"Eat until you're...what?!"

There I was. About ten years old with a heavy encyclopedia in my lap. Volume W-X-Y-Z. The only volume of the World Book series that contained four, count ‘em, four letters.

My Dad bought this set from a door-to-door salesman
decades ago. He recently asked if I wanted them. I told
him, "Thanks, Dad, but I have all that information at
home on a thumb drive."

        Mom said that was because less words started with W, X, Y and Z, but I knew the real answer. The poor sap who had been forced to write an entire encyclopedia had to be so freaking bored by the end, he naturally started to do some condensing. 

        This seemed obvious to me because at that very moment I was being forced to write a report on “Washington, George” and had, at loooong last, come to my final paragraph which tumbled out like this: 

“An English guy surrendered to George Washington. Then Washington went back home. Then he turned back into a farmer. Then he died. The end.”  

The people who caught the last helicopter out of Saigon could not have been more anxious to be finished than I was. 

The only thing that could have made this event worse would be having
to write a school report about it.

  All I had to do was come up with a more original word for “died” and I’d be done. 

        "Croaked?" I thought. "Yeah, Croaked." 

        I called to my Mom in the next room.

“Mom, how do you spell “croaked”?! 

And then she said it. Those three words that have the power to make a young student cry out in despair and confusion.

“Look it up!” 

“Look it up?! What do you mean?! Just look at all the pages in the whole stupid dictionary and hope it magically appears?!”

  Of course, as the years passed, I came to understand this phrase. But when I became an adult (and got a little paunchy), an equally perplexing phrase took it’s place.

“Eat until you’re satisfied.”

        "Eat until you're satisfied?!"

For twenty years this phrase gave me fits. Every time some one offered up this little gem of nothingness I wanted to say, “Um, excuse me, but I’m not satisfied until the last morsel I swallow drops a mere quarter of an inch down into my esophagus and stacks itself neatly on top of the rest of my meal.”

202 lbs. (Due to the size of my wife, objects
in the picture may appear larger than
they actually are.)

172 lbs. (Son, Ben, ain't helping me much
either.  He's 129 lbs soaking wet)

        Seriously, for most of my adult life I have eaten until I simply can’t take another bite. That’s what "satisfied" had always meant to me. It never dawned on me to stop eating before the bursting point. Why would it? There was more food on the table. My jaw still worked. I could still grip a fork. Why would I stop shoveling stuff into my mouth?!

But earlier this year, a few days into a whole food, plant strong diet, I contemplated a second bowl of lentil chili, but then I thought to myself, “I guess I could eat more, but I’m...hey!...I’m satisfied! What the-?! So, that's what they mean!" The planets aligned! (Turns out there's an actual reason for this.)

        Five months later I’m 30 pounds lighter and 30 inches slimmer. Next month, I’ll get some blood drawn and find out whether my A1c number has dropped significantly. I'll let you know how that goes, but for now (sigh) I'm done writing. You get the point. Blah, blah. Wrapping up. The end.