World news is just depressing. It’s time for some lighter fare. This one is pretty much all about my favourite subject – myself. Feel free to ignore it if you wish. 

            December 2023 was a miserable month for me. I caught a terrible cold. Tested negative for Covid, which was a damn shame, because when I had Covid I was over it in about five days. This goddamn bug hung on forever. I was planted in my La-Z-Boy for the entire month, and into early January. And I coughed and I coughed and I coughed. At one point late in the month I had a coughing spasm and I felt something pop sharply in my lower left abdomen. I thought “Damn, I’ve pulled a muscle.” Several months later I still had this dull ache down near my groin and it would be getting painful near the end of a round of golf. A short and quite personal examination by my old friend Don McCulloch confirmed what I suspected – this was a hernia. Which proves that it’s true – you can bust a gut coughing.

            In January, I visited the Shouldice Clinic in Thornhill, just north of Toronto. For those who are unaware, the Shouldice Clinic specializes in hernia repairs. It’s all they do and they are famous for it. The examining surgeon told me that Don was right – it’s an inguinal (groin) hernia and it will never get better on its own. Since it wasn’t terribly painful, I could choose to ignore it and hope it doesn’t get worse.  But if it does get worse, especially if you’ve let a few years go by, it will be a lot harder to fix. I agreed to go under the knife. I was good with all of that. It was almost exactly as I’d expected.

            What I wasn’t expecting was that I’d be told I ought to lose close to fifteen pounds to be ready for the operation. I’ve been playing hockey three times a week and going to the gym two or three days a week on top of that and I figured I was in pretty decent shape for an old fart. I weighed in at 185 lbs and he told me I should get down to at least 172. Then he gave me a diet card, made that buah-haw-haw sound that evil geniuses make, and kicked me out. I wound up with about ten weeks to lose fifteen pounds.

            Here’s the diet they gave me.

It wasn’t all awful. You can see that it was mostly a low carbohydrate diet. I was allowed meat and eggs in reasonable enough quantities. I found that I didn’t mind yogurt with blueberries and chopped pecans for breakfast. Grapefruit is delicious, about half-a-basketball big, and still counts as just one fruit. I actually ate a lot more breakfast eggs than I’d been habitually eating. I ate a lot of carrots and celery sticks and tomatoes with perhaps some kielbasa and cheese for lunch, and I’ll probably keep doing that. It makes a damn good lunch.

Of course, I cheated a little bit here and there. Perhaps a second slice of bread sometimes, or two pieces of fruit in a day when I was feeling especially rebellious. And if we decided to eat out with friends, the diet just went on hold for an evening. But fundamentally I followed it fairly closely.

What was hard? Well, I insist that I’m not an alcoholic. But it turns out that I really do like wine or beer with my dinner. And I really hated not hanging around the hockey dressing room after our games for pizza and beer. I mean I could have hung around and sipped water and watch 21 other guys enjoying pizza and beer, but I found that really hard to do.

I bought a few zero alcohol beers to try and found them actually fairly good. The Guinness Zero tastes a lot like the real thing, and it’s only 60 calories a can, not 150. But I stopped buying them because I didn’t need the 60 calories either, and I stuck with water and tea or coffee. 

I was drinking milk for the first couple of weeks. Then I looked it up.  Milk has more calories than beer! Pissed me off. Milk may be better on your cereal, but for most other purposes, beer is better.

The other thing?  I wouldn’t have described myself as an habitual evening snacker, but it turns out I am. I have the snack habit for sure. Tea after supper was almost always accompanied by cookies or a piece of pie or perhaps a peanut butter sandwich.  Or nuts. Or hickory sticks or potato chips. Or…you get the picture. I wasn’t able to stop snacking altogether, but I converted to a small bowl of mixed nuts instead of all those sweets. But whenever I was playing euchre on Wednesday nights with my card group, my hand kept dipping to the bowl of potato chips or cashews like a goddamn metronome.

My operation was scheduled for the 4^th of April. By Apr 1^st, I’d gotten my weight down there. In fact, I went past the target a bit. I’m now down to almost exactly the weight I was when I graduated high school in 1970, at 164 lbs. 

Here’s the weight loss graph.

I regularly eat too damn much at Christmas time, including lots of home-made shortbread cookies (I’ll put my shortbreads up against anyone’s) and lots of Mill Creek chocolate. And every year I put on the best part of ten pounds. So, every year I come off Christmas determined to lose some weight. And every year I lose a few pounds – I get down from around 190 to perhaps 185 by the end of hockey season. Then in the summer, cycling and golf melts off another couple of pounds, and I might get down to 182 or thereabouts.  

This experience was different for me. It might work for you too, if you’d like to go skinnier. Here’s what made it different:

First, this time I had a target. 13 pounds had to come off by April 4^th. Concrete. Not some vague intention of dropping a few pounds, but a number and a timeline to shoot for.

Second, I had a tool. Maybe the diet I was given isn’t the one for you. (Please note the caution on this diet that says you should get advice on what might work for you. Don’t just automatically use this diet). But if you have a target you’d better have a plan for how to achieve that target. I’d almost certainly have failed without this detailed diet plan.

Third, for me at least it was very important to be tracking data. We science geek types are all the same. We love a trend graph. That graph was very important to keep me focused on the task at hand.  Let me explain how I managed the data tracking. I got up every morning, went to the bathroom, eliminated every last ounce of waste I could, and then weighed myself. That weight, which I call the BBAP weight (Before Breakfast, After Pee) is the lowest weight I’d likely achieve every day, which sounds like cheating. But it also creates a consistent set of circumstances to prevent the number bouncing around too much. Even so, as you can see from the graph, there’s a lot of fluctuation. When they weigh me in at the hospital, it will be after breakfast and fully clothed, so that will add about five pounds, so I really need to get down to 167 pounds or less on my BBAP (naked) weight.

Fourth, trust me, you’ll feel the difference. I can feel the difference when I play hockey. It feels like I have a little extra jump in my step. So, feeling good about feeling good helped keep me on track.

Will I stay this skinny? No chance. I plan beer and pizza for the first day I’m back home and there might be have to be pie for dessert. But I think I’m going to keep weighing myself daily and tracking the results and anytime my weight gets over perhaps 175 (or maybe 180, says the little devil on my left shoulder), I’ll be back on the diet. 

Today is April 4^th. D-day. I’ve been up since 5:45, dressed in that silly gown that ties at the back, with pants that would fit nicely on a Hereford, a hair net and foot covers. I’ve been shaved “down there”, and pricked for blood sugar. Surgery is set for 07:20. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Skip to April 7^th. I’m home now, having been released from the Shouldice Hospital yesterday morning. The Shouldice Hospital was great – fine medical care, nice patient lounges with pool table and shuffleboard, nice grounds for walking in, and vacation resort quality food, with no expectations about keeping me to a diet. If it wasn’t for that nasty habit of slicing every customer deeply in the gut, I’d call it a great vacation spot. 

Everything went well with the surgery, they told me. It’s a good thing they told me that, because I probably wouldn’t have been so complimentary. The first time after the surgery that they tried to get me up to walk I nearly passed out, and recorded a blood pressure reading of 68/50. After some more IV fluids we got past that. Which got us to the walking part.

 It friggin’ hurt! The muscles in my abdomen are presenting a deep dull ache all the time, and every now and then I get a hot burning sensation like someone is tugging on the end of my incision. And I sneezed three times today. That’s an experience, let me tell you! However, yesterday was much better than Saturday, and today is better than yesterday, and I’m grateful for a medical care system that we have in Canada. So, I’m doing well enough. Thank you to the many people who wished me well going into this little adventure.

I apologize to anyone who hoped to get anything meaningful from reading this item.

Dennis