Slender, lean, thin, lithe …. all words to describe … the old editor?
Well, not just yet. But I have dropped 15 pounds since New Year’s Day on a newfangled Cedar Tree Diet. It works like a charm.
Don’t look for details in the bookstore or among the supplements in any health foods shop. This is new therapy.
I’ve cinched up my belt two notches and could fit into the khakis I outgrew 15 years ago … if I still had them.
Frankly, the old editor was getting puffy. No more.
I’m leaner and meaner, almost ready to drop to a lighter boxing division.
This diet doesn’t require a gym membership, push-ups or a jogging machine. Elizabeth doesn’t cook special meals. I’ve only banned one thing from my diet: Wine.
The difference is in the cedar trees, the most abundant tree of my native Farmington. They grow like weeds.
I haven’t been eating them. I’ve been cutting them … by the hundreds.
Armed with my trusty chainsaw on weekends, I have been clearing away the cedars growing along the fence lines at the farm, planted generously by the birds over the years. Then I bought a new weed whacker and tackled the briars on Saturdays since Christmas.
I’ve returned home with scores of scratches, stumbling into the house on Saturday evenings exhausted from this never-ending chore.
Then I stepped on the scales one day. Part of me was missing.
I always had trouble with exercise. Lifting barbells seems like wasted energy. There is no purpose to the work. As a farm boy, I got my exercise by stacking hay. The action had merit. So does cutting cedars.
The work has proven far more exhausting than lifting weights. Ripping through briars and weeds with a spinning blade has the same beneficial result. I sometimes relate to the Greek mythological character Sisyphus who was assigned in Hades to constantly …