DAY 5: Eat, Drink and Be Merry, For Tomorrow We Diet!

Five days into my self-imposed exercise incarceration and I'm still standing! Well, after a good nap and a shower I can stand...for a little while. Now I understand why they always say "Check with your doctor before starting any exercise regimen." Exercise is not for sissies! I think the rule should be that you should already be in shape before exercising to get into shape. 

I have exercised for five days in a row, longer than I have ever exercised in my life. Physical fitness wasn't a high priority in our household when I was growing up. There were no 'daycamps' for kids  back in the good ol' '60's, or at least there weren't any in our little town. Summers were spent at the Town Park Pool, not so much swimming as baking in the sun slathered with baby oil. And the occasional game of hide-and-seek or kick-the-can could hardly be considered exercise. 

On Saturday afternoons after summer was over, you could find just about every kid in town at the Beetles' Alhambra Theater watching a double feature of Gothic horror movies starring Vincent Price, Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi. And everyone knows you need plenty of buttered popcorn, JuJuBees, Good and Plenty and Milky Way bars to get through that!

No one thought about the fat content of foods back then. My grandmother, an immigrant from Sicily and a fantastic cook, wouldn't know what to do if you took her olive oil away from her. Sunday dinner consisted of spaghetti and meatballs, topped with mounds of grated pecorino romano cheese and was the highlight of everyone's week. 

Then calorie counting became the latest thing and everyone carried around a calorie bible to check the calorie count of every possible morsel that went into their mouths. I remember my older sister Carmala introducing calorie counting to the family at one Sunday dinner. She knew the calorie count of everything and tried to convince everyone that calorie counting was the answer to keeping trim. The old-timers around the table, my grandmother, dad and aunts all poo-pooed the idea. "Just watch what you eat," my Aunt JuJu would say, "and don't eat too much. You don't have to do all that counting."

As it turns out, Aunt JuJu was right: she is now 80 years old, maybe 10 pounds more than she weighed 40 years ago, and has a boyfriend two years older than her. The two of them keep trim by going dancing every Saturday night. She still works as a hairdresser and goes up and down 14 very steep steps in her house more than several times a day. And her motto remains, "Just watch what you eat."

So I'm going to take a page from my Aunt JuJu's book and start watching what I eat. It's not that I don't know the good things to eat, I just intentionally never paid attention before. But today, five days into my exercise regime, I am not going to start dieting, but I am going to start watching with a very critical eye what I put into my mouth.

Betsy