I Had a Dream

Would you like to hear my dream? Of course not, unless, perhaps it is the Martin Luther King, Junior kind. If it’s comprised of the hallucinational images I awoke with in the middle of the night, of course you do NOT want to hear my dream. A couple of weeks ago I updated my Facebook status with this comment:

Passover song parodies are like certain bodily aromas. It's hard to take someone else's, but your own seems fine. I didn't like a version of Take Me Out to the Ballgame I saw, so I wrote my own. Seems fine to me. 

And then, of course I offered the words to my song parody for all to groan at, like someone else's flatus.

It seems there are a lot of words one can insert in place of “Passover song parodies” in the snippet above. “Dreams” is one. “Diet plans” may be another. As I move inexorably closer to the beginning of my next major life improvement project I become increasingly nervous that I will find myself talking incessantly about its demands and ramifications as friends and family desperately edge backwards out of the room. With each step they take toward the exit I am afraid that I will follow pontificating that, “It isn’t a diet actually, it’s a life style change. Here, let me tell you more!”

All of that is understandable, perhaps even admirable. For one thing, as I learned in one famous weekend transformational seminar that, like dreams and diet plans, the mere mention of sends people scurrying like pigeons running from a four-year old, it is important to talk about your goals with others. They called it “enrolling” others in one’s vision. I call it trying to convince oneself by trying to convince others. The more people one tells about one’s intentions, the more pressure one puts on oneself to live up to those intentions. No doubt there is truth to that, only why should other people have to suffer?

Setting aside the power of “enrolling” for a moment, there is also the issue of how one avoids, in the course of polite conversation, mentioning what is likely to be the most all consuming topic in one’s life at the moment. Am I thinking that I will embark on a “life style changing” campaign that requires my abstaining from eating almost all manner of food for six months and somehow not mention it to the people with whom I would normally enjoy both food and their company (which often focuses on the topic of food)? The subject has to come up.

My conclusion is that I will feed my soul, even as I “deprive” my body, by blogging a bit about this journey from obesity to fitness. If I find myself in a situation where I feel compelled to speak about the Medical Weight Management Program at Kaiser Permanente to someone not affiliated with it or, bless her, to my longsuffering and supportive wife, I can merely say, “It’s a long story. If you are really interested read my blog.” That way I get to blather endlessly about how “I really don’t have any food cravings” and no one has to sneak out of the room. They can simply choose to read it or more likely not.

So, would you like to hear my dream? There was this huge cheesy New York pizza....