My avatar looks good if I must say so myself.  I’ve spoken of him before.  He looks like a young Carry Grant.  He is smooth and confident.  He has immaculate hair and wash board abs.  I’m tired of looking at him and then looking in the mirror.  I look in the mirror and Carry is not staring back.  I’m not sure I even have abs anymore.  I guess they’re there somewhere hidden or they fell off sometime in my thirties.  I don’t know.  I’ve been watching my avatar and how confident he is and I’ve decided it’s time to do something drastic.  I’ve been working out.
Getting into shape used to be easy.  I would eat less of the bad stuff, and presto chango, I’d lose weight no problem.  My avatar doesn’t eat so he’s doing  just fine.  I, unlike my avatar, love to eat.  I love food.  Always have.  In my younger days I would eat so much that breathing became a chore.  I would be in so much pain after a big meal at my grandmother Newton’s house that simple things like walking or bending over couldn’t be accomplished for a little while.  It wasn’t all my fault.  My grandmother could really cook and I was always really hungry.  A deadly combination.  I remember cat-head biscuits and  chocolate gravy with fried eggs and mounds of bacon.  Squirrel and dumplings.   Battered and deep friend catfish or crappie with fried potatoes and brown beans and wampum bread.  She also did piles of mustard and turnip greens, lambs quarters or polk salad.   Other than dirt, rocks, and cow droppings I don’t know of anything else she didn’t cook to perfection.  I ate and stayed thin.  It was nirvana until my mid thirties.  I still ate like a hog but the staying thin wasn’t happening so easily.  There were a few years there were I thought of just giving up.  The numbers telling me what size pants  I wore became inverted.  I was getting wider than I was long.  Something had to give.  Luckily something did.
I used to stay reasonably thin by working hard.  I worked for a friend of mine roofing houses and  that kept my width close to my length.  This friend of mine was also a fireman.  I was visiting him at the fire station one day when I discovered something amazing.  These firemen were eating mounds of sausage, piles of bacon and eggs.  They were digesting whole herds of cows, whole flocks of chickens, and hogs by the dozens.  I was amazed.  I asked my buddy what was going on and he said they were trying to lose weight.  I thought this was the craziest thing I’d ever heard and dismissed it entirely.  However, I went back and seen those firemen again in a few weeks and they were thinner and still eating like a pack of coyotes.  I couldn’t believe it.  I inquired about this diet and discovered it was the Atkins diet.  Much to my wifes horror, I began immediately.  She was worried I was killing myself but the pounds flew off of me.  She became less worried about my health after a few weeks when my clothes no longer fit and I could see that “come hither” look in her eyes.  She immediately tried it and the pounds flew off of her too.  It was amazing.  Life was good.
She has been a devout Atkins dieter ever since and I’ve waffled on and off.  Then I hit my forties and had to get serious again.  I was just rocking along thinking I was doing good.  Yes I wasn’t heavy any more but soft comes to mind.  Everythng changed when I started parousing the virtual world and saw how good my avatar  looked.  He has ripped muscles and six pack abs.  It was hard to go from virtual world to real world.  You’re bound to cross a mirrors path at some point.  What stared back from the mirror didn’t quite exactly resemble my avatar.  Those damn mirrors.  Now me and a buddy of mine work out almost every day.  I still don’t look like my avatar but things are starting to look like they’re supposed to again.  I don’t have six pack abs, but I am now longer than  I am wide.  That’s a start.  I don’t know if I’m ever going to be Carry Grant, but at least I’ve left Larry the Cable guy in the dust.