I’m forging a new relationship between me and food, and I am enjoying it, learning a great deal.  I believe I am on the way both to losing weight and being so much healthier.

I am on the road back from willful ignorance and grandiosity. I’m on the road back to health. Our refrigerator is jammed with new and healthy food, and we are having a blast cooking it together. This is change for the good.

I think I’ve always understood that diets don’t work for most people over any length of time.

There are so many commercialized diet programs, and everyone I’ve ever known who tried one lost some weight and then gained it all back soon enough.

I knew that diets were not for me; I needed to believe in how and what I am eating and how I feel about food before I could change my life in a way that could be long-lasting and meaningful.

No diet program could do that for me; there are no magic pills to deal with my twisted relationship to food, no chocolate protein drinks, or six-week plans to beauty and health.

I had to deal with that, and I am just beginning to. I am optimistic, but I don’t know if I can make it or not. I am eating more vegetables than ever and enjoying them very much. To my surprise, healthy food can taste good if you think about it and work at it.

I’ve learned that getting healthy and being healthy are not fast. Americans love quick fixes, from weight loss to dog training. What I have learned is that it’s the long and hard slogs that stick, not the tricks or shortcuts.

There are no shortcuts to being healthy, as I have learned the hard way. Open Heart surgery, h heart disease, and diabetes are potent teachers. And there are no cheap and easy fixes.

I start, of course, with no sugar, smaller portions, healthier foods.

I think diet plans probably kill more people than Covid because they help so many people avoid reality and fool themselves into thinking a can a day will set them free.

I am about 30 pounds overweight, which will impact my heart, my diabetes, the chances of a stroke or other heart attack. It already has, I know.

Being overweight hurts my legs and doesn’t feel good. I’ve never been overweight in my life, it was the heart disease, and diabetes that had me gaining weight for the first time, and I lost control of it.

Diabetes will do that. I am too quickly distracted; as long as I have my wife, farm, animals, and writing, I’m happy. But I won’t be satisfied if I am not healthy, and neither will all the living things around me. It is selfish to be unhealthy, as well as self-destructive.

Last year was a significant health care year for me, and I mean that most positively. I took on my heart and a half dozen other things and came out ahead on each one. I even have come to love my sleep apnea mask, which brought natural sleep back into my harried life.

I want to live awhile and be healthy; it’s as simple as that. I’ve lost 15 to 20 pounds in the past month by changing what I eat and eliminating what I should not eat. It’s not a diet, really; it’s just a significant change in how I see food. It starts there for me..

This is a big step for me, and I want to keep it going. So I’ve signed up for the Maor Clinic diet and weight loss program, and I am forging a new relationship with food that I am liking very much. And it works for me.

I’ve long been a reader of the Mayo Clinic website, where I read up on illness, symptoms, and treatments. I trust the Clinic; they seem direct, knowledgeable, and calm—no hysteria, tricks, or bullshit.

Trust me; this is so better and wiser and truer and more helpful than the legions of amateur diagnostics and wannabe doctors on social media. I can’t imagine listening to strangers on Facebook tell me how to live and be healthy when trained and professional and dedicated people know what they are talking about.

Social media teaches us that we don’t need to work at it, we just have to know how to use the send button.

When they offered this three-month program for $99, I grabbed it. A week-and-a-half into it, and the first two weeks are “Lose -It” they are all about losing weight in a thoughtful, informed, and gradual way.

Then the program will branch out to maintenance and nutrition.

The site has already begun this transformation for me; they offered me a list of things I needed to buy to follow their food plan and information about vegetables, fruit, healthy fats, proportions, and snack that are healthy.

In one sense, there is nothing in the program that I didn’t already know. But I needed some structure to move onto the next step and keep going.

They don’t manipulate or play with me. They trust me and treat me with dignity.

They urged me not to eat anything I don’t like but to get into vegetables, healthy grains, and fruit. In a week, half of my diet is now vegetables.

All the “healthy” snacks I bought are gone. My snack for tonight is a pear, carrot sticks, and fresh green beans. And I like it.

Today I made lunch. It was boiled barley with tuna in oil, tomato, cucumber, avocado, cilantro, feta cheese, salt, and pepper.

It was delicious. And I wasn’t hungry afterward.

Tonight was a chicken stir-fry with a dozen different vegetables, tasty, filling, and healthy.  Tomorrow will be a shake with banana, apple, berries, yogurt, oat milk, and some protein powder.

Stirring the vegetables and chicken in tonight’s stir-fry, I felt like Merlin the magician, spinning up some magic. I am loving what I am learning.

I can eat as many vegetables as I like, and as much fruit as a person with diabetes should eat. (not too much.) Lots of apples, berries, some slices of cheese.

And who would have thought it? Mozzarella cheese is excellent for people with diabetes. So are organic veggie potstickers. And I have a jar of healthy nuts to eat alone or mix into my food.

I am trying mixes of foods I thought I hated but didn’t. I see very clearly that this isn’t a diet at all in conventional terms; it’s a new way to feel food, catch food, smell it, buy it and cook it.

Maria and I went food shopping yesterday (I always did it myself), and she was an enormous help. This kind of shopping is actually a lot cheaper than the old kind. Junk is expensive.

This is a perfect fit for our relationship. She gets to be creative and supportive at the same time. Bless her, she would like to keep me around for awhile, despite my many shortcomings. And I’d like to be around her.

She loves eating this way and is creative about mixing vegetables and rice, barley, and tomorrow I am making a big bowl of kidney beans to eat with my vegetables all cut into small pieces and mixed with rice and grains.

Mixed together and warm, it tastes wonderful to me; it is no sacrifice or loss at all; it is all gains.

Doing this together has made it so much easier, I need her support and asked for and welcomed it. She is an angel.

Mayo doesn’t make a massive deal of it this early, but I can’t help noticing I’ve lost two pounds in the last five days. I feel that. As every pound leaves me, I am lighter, happier, healthier. I can feel it.

I’ve learned that I can’t pawn my health off on anyone else, not even doctors. Nor can I ignore it in my sometimes grandiose way. I have learned again and again that I have no magic powers.

Life can find me whenever it wants to.

If I don’t take responsibility, there is no miracle waiting for me, only a harsh and painful ending.

I have a lot to live for, and I will do my very best to live for it. I know these are turbulent times and may get more turbulent yet, between politics and Mother Earth.

I am not afraid of it; I will not run away from it. I want to face it and respond in a positive, helpful, and honorable way. I can’t control the world, but I can control myself.

I want to be write here completing the story of my life that the blog has become. There is a lot to write about.

I am excited about my new relationship with food. I’m thinking of posting my weight every morning on the blog until I get to the goal of the Mayo Clinic. I plan to get to it. But I’m not quite ready yet to do that.

The deadline goal for this weight is sometime in March or April. I’m going to for it. Healthy food and I have decided to become good friends.

My idea is that this is a friendship I will keep and nourish, the kind of relationship I’ve been wanting for much of my life. And just think what I will know about cooking, buying and eating healthy food by then.