Health and Fitness Journal

I feel so bloated I can’t even get up. My doctor told me I should cut down on fatty foods and get myself a StairMaster. But I feel so bloated that I don’t have the energy to get up, get out of the house and go looking for a StairMaster. And anyway, my New Year’s resolution was to cut down on buying useless junk, like Stairmasters.

“It’s a good thing you still make housecalls, Dr. Beckles,” I told my G.P. “I’m so bloated these days I can…”

“I know, I know,” Dr. Beckles cut me off, “you’re so bloated you can hardly find the energy to get up off the couch.” He coughed without covering his mouth. “Well, it’s a good thing you could a least find the energy to dial my phone number and call my office,” he said, wrinkling his busy black eyebrows up in a classic “Don’t give me any of your guff” physician’s scowl.

“Oh, Dr. Beckles!” I poked him in the collarbone. “But what can I do to…stop this bloating thing I got? I ain’t getting any younger, you know.”

It was at that point he loosened his collar and leaned over after wiping the back of his sweating neck with a hanky. “You need a strict non-fatty foods regimen, complete with treadmill exercise and a lightweight aerobic component.” His breath was heavy with barbeque sauce, most likely from Aruba Joe’s, the nearby gourmet sausage café. Suddenly I was hungry.

“Couldn’t you just…go in there with one of them little probes and suck it out?” I wanted to know. “Couldn’t you just cut it off a bit here,” I gripped a bit of the bloated area in question so he could get an eyeful, “and kind of nip it in the bud, so to speak?” But Dr. Beckles wasn’t having it; he was a professional – he’d seen my likes before:

“If I was say, Dr. Lapus, down at the clinic, I might well advise you to take such a foolish path. But it would be unconscionable for me to do so. It would also probably be illegal. The thing for you to do is to practice aerobic twisting exercising movements. These will get your heart rate and blood pressure up. If you visualize yourself sort of picking apples and reeeaching over to pick them off the coffee table here, you’ll be taking the first step at least towards reducing your bloating.”

After he had gone I still felt bloated. And I was hungry. For a barbequed sausage. At least I would have to get up and go out of the house to get it. Maybe I was only taking baby steps, but wasn’t it a sign of some small progress?

Comments are off for this post

While vacationing in Los Angeles I am struck by the real obsession here people display with all things relating to plastic surgery. Billboards, magazine ads, even car bumper stickers and motel signs make some allusions, witty or otherwise, to such things as “non-surgical nose jobs”; “discount rhinoplasty”; and even “drive-through cosmetic surgery.” Yes, the stereotype is true – everybody drives in L.A.

Understatement: People in L.A. care about how they look. Spoiler: Some of those whom you may least expect have had work done. I was floored to read that Lemmy, the leather-clad unwashed lead plunker of the world’s greatest rock and roll band, Motorhead, reveal in a local paper that he’d had his teeth replaced and kept his hair long in order to cover up signs of aging. “Best place in the world for teeth, L.A.” he said. His teeth did look good. From what I could see, at least.

The whole topic of looks and how far one should go in order to alter one’s natural appearance became fodder for our car conversation as my wife and two children drove around town seeing the sights. “Cameron Diaz is ugly,” said my ten-year-old daughter, Kyla. “She has a big nose, and her mouth looks like a UFO.” I hadn’t seen it before, but she was right.

My son David thought Arnold Schwarzenegger should have some work done on his looks too. “He has a bowling-pin head and a peanut butter face,” he remarked, when we passed a billboard with the California governor’s mug plastered on it. He was right, too. Why hadn’t I seen it before?

Comments are off for this post