I’ve been dismayed about how difficult it is, when older, to lose weight. Of course I haven’t stopped eating, which may give me a clue as to the reasons for the difficulties. In fact yesterday….another community pig-out celebrating Memorial Day here at the Allegro Campground in Red Bay, where a couple hundred of us strays wait to get our respective motor homes worked on at the Tiffin factory….there was so much food on the various camp-tables that we could have easily fed a small Vietnamese village, assuming that the Vietnamese would find three kinds of cheesecake, for instance, to their liking. Well, the heck with the Vietnamese anyway….I found all three types to MY liking and there were only scraps left when all was said and done, with me doing more than my part.

This morning  I spent in dismayed conversation with Irene, having suffered the sticker-shock of the scale, which showed I had found a way to 211 pounds. My sausage-like self seems to evidence this creeping gain correctly; I haven’t been this round for some time. And I have to say I don’t care for it;  my (or perhaps “our”, given Irene has signed up to help) new goal is a comparatively svelte 180 by the time we get back to the Palm Creek Golf and RV Resort, our winter home, on or about November 1. And my “new” approach will be the Zone Diet, which, ever since oldest son Roy sent me three books on said subject for Christmas, I’ve been flirting with. By “flirting” I mean eating one Zone-favorable meal and then eating whatever the heck I feel like for the rest of the day. From here on out it will be more like marriage…a commitment…and less like dating, not to say that there’s anything bad about dating, of course. (If I can remember that far back correctly, I seem to recall I used to gain weight when dating, too…not that that has much to do with this subject.)

The Zone diet purports to be simple and may be, once you are into it. But to GET into it requires a little effort. Among other things it requires you to go through your kitchen and literally throw away (although they will allow “give away” to a local food bank, somewhat grudgingly) anything which is not Zone-worthy. This is most everything I’ve been eating up to this point, especially complex carbohydrates, which, it appears, push Insulin levels unpleasently and  promote not only Type Two Diabetise but Cancer, Dementia, Hernias and hairy palms, too. God knows how I’ve made it alive this far, but hopefully He will keep me alive during this next couple of months to see if I can benefit from what I already perceive is going to be a pain-in-the-ass program.

More to come…..