Happy colon, happy life

I happily accepted the "gift" and ate it.  

When you get older, you swallow your pride and whatever else you need to keep your biological rhythm regular. You try new things. And friends in their forties (which sounds like a good TV sitcom) are none too shy to share these things with one another. 

In my 20s, I wouldn't have even touched the thing. And if it were my parents eating it, I would have thought it funny. Especially with the picture on the package – a smiling multi-generational family from the '90s. Who exactly are they appealing to in the 21st century?  

But I'm not in my 20s anymore. Here I am at 40, eating a thing – officially called a Happy Colon Chewy Energy Cookie – so full of fibre it felt like a bristle brush easing down my esophagus.  

The craziest part? It was actually pretty good. The end product in particular (I won't go into details). 

I never thought I'd be talking about this – and in this open forum – not even a few years ago. I could pretty much eat anything up until age 39. Then something just stopped. Something went wrong in my digestive universe. Right about the same time I noticed grey hairs in my stubble. 

I've never been one to enjoy eating copious amounts of food, but I have noticed that I can't stuff myself like I used to. There's a limit now. And every meal, it's a real question about whether I want to exceed that limit or not. 

I try to limit my daughter's consumption of sweets, but who am I kidding? It's me who requires the regulation.  

I used to live off a steady diet of ice-cream. Ever since I was a child, I would eat an assortment of frozen flavours before bedtime. I continued that tradition faithfully, even through marriage. It was only five years ago that I embarked on a particularly reckless phase of nightly root beer floats.  

But all good things must come to an end. I wouldn't say I hit rock bottom, but I'm onto plain yogurt now.  

And this isn't some weight-loss thing, if that's what you're thinking – and I'm sure you're not, for those of you who know me. I actually struggle with weight gain – that is, to actually gain weight. My body type is such that my daughter could only identify one other man in all of British Columbia's largest outdoor waterpark last summer who looked thinner than me. His trunks feebly clung to the knobs that were his hips and his ribs protruded from his chest like an extra on Schindler's List. She looked at me carefully and said: "Umm, maybe he's a little skinnier than you." I vowed at that moment to never go shirtless again. 

But this isn't about my appearance. It's about feeling good. It's about being able to sleep soundly through the night because I didn't eat that cinnamon bun at 9 pm, after I had some chips and salsa, after I had the rocky road frozen yogurt.  

That was my life. In those reckless, risk-taking days of my 30s. 

Now I'm chipping away at a four-kilogram tub of plain yogurt, trying to finish it before its expiration date. 

On a side note, I actually prefer plain kefir, but the good folks at our local Wal-Mart abruptly removed it from their shelves. Perhaps not enough people know about the wondrous attributes of kefir: a thick, cold soup of thriving bacteria – a biological motor oil, if you will, for an aging body. 

And let me tell you, for dipping colon cookies, there's nothing better.