Sure, I could look good … if I could go back in time 40 years

Photo courtesy of Pxhere and provided uner the auspices of a Creative Commons license.

I’ve been told I would look good if I just lost a hundred pounds, colored my hair chestnut brown, Botoxed my wrinkles into baby-butt oblivion and bleached away all those liver spots.

In other words, go back in time 40 years.

Unfortunately I don’t have a flux capacitor bolted to a Delorean, so I guess I’ll keep on being my potbellied, white-haired, wrinkled and spotted old self – until I become something worse. At that point I hope somebody trundles me out to the mulch pit where I can be recycled as a whimpering yew.

Of all those changes, the one I’d want to see happen is the weight loss. But that’s about as likely as Marty McFly actually hooking up with the 1955 version of his mother. They don’t tell you this when you’re 25, but 40 years hence the only way you lose weight is if they start lopping off body parts, and I still use most of my body parts, not including the one between my ears.

 For most of my life I maintained a svelte 145 pounds. What was my secret?

I worked at a high-stress job.

I jogged.

I played tennis.

I smoked cigarettes.

I drank lite beer.

I didn’t eat.

I sometimes threw up what I did eat.

I mainlined caffeine.

Not exactly the stuff of TV doctor diet manuals.

For most of my childhood I was Chunk, the chunky boy of “The Goonies.” My jeans size was “husky” – 1960s polite for “fat.” At my biggest I reached a jiggly 190 pounds. Then something happened.

I was playing tennis when one of the guys jokingly asked why I never took off my shirt. “Because I’m fat,” I said. They goaded me into taking off my shirt, and when I did, the same guy said, “Wow, you really are fat!” I hold nothing against him for saying that because he was right. I really was fat. I knew it, and it embarrassed me, and I was ashamed – so ashamed I vowed right then and there to do something about it, something more than promising to do something tomorrow and then surrendering to the next box of Cocoa Puffs that mysteriously landed in my shopping cart. This is what I did:

I eliminated sugary soft drinks from my diet.

I switched to lite beer.

I quit eating three meals per day – I limited myself to one.

I started an exercise program which included jogging.

I cut out carby snacks – I was no longer cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

The first week nothing happened except my blood pressure went up when I climbed aboard the scales and the little needle failed to go in the opposite direction. In fact, I think it went up just a smidge, evoking curses and imprecations.

But eventually it started falling and that became the routine. I would plateau for a week, cuss a lot, and then the weight would go down. I never knew you could burn so many calories using the F-word.

I continued to lose weight until people began asking if I had a life-threatening disease. At one point I dropped to 139 pounds, which was too low. I evened out at about 145. That seemed to represent an acceptable balance between starvation and looking less like a stranded marine mammal.

The most fun of losing weight is buying new clothes. Out went the fat pants, the big-and-tall shorts and the “husky” jeans. In came the Calvin Kleins, obscenely short Fila tennis shorts and cropped tops. Yes, we’re talking the ’80s. That’s how far back I have to go to find 145 pounds.

I remained at that weight, give or take 5 pounds, until I reached age 50. Then, several things happened.

I noticed when I set out to jog, my knees crackled like a string of Black Cat firecrackers exploded to celebrate National Arthritic Knees Day. I now began to understand why all those old codgers I played tennis with wore knee braces. My knees felt like my head after a night of mixing Natty Lites with Irish Wakes. One day, the pain of jogging became impossible to overcome and I stopped. I had seen too many people go through knee-replacement surgery and I wanted nothing to do with it.

I also noticed it took a lot more effort to get my “metabolism” revved up. My body was permanently stuck in low idle. One cannot lose weight when the body is stuck in first gear.

My 32-inch waist pants had long gone the way of the dinosaurs, but now my 34-inch pants were feeling “snug,” which is a nice way of saying they cut off the circulation to my head. I knew that if I graduated to 36s my life as a trim guy would be gone forever, but the pain became too great, or maybe the lack of oxygen to my brain convinced me to embrace the inevitable. After that I ballooned out to my current zeppelin-like proportions.

At my heaviest – this would be the Go-Ahead-And-Buy-The-Craft-Beer-You-Only-Live-Once phase – I topped out at 269 pounds. My flab was complaining about its flab. I needed a sawhorse to hold up my belly.

Which leads me to my current weight-loss effort. At age 65 I probably won’t shed many pounds, but if I could get below 200 one more time in my life – and if the Miami Dolphins could win one more Super Bowl – I could die a happy man. Well, maybe not happy. But a thinner Dolphin fan at least. So I am trying to eliminate some of the things that pile on the pounds – diet sodas, cookies, cereal that I treat like popcorn, starchy carbs – in other words, everything I enjoy eating and drinking. I walk a couple of miles per day and I am adding more exercises as we gasp for breath. I am trying to ramp up my “metabolism” or what remains of it – without ramping up my blood pressure or my appetite. Again, easy to do when you’re 23 years old and can work all day, party all night and survive on a single Cheeto.

And what will I do when I am newly svelte? Hit the dating scene? Go after that Abercrombie & Fitch modeling contract?

I haven’t thought that far ahead. More likely I’ll be a skinny guy falling asleep at 8 o’clock and dreaming of IPAs and cheeseburgers. I may be miserable, but at least I’ll look good being miserable.

To paraphrase Carly Simon, isn’t that the way we’ve always heard it should be?

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .