Eating your vegetables

Aug. 14, 2008

Dear Leslie,

For much of the first third of my life, the sandlot sports seasons -- baseball to football to basketball -- were serious business in my neighborhood. We played basketball with frozen fingers and football with blood on our foreheads. Baseball games began early each summer morning and didn't stop until we lost the ball in the weeds or someone's mother called him for lunch, whichever came first.

I was skinny and not very strong. It's almost a curse to love sports without being particularly athletic. That's why God made sports writing. Like most people, after childhood I mostly watching the playing grounds from afar.

Everyone who has been through their 40s knows your body can begin looking and feeling like someone else's. Maybe like your mom's or your dad's. Just doing what I normally did wasn't enough to keep from adding a few pounds each year. Because of poor nutrition and idleness, the process is beginning earlier and earlier.

One morning on the bathroom scale, an extra step I hardly ever bothered with, I realized this accumulation of a few pounds here and there had added up to 198. Somehow a 200-pound Sam did not match my self-image.

The two-year anniversary of beginning a weight management program at my gym just passed. I'm in the second phase of the program, which functions as a support group. We weigh and talk about how simple losing the weight was and how much more difficult keeping it off is.

In their book "Younger Next Year," Chris Crowley and Dr. Henry S. Lodge Lodge say people who were natural athletes in their youth often have trouble with the fact that in middle age they are no longer the athletes they once were. "They sulk. They drink. They refuse to play." Those of us who were more uncoordinated in youth don't have that obstacle to hurdle. We can become fitter than we ever were before.

By now most people know that nine daily servings of fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains and just a little protein will keep us healthy, and that processed foods won't. Still we resist. Eating vegetables makes me think of the retch-worthy canned peas my mom tried to make me eat before I could leave the dinner table. Vegetables aren't unpalatable, it's being told you must eat them. Only a change of attitude is required.

In class one night we tried to remember when exercise ceased being fun. The consensus was that seventh-grade gym class was the turning point. Drill sergeant teachers, ugly uniforms and games like dodge ball that are more terrifying than fun were the norm when I was in school. Gym class surely has evolved since then but in fact it hardly exists anymore.

Watching the Olympic athletes in Beijing perform wondrous feats with their bodies and minds is inspiring. Their grace and agility are part of each of us. Their dedication points to the need to be constant.

A man named Dennis drives 30 miles to attend the weight-management class. He lost 100 pounds more than three years ago and chucked his medications. This time of year he brings us the bounty from his half-acre garden: tomatoes, squash, all the God-stuff the Earth provides.

For the pleasure in moving your body and the sweetness of ripe peach juice dripping down your chin, be grateful.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.