Fifteen Pounds

I’ve lost fifteen pounds of blubber.

And do you know what I found under all that fat? More fat.

There’s just layers of the stuff.

You know how so many women have body issues. Like, no matter how thin they are they always think they’re fat?

Well, I am the opposite. I was always so thin that when I got fat, I honestly kept thinking of myself as a thin person. I just didn’t have a fat man’s self precept.

But recently, when Adam and I got our life insurance policies, the nurse came to the house, pulled out her punishing scale and made me jump on it. When I saw the tonnage, I was embarrassed to the point of making self deprecating jokes for the rest of the evening. The nurse, who was pretty rotund herself, was not a very interested audience. Officially, I was 25 pounds overweight (according to ideal BMI –body mass index—charts). Nasty. But let’s remember, those BMI charts are for perfect conditions and they also assume you don’t pack on the muscle the easy way I do, just by picking up a newspaper or walking across the room. But that pesky chart does exist...and from what I can tell so far, it’s pretty right on.

The packed on muscle that I easily acquire has stayed with me my whole adult life, so underneath my hog layer, I always felt kind of strong and thin. I was a thin man trapped in a fat man’s body. Plus, my skin stayed pretty taught across all the suet. So I never had that jiggly thing going on. In fact, I really was all solid muscle with great skin tone. But between the muscle and the skin was an enormous layer of dense lard.

Anyway...as the fat comes off, I am still fat, but what is so interesting is it’s like an excavation. When I see each layer, I can remember back in time when I was that particular level of fat. Right now, I’m at about the fat I was five years ago. And I remember then how I thought, well, I can always lose this little bit. But I had no plan. And when nature encounters someone without a plan, she loves to make a fat guy.

I really want to be ten years ago fat. If I keep on this trajectory, I could be there in another two or three weeks.

At the very beginning of all this, when I lost the first five pounds, I also became aware that I was extremely contracted and stiff. My body had become the letter C from sitting so many hours in front of the computer eating loaves of bread covered with jam. And that letter C was getting super encased in blubber...it was like I was shrinking into a tiny ball and getting bigger all at once. I had to change that. I became consumed with turning my C into an I. Every night, I stretched using stretches I remember from Yoga, workout classes, dancing days, etc. I felt like an alchemist. Changing from one letter to another is like turning Strontium into Gold.

As the weight keeps coming off, I keep stretching. And as I keep not eating bread, pasta, sugar, processed foods, etc., I feel incredibly healthy. So although I am naturally a pig, I can now honestly say, I’m a pig with a purpose.

As a young, thin person with enormous energy and a love of huge challenges, I always thought it would be kind of fun to get fat so you could then have the big project of getting thin. I was so vain I figured I would just do that the minute the encasement of adipose rendered me hideous. But a man’s vanity can be subsumed by éclairs and bottles of bubbly. And let’s face it, aren’t all mirrors distorting? It took the nurse with her nasty scale of truth to tell me, “You better put down that donut!”

I bet she just wanted it for her fatass self.

Being fat is much funnier than being thin. As I try to excavate to ten years ago fat,
I hope I don’t lose my sense of humor.


Cow:




Even the eyelids are fat in this grotesque specimen that was me at my fattest, two years ago. To enlarge and shriek, click on the pic.