Hotdogs
a humorous essay by
Janice Daugharty
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Janice Daugharty
In January, 2005, I became a card-carrying member of what’s called CAD. What we CADS do for fun is compare cholesterol levels, blood pressure readings, and heart doctors. For those of you who don’t know, CAD is the acronym for Coronary Artery Disease. Yep, I’m wearing a tiny metal lattice device, a kind of badge, inside my chest to expand a blocked artery to my heart. I think of it like my daddy’s Purple Heart Award received for a battle injury during World War II. I received my badge for a fifty-year battle with fat, beginning shortly after weaning from my mother’s breast. Apparently, I was born with a fat gene, and that gene was bequeathed by my deceased grandmother, who I never did a mean thing to in my life.
I weigh in now at a solid 130 pounds, which is approximately what I’ve lost and gained back on an average of every five years.
Name the diet crazes and I’ve tried them: fasting and bingeing in the Fifties and Sixties (my wedding dress won’t zip on my nip-waisted, teeny-tiny granddaughter); Atkins in the Seventies, alternated with the so-called Mayo Clinic Grapefruit diet; combinations of all the above in the Eighties; feasting in the early Nineties while on book tours with my HarperCollins AMX card (try staying free at The Peabody, in Memphis, for weeks at a time and not gorging yourself). Next came the lean years of low-fat dieting, followed by back-to-Atkins, till I had to have emergency angioplasty for Coronary Artery Disease.
Exercise, you say. Well, for over twenty years I’ve tortured my feet, walking 30 minutes a day, full speed, rain or shine, hot or cold. Lots of jumping when I happened up on rattlesnakes along the trails on my 300 acres cleared from the South Georgia pinewoods. I have as proof of my dedication to what I call aerobic walking, hammer toes, bunions and calluses. Okay, so my pointy-toed high-heels had something to do with my ruined feet. Think Tammy Faye Baker and Dolly Pardon to get the whole picture of my twinkling and hoofing around in those fool shoes.