Fat Man Running

The Biggest Loser is starting up again pretty soon. This is very exciting news for my wife. She loves it. She loves that show. Me? I’m not the biggest fan. The show is essentially two hours of fat people crying. They cry tears of joy over emotional breakthroughs and weight loss triumphs. Then they cry tears of self-loathing over poor relationships and poor decisions that have led to them being fat. Fat people crying. Which is why I don’t like it: If I wanted to spend two hours watching fat people cry, I’d go take a long shower. That’s what goes on in there. I look down and the voice in my head chimes in with a, “What have you done.” More a statement than a question. Because we all know the answer.

But my wife insists that it’s more than fat people crying. “It’s inspirational,” she says. “You’re just a cynic.” It’s true, I can be a cynic. But I fail to see anything inspirational about people who are 5’3”, weigh 300 pounds, and can’t get motivated to lose some weight unless someone puts them on T.V. and gives them a chance at $250,000.

It’s like Society is holding out a carrot, “Here fatty! Dance! Dance for our entertainment!”

It may be sponsored by Subway, but my wife (who is not overweight) watches while eating stuffed pizza from Giordano’s. “Very inspiring,” I say as I reach for another slice of stuffed pepperoni.

But it’s true, she does find it inspiring. I don’t know what it is, but something about watching a 340-pound man who’s had his stomach stapled on three different occasions ride a bike to exhaustion while getting yelled at by a nasty little woman really motivates her. It motivates her so much that she comes home from work one day and tells me she’s got a great idea.

“We should go online and enter our heights and weights into a Body Mass Index calculator!”

“Nope. No, we should not. That is not a great idea. It is a terrible idea though.”

“It’ll be fun!”

“Nope. Gonna have to disagree with you again.”

“Come on! We can have our own little challenge,” says the woman who doesn’t need to lose weight to her fat husband.

“Fine.” The things I do…

“Great! I’ll go first.” She goes online, types in her height and weight, and what do you know? She’s “normal weight,” whatever that means.

Now it’s my turn. I go online, type in my height and weight, and…

I have to lose 30 pounds just to be overweight! I’m 30 pounds over overweight! If I bust my ass, change my diet, and drop 30 pounds, I will be fat. I knew it was bad, but Jesus! That takes the wind out of your sails.

“Hey, what the fuck!” I say.

“Oh that’s okay, don’t be dejected,” skinny wife tells me. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

And Hitler just wanted to deport the Jews.[i]

“I don’t feel bad. I’m good. I mean, I’m pretty strong. Muscle weighs three times as much as fat. So it’s mostly because I’m pretty ripped, I’m sure.” It’s because I’m fat.

“I don’t think of you as obese. That’s not what I see when I look at you,” she tells me.

She did it! She used the “o” word. I’m a whale!

“Well, I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me. Thirty pounds to being fat.”

“Don’t think of it that way. Just eat right and exercise.”

And there it is. A perfectly simple two step solution to fat people everywhere’s problems. Step one: Eat right. Vegetables. Fruit. Cut out the carbs. Less red meat. Lean protein. Whole grains. That’ll be super easy until I want pizza later tonight.

And step two: Exercise. Jogging. Biking. Who am I kidding? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that. “Let’s start with step one,” I tell myself.

I go to the grocery store, and what’s the first thing you see when you go to the grocery store? The produce aisle. Green everywhere. And I’m looking around, browsing, weaving in and out of the different stands like they’re some foreign labyrinth. I’m weighing my options, taking it all in before I make a decision. It’s like Smokey Robinson said, you better shop around. I do a few laps and settle down in front of the bananas. I like bananas. In the basket. Next it’s on to apples. I ate those when I was a small child. In the basket. Good, fruit is taken care of. Now for some vegetables…

I see spinach. I never liked spinach. Some carrots catch my eye. Bright orange and terrible. Carrots suck. Bugs Bunny was full of shit. I come nose-to-nose with a pile of green beans. Just a giant bin filled with a mound of green beans. A pyramid of vitamins. I kind of remember not hating green beans. I’ve had green beans that aren’t awful. But my hands are feeling heavy. I can’t pick them up. I’m just staring at them. And then the most pathetic thought that’s ever gone through my head pops in there, “Isn’t it enough that I brush my teeth? I’ve got to eat this shit too? I take out the garbage. Come on.” I’m actually getting mad that I have to supply my body with nutrition in order to be alive. It’s then that I realize I’m a terrible person.

Fast forward one week, the bananas are brown, the apples are firm but untouched. I’ve eaten pizza three times in the past seven days, and it occurs to me that I’m really good at buying bananas.  It’s as though I believe that possessing bananas will magically give me potassium. “Honey, the bananas are getting brown. I’m gonna go out and get some fresh ones.” I throw out the brown bananas and the apples, the apples because I don’t trust anything that’s still good after a week.

Skip step one. Step one has defeated me. Step two is now step one. Exercise.

“Hey, you just gotta exercise,” the wife tells me. “It’s fun.”

“What’s that? What’s fun?”

“Exercise. Running. You should come for a run with me. Running is fun.”

My wife is a liar. Running is not fun. And I can actually prove this. If running was fun, we wouldn’t call it “exercise.” We would call it “play.” Remember when you were a little kid, and the phone rang? Your mom told you it was your friend Matt from down the street.

You pick up the phone and Matt says, “Do you want to come over and play?”

And you say, “Yes! That sounds like fun.” PLAY! “What are we gonna play?” you may have asked.

“The Jacksons and the McDermotts want to play kick the can in our alley.”

“Kick the can? That sounds awesome!”

And you go. And you run around like crazy. And in spite of the running, it’s fun. Kids play all the time, and they have a blast. They use their imaginations to distract their mind from the fact that they’re doing wind sprints. Because it’s not wind sprints. It’s not exercise. It’s “ghosts in the graveyard!” Everybody’s a ghost! And if the clock strikes midnight and the ghosts come out of their graves, you can’t let them catch you or you’ll be a ghost! Oh man, that sounds awesome. I’d go play right now.

Or you’re playing “cops and robbers!” My dad’s sprinkler head is actually an invaluable jewel that gets kept on our front porch and I’m Sherriff Lou! I don’t know when the robbers will strike or why something so valuable is being kept out in the open, but they’re coming and I’ve got to be on my guard! If I catch them, I take them to jail, which incidentally is the porch right next to the jewel. Poor planning Sherriff. But it’s great fun!

That was play. Running? Jogging? I don’t have the imagination to make a fat man running slowly for five miles fun.

I’m running from the Russians! Only, the Russians are very slow and don’t possess tanks or cars? Nope. That won’t work. That’s terrible.

Michael Myers is chasing me, and since he only walks in the movie Halloween (the original, Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers might be able to run, but that’s kind of why he sucks), so as long as I’m moving slightly faster than walking, he won’t catch me… But I’m running in a loop, so why would he chase me? He’d just be hanging out at my house waiting for me to come home all tired and shitty, and then he’d strangle me to death when I came through the door.

I need to move in exactly this same loop every other day in under an hour or God will punish me!? Wait, that’s not fun. That’s OCD. Fuck.

There is nothing that can turn running into fun. It’s an inescapable truth. It’s exercise. And the only thing worse than being a fat person exercising is being a fat person watching fat people exercise. And the only thing worse than being a fat person watching fat people exercise is being a fat person eating pizza while watching fat people exercise as a nasty little woman screams at them. And the only thing worse that that is watching fat people cry.

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[i] Yes, my wife is Hitler in that analogy. And my feelings are Ashkenazi Jews. Whatever, fuck you. It’s a joke.