You know it's time to lose weight when your wife's friend compares you to the United States of America's fattest president.

Can you tell which one is me?

A.

B.

In the American school system they make sure you know certain key things about our presidents, namely that George Washington chopped down and cherry tree and said, "I cannot tell a lie"...(Which IS a lie, a mythic lie, but a lie, nonetheless) about how Lincoln was really tall for his day, how William Henry Harrison died 30 days after his inauguration, AND how William Howard Taft was SO fat, he couldn't fit into the bathtub of the White House, so they had to make a special one for him.

I mean, what's the point of sharing that point with kids, so they can say, HAHAHA, he was FAT!......so humiliating for him. He's long dead, and I still feel sorry for him.

Anyway, what spurred this post is that Cicada's friend just posted a comment today on her blog about how I look just like William Howard Taft. Contextually, this is in reference to a picture of Cicada and Gulliver and I at my friend Pete's Halloween Costume party where we came as a family of circus freaks.


I told Cicada I wanted us to look Victorian, so she went to Wal-Mart and came back with a mustache for me among other things including fur fabric for her beard and Gulliver's fur, being wolf boy and all.

Anyway, I do see the resemblance actually, I really do, and it's funny, but the truth is, it's no fun for me as a fat person to be inadvertently told by a skinny person that I look like Taft.

I try not to be offended by the fact that I have 'let myself go' since I returned home from my mission a fairly trim, 180 lbs. I also make no excuses other than to say, it is a direct result of having a job sitting in front of a computer all day, and running to my girl Wendy to grab something fast and convenient for lunch. Oh and I am not prone to exercising, so there is that. I guess those all sound like excuses, and they are, but I see them more as the root of the problem.

I have never been as fat as I am now, and it's really hard to see pictures of me know and think, is that really me? Crap, my face is FAT, my gut is FAT! I don't know how people that have met me since I have gained all this weight view me.

Now that I have been 'freed' of my day job, and now that I am sitting at a computer at home all day, instead of one at work, I think I can actually eat better. There is no reason to run to Wendy for my food, because my new girl Cicada can cook, and lately we have been eating better. Cicada is actually off sugar and losing weight. I have made no such commitment, but I am considering it.

I took Gulliver for a walk today and It was great. I felt positive and encouraged , that is until I read that comment. Then again...

I really feel, much of the way our lives turns out depends on our attitude and the way we react to negative things that happen to us.

Maybe Taft got tired of being 'Fatt Taft' (I just made that up, I just realized his name is a anagram for Fatt.)

Maybe I can let this comment motivate me do really do something about it.

Maybe I could be compared to Jimmy Carter............Maybe.


-Murray Terreno Di Amore

P.S.

By the time he left office, Taft had lost 70 pounds.