A letter from the author
The Afternoon With My Grandson That I Only Got Through
I am sixty-four years old. I have type 2 diabetes. I have COPD — I never smoked a cigarette in my life, but I grew up in a house full of them. I have sleep apnea and I sleep with a machine. I broke my back and my hip in a car accident in 2015 and neither has been quite right since. And I am still heavier than I intend to be.
I put that first because nearly every book like mine is written by somebody in considerably better shape than the man reading it. A trainer at forty. A doctor who has never been heavy. I am not that. I am, in all likelihood, in worse condition than you are — and I am going to tell you anyway that something can be done, because I am doing it from underneath a longer list than yours.
My daughter moved back to my town about two years ago and brought my grandson with her. Elijah was three.
The first time she asked whether I could watch him for an afternoon, I do not think I let her finish the question. We had a wonderful day. We watched television. We laughed at things that are not funny to anybody over the age of five. I fed him and looked after him, and when he went home I sat in the quiet for a while feeling like I had been handed something.
About six months later she asked me again.
By then he had arrived at the phase they all arrive at. He spent that afternoon running the length of my house at full speed, screeching, with both dogs galloping along behind him — and of course the dogs made him louder and he made the dogs faster, and around it went.
I want to be careful about what did and did not happen. I did fine. He was safe, he was fed, nobody got shouted at, and he went home happy. I am not sitting here confessing to being a bad grandfather.
What I am confessing to is quieter than that. I did not have the energy to turn that afternoon into anything.
Because a four-year-old tearing around a house at full volume is not a problem. It is raw material. With something in the tank you take that and make a game out of it. You get him outside and run it out of him. You get down on the floor and become part of the noise instead of waiting it out.
I could not. I got through it.
Sit with that phrase a moment, because I have thought about it a great deal since. Got through it. That is a phrase for a dentist appointment. It is not a phrase for an afternoon with your grandson, and it was the first time I understood that being tired had started costing me something I actually wanted.
Nothing went wrong. It was just disappointing, in a way I could not put down afterwards.
That is the difference all of this is about, and it does not show up on a bathroom scale or in a lab result. It is whether the second afternoon can be as good as the first one.
Here is the thing I worked out slowly, and it is the reason I finally did something.
The things a man refuses to admit are precisely the things he cannot control.
Nobody minds confessing to a flaw he could fix on Tuesday. It costs you nothing to say you ought to eat better. What sticks in a man's throat is the thing that is simply, permanently true about him — the disease he has, the lungs he was left with, the years he cannot have back. Admitting that feels like surrender. So he does not say it. And because he does not say it, he never deals with it.
I spent years not saying it.
Not one item on that list at the top of this page ever improved by being ignored. Several got considerably worse. The ones I have made real progress on are, without exception, the ones I finally said out loud first.
That is all I am asking of you here. Not a plan. Not a diet. Not a purchase. The willingness to say the true thing before you try to change it.
Send me the chapter I would hand you first
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I should tell you what I am not going to do, because it is probably the reason you are still reading.
I am not a doctor and I will not pretend to be one. I will not tell you what to take, what dose to take it at, or where to get it. I will not promise you a number of pounds or a result of any kind, because nobody honest can promise you that, and the men who do are selling you something worse than a book.
What I will do is tell you exactly what I did, in the order I did it, including the things that did not work and the things I read about carefully and then decided against. Whatever happened to me happened to me. What happens to you is a conversation between you and your own physician, and I would far rather you took this whole account to him than acted on any of it alone.
So let me start you where I start every reader — with the chapter I would hand you first if you were sitting across from me.
What is in the chapter I will send you
- The forty minutes you can do tomorrow morning, before you change one thing about how you eat
- Why I stopped trusting the number on my bathroom scale, and what I started measuring instead
- The seven years I spent guessing, and the week I stopped
- The question I make every reader answer before he is allowed to turn the page
I am not a physician and nothing here is medical advice. This is one man's account of what he did and what happened to him — it is not a diagnosis, a treatment, or a plan for anybody else. Talk to a qualified, licensed doctor before you change how you eat, how you exercise, or anything you take. If you are on medication, that conversation matters more, not less.
Send me the chapter
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