The worst part about growing older is having to admit that your body will not do the things it used to do.

Gone are the days of being able to ingest every bag of Doritos from here to the Mexican border without the consequences of my pants ripping apart at the seams. No more late night runs to the fast food joint to fulfill that craving for whatever they are passing off as food.

I sat down in a lawn chair the other day and I could have sworn that I heard it groan just before it gave up and sent me crashing to the ground.

Later that week, I was walking across the wooden deck on the back of my house and I heard one of the boards complain that they were not designed to hold up elephants just before it cracked.

I didn’t need to use the years of knowledge in fact finding that I gained by watching years of CSI to deduce that it was time to go on a diet.

The question then became how I was going to go about it.

Going to the gym never made much sense to me. I never understood why anyone would get on a treadmill and walk three miles but not go anywhere. Why would anyone pay someone to go to a place to lift weights?

If you want a workout, contact a local farmer and help him put up hay in a barn. If you can do that then I assure you a good workout. However, I was sure that I wasn’t willing to do either of these things so I continued to search for a way to lose some weight while still being able to eat what I wanted and sit around watching episodes of Jerry Springer.

Later that week, the wife and I decided to load up the RV and go camping and rough it a little bit. However, living in our air conditioned RV with a stove, microwave and shower is not exactly primitive living.

I convinced her to try and go off the grid a little bit by cooking our hot dogs on a charcoal grill instead of the stove in the RV. It was then that I realized cooking my food on a charcoal grill was the perfect way to lose weight because I would starve to death long before any food was ever cooked.

I spent the first 30 minutes trying to figure out how much lighter fluid to put on without burning my eye brows off.

I finally lit the grill and the next hour was spent trying to keep the fire from going out. It seemed to go alright at first and then nothing. No flame, no heat, and no hotdogs. After repeating this process several more times, I finally decided to put the hot dogs on the grill and hope for the best.

After another 45 minutes, a few of the hot dogs began to sizzle a bit while the rest were still frozen solid. It was then that I realized that the perfect diet would be one where I cooked all my food on the charcoal grill. By the time the food would be cooked, I would be so frustrated that I wouldn’t care about eating anymore.

I did learn some things in this experience.

I learned that a little lighter fluid goes a long way and that eating half frozen hot dogs is not so bad. Come on over and I’ll pull out the charcoal grill and fix you some. Hopefully you like them rare.