Humor: A bedtime story for losing weight

A bedtime story for losing weight

Of all the junk e-mail I receive, I think my favourite is the one that arrives with the title "LOSE WEIGHT WHILE YOU SLEEP".

I am not sure why this appeals to me so.
Perhaps it is because I am carrying a bit of extra weight and cannot be bothered doing anything drastic to lose it.

At 44, I am not too far removed from a generation of men who wore their beer bellies like badges of honour.
It was nothing for them to smear dripping on their toast in the morning and finish the day with a big T-bone steaks, dripping with fat, and with a massive serve of greasy chips on the side.

If you had a bit of a gut, it just meant you had been in a good paddock. Nothing wrong with that. It was something to gloat about.

Until my father's heart bypass operation, I cannot remember him ever going for a walk. Not even to the local shop.
Heck, that's what cars were for.

I am not criticising that attitude.
It was the viewpoint of a generation, born in the post-World War 2 era when a whole host of effort-saving technology came into common use.

My father did not own his first car until the late 1950s so imagine what a novelty it was for the rest of his life.

B.C. (Before Car), he was a keen amateur sportsman. A.C., the only sport he ever did was gardening.

If he needed something at the shops, he took the car.

The only time he broke into a fast waddle was to pursue the Mr Whippy ice-cream van up Ronneby Road and only then because he could not find one of the four kids to go buy him a double soft-cone with a stick of chocolate, strawberry topping and nuts.

Things have certainly changed.

We well and truly know now that being overweight is not conducive to good health.

My doctor told me a couple of years ago that I needed to lose some weight. He said I had the perfect weight for a man of six foot two even though I am only five foot six.

I tried very hard to heed his advice. I really did.

I even tried exercising by joining a water aerobics class.

But I gave that up when I nearly drowned on my first lesson and decided that being overweight was probably the less dangerous pursuit.

A former workmate managed to lose weight after he switched to diet beer.
He swore that the more he drank, the thinner he got.

Being a lateral thinker, I applied the same principles by eating only low-fat chocolate for three days.

But all I got was lots pimples on my face.

It is bad enough being overweight and middleaged.
I did not need to look like the oldest, fattest teenager in my neighbourhood.

So I hung up my skateboard, boots, beanie and oversized trousers and reverted to Plan B. I am a blimp: it is time to get used to it.

You can understand then why I was so interested when the junk e-mail arrived saying "LOSE WEIGHT WHILE YOU SLEEP".

Hey, at last, here was MY kind of weight solution. The more you snored, you more weight you lost.

At least, that's what I guessed it said.

I did not actually open the e-mail to find out how it worked and how much it would cost me.
Pills? Nocturnal exercises? Eating low-fat pillows?

You see, I get a lot of junk e-mail. It seems to me that most of it appeals to people's vanities, greed or insecurities and I have no wish to encourage these charlatans.
(If anyone is offended by that accusation, please feel free to strike me off your e-mail lists in anger and indignation.)

People have told me, rightly or wrongly, that if you open the junk e-mails it just encourages them to send you more.

So I trash them. Unread.
And then I trash my trash basket.

Besides, opening e-mails requires a teensy-weensie bit of effort and I am not into effort, especially when it comes to losing weight.

If I were, I would probably be fit and healthy and slim and trim and would not be tempted by them in the first place.

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it