"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

A customer walked into my shop last month. He was sixty-one, a retired schoolteacher, and he had lost fourteen kilograms in four months on Wegovy. He looked great in his clothes. He also looked tired in a way I recognized — the way men look right before their body sends them an invoice they did not expect. He asked me what supplement he should take to "support" the medication. I asked him a question instead. "How much of the fourteen kilograms was fat?" He paused. He did not know. His doctor had probably said something about it, but it had been wrapped in medical language and surrounded by congratulations, so it had not registered. He had a number on the scale that was lower than it had been in twenty years, and he had stopped asking what kind of number it was. That is the documented truth that nobody puts in an Ozempic commercial. And then, because I have been doing this for four years now and I am tired of watching men our age make the same mistake, I told...

                        Every morning, I walk down the stairs from my apartment. Fourteen steps. And every morning, my knees announce each one. Click. Pop. Crack. Click. Pop. Crack. My wife says she can hear me coming from the bedroom. She doesn't need an alarm clock. She has my knees. I'm 59 years old, but my knees are at least 60. Probably 65. They've lived a harder life than the rest of me. While my brain was sitting in boardrooms and my hands were signing contracts, my knees were still paying the bill for what I did to them in my twenties. Let me do the math. In my professional baseball career, I estimate I slid into bases roughly 2,000 times. Each slide slammed my knees into packed dirt at full sprint speed. I squatted behind home plate for catching drills thousands of times — deep squats, full body weight, for hours. I sprinted from first to third, stopped hard, pivoted, pushed off. Over and over. Season after season. Tha...