Blankenship: A vow to shed pounds, beat dog days

Sadly, the sun still isn’t done with us this summer. Not content to fry us thus far in 2010, which they say has been the hottest since I don’t know when, it’s due to grind on as usual, until the Redskins kickoff their first game that counts.

As if the heat isn’t enough to make this year so forgettable, beyond the Democrats and their oil spill and their terrible new laws, there’s a personal travail of mine that’s become even worse lately.

I hate to even raise the subject, but it’s bad. No, it’s not my wordy prose in these columns, droning on relentlessly now for over 15 years. Rather, it’s something much more personal.

Not age, either. True, the eyesight is dimming, the cognitive impairment worsening to the extent I have trouble completing a spoken comment without stumbling for the name of someone or something, and my back aching — becoming “chronic,” a synonym for normal anyhow after 75. And lastly, it’s no medication’s side effect of mine that’s lasted over four hours.

Rather, it’s a malady everyone agrees is a national problem, one I notice most people obviously share. Obesity. It’s mine and I hate it.

Visiting the doctor the other day, he made me step on the scales: 255, but including the belt, shoes, pocket contents and insufficiently exhaled breath.

That tonnage approaches the worst ever for me. If I were really tall, like friend and fellow columnist Dave Kerr, and if I worked out as often, it might not be so bad.

True, at six feet and a large frame, I can still conceal, with clever clothes, the ugly (and I do not exaggerate) truth. And, to keep the back spasms minimal, I regularly work out on machines that hurt like heck at Sport and Health on 610.

You see, my lifelong problem is that I truly enjoy eating, pretty much anything in fact. Back when I played high school football and the local newspaper labeled me “heavy timber” (215 then was notable), that wasn’t so bad. I never lacked for dates.

And after marriage, I once went on a diet and proclaimed “210 never again.” That discipline endured for approximately six months.

The purpose of my embarrassing public confessional is to put it on paper and thus discipline my food consumption with an eye to composing a future column, “See, if I can do it, anyone can”

Granted, ridicule and not exemplary example may be the main outcome, but I hereby pledge that by Christmas I will have lost some weight, and that I will then report how much. Specific enough? No public commitments beyond the bowl games, though. Baby steps, anything to get started, right?

My secret? And it’s worked before: Eat less, stay hungry. Suffer.

That goes for me and my loved ones here at home who’ll offer encouragement and/or ridicule as personal discipline ebbs and flows depending on my moods and the tastiness of whatever I can get my hands on. Stay tuned.

Ben Blankenship is an Aquia Harbour resident and career journalist. Reach him at Benblanken@aol.com. Editor’s Note: Ben’s “secret” should not be taken as advice and does not reflect the opinion of the Stafford County Sun.