This has been weighing on my mind...

People get mad at me when I tell them I’m trying to lose weight.

“What are you, anorexic?” they ask. It gets a little tiresome, truth be told. I’m to the point now where if it comes up, instead of argue I simply lift my shirt up and let them see “the roll.”

It’s not a huge roll; it probably doesn’t even qualify as a spare tire. More of an inner tube. Nonetheless, there it is, the result of too many years of Caribou blueberry muffins, nightly desserts, and daily visits to innumerable cubicles at work offering free candy.

I tried to lose my roll by dieting, specifically the Atkins Diet, and that was by far the worst seven hours of my life. I don’t see how people do it. How the Atkins Diet qualified as a medical breakthrough I’ll never understand. I mean, no offense, but a person with Down’s Syndrome could tell you you’ll lose weight if you don’t eat anything, for Christ’s sake.

“For breakfast,” says the Atkins Diet book, “have a single scrambled egg white, a grape, and half a cup of coffee made with low-fat water. For lunch, treat yourself to a single slice of lunch meat, a quarter-inch square cube of cheese, and a tablespoon of cottage cheese. For dinner, repeat lunch. For dessert, stick a gun barrel in your mouth, using low-cal cooking spray rather than traditional gun oil.” The book also recommends that you alert friends and family that you’re dieting and may thus be crabby; in other words, give them a heads up that at any given time you might without warning eat their face, ala Hannibal Lecter.

So I tried to compromise by cutting some of the crap out of my diet, like breads and sweets. The latter are my Achilles heel; somewhere along the line my wife and I found it necessary to start having dessert every night. Chocolate chip cookies, cake, and pudding have been staples in our diet for nigh on three years, and when there are only two folks under the roof that means larger helpings and leftovers for days at a time. It’s a wonder we don’t topple the scales at 200 pounds apiece, and I think we’d each suspect the other of secretly purging if it weren’t for the fact in a town home this size you can’t tweeze your eyebrows without your partner shouting “Will you keep it down?”

One day the specter of dieting struck me as ludicrous. Anyone reading this is aware that I’m a defeatist; that I truly believe that one day soon, Iran will lob nuclear weapons at Israel, spaceships will descend upon the earth, and we’ll all have a front-row seat to the Book of Revelation. I’ll be damned if I’m going to wave hello to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gnawing on a stalk of celery. I want a plate of chocolate chip cookies in my hands when Christ returns, and none of that Hershey’s shit: Ghirardelli all the way.

What I ultimately decided upon was moderating my consumption and engaging in regular exercise. The former consists of calling it a night after six cookies rather than twelve. This may not seem like a sacrifice, but it takes all the self-control I have. As far as the exercise, for about a month now I’ve been working out semi-regularly, which means every other night I do three miles or so on the treadmill burning around 300 calories at a time, then I do leg lifts and squats to strengthen my back and tighten my abdomen.

The amazing thing is that it works. When I began, I weighed in at around 137 pounds. Tonight I weighed myself and am down to 133 pounds. And what I love is that I don’t look skinny, but rather am starting to appear toned. I’m nowhere near the six-pack abs I crave, but I’ll get there. My goal is to weigh 129 pounds and to have an abdomen that looks like Brad Pitt’s in “Fight Club.” Dream on, Admin Worm.

What I really dig is that I’m feeling more confident. This will sound strange, but for the first time since meeting my wife I feel “worthy” of her. She is stunningly beautiful and has an amazing body, and frankly I’ve always felt that I paled in comparison to her. Please don’t misunderstand; she loves me just as I am and would accept me if I weighed 300 pounds or 100. However, I think that she appreciates the fact that I’m doing something to feel better about myself. Confidence is a trait I’ve never exuded in large quantities, and to be honest I think she finds it a bit attractive.

The most important thing is that I’m not allowing myself to be discouraged by setbacks. If I go a week without exercising, no big deal. If I happen to down an entire batch of brownies in one sitting, se la vie. The longer I go on, the more of a habit doing the right thing becomes, and slowly but surely I’m seeing results. And if Christ happens to return during my lifetime, I’ll whip him up a pan of brownies, and as we munch them I’ll say “Yeah, you have nice hair, but check out these abs.”