Cuffs, Pleats, And A Sartorial Visit to My Past
By
Leonard Zwelling
Tirzepatide injection is used to treat type 2 diabetes. It is used together with diet and exercise to help control your blood sugar. Tirzepatide is a glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) receptor and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist.
From The Mayo Clinic website
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7i3VlEAnFm5HzrgrYJVXDj
From the fifth episode of the podcast A New Prescription that I do with my son Andrew
I don’t know when I decided to lose twenty pounds. My doctor has been asking me to do so for years. I think there were two events that spurred me to lose the weight.
The first was my reading of an article in the Science section of a Tuesday New York Times edition relating how a group of cardiologists at a medical meeting dinner all pushed away their plates with their food half eaten. They all knowingly smiled at one another. They all were taking either semaglutide (e.g. Ozempic or Wegovy) or tirzepatide (Mounjoro or Zepbound). Please listen to our podcast to get in depth insight into these remarkable drugs (link, above).
Hmm, I thought. If these guys thought it was safe, maybe I should give it a try.
Then son Andrew and I interviewed Dr. Estratios Koutoumpakis, an oncocardiologist at MD Anderson, for our podcast A New Prescription (see link). The podcast was all about these drugs and I became convinced that maybe with the help of the drugs, I could lose the weight.
My doctor and I carefully planned the therapy. He even gave me a sample of Mounjaro at the lowest dose.
To make a long story short, I had to increase my weekly injection dose twice to get to a final effective and tolerable dose. The gastrointestinal side effects are not as benign as the TV commercials would have you believe, but the drug worked. I immediately lost my appetite, controlled my food intake, and had no desire for sugar at all. Over about eight weeks I lost about twenty-two pounds and I am weaning myself off the drug. Hopefully, I have locked in a diet that will keep the weight off.
This is a lengthy introduction to why I have spent the greater part of a week cleaning out my clothes closet. It was time to throw out the vestiges of old, working me.
When the BW and I built this house in 2001, we, of course, installed large closets in the master bedroom area. She has been good about giving away her older clothes. I have not. I now have nine large boxes of old, but still in good shape, clothes to give away sitting near the front door of our house. And, I am not done.
The hardest part of the cleansing process was pants. Almost every pair I came across was in wearable shape. It was almost like discovering a new wardrobe I didn’t know I had. So which ones do I donate?
I tried on every pair. It took hours, but it needn’t have. Every single pair with cuffs, pleats, or both were too small. They came from an era of a much smaller me and much different sensibilities in men’s fashion.
I spent much of the time in the purging process laughing at what I used to wear, particularly when I wore a tie every day. On that subject, does anyone know what to do with old ties? I rarely don one any more. I have many.
I am down to dress shirts and suits. Then I can call a charity that has the ability to pick all of this up.
I have learned two lessons. First, cleansing your closet on an annual basis and ridding yourself of anything you haven’t worn in a few years is a good policy. Second, if you don’t follow policy one, you can clean out twenty-year’s worth and give yourself a good laugh. You won’t believe what you used to think was cool.
