Apparently, I’m still fat.

It started sometime in the late seventies, when I was but a wee lad. I didn’t even notice it happening. But in those days, my family was enduring difficult times. My father was in the throes of post-heart-attack existential depression, near bankruptcy and suicide, having lost his health, his stepfather, his job, and his mother in rapid succession. My siblings lost one of their best friends in a motorcycle accident around the same time. Somewhere in there, I’m told, I killed the family dog by opening the front door, whereupon it promptly ran in front of a car.

I was too busy thinking about where to hide boogers and wondering why kids made fun of my Toughskins to notice the heavy cloud hanging over everything, but the stress must have taken a toll on my young figure. Well, the stress, in addition to a heartland diet of meat, meat, cheese, milk, meat, cheese, Chef Boyardee, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I had one advantage over the kids these days: in the days before video games, I still had to play outside most of the time, which usually consisted of one of the following activities:

• Throwing stuff into trees and then climbing the trees to get the stuff back. Then doing it again.
• Throwing a tennis ball against the garage door and then catching it. Then doing it again.
• Running around in circles until I was dizzy.
• Riding my bike to the end of the block and then turning around.
• Rollerskating to the end of the block and then turning around. This was especially enjoyable the summer they repaved the street. You could go like a million miles an hour. Waving your arms like a moron helped a lot.
• Watching ants.

I first suspected that something was going wrong when Robert Allmart beat me in a race down his block, past the witch of an old lady’s house who every Halloween gave out nothing but Peeps and those shitty rock-hard peanut butter candies wrapped in orange wax paper. This had never happened before in all of our many races, and my young mind simply couldn’t or didn’t connect my decreasing physical abilities with the upticking digits in the waist size of each fall’s back-to-school Toughskins.

The problem continued through junior high and high school, but I’ll spare you all the painful details about name-calling and self-doubt and such. The point is this: I have carried extra weight pretty much since I can remember. And now, despite months of work and gallons of sweat on my part, the arrogant monkey at the gym, having applied his dreaded calipers to various fleshy bits of my body, has again decreed that I am “out of shape.” In fact, for all my work, I have gained ten pounds in six months.

Even though the recent news is bad, the fact is indisputable: I’m certainly less fat than I was. My girth was on the verge of impressive there for a while. During the year after I graduated and was unable to find a full time job, I worked three to four part-time jobs at a time, averaging 50–60 hours a week (but, sadly, without overtime) to save up for our open-ended journey to the Czech Republic. All my jobs had something to do with sitting at a computer, and none of them had anything to do with getting any exercise whatsoever.

The funny thing about getting fat is how it sneaks up on you. If 40 pounds of slimy goo waited to hear your first tentative snores, crept up under your covers, slid into your earhole, and oozed around inside your body, depositing itself more or less uniformly under your skin, you’d wake up screaming in the morning. But when that 40 pounds comes over many months in the form of delicious food and beer, it’s not quite as noticeable.

I left the midwest years ago. I haven’t necessarily noticed my diet changing, but it obviously has. While growing up, many of my meals involved ground beef, Velveeta, and/or ketchup. Milk, bologna, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, Bisquick, peanut butter, and strawberry jelly were on maximum rotation. Vegetables, if they appeared, came from the freezer and were a mealy little lukewarm lump next to the real food, like your new girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend at a party—there was an obligation to cordiality, but no enjoyment on anyone’s part. My diet has slowly changed for the better, a result of the confluence of at least three factors: (1) further experience with the bags-of-frozen-vegetables food group in its natural state has proved surprisingly enjoyable and varied; (2) a year spent in a country where the choice of available vegetables ranges, for a few straight months in the dead of winter, from cabbage to cabbage has taught me that you don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry; and (3) a girlfriend who (a) was raised vegetarian by parents who brainwashed her into thinking that artichokes and asparagus were treats for good children who mound their manners and (b) enjoys both (i) cooking luxurious vegetable-based meals from scratch and (ii) gardening like a mofo has proved a crowbar to my admittedly sometimes formerly closed-minded ways regarding unmeat.

And so it is that now, when I encounter fellow midwesterners still in the throes of their meat and whitefood addictions (my favorite is pasta in a cream sauce with mashed potatoes [which, for the record, are not a vegetable] and a glass of milk), I want to preach the glory of the vegetable with the zeal of a convert. I share a name with one of the most zealous, after all—and since I am careful to hold my tongue when it comes to reminding smokers about how much healthier I feel with two years behind me of not smoking (after emphatically smoking for twelve)—reminding white-food folk that they could eat better, and by eating better would look and feel better, seems like it would be a helpful thing to do. But it would not be welcome.

Hey, but ketchup has lycopene. It should be its own food group!

I really dug the searsarchive. It brought back fond memories of my gradeschool days wardrobe: red jeans, brown jeans, and green jeans. the closest thing I had to blue in my wardrobe was a blue floral print shirt that went with maroon hip-hugger bell-bottoms and a matching sleeveless sweater vest. But somehow the following year, the cool guys (including one who went on to become a pro football quarterback) still played tennis with me. Go figure.

of course, i'll never trust you now that i know you photoshopped once, but if those are really your arms? looking good!

i've lost some of the weight i gained in the past two years. i keep picking up the dumbbells and telling myself, "i used to carry this around on me!" if only it were so easy to put the weight back down. set it back on the stand.

but i bought some zucchini last week-- it seems like cabbage season is over!

Hmmmm, let's see. You allowed somebody who works in a health club for a living (and undoubtedly spends hours on equipment to improve himself by making his muscles stick out) to pinch your body in numerous places and tell you how healthy you are, and, according to this person, there has been no improvement despite months of steady work. I wonder if he has any interest in your continuing membership in the health club and finds shaming people an excellent way to achieve that result? I wonder if an MD on your excellent new health plan might have a more helpful opinion, perhaps might even applaud your efforts?(alrighty rooney, checked that box off! - good girl!)

are you going to comment on the revamping of "torrid" ("toughskins" for sassy/sulky teen girls)?

I have no comment at this time.

As Dr. Dean Ornisch says, "in shape" and "healthy" are not necessarily the same thing. "In shape" athletes and runners drop dead all the time because they are not healthy. And, from another unknown source, fat people can be in shape; round is also a shape.

I probably should have looked into one of these diets a long time ago.