The Pink Salt Trick: Myth, Magic or Just Salty?

More than likely you've heard of the Pink Salt Trick for weight loss. I've known about it for a year or more but it's only been a few weeks that it's come to the center of my radar screen. This winter I've been gaining weight at an alarm rate and when I got my summer clothes out most of them were too tight. I hate tight clothing on me and other people. If they show tummy rolls and cellulite I won't wear a garment. Even on women who are slim and fit if her "camel toes" are showing I'm going to mentally call her out for wearing a second skin and calling it workout gear. And before anyone is tempted to scold for not being politically correct, I would never say anything out loud to another woman, to her friends and mine so how is that body shaming if I keep it to myself? Either way, I'm not going to be silenced in my own blog for what I think. Sooner rather than later all of us who grew up with a certain standard of decency in dressing will die off and then the sin of women judging the way other women dress will be solved.

Boy, did I get off track! Back to pink salt. I can't help thinking about my brother when the topic of salt comes up. A few years ago when I was on a kick to learn more about cooking I wanted to buy a pricey gift box of salts from around the world. I was fascinated that you can get black, pink, brown, yellow and blue salt as well as the white I've seen all of my life. My brother and I bickered back and forth, as siblings tend to do, about whether or not they tasted any different. He thought it was a rip off---that there wouldn't be any difference except in price---and I thought it might be one of the secrets of good cooking that he learned and I didn't. 

I never did get my sampler box of salt but I did manage to buy some pink Himalayan salt at the grocery store that went mostly unused until recently. Pink salt comes from the Himalayan mountains and supposedly it contains many trace minerals including calcium, magnesium and potassium. Anytime I've dieted in the past I've never tried the fad diets. It's been Weight Watchers, Tops, gym memberships and once I did a doctor supervised, all liquid diet that was my favorite because I never got hungry. I take that back, my mom and I did the cabbage soup diet once. That must have been back in the '70s and I haven't eaten cabbage since. 

When I first googled the Pink Salt Trick I lucked out and found a straight forward recipe---a practically free concoction to put together.  I was not so lucky the next few times I google the Pink Salt Trick looking for more information about its safety, etc., and I found instead Oprah's VERY LONG video hawking a weight loss pill based on pink Himalayan salt. Both the free concoction and Oprah's pill claim that they tackle insulin resistance and is an alternate to the Mounjaro shots that people are paying big money out-of-pocket for but are getting amazing results. Both Pink Salt Tricks have dozens of testimonials attached to their claims.  

I'd already tried the free version before stumbling on to Oprah's video and silly me I thought I'd just be finding some science behind it and variations to the basic recipe so I started watching it. Instead, near the end of her VERY LONG video she revealed that she's selling pills, pills called Prozenith made with pink salt and three other ingredients you can only get in Japan. It ticked me off that she made one of those so-called medical break-through videos. In my mind if it's a good product you don't say things like "we only have 182 bottles left in stock so order now!" You also don't make people buy two bottles at a time for $79 each while encouraging people to buy eight at a time at a reduced rate of $50 a bottle. You also don't have to offer the first ten people who place an order a zoom meeting with Oprah. 

Out of curiosity I did a google search to see if you could by the Prozenith any place else other than at the VERY LONG video website and I found a product on Amazon called Pro Prozenith that contains two of the four ingredients in common with those in the pills Oprah is hawking but for less than half the price. The labels even look the same except for the addition of the word Pro and the difference in the ingredients. 

According to the VERY LONG video The Pink Salt Trick was first introduced in Dr. Casey Means book, Good Energy and from what I gather from the video she helped Oprah loss a bunch of weight and afterward they started working together to make the Pink Salt Trick into a pill form that they could bring to market. Their formula has pink salt, quercein, bern berberiene and mountain root. The practically free version has pink salt, lemon juice, honey and water. 

To make things even more interesting a 10 minute video of Oprah showed up in my Facebook feed that I suspect was AI generated. It introduced the Pink Salt 'Hack' and a web link to a guy selling a liquid drop version of a concoction made with pink salt, bern bereriene and an ingredient you can only get in Brazil. See a pattern here? I didn't watch his entire video because the ending was predictable...a high pressure pitch to buy his high priced hack/liquid drops.

Like I said before, I didn't know there was more than one Pink Salt Trick out there before I tried the practically free version. All the testimonials for all three versions claim dramatic lost weight without changing their diet or exercising. To judge if this is true, I drank the nearly-free concoction for a week without going to our gym or taking walks around the campus. I also didn't give up eating things I know I should. For example over the week I had 7 pieces of Ghirardelli's dark chocolate squares, 4 cookies and 2 bowls of ice cream and I didn't cut the portions down on any of my meals nor did I pass up on the bread they serve here with all dinners. I lost 4.8 pounds in the first seven days and maybe it's magical thinking but I feel better---less food obsessing going on in my head. No foraging in the kitchen out of boredom. It also didn't effect my blood pressure. 

By the middle of my second week, the scale seemed to get stuck and by the end of the week I'd only lost two more pounds and I had given up all sugary stuff except for my daily dose of chocolate, so I expected more. I really need to add exercise to the mix. I only average around 2,500 steps a day. Am I going to keep using the salt? As long as it doesn't start effecting my blood pressure will---I'm checking it 2-3 times a day. If you'd tried a Pink Salt Trick what was your experience? ©

Until next Wednesday.  

The Pink Salt Trick Recipe

1/4 teaspoon of pink salt dissolved in an 8 oz cup of warm filtered water. Add a 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice and 1 teaspoon of raw honey. Drink this first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. I've seen suggestions where you can add grated ginger, mint leaves or coconut water to mix things up, if you get bored with the taste or can't get it down. I find that drinking it fast without stopping allows you to avoid the taste issue all together. 

 

Here's an article claiming the Oprah endorsement is fake and so it the pink salt trick - tells how to spot fake endorsements. Click here.

Binge Eating, Funerals and Continuum Care Living

It’s Sunday and my birthday and I’m hiding out from the public places so I don’t have to listen to ten verses of ‘happy birthday’. It's one of those love/hate things you get when you live on a continuum care campus.

Do you know what I like best about Sundays? It’s the only day of the week I can be 100% sure I can stay in my nightgown all day long and not be caught by the fashion police or worse, the health care police who automatically think if a older person doesn’t get dressed they are depressed or giving up. Not that I have to worry about the Health Care Police anytime soon, but I know for a fact that if I end up moving on down the road to Assisted Living or Memory Care I will have to fight the aids to stay in my jammies. They have a job to do and by god old people need to dress for breakfast! And that breakfast is served at 8:00 in the morning. I might be out of bed before the clock strikes eight but that doesn’t mean I want to be social at that hour or have someone helping me change my nickers before my head is in the game.

One of my neighbors gets up at 4:00 and loves to watch the sun come up while is wife sleeps in until 7:00. More that few of my neighbors get up at 6:00 or 7:00 and are out walking and taking the cool, morning air into their lungs. From what I can see of the health nuts those daily walks don't protect them from moving on down the line. A couple who lived on the floor above me spent their entire adult lives walking every day and watching their weight like hawks, just recently got moved---him to assisted living because he got a diagnosis of ALS and he could no longer care for his wife who was moved into the Memory Care building. They both seem to be adjusting well. He has a motorized wheelchair now and is just a court yard away from visiting his wife. And it’s two short blocks for him to come back to the independent living building which he’s been doing to play bridge and attend a couple of lectures. (Won’t work in the winter, but for now it’s making him happy.) He says their care is excellent down there and he looks like the weight of the world is off his shoulders. Herding his wife around to keep her safe was taking a toll on him that few people fully appreciated. But I've been there done and many of my readers have too.

The wife of another couple just moved into the assisted living building, too but I heard she resisted going and they had a huge fight over it, but their kids sided with him and off she went. She lost her leg a year ago and he, too, looks like a changed man now that he'd no longer responsible for her care.

The cross-over aspect of living in a continuum care facility gives you a sense of comfort knowing if and when you do go on down the line we wouldn’t be thrown in with a bunch of strangers. In the two years I’ve lived here, five people got moved to a higher level of care (aka “got moved on down the line”) and five people have died. I didn’t go to any of the funerals although I was tempted to go to one of them. When I moved in I made a rule that I didn’t want to be one of those stereotypical, old people who goes to all the funerals in town, like they are social events. If that makes me a cold-hearted bitch I guess that’s what I am. I have, however, started buying sympathy cards by the box, instead of individually.

Despite my current, no funerals rule I never looked for excuses not to go to funerals during my lifetime. For the most part I find them interesting, almost heart-warming to know how family and friends will carry their memories forward. And I always learn something about the deceased as people share stories from parts of their lives I didn’t have privy to. It reaffirms the fact that we don’t always know how we might have touched or influenced someone else as we go through our lives.

In my lifetime, however, I’ve been to a couple of funerals where I wondered if I was in the right place because the service didn’t reflect the person I knew. Last year I wrote about an old neighbor at our cottage who was the closest thing I had to a grandfather and 7-8 people walked out of his funeral in a silent protest as a preacher went on and on about how the deceased was going to burn up in hell because he didn’t accept Jesus as his Savior. This man and his wife were pillars of kindness but they hadn’t been allowed to know their own grandchildren because they wouldn’t get baptized in their daughter’s church. <rant on!> It's scary that our current political climate is made up of too many people like that daughter whose intolerance is leading us into creating a monotheocracy that would rival Gilead in The Handmaids Tale. <rant off>

Change of topic: Since my surgery I’ve been on a real eating binge and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. The day after the surgery I could zip up my black jeans after weeks of dieting and the four day fasting for the colonoscopy. If nothing else, I’m good at self-sabotage and I'm currently eating my way back up the scales and out of those jeans. 

And now it hits me why I’ve been indulging in comfort foods again! After my mom died I wasn’t eating, I was severely depressed. One day I found myself amazed to realize I’d lost two sizes but that happiness quickly turned to deep, gut-wrenching guilt as it dawned on me that the weight loss was a by-product of my mom's death and it was nothing to celebrate. Fast forward to when my dad and my husband died and I subconsciously started binge eating---I think---so I wouldn’t have live with any guilt if I had lost weight after they left me. 

I need to get back into healthy eating mode again but I won’t seriously tackle the issue until after my brother’s service which is a little over a week away. I should rename this blog The Misadventures of a Fat Lady. ©

 Until next Wednesday. 

 

War and Play and my Black Jeans

It’s been a head spinning week starting with a lecture here at the continuum care complex that was---well, very complex and totally over my head. It was presented by a woman whose field of expertise is the Holy Lands and she’s spent a lot of time in that area of the world. It was titled: Understanding the War. I went away from it being nearly---if not more---confused than I was before. As one of my fellow residents said, “She assumed too much about our basic knowledgeable of the region and used a lot of words that aren’t in most people’s vocabulary.” I went into the lecture hoping to learn exactly what it means when people say they believe in a two state solution. I was under the (apparently false) impression that the two proposed states would be like our states under an umbrella of united states that formed one country. But, no. The two groups would be living intermingled but with separate religions and governing bodies---this assumes I understood the lecturer correctly.

In the speaker's opinion a two state solution won’t word because they have too long of a history of fighting with each other, with each side having valid claims over the territory. And as much as I really want to understand that conflict I could have easily fallen asleep in the first three-quarters of her lecture because she started around 3,500 years B.C. and went through ALL the conquers and surrenders from that time frame to the present time. 

Beware of a Rant Starting Here: 

Cynical and naive me, at one point I was thinking, Why can’t they just let the past go and start where they’re at? Clean slate; no religions nor scores to settle from ancient history of any kind to muddy things up. I just don’t get holding century-long grudges against people you never met. The blacks in this country have---for the most part (70%?)---let go of their collective grudges born in the slave era in the name of co-existing. How many more centuries is the Holy Land region going to fight over whose religion is "best" and who is the most entitled to live there? Wouldn’t it bring harmony faster if we quit worshiping the person/s credited with bringing us our value systems and just concentrate on living up to those values? I contend, for example, that The Ten Commandments, that are held up as the word of God SHOULD be held up and valued because they are the moral foundation for Judaism, Christianity and Islam---a logical way to live in peace---and NOT because they supposedly came straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, via way of different messengers. I could care less where they came from. It’s the message, stupid, not the messengers who went around spreading and planting the seeds that would become our major religions that are the important part. Forget the spin that has been added to the Word since biblical times; Get back to the basics, find those long-ago common values and take it from there. Compromise. It's not a bad word.

Rant off.

The next day was my play day on steroids. I designed and taught the first of a three part clinic on how to play mahjong. (And after that hour and a half classs was over I played the game for two more hours.) I had on my Mahjong University sweatshirt and my packet of hand-outs and I so prepared it wasn’t funny. As I said in an earlier post my co-teacher and I were shocked by how many people want to learn…a total of eleven people! We cut the sign-up off at six with five on a waiting list for the next time we teach. Halfway through our first session my co-teacher came over to my table of students to whispered, “Never again!” She didn’t really mean it. We both know that if we don’t grow the present group of players, the club will peter out, not just from people in a senior complex dying but someone is always going to a second home up north in the summers or down south for the winter. Some days we can only fill one table and other times we can fill three tables.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with this ancient game from the orient it was introduced to America in 1920 and it’s a gin rummy-like game played with 152 tiles that combines luck, skill and strategy. Every year the National Mah Jongg League puts out a new card listing over 60 winning combinations of tiles and who ever builds their hand first as the tiles are passed around, drawn and discarded wins the game. I love it because the more you learn about playing and its history the more there is to learn. And nearly all the action goes counter-clock-wise which makes your old head work in a brain-cell building way you don’t get from games designed in our part of the world. I love studying the old game sets as art and antiques and I love following the mahjong Facebook groups. I love everything about mahjong and guess what, I just bought my very own set and a tee shirt that says, “I don’t always talk about Mahjong…oh wait! Yes, I do.” Can’t wait to wear that shirt but I’ll have to wait until it gets a little warmer.

For me, I’d like to stay in my winter wardrobe another month or more. I’ve been trying to lose weight and it’s going slow…only down six pounds in a month. But it’s enough to make my clothes feel more comfortable. Hopefully when I can get out to walk more I can lose at a faster pace. I am, however, proud that I’ve been consistently making better food choices. I hate being fat but its been more than a few decades since I’ve been ‘normal’ that I wouldn’t know how to act. Hopefully not like an old friend from my other life who daily posts photos of her body, her face, her meals, her hair or toenails on Facebook a couple of times a day.

Actually, my goal isn’t to get that far down on the scales that I'd be normal sized again, but I’d like to drop a size and a half. I’m right in between two sizes and nothing looks good on me. My friend mentioned above who has lost 50 pounds would go every few weeks to Goodwill to drop off a batch of clothing that got too big and to buy some new things from them. I couldn’t do that. What if I gained the weight back and couldn’t afford to buy new stuff? It’s not like Goodwill and other thrift shops have a glut of queen size clothing on their racks. Anyway, I have a brand new pair of black jeans that I'd lusted after for years that I couldn’t zip up a month ago. Now I can get it the zipper half way up. I plan to be able to zip them fully in another month. Wish me luck.

Until next Wednesday. ©

 P.S. The map above is the same one the lecturer used during her lecture.

Confessions from a Dieter Drop-Out

There are a couple of (gay) women living here who I’ve nicknamed the Skinny Minnie Twins. Both of them were college professors and have been together since their early twenties. They are upbeat, friendly and well accepted into the ecosystem here…if the term ecosystem can be applied to a continuum care campus. They both took Mahjong lessons when we all started but one decided the game was not for her. We’ve had 4-5 others who’ve tried to learn but gave up on themselves ever catching on, so they dropped out too. But the other twin plays Mahjong every Wednesday along with me and enough others to make up two tables. American Mahjong is a hard game to learn and even harder to get good enough at it to occasionally win which is why I love it. The challenge of always having something new to learn about playing the game excites me. Yes, I’m obsessed. And I'll bet you're thinking I got side-tracked away from the dieting theme. I didn't. Well, maybe a little bit but not much.

I recently learned that Twin # Two has been going to Weight Watcher meetings every week faithfully for over 40 years. I’d been a member of Weight Watchers for a couple of stretches in my life but I gained what I lost back again when I quit. I’ve been in Tops and another diet group whose name escapes me. I’ve done a doctor supervised, all liquid diet (my favorite of any I’ve ever been on because I never got hungry or thought about food). I’ve joined gyms and worked out obsessively, then quit when the pounds were gone. I’ve lost and gained back 50 pounds three times in my life.

I was 14 or 15 the first time my mom dragged me to a (quack) weight loss doctor. He had me breathe into a tube and declared I needed thyroid medication to speed up my metabolism and he had me wrapped in clothe strips soaked in some kind of herbs and put in sauna bath. Behold I’d come out five pounds lighter and ready to pass out. Of course, the water weight that got sweated out of me would come back just in time for another ‘treatment.' which he sold in blocks of ten. Years later, another doctor told me that putting me on thyroid medication that young and without the proper tests to know if I even needed it is probably what killed off my thyroid gland so that now I actually do need it. (Being on it for so many years is what thinned my bones out.)

I’ve always admired how the Skinny Minnie twins look. Their bodies could easily pass for women in their twenties and they dress in simple but well-made jeans, tailored shirts and occasional sweaters. Before I learned about Twin # Two not always being skinny I thought they maintained their healthy bodies because they walk a lot and take the line dancing classes which I know helps, but I never would have guessed # Two once had an unhealthy relationship with food, like I do. I asked her if she was a WW leader. “Nope.” I thought maybe she worked for the corporation like all the long-timers I knew back in the day. I asked her if after all this time she still feels she needs to go and she replied, “I’m afraid to stop going.” I need to have a one-on-one conversation with her sometime. I’d love to do a deep dive into her back story regarding her relationship with food.

My back story is the classic tale of a fatty-fatty-two-by four. I use food for comfort, for celebration, to soothe hurt feelings or to treat anxiety and depression on the rare occasion when I experience the latter. I use food when I’m bored or if I want to punish myself or someone who dares to suggest I shouldn’t eat this or that. Yes, I’ve been known to be a closet eater because no one tells ME what I can or can’t put in my mouth! Not since I turned thirteen and my dad and mom had a huge argument over making me clean my plate or sit at the table until bedtime when I didn't comply. Closet eating makes no sense and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out nor would it take a psychiatrist to point out that it’s all my mothers fault. Just kidding. She may have set me up for an eating disorder but intellectually I know I’ve been an adult for far more years than she forced fed me as a child so in theory I should be able to monitor myself by now. I can get obsessed over things like playing Mahjong or learning a new craft so why couldn’t I have obsessed over developing a healthy relationship with food for the past 69 years?  

Weight gain has been on my mind big time since the first of the year when I usually do the traditional New Year’s Resolution and loss a few pounds but this year instead of losing I’ve been gaining at an alarming rate. So fast that I obsessed for awhile that I had a huge tumor growing inside me until I remembered that in February when I was in the hospital they did a thorough set of  x-rays of my body looking for broken bones and would have seen the mass my imagination conjured up. 

My only comfort is that one day at a lunch table with a dozen or so of my fellow residents everyone was complaining about gaining ten pounds over the past year. One lady said, “It’s all the carbs they serve us” and a guy replied, “they do it on purpose so we’ll all die off faster and they can resell our apartments.” Ms. Social Worker bemoaned the fact that she’s had to buy all new clothes and I confessed that I refuse to do that and I have fewer and fewer choices left in my closet. I mean that, too, about not buying clothing in a larger size. I’m only fifteen pounds under what was the highest I’ve ever weighed in my life. I’m not going to make it easier for me to get there again.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about my life since The Fall in February. I’ve experienced most of the benchmarks we humans are supposed to find along the way and I’ve long ago made peace with the ones I’ve missed. I’ve had hard times and good times. Fun times and sad times. Times when I've failed and times when I succeeded. But I’m mostly proud of the way I've 'done life.' I may not have accomplished great things that will go down in history but I've had some good friends,  found my soulmate and I'm a good person where it counts in my heart. I have only one real regret, one big thing that if we had do-overs in life, I’d do over and that's my relationship with food. Its my Achilles' heel.

Until next Wednesday… © 

Sleepwear and Pandemic Diets

I ran out of cereal bowls this morning and no, smarty pants, it wasn’t because I’ve been using them for ice cream. I haven’t had ice cream in the house since Ben and Jerry dropped off a pint of Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream last May unless you’re counting Purple Cow Cream Pops. Since you can have one of those ice cream core popsicles for 46 calories, I just call them Dessert Without the Guilt. Stick with me, kid, and I’ll teach you how to think like a fat lady.

I’m getting a head start on that January diet I usually do each year only I’m rebranding it as my Pandemic Diet. I hate to admit this but I gained eight pounds since the world pandemic and the American election formed a symbiotic friendship, like an oxpecker riding on the back of an elephant. Thank goodness pandemics only come around every 100 years and elections have never stressed me out in the past or I’d be as big as the elephant in that little visual I planted in your head. Let’s hope 2020 turns out to be an anomaly in the grand scheme of things. By the way, did you know that oxpecker birds graze exclusively on the bodies of large mammals eating “ticks, small insects, botfly larvae, and other parasites” according to Wikipedia as well as earwax and dandruff. Can you imagine a bird pecking at your ears? That would stress me out enough to eat gallons of comforting ice cream.

Back to cereal bowls…when you’ve eaten so much cereal that all your bowls are in the dishwasher it’s time to switch to coffee cups. It would take me twenty days to run out of them because I rarely use them for caffeinated beverages. I have one favorite cup I use for my morning coffee which I rinse out and put next to my coffee pot after each use. Probably not the smartest habit in the house but I have so many bad habits you’d be hard pressed to notice this one should you come to visit. Just know if you do come over, don’t grab the only yellow cup in the house and pour yourself some Starbucks Sweet Morning coffee. Not that you could do that during the pandemic. It hasn’t been in the store for several months. Neither has the Reddi Wip Barista Series Sweet Foam. The last time I found it I almost bought all four cans in the cooler but then I felt sorry for the next addicted person looking for it and I put one can back. Call me crazy, but don’t call me a pandemic hoarding bitch. Or maybe Levi my Mighty Schnauzer is rubbing off on me. He has a highly annoying habit of leaving one piece of kibble behind in his dish when he eats. Why? Is he dumb enough to think he’s leaving it for seed? Maybe. What ever the reason I’m jealous of his self-control. As old as I am, I still feel the compulsion to clean my plate for fear my mom will make me sit at the table until bedtime if I don’t. Light bulb Moment: Could Levi be my mom reincarnated come to torture me with that stupid, single kibble left behind in his dish daily reminding me not to keep blaming her for my lack of self-control? I mean I've had well over a half century since I ate at my mother's table to reprogram my mindset. Aren't I supposed to be the boss of me by now?

New Topic: Levi has me rethinking what I wear to bed. Don’t twist that into something kinky. What I mean is I’m not a person who likes to pop out of bed and get dressed. I like to wake up slow, drinking coffee and not get dressed until mid-morning. But once I move I won’t have that option because I’ll have to walk him instead of just opening up a door and turning him loose. My favorite one-stop-shopping store has a huge display of sleep jammies in stock---pandemic office wear---and seeing them made me think if I started wearing those to bed I could just put a coat over them do take Levi outside in the morning and late at night. For years I’ve worn L.L. Bean long flannel night gowns in the winter and oversized Hanes cotton men’s t-shirts in the summer that fall to my knees, neither of which would look good with a coat thrown over top. While shopping I saw a twenty-something walking around with sleep jammies on and she obvious wasn't wearing underwear underneath. Why is it that kids like her can get away with wearing sleepwear in public but a seventy-something can't do it without others thinking she's lost one too many of the social norms to be living alone? Sure, twenty-somethings have firm and perky breasts under that flimsy fabric but aside from the unfairness of gravity, I am here to protest against young people's right to dress comfortably 24/7.

I bought a set of jammies to try out. And while I was tempted to get a 'Hello Kitty' set, I didn’t. Too many of the heroines in the romance books I’ve been reading wear 'Hello Kitty' jammies while eating ice cream straight out of the cartons when they're on a classic, Ross and Rachel Break. As a widow I’m on a long break from my soulmate but I don’t need another visual trigger for eating my favorite comfort food. ©

Diets, Dogs and Summertime Reading

It’s official. The dog lost two pounds since his last yearly physical and the vet wants him to loss two more. “Ideally,” she said. “At his age,” she said. She questioned me up one side and down the other about what I’m feeding him, how much exercise he’s getting to the point I wanted to scream, Get a life, Lady! He’s fat, I’m fat and we know which one of us buys the groceries in the family. I wanted to tell her that if I was only two pounds overweight I’d be running naked up and down the sidewalk…which come to think about is exactly what Levi does. Everywhere that dogs goes, people praise him for his handsome, good looks and fine manners. Maybe it’s a schnauzer thing but he’s got attitude with a capital A which is probably why no one but the vet has ever fat shamed him.

All this cause and effect between eating too much and moving too little was discussed over my cell phone while I sat in the clinic’s parking lot and they had him kidnapped inside where they drew his blood and felt him up for lumps and bumps. Pandemic rules of engagement. After $215 worth of examination that included two canine flu shots, a fecal exam looking for worms of various descriptions they didn’t find and a CBC blood chemistry test and they finally brought him back out to car. Can you believe it, they charged $3.95 to throw out the inch long sample of poop after playing with it under a microscope. I should have asked for it back and used the $3.95 down the street at Starbucks.

You will never guess in a hundred years what I’m reading right now. No, Not War and Peace. I’m reading a book titled Pandemic by A.G. Riddle, as if I don’t get enough scary data off the nightly news. 722 pages that were written in 2017 and its blurb describes the novel as “a groundbreaking sci-fi thriller that takes you inside the CDC and WHO response to a global outbreak. It's an eye-opening journey that will change everything you think you know about pandemics--and how to survive one. The product of over two years of research, Pandemic is filled with real science and history--and more than enough twists to keep you up late into the night, promising, ‘just one more chapter.’" The Guardian reviewer wrote, it "...reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown [The De Vinci Code] and Michael Crichton [The Andromeda Strain]." Oh! My! God! I’ve ready both these authors and is that statement ever true.

I’m just past the half way point in the book and already I’m flabbergasted that our president bad-mouths the CDC and WHO and wants to defund them. The kind of work they do to contain viruses around the world blows my mind. Dangerous work done by super-smart and highly educated people, I might add. The most dangerous thing Trump has ever done is stick his penis where it doesn’t belong without wearing a condom. I’m sorry, I should compartmentalize my politics and not let them contaminate my book review.

So, how about those Yankees? The urban dictionary says that phrase is used to break up incredibly awkward silences, presumably the kind of silence that follows when someone says something mean about the president’s penis. Did it work? Are you now thinking about baseball and how cute some of those players look in their uniforms? I don’t follow sports so I don’t even know if the baseball season was canceled or not because of the pandemic. And once again, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be sexualizing the players by making your mind’s eye check out the players’ abs, tushes or 'bumps' in the front.

I’ve been trying remember what we label the action where you hold your hands in front of your eyes with two fingers on each hand forming V-shapes, then you slowly draw your hands off to the sides. I think it’s meant to show you clearing your head of all its wayward thoughts and are ready to party. I don’t know if that’s true but either way picture me doing that right now because it’s time to change topics. But, darn it, it bothers me when I have a picture like that stuck in my brain and I can’t figure out how to google it for an explanation, but a goofy movie with Woody Allen keeps playing with my thoughts. (If you’re getting the idea that I’m filibustering my own blog post to get my word count in, you’d be right.)

Let’s get serious here for a minute. The dog isn’t the only one with a doctor who is wanting a change in eating habits. When my blood tests came back in preparation for my Reclast infusion, they showed my blood sugars were elevated—duh, pandemic comfort foods did that to me. And the doctor had me run a second test---an A1C test that shows your blood sugar levels over a three month period. For the first time in my life, I’m dangerously close to being labeled ‘diabetic.’ I’m at 5.7% and 6.5% is where they slap that label on your patient file. I told the doctor, “No way! Give me a couple of months and I’ll lower that percentage.” So now not only are we still living in Pandemic Park I have to do it with the added stress of having to trade my comfort foods in for healthy stuff while listening to dog complain when he doesn’t get all the comfort treats. Trust me when I say that he doesn’t suffer in silence. And guess what, neither do I and aren't you glad you're not my neighbor. ©