Cutting Loose Some Ballast

Dunking a basketball involves being airborne, and things that fly are typically light weight. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when, after just a couple of workouts with Gil Thomas, the dunkmaster of Dunk Dreams, I was told I needed to shed a few pounds.

I never had to think much about my weight before and I certainly had never dieted. I was 6-foot-1 and a shade over 200 pounds (202, I believe) when I started working out with Gil. I was always basically fit. A woman at the Al-Anon meeting I used to attend regularly (that's a topic for another blog, believe me) actually thought I was a retired professional baseball player. But Gil wanted me lighter. There's no way I could get far enough off the ground at my current weight, he said. Which initially didn't make sense to me. Jumbo jets fly, and I didn't weigh nearly as much as one of those. But then, jumbo jets have huge engines and I have two skinny little legs, so I was beginning to see Gil's point.

Thus began my first experience with an actual, honest-to-God diet. At Gil's urging, I eventually settled on the South Beach Diet. I got the book. It's about 300 or 400 pages, and I'm sure the authors want you to read every word of it, but I had no use for the theory behind the diet. I just wanted to know what I was supposed to eat and what I wasn't. From what I could tell, it basically came down to no bread, no potatoes, no rice.

Well, I'm a meat lovin' man, so I figured this diet wouldn't aggravate me too much. And, actually, it hasn't. Except for one thing. I have always loved the sandwich. I would say that the sandwich is my favorite thing to eat, be it a hamburger, a hoagie or a hero. Sandwiches, of course, have bread as one of their main ingredients. Initially I substituted lettuce leaves for the bread, and that worked okay for a while. But I grew impatient with the process of peeling the leaves off the head of lettuce. The damn things kept ripping and I'd find myself virtually shredding an entire head of lettuce just to get two suitable leaves for my sandwich. So now I've settled on just eating the stuff that goes in the middle of the sandwich. I have by no means been a South Beach saint--I still have the occasional piece of pizza (I have two kids, age 14 and 9, so ... there's pizza), and once in a great while a donut (they haven't found a way to make those out of lettuce, thank the Lord in heaven)--but somehow I have managed to plummet to 190 pounds. I haven't been that weight since I was in college. When I first saw that number on the scale a couple of months ago, I was ecstatic. Gil's reaction? "Let's get you down to 185."