I used to be able to eat & drink with relative impunity. Really, it was a gift. I was rail-thin for most of my life. Then I crossed the perilous rubicon of 40 and stuff started to change. My metabolism slowed down. Nowadays, if left blithely unchecked by my vanity, conscience & better judgment, it's entirely possible for me to gain an unseemly amount of weight. By no means am I suggesting that this problem is mine alone, but it's still a bummer. Aging sucks.
If I had to guess, however, I'd suggest that the biggest contributor to my gain in the gut area has to do with the shimmering, golden divinity that is beer. While I periodically take efforts to curtail my enthusiastic basking in beer's benevolent splendor, I have yet to swear it off completely. This puts me in an odd place, for how does one battle what is essentially a beer gut without giving up the beer?
Time was when I had the time and financial resources to go to the gym. Two children later, however, those days are long over, as are my opportunities to ride my bike (although I'm planning on making time for that again, now that the weather's gotten warmer). Since writing a strikingly similar post back in 2008, I've been walking the forty-someodd blocks to and from work. It's a nice bit of exercise, but hardly "high impact." I also recently resumed the practice of getting salads for lunch. I've never been especially fond of eating salad. Having just a salad for lunch, to me, is like a sentence with plenty of adjectives, but no noun. It makes no sense and feels unfinished. Still, the gut has got to go.
As that there's no scale in our house (we had one, but it broke and we've yet to replace it), I honestly have no idea how much I currently weigh or if I've actually made even the slightest dent in that enigmatic number since taking these various steps. I only have the mirror to work with, and the reality depicted therein can radically differ depending on one's disposition at the time. Being that I generally assume the worst (my unofficial motto is basically: "when in doubt, WORRY!"), I've begrudgingly soldiered on in my salad campaign. Instead of grabbing a burger or a big, heaping bowl of lamb & whatever from the local halal cart, I head over to the antiseptic "Digby's" on West 52nd street and get a tossed salad (and by that, I'm talking specifically about mixed greens with chick peas, black olives, sprouts and maybe some tomatoes, ya pervs!) Throw on some dressing and BOOM!, there's my lunch.
So, there I am, eating my salad over my lunch hour earlier this week, and I stumble upon an illuminating interview on Vice with longtime Flaming Pablum favorite, Glenn Danzig. The interviewer was a gent named Sam McPheeters, former vocalist of early 90's hardcore band, Born Against. A bit of a wisenheimer, McPheeters somehow engaged the lovably frowny Danzig in a discussion about his diet. Out of nowhere, McPheeters admits that he eats a salad for lunch and "wakes up everyday feeling like a wet bag of sand." In heroic style, Glenn counters with a blackened brick of Luciferian wisdom that pretty much makes me choke on my chick peas: "Salad is terrible if you put creamy crap on it."
I looked down into my salad bowl and saw my otherwise earthy greens positively slathered in a viscous ranch dressing that looked more like the emptied contents of a bottle of White Out. I felt ashamed and like, well, less of a man.
Now, I don't read diet books or regularly keep up with famous nutritionists. I couldn't possibly give less of a crap about what Jamie Oliver has to say about changing America's pig-headed palette, however well-intentioned. The swiftest means of losing my attention is to start lecturing me on the merits of a healthy diet. But godammit, WHEN GLENN DANZIG SAYS YOU NEED TO EAT SALADS WITHOUT CREAMY DRESSING, BY GOD, YOU LISTEN TO THE MAN!
And that's why I now take my salads with Balsamic Vinaigrette. Thanks, Glenn. Incidentally, you can read the full Vice interview with Glenn by clicking right here. Hail Satan.
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