the medical staff pretended to be doing something. Occasionally, someone would show up to drain more fluids for additional tests. (It turned out that I had taken the wrong medication. But none of the highly-trained professionals caught it, even when they looked at my medication.)

Nurse Ratched would return repeatedly to give me a lecture about how I was undoubtedly diabetic and I needed to come to the altar of good health for salvation. When my brother asked her for the test results showing I was diabetic, she responded: "I don't need test results. I know what they will be. I can see he is diabetic." And here I was thinking I was jolly.

After about the seventh lecture, I told her: "My greatest fear in life is being seated next to someone like you at a dinner party who thinks that life can be reduced to a series of numbers." She left in a moral huff.

As we were leaving the hospital, my brother asked the nurse for the results of my blood test. She said, "Oh. They show no diabetes now. But I know you have it." Her approach was not persuasive.

Even though I know some people are extremely free with their advice (and some of it is good), I hear nothing if a sentence starts with "You need to --." My reaction is usually, "I need to live my own life and you need to mind your own business."

Of course, I do not say that out loud. I still have enough Canadian DNA in me that I sometimes opt for being nice over being frank. But, I suspect the expression on my face conveys the thought because there are usually no follow-on suggestions.

I am also never persuaded by political arguments when it comes to health -- even though they may be positions I hold myself. Politics simply is not a guiding passion for me.

Tirades against "big government," "secret cabals," "the medical-industrial complex," "monopolistic food practises," "brainwashing by big business," "evil pharma" may be true in some form or other, but none of that is going to persuade me to eat more healthily. That rhetoric may motivate some people. I am not one of them.

My friend Leo was the first person who discussed health with me who understood what motivated me. He had reduced his weight to his high school level by changing his daily diet and walking four miles each morning.

I ate the wrong foods because they gave me pleasure. I had so bought the "live in the moment" philosophy touted as Mexico's gift to humanity that I started living that meme cliché that frequently litters my Facebook account: “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body. But rather, to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up,totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: 'WOW! What a ride.'”

Leo was wise enough to point out that revising my daily diet and regular exercise would be fun. Healthy food can be good food. He remembered I was a good cook. I could find lots of ways to be creative with healthy ingredients that would keep me interested in sticking to a new way of eating.

As for the exercise, he started me out on his daily walks. He knew me in college, and knew that I enjoyed solitary exercise. Back then, it was running.

He was correct. Walking is fun. Even though I may get a bit obsessive with it.

So, I am now eating better. I am regularly exercising. During the past four months, I have lost in excess of thirty pounds (well below the demands of the Gypsy Woman, mind you), my blood pressure is that of a fit twenty-year old, and my blood sugar is normal. At the suggestion of Nancy over at Countdown to Mexico, I am experimenting with intermittent fasting (a 16-hour program) to break through the weight loss plateau I have been on for the past month.

As we were warned in the original Star Wars, "The Jundland Wastes are not to be traveled lightly."

If I ever become one of those zealot converts who constantly pushes their new lifestyle into other people's faces, please call me on it. Or just put me out of my mercy.

This is my second attempt at altering my diet (the most important part of enjoying my new life). And it is sticking. Probably because I have a good incentive now to make it work.

If you see a grizzled guy with a white beard singing on our local walk paths, that is not me. He is Willie Nelson.  I will be the guy walking along at 4 MPH enjoying life in Mexico.

A lot more.