Getting the right tood

How’s your food tood?

I am modifying mine this summer – again. I am both happy and sad that food has to become an attitude in one’s life. When we were young, we ate what we wanted to and burned it all off at the normal pace of a 10-to-25-year-old life. As we age, our normal pace slows, and we don’t burn it off, even though we aren’t eating what we want to any more.

I say that from the advantage of a man born in 1943. Men born at that time ate what they wanted to, which essentially was what our elders placed on the table. It was the post-Depression era, and householders in those days had become deeply imprinted with the necessities of making a little go a long way.

From that reality emerged pinto beans, smothered steak, corn bread thangs and back yard vegetable gardens with chickens running through them. A typical Sunday supper would be green beans and tomatoes from the garden, along with one of the chickens, who this morning had a name and this evening lay on the dining room table, fried. My gosh, that was life on another planet. If a mom went into a back yard today and killed a chicken for supper, the child would be plunged into therapy and neighbors would sue for public cruelty. (I do retain vivid memories of the chicken going down under my grandmother’s quick, practiced hands, but I accepted it as just the way of doing things.)

So it was a privileged time, compared to today’s pre-packed, fast food spreads. We were also privileged to have nothing to do after breakfast (cornmeal mush was my favorite), lunch or dinner but go outside and play. We are just about the last generation – 12 years old in 1955 – for whom our world was our sovereign neighborhood. We went out of our houses into this world; today the world comes into houses and keeps the kids inside.

It was a golden age, but by 30 food had become a tood. Balance, once automatic, now became a function of tood, which involved will. Instead of asking, “Can I go outside and play?” now I have to be commanded: “Just do it.” If my tood was to wear 36 jeans, I couldn’t eat what I wanted to, and I had to go work out. I had first-class inspiration. I was a sports writer at The Abilene Reporter-News in 1969 when an Air Force major named Kenneth Cooper came through town, promoting his new exercise book called “Aerobics.” I interviewed him and wrote a story, and I followed his counsel in the book. I lost 30 pounds in three months. I have done it again several times since, and Dr. Cooper now heads the world famous Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas.

His target for us was the eight-minute mile. It was hell, but when I got there, running three miles in 24 minutes and weighing 185, life was heaven. Today, I can’t go out and get the papers and get back to the kitchen inside of eight minutes, but the tood is still there. It is always there, whether you have it or not. Today, I have it. I am modifying it this summer to eat what I don’t want to, and work out six times a week. No more eight-minute miles, though. Hell, I can’t even jog, after hip replacement. Dr. Cooper says you can do aerobics by swimming, too, but that’s not for me. To me, swimming is the avoidance of drowning. So I’ll walk, and ride the cross-trainer, and pump the machines, and by August I’ll weigh 195, (down from 215), and by November, 190. That’s as low as I’ll go. You’ll see why, when I tell you what I plan to be eating by September.
©Michael Grant, 2006