Diet Chronicle, Article (18)

My youngest son, Zach, graduated from high school this past week. As I did with my oldest son, Matt, I went through tons of photos, snap shots, keepsakes, school papers and news clippings to put together a scrapbook of his entire life up to graduation.

In the process, I came across a lot of pictures in various sizes. I don’t mean the photos were in various sizes (although they were), I mean I was in various sizes. Obviously my son was also various sizes and ages. From birth to graduation night he changed a lot.

But then so did I. I mean from his birth to his graduation.

Just out of curiosity, I started three piles of pictures as I was sifting through the thousands of photos in boxes, albums and drawers. The first group were photos of the skinny me. It would prove to be a very, very small "pile." And they were all from high school or earlier, mostly earlier.

Then there was the group that more closely resembled an actual "pile." They were of me at, what one writer called, our "warrior" stage. Not too thin and yet, not overweight to any alarming degree. You know what I mean. A pound or two here, a pound or two there, but nothing that can’t be taken care of with a week or two of watching what you eat and running that extra mile, playing that additional set of tennis and so forth.

Then there was that third pile. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s the one where every expression says, ‘No, no, I don’t like to have my picture taken." Or "Don’t get me in the picture." Of course the big mistake is that you are usually running away from or turning your back to the camera. Not the best side to show if you’re trying to minimize a weight problem.

You probably think I was wasting a lot of time making these piles (while I should have been working on the scrapbook for my son). Two things are important for you to know; one, I’ve already had that discussion with myself and, two, those photos helped keep me to my diet while hosting his graduation open house and while attending open houses for the other young people in his class.

And so, I made it through another diet challenging period staying, for the most part, true to my diet. I say "for the most part" because my sister, Joyce, has threatened to tell all of you that while cutting the cake for my son, I licked a small sliver of icing off my fingers. But now that I’ve come clean about that, she can’t blackmail me.

Not that I’m overly sensitive to that, it’s just that when you cost fellow Kiwanis members 25-cent fines each week, it would be easy for my sister to team up with any number of them to get me back.

So I looked around at last week’s Kiwanis meeting and asked myself if someone like Bob Guillozet or Ken Ruth or Bob Anthony or Mark Kaufman would team up with my sister to get even with me. I started a new pile of those who would like to "get even with me." Talk about a big pile!