Recovering from dietary and fitness lapses

Hey, if you want to talk about overweight and exercise mistakes, you can call me the poster boy of bad health habits. How about a lazy lapse of more than 60 years? In high school more than two generations ago, I lettered in track, baseball and swimming. I was captain of our swim team when we won the state championships, including beating a bunch of college teams. When I went into the Navy less than a year later, I weighed a super-fit 145 pounds, just about right on a five-foot-nine-frame.

My weight and lack of exercise went up and down during my Navy time, depending on the food, activities and lack of both. When World War II ended, I sat around on a Philippine island for four months, mostly chowing down on blubber-producing food, griping and waiting to get home to go to college. When my first semester started, I weighed 175, took a heavy double major schedule and did no sports. Therefore, the pounds stayed on my expanded frame that way through my physically inactive and junk food college years.

Then, during my 40-year working career, I continued to do virtually nothing to push my fat butt away from the dining table or do any other significant exercise. Because some of my job duties involved producing conferences at resort hotels and setting up VIP banquets, I didn’t miss too many heavy meals nor heavier desserts, usually four or five of each a day. When I retired at age 65, I weighed 210, although I lied to everyone that it was only 199. I looked and felt awful.

We chose an Arizona city near the Saguaro National Forest for our retirement home. One of the great advantages was that there was an Olympic-sized lap pool within a hundred yards of my house, and the hot, hot desert climate allowed swimming 365 days a year. So, with the intent to survive into my sunset years, and to begin to recover from blubber, the old ex-swimmer went back into the water daily for the first time in more than 50 years.

On the first day, I swam one lap, then dragged my bulk up on the side of the pool and lay there like a beached whale. Probably also looking like one. Determined to jump back into my old high school practice routine, I returned to the pool day after day. I progressed from two laps to four to eight, and by the end of my first retirement month, I was doing 20. With a year, I was doing 40, and that is still my daily routine.

Of course, it wasn’t only daily lap swimming that helped me lose the weight. With the help of a doctor friend and my own common sense, I reduced my daily calorie intake from 3,000, and like the progress in the pool, I brought down to 2,500, then 2,000 and finally to around 1,400. I knocked off all my old blubbery eating habits, and worked up a healthy diet of fresh and raw fruits and veggies, and small servings of chicken and fish. I eat much smaller portions, and quit fried foods, cake, pie and other heavy stuff. Of course, I cheat once in awhile, but the combination of daily swims, with about six miles of hiking each week, and a much more sensible diet, I’m now doing OK.

Now retired for more than 17 years … yeah, I’m 82 …. I can brag truthfully that I feel much better today than I did in my 50s and 60s. The former 210 pounder … I can admit it now … weighed in last week at 154. Despite what they advertise on TV, here’s no magic formula to recovering your health and fitness. Just sensible regular exercise and pushing away much earlier and more often from that dinner table.