Omigosh! I stepped on by bathroom scale this morning and, to my dismay, weighed in at 200 lbs. Good grief Charlie Brown. That’s more than 40 lbs over what I weighed in college. So what did I do? I went to the fridge. and started to cut up some celery and carrots for future snacks. Be gone potato chips and ice cream. It’s time to reform.

Problem solved? Well, it’s a start. I will have to put some effort into taking off that excess blubber. For all kinds of reasons, being over-weight is neither healthy nor comfortable.

BUT, one thing I am NOT going to do is join the millions of Americans in their national obsession with losing weight. Frankly, I think it’s sort of depressing for people to be spending so much time worrying about how they want to LOOK.

Years ago, it was the touch-feely 70’s as I recall, I went to a couples’ counseling session with my partner at the time. The therapist suggested that we needed to get more in touch with our bodies and, as our homework, she told us to strip naked in front of a full-length mirror at home and just look at our bodies for about ten minutes. Exactly what we were to observe I don’t remember, but being new to California at the time and having grown up in decidedly blue collar South Buffalo, I thought her suggestion was hysterical. That’s putting it mildly. I think my response was a guffaw, followed by something like “You gotta be kidding, ” which sort of insulted the therapist and ended the session on the spot.

Well, things haven’t changed much from the 70’s. The cult of the body is still alive and well. Maria Shriver, a Kennedy and wife of former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, wrote a neat little book a couple of years back encouraging us to put aside our single-minded concentration on “looking good” and put some effort into “being good” human beings.

In “Just Who Will You Be?” Shriver asks us to change our perspective, to turn from focusing our attention on the outside stuff, the money we make, the car we drive and our physical appearance and begin to look at our inner worth as human beings. Ask first not “How do I look” but who do I want to be in the world.

Much as I liked what Maria Shriver had to say, I’m writing these thoughts on New Years Day well aware that millions of us will be trooping off to fitness centers or signing up with Jenny Craig, convinced that looking good is the most important thing in the world.

Well, what the hey? Keeping our bods in reasonably good shape is hardly a bad thing. It does no one any good to sail off blissfully into lardo land, out of breath, and setting ourselves up for cardiac arrest. But, for God’s sake and our own, we need to remember to keep our balance. There is much more to life than keeping a trim physique. And we don’t really need to strip naked and stand before a mirror to know that what is in our hearts trumps our outward appearance anytime.

Hank can be reached at: hmattimore@yahoo.com