Fat belly to flat belly redux

When last I left my fat belly, I had started a journey of diet and exercise to a flat belly.

The most current tale of the tape shows me at 162 pounds, a loss so far of 23 pounds and close to my goal of 25.

It wasn't that I looked too bad when I started back in March. Being a little round around the middle is what you get in middle age, right? The Baby Boomer boom of the gut, right? No.

At 185 pounds I was overweight, according to the body mass index specs for my height of 5-foot-8.

You're considered overweight if your BMI gets above 25. I was at 28.1. With a BMI of 30 or greater you're considered obese. I didn't like the upward arc I was on. I didn't like the image I had of myself.

I wasn't looking to regain my youth -- that boat sailed long ago. With age, hair turns gray, hair falls out, hair grows in places it doesn't belong. I accept I can't turn back the clock. I wanted to get back on path of better health.

Too many bad things come from being overweight. It's been enough to deal with my inherited cholesterol issues. I didn't need overweight issues -- heart disease, diabetes -- on top of that.

My redirected path started with my purchase in March of the "Flat Belly Diet: For Men."

It made me think differently about eating. It made me think differently about food shopping. It made me think differently about exercise.

My eating and shopping mantra became: Reduced fat, no fat, reduced salt, no salt.

I've become a label reader, something I never was before. I became a calorie counter, something I never was before.

And I became a MUFA eater -- mono-unsaturated fatty acids. Olive oil, nuts, avocados, olives. I boosted my metabolism by eating a little heat (red pepper, jalapenos, hot banana peppers) with a lot of my meals.

Mostly, though, I changed my brain.

I don't think or worry about the things I don't eat or drink. I think about the long-term benefits about the things I don't eat or drink.

I'm not a diet Nazi. I still over-indulge at parties, at family gatherings, at restaurants. But not all the time.

My BMI target of 24.3 (160 pounds) is a goal. After that it'll be a way of life, a fixed number to carry just like my Social Security number or date of birth.

For this Baby Boomer, the issues associated with aging are challenging enough. It's better to confront and deal with some of them while I still have the will and motivation.

My first summer job

National Public Radio has been doing a series of stories on people and their most memorable summer jobs as teenagers.

Here's my contribution as a laborer on a "muck" farm in upstate New York.

They're called muck farms for the soil, rich with humus from drained swamp or wetlands. The dark soil is good for the onions and lettuce and other crops, and working on these farms was a rite of passage as a teenager in Oswego County in upstate New York.

It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore in the late Sixties and one of the men in my neighborhood was a heavy machine operator at one of the many farms in Oswego County.

He was the one who stripped the swamps and wetlands of the vegetation to expose the muck that then dried and was planted. He was my ride to work before dawn each morning and my ride home each afternoon.

There were three jobs to be done depending on the day and the weather: Weeding, harvesting, or making boxes.

Weeding was the worst because it involved walking the rows -- which seemed endless -- pulling a particularly virulent weed by the roots and placing it a sack. At the end of the day the weeds were put in piles. When the piles dried they were burned.

It didn't do any good to get lazy, and kick the weed out of the ground, instead of leaning over and taking it out by the root. This was a fast growing weed and when it grew back you returned to the rows to re-do the work you could have taken care of the first time out.

The best job was making the boxes, which we did on days that it rained. We worked inside the warehouse, using a machine to staple brads into the bottom flaps of the boxes that were used for the lettuce at harvest.

The hardest part of the job -- but the most exciting -- was the harvest. Migrant lettuce cutters trimmed the lettuce and boxed the heads. We loaded the boxes onto flat bed trucks and brought them to an area where we then loaded the boxes into tractor trailers.

You can imagine how I labored at the beginning of that summer lugging box after box after box after box of lettuce into the trailers. You also can't imagine how much strength I developed by the end of the summer, literally heaving boxes right into place in the trailers's hold.

That was one benefit from the job: the abs and pecs from a summer of lifting. Man, what a stud. But I'd come home so filthy that my mother made me change out of my work clothes in the garage before being allowed into the house. I suspect, like the weeds we pulled, work clothes were burned at the end of the summer for fear they contained some kind of muck plague.

The NPR look at memorable summer jobs is a series that Baby Boomers can relate to; we're at that age where we enjoy looking back to consider the people and events that contributed to the people we are today.

My summer on the muck farm is the job I loved to hate. I respected the job for the hard work that it was, used the money to buy a Yamaha acoustic guitar that I still play today, 43 years later.

I had other summer jobs -- clerk at a pharmacy, lifeguard and swim teacher at the YMCA. But none has the visceral memory that the muck farm has. No other job convinced me of the need for an education to earn my white collar, which I proudly wore for a long professional career, never having to change clothes in the garage again.

I'm now unretired

I officially declare myself unretired.

I've retired from being retired.

It doesn't make sense to say that I'm retired anymore when what I do every day doesn't feel like the retirement manual written by my parents' generation and their parents' generation.

My un-retirement is a template for Baby Boomers everywhere. We are redefining retirement as we rewrite the manual on how to do it.

Here is a pretty typical example of how "retired" is defined: "A retired person is an older person who has left his or her job and has usually stopped working completely."

More and more you see and hear how us older persons are continuing to work, either in our jobs or in new jobs, and a lot of us have not stopped working completely.

The redefinition of retirement is driven by economic needs, to be sure. Survey after survey shows that as a group Baby Boomers haven't saved or invested nearly enough to retire to life without working.

But there is also a personal need to be un-retired, to not simply withdraw from life and society and the grind we regard as work. We still want to contribute, we're driven by a desire to show the value in what we have to say and what we can do in the time we have left to do it.

Three Junes ago, I thought of myself as retired because I had retired from my job.

I called myself retired because, at the time, I liked the sound of it. But I knew there was still more work -- albeit different work -- to be done.

My work schedule is now as full as ever.

It is a work schedule defined by me and controlled by me according to the deadlines and expectations of the people with whom I have freelance contracts.

The definition of work hasn't changed among Boomers. Work is work. It is a task to be done. It still requires our time, treasure and talent, and it doesn't matter that the work is for yourself.

I'm chief blogging officer for my one-man company. Certainly it's a different kind of work. I can commute to the office in my underwear. I take a break and play the guitar or piano. I rearrange my writing duties to spend a part of the day at the gym or at the beach or skiing.

The work can involve nights and weekends, which it rarely did when I was someone else's employee. Work doesn't necessarily have to be an office. It doesn't have to be 9 to 5. It doesn't mean having to wear big boy clothes every day.

As Baby Boomers redefine retirement, perhaps they're also redefining work in the process.

Not as distracted as you might think

Statistically speaking, I'm a distracted driver.

In fact, statistically speaking, I'm more distracted behind the wheel by my cell phone than drivers half my age and younger.

I say statistically speaking based on a recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that shows Baby Boomers as a group are distracted drivers because of their cell phone use.

It says: "Fully 61% of adults say they have talked on their cell phones while they were behind the wheel. That is considerably greater than the number of 16- and 17-year-olds (43%) who have talked on their cells while driving."

I can see how this is true. When I walk or run along my usual route, I see a lot of commuter traffic and I'm always amazed at the number of people -- older and younger adults like -- who are talking on the phone. Or they are holding their cell phone and texting with a thumb. And this while they're approaching a traffic light in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I'm surprised there aren't more bumper car accidents than there are.

I'll admit to being distracted on occasion, but it isn't by my cell phone. Primarily, it's the stuff going on in my head as I travel from Point A to Point B.

My biggest distracted offense is forgetting to turn off my turn signal.

Yes, I'm one of those drivers: blithely driving down the road my turn signal indicating a turn to nowhere.

I'm very aware about turning my signal on to make a turn; I'm bad about turning the indicator off after I've made the turn.

The problem is those turns that aren't sharp enough for the indicator to shut off by itself. If I'm merging in or out of traffic, if I'm exiting onto an off ramp, if I'm indicating a turn at a fork in the road, the indicator is likely to stay on.

Just ask my son David. He's the one, if he's in the car, who is always telling me to turn off my turn signal.

I don't know what I'm thinking about that excludes me from turning off the indicator. I can't hear it the tick-tick-tick, which is part of the problem of being distracted. You get so closed into your head that it distracts you from other things going on outside of your head.

I know I'm not alone in distractions that have nothing to do with a cell phone.

I pulled away from the grocery store parking lot the other day to see an older gentleman behind the wheel of his new generation station wagon/SUV mixed breed with the tailgate of his vehicle lifted wide open. I thought he must have a big load in the back to be driving around like that. But no ... there was nothing in the rear of the car to warrant the tailgate being open.

It seems he just forgot about the tailgate and was distracted enough not to realize the road noise or the warning light on his dashboard.

I almost preferred that the guy would have been on the phone.

He and I need a better excuse than the things roiling around in our heads as a reason for our distractions.