Losing the battle of the bulge

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist
One sure sign that you're an old codger is when you're more interested in watching a Clay Henry commercial than reading news about or watching TV about Clay Aiken.
I really know virtually nothing about the latter, who is on some ridiculous TV show called American Idol and keeps popping up on the front page of a newspaper I shall not name.
I haven't watched the TV show and don't expect I ever will, but then I am quite sure the intended market for that program is most assuredly not old gray-haired codgers like me.
I know who Clay Henry is because I want to do what he did -- shed many pounds of lard.

From a spare tire to a dually

If you've met me in the flesh, you know there's a whole lot of it. I don't have a spare tire around my middle, I'm a dually, which is what they call a pickup truck with four rear tires. I've got one on each side of what's supposed to be my waist and two more you can view if you should be unlucky enough to be southward from my carcass when I'm headed north.
I've been fighting the battle of the bulge for more than two decades, and so far my results have been about the same as the Germans' last big push in World War II -- initial success but then I end up right back where I was before, a growing likeness to the Goodyear blimp.
But there is hope.
My sweet wife has got both of us on the Atkins Diet, which has got to be a glutton's dream. I get to eat protein, meat and eggs and other good stuff, and even fat, like genuine Ranch dressing on your salads. Of course there's no sweets and few if any carbohydrates.
Man cannot live by bread alone, and if you're on the Atkins Diet, you get no bread at all.
But I've tried and failed at a lot of other diets that were a whole lot worse than this one, so I have hope that at long last I've found a way to get back to a relatively slim 200 pounds -- and stay there.

Oh, for the good ol' days of 205

I want to turn back the clock -- bulkwise -- to 1971, when I had just finished a year in the Persian Gulf on my last tour in Uncle Sam's Navy. I spent most of that year hiding inside an air-conditioned ship because it was so ungodly hot there you couldn't survive outside. Maybe the Arabs could, but I couldn't.
I was stationed on a ship on Bahrain Island, which is between Iran and Saudi Arabia, where the average daily high was 120 to 130 degrees during summer, which lasted about 11 and a half months. It had two weeks of winter when the temperature dropped below 70.
After that, we put the blue wool uniforms away again and went back to tropical whites -- or less if we could get away with it. Hands down that was the hottest year of my entire life.
Even the Arabs stayed inside during the day and only came out at night when it cooled. So I spent that year sitting on my ever-spreading posterior. When I was sent back to the states for discharge, I weighed in for my last physical at 205 pounds and thought, "Boy, you are so fat you have to go through a door sideways."
Storm Thurmond once saw a good-looking woman and sighed, "Oh, to be 90 again." I harken back to 1971 and muse, "Oh, to be 205 again."
I've been up and down the scale several times over the last couple of decades since my weight started going up in my 30s, and every time coming back down grows more difficult.
I hope and pray the late Dr. Atkins' plan will be my salvation. Here's hoping and praying that the next time you see me, there'll be less of me to see. A whole lot less of me to see.