Fate Has Turned Him Into A Health Freak

Goodbye Uncle Mike’s pizzas, bacon cheeseburgers with fries from Carl’s Jr., chili dogs, fried chicken and barbecued buffalo wings.

Goodbye Marlboros, margaritas and martinis. Adios Hershey’s syrup, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and Trader Joe’s cheesecake.

See ya, old pals. We had some laughs and great times together, but now I’ve got to be moving on. The doc says I’ve got to find some new pals to hang out with. You guys are too dangerous.

New pals like fat-free cheese, salads and yogurt. Health foods, vitamins, veggies and their kissin’ cousins - low cholesterol and exercise.

Fate, that heartbreaker, has turned me into my worst nightmare. A health freak reading labels and counting fat grams.

Age 50 blew in a few months ago and didn’t waste any time slapping me upside the head and getting my attention that the second half century wasn’t going to be the physical cakewalk the first half was.

One minute I’m sitting on the couch with a bowl of ice cream watching Mystery Theater - the next I’m living it, trying to figure out why a 500-pound gorilla is sitting on my chest.

I felt like Redd Foxx in Sanford & Son. “It’s the big one. I’m coming, Elizabeth.”

Well, it wasn’t the big one, and I didn’t go anywhere except an emergency hospital room for a few days’ stay at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where some fine nurses poked and pried me while some excellent doctors Roto-Rootered the main artery into my heart with a balloon until it unclogged.

They called it angina. What I had was basically a blockage of the arteries, which decreases the blood flow to the heart - a bad thing if you want to stick around to see your kids grow up and spend all your money.

It seems all those carefree years of abusing this temple of mine with just about every saturated fat known to mankind had finally caught up with me, the doc says.

The good news is the odds are 70 percent in my favor that the artery will stay open, but I’m going to have to change my ways - get rid of my old pals, fat and cholesterol.

The choice was pretty simple, the doc said. You want to stay alive, say goodbye.

I paid my old pals a last visit at the supermarket the other day, stopping by the cheese case to say goodbye to sharp cheddar and mozzarella - breaking the news that I was leaving them for Healthy Choice fat-free.

I swung by Farmer John’s display case to say goodbye to a couple of my oldest pals - bacon and sausage - before walking down the aisle to say goodbye to Entenmann’s New York crumb cake and a box of chocolate doughnuts.

I stopped by a can of Dinty Moore’s beef stew and a couple of my favorite brands of canned chili to say adios. Too much saturated fat, pals. Sorry.

On the way out the store, I gave a carton of Marlboro’s a wink goodbye. Looks like I may have beat you, grim reaper.

And now I’m reading labels, counting grams, and playing mind games - trying to convince myself, for instance, that you can make a fat free cheese pizza from scratch that tastes anything remotely like even the worst home-delivered pizza.

“What is that stuff?” my 10-year-old son asks, watching me try to break up a brick of fat-free cheese to spread it over a pizza crust Friday night, our traditional pizza night.

The kid’s been a model of support for me these past few weeks, backing me up 100 percent in trying to go cold turkey leaving my old pals.

“I ain’t eating that thing,” he says. “I want Domino’s.”

“You’d eat a Domino’s pizza in front of your sick dad who can’t have any?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said.

The kid laughs. I laugh. It’s a good laugh, an overdue laugh. There haven’t been many laughs in my house these past few weeks while I’ve been trying to get that 500-pound gorilla off my chest.

There’s a cliche that says you don’t really know what’s important to you in life until you think you’re about to lose it.

It’s true - and it’s good to be back.