A welcome loss
December 29, 2023
Sometimes less really is more.
by Jim Dodson
At the end of 2022, I decided I was going to give myself either a new left knee or lose 30 pounds before the end of 2023. Well, miraculously, I managed to do both. I actually dropped 50 pounds and discovered that my formerly dodgy knee works just fine, almost good as new. No replacement needed.
In the most well-fed nation on Earth, losing weight seems to be our truest national pastime.
There’s no big secret to how I managed to accomplish the feat: the old-fashioned way. I simply ate less of everything I thought I couldn’t live without — ice cream, real ale, double cheeseburgers, crusty French bread, pizza, jelly beans, diet soda and my talented baker-wife’s insanely delicious pies, cakes and cookies.
To my surprise, once I cut back, my craving for them diminished. I also walked more and drank enough water each day to fill a small bathtub.
The first 25 pounds came off quickly. Then, in early summer, my family doctor suggested I go on a new wonder drug intended for borderline and Type 2 diabetics, a disease I inherited a few years back from my dad and sweet Southern grandma. The new drug is a weekly injection you take via an EpiPen-like device by poking yourself in the thigh or abdomen. It’s similar to the one advertised on television by the cheerful lady singing and dancing around a public fountain with the touring cast of Oklahoma! By helping your pancreas produce more insulin, thus lowering your blood sugar, the drug also can cause significant weight loss. To date, I’ve lost another 20 pounds on it, principally because it reduces your appetite for anything, which means you eat less and enjoy it more — or at least I do.
While visiting my daughter in Los Angeles recently, I learned that this type of drug is in such high demand by Hollywood cosmetic surgeons and weight loss gurus, it’s being bought up by the case load and sold to their clients for as much as a thousand bucks per shot. Health authorities have expressed concern that this breakthrough treatment could result in people who really need it not being able to get it. Another report notes that experts speculate this drug may even have positive outcomes for treating alcoholism and depression. A wonder drug indeed.
At a time when the FDA and makers of modern drugs and vaccines are often under attack, it’s encouraging to think how many ordinary people on this troubled planet may live longer and enjoy a better quality of life because of what modern medical science can do.
This undoubtedly explains why Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman — the two Perelman School of Medicine professors at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the modified mRNA molecule that allowed biotechs Pfizer and Moderna to mass produce therapeutic Covid vaccines — received a Nobel Prize this year. Millions of folks are alive today — and probably will be tomorrow — because of their work.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the scourge of polio and how it terrorized domestic American life can only marvel at this Age of Misinformation and the plague of conspiracy theories that seem to accompany every public happening these days.
To this day, I still think about a sweet girl named Laurie Jones who sat behind me in Miss Brown’s fifth-grade class. She wore her Girl Scout uniform every Wednesday for her after-school scout meetings. Laurie’s thin legs needed braces as a result of battling polio since the third grade, but she had the sunniest personality of any kid I knew. I sometimes walked with Laurie to her school bus to help her get safely onboard. She told me she planned to become a nurse someday.
One day, Laurie Jones didn’t come to school. Miss Brown tearfully informed us that Laurie had passed away. A short time later, the entire school lined up in the auditorium to take a sugar cube dosed with the latest Salk vaccine. It was the week before school let out for Christmas. They played Christmas music and gave us cupcakes and little hand-clickers labeled “K-O Polio.” Funnily enough, my dad was on the advertising team that came up with the plan to promote the new vaccine in public schools across North Carolina. Those hand-clickers drove parents and teachers across the state nuts for months.
Thanks to modern science and my own desire to have less of me to love, losing a quarter of my body weight has been a blessing. I’m off blood pressure medicine and my sugar count is perfectly normal. I haven’t physically felt this good since I was driving my own mother nuts with the K-O Polio clickers.
I really have only one silly problem now.
None of my old pants fit. Losing four pant sizes makes me look like Charlie Chaplin minus the top hat and cane. Until several pairs of new jeans and khaki trousers arrive, I shall uncomplainingly do as T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock did as he walked through the evening dusk of a town filled with memories.
I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
At unexpected moments, I still think about sweet Laurie Jones, wishing I could have said goodbye. SP
Jim Dodson is a New York Times bestselling author in Greensboro.
