Amazing Boomer Menopause Diet

March 10, 2010 | Cafe | Comments 2

My oh my how our boomer bodies have changed! Humor writer Kathleen Norton didn’t take it sitting down, though. She stood up — and went to the mall. She treats us here with her “Amazing Boomer Menopause Diet: Losing weight one toe at a time.”

Thanks to hot flashes, my 52-year-old baby boomer sweat glands work harder than Hollywood’s plastic surgeons. So doesn’t it make perfect sense that if you produce enough sweat to power a nuclear reactor, you are losing weight?

At least it made perfect sense at 2 a.m. as I leaped out of bed to turn on the fan, turn off the heat and tear off all the covers. “That’s it!” I cried. Menopause is the answer!”

“Huh? What? Give me a blanket,” my poor husband said. “‘I’m freezing.”

“Roll over,” I said. “It’s just a bad dream.”

“You have no idea,” he mumbled and tried to cover himself with ruffly pillow shams.

The next morning, I was ready to attack the mall and try on smaller clothes, completely ignoring the fact that my old clothes fit the same as before. But nothing will stop a woman – from the largest to the smallest – if she thinks she’s found a way to drop a few pounds without trying.

Just ask my sister. We spent years trolling the diet world together.

We did the Beer-and-Bananas Diet. We lost no weight, but giggled all day. We did the Eat-All-Your-Calories-By-11 a.m.-Then-Starve-All-Day-Diet. That lasted until noon on the first day. We ordered “diet candy” (remember chocolate “AYDS?”) and ate the whole box in 48 hours. It was supposed to last four weeks.

We almost bought a plastic suit that hooked to a vacuum and promised to make you buff while you cleaned. We wanted smaller thighs… but not so badly that we’d do more housework. And after all that, I thought, it turns out there is going to be an upside to being a human inferno.

I explained my theory at breakfast. “Every night I sweat. Every day I sweat. It’s gotta pay off,” I said.

My husband looked confused. “Let me get this straight. Menopause, which you said yesterday is making you crazy, is now making you lose weight?” he said.

He circled around me slowly to see if I was armed. I thought he was evaluating my backside.

“What? I look fat? Are you saying I look fat?!?” I glared.

He did not respond. He did what he has learned through experience is the best way to handle this question. He went to the garage. Quickly.

Kathleen Norton

My first stop at the mall was the jeans rack, where all pants smaller than my usual size refused to go up over my keyster. The same happened with dresses and skirts, and in the Bathing Suit Department, where I invented four gymnastic moves as I tried to squeeze into things I had no business squeezing into.

There were only two possible explanations.

A) Every size tag was wrong.

B) My menopause weight-loss theory was for the birds.

Depressed, I sank into a chair in the shoe department, where an eager young salesgirl hungry for a commission shoved a sizing gadget on my foot. “Looks like 6-1/2,” she chirped.

As a major hot flash swept over me, I turned to her and said. “Look Tinkerbell, my feet have not been that small since I gave birth 28 years ago.”

“Well, they are a six-and-a-half now,” she sniffed. I looked down and could not believe my eyes. The menopause weight loss plan had worked, all right. But only on my feet.

That’s when my husband strolled by. “I lost weight in two places,” I huffed and wiped my brow. “Right foot and left foot. Geez, turn off that heat, would ya Tinkerbell?”

The poor man married to me looked at my steaming face. He looked at the frightened salesgirl. Then he did what any husband would do if his menopausal wife was in a rage because her feet lost weight.

He spun around, headed for the door and yelled: “I’ll be out in the car!”

You can read more of Kathleen’s humor at http://kathleennorton1.wordpress.com.