I always figured I would get married, spend a wonderful decade growing fat
off junk food, followed by a presto-changeo midlife crisis health kick/divorce.
That’s just the way it’s done. But, given Nate’s example, it’s becoming clear
that I too should log a few hours blasting my obliques, feeling the burn,
hitting the crunch or whatever-the-hell fruity terminology they use at gyms
these days.
Actually, screw that. Exercise sucks.
I’ve tried it, and like a Ben Stiller movie, it’s just painful and boring.
Besides, if I date only fat girls, I can still be the attractive one in the
relationship. I have to think the sex would not be as bad as they say. The trick
is to pretend she’s someone famous. In other words, it might not be all that
erotic to hump a giant talking beanbag, but if you scotch tape a picture of
Luciano Pavarotti onto her face, it’s at least interesting.
"There’s probably a brand of gravy out there that actually
doubles as a sports drink."
A quick survey of late-night TV doesn’t
improve my views on exercise, either. Every infomercial starts with
black and white footage of a doughy guy trying desperately to
perform a sit-up. I guess I’m supposed to identify with that guy,
but I can actually do sit-ups, and without muted trombones of
failure blaring in the background. For a few easy payments, I could
contort myself into an arrangement of tubes and straps and
theoretically become a mountain gorilla in just minutes a day. No
thanks.
People like me who hate exercise aren’t necessarily doomed to a life of
trying to find their genitals in a sea of blubbery thigh-folds, though. As long
as you eat healthy, you should be OK. Of course these days, there are a million
diets offering hope to gullible fatsos, a demographic rivaled in number only by
the Hispanics. And everyone knows they’re busy feeding America taco after taco
until the
gringo threat is rendered immobile.
Speaking of which, have you been to a Taco Bell lately? Yo quiero barfbag.
I’m no mathematician, but I find it remarkable that they can compile a hundred
different menu items, all from the same five ingredients. And every one of them
will kill you, particularly the Grade-Z Beefoid Paste.
I have a friend who considers “Think Outside the Bun” a personal philosophy.
He’s such a good customer at Taco Bell, they’ll make him random crap that’s not
even on the menu. “Hey, give me four taco shells arranged in a trapezoid, with a
60/40 mixture of salsa and guacamole drizzled in a concentric spiral.” “Yes,
sir!”
At some point in the pursuit of easy weight loss, science lost its damn mind.
There’s no other way to explain the Atkins craze. I think some executive decided
people would be dumb enough to think that Big Macs were healthy, as long as you
skip the bun. Here’s what they don’t say: Even if you bread them in vitamins and
deep-fry them in soymilk, chunks of greasy meat and reconstituted cheese are
always going to make you fat.
Years ago, my friends and I used to reward ourselves after road hockey with a
trip to Burger King for a Whopper—heavy-all. The “heavy-all” part wasn’t a
sanctioned Burger King term, but it aptly referred to a burger positively
bulging with cheese and mayo and lettuce fragments. You have to hand it to BK—no
other franchise had the nerve to offer food that turned into a shapeless handful
of meaty slop after two bites.
Wendy’s recently launched a burger called “The Baconator.” And while my
stoner friends love the idea of combining two patties with six strips of cured
smoky goodness, it’s not exactly a recipe for health, in spite of what Atkins’
zombie would say. The name alone should strike fear into the hearts of
cardiologists, not to mention Sarah Connor. It clocks in at 830 calories and 51
grams of fat, which is more than enough to turn you into a lumbering porkbeast.
Still, when
you’ve got the munchies....
Burger joints aren’t the only offenders. Kentucky Fried Chicken spent
millions of dollars rebranding into “KFC,” so as to de-emphasize the “fried”
part. Now, I do enjoy commercials wherein a cartoon plantation owner jumps out
of a bucket of chicken to breakdance, but I have a better idea in mind for KFC.
If they really wanted the public to stop calling it “fried chicken,” step number
one is to quit frying the goddamn chicken.
At the supermarket recently,
I actually saw reduced-fat aerosol cheese. At first I thought the executives at
Nabisco were simply lying. After all, these are the same shady characters who
devised “Reverse Oreos.” But science has actually created a nitrogen-propelled,
sodium-laden tub of orange goo that won’t make you fat. Food doctors can get
cola down to one calorie and there’s probably a brand of gravy out there that
actually doubles as a sports drink. So, why is there an obesity epidemic, again?
Maybe it doesn’t matter, anyway. Maybe liposuction technology will grow so
advanced that future eat monsters will be able to strap butter to their insides
with impunity. They’ll walk up and place their orders for a dozen Atomic Slam
Baco-Meals, and the clerks, instead of simply assuming that lunch is being
picked up for a construction site, will ask “For here or to go?” without a trace
of sarcasm.
I hope that day never comes. I may not be in perfect shape, but as long as
there’s a hierarchy of fat, I can always work just hard enough not to occupy the
bottom rung. You won’t see me running any marathons, but you also won’t see me
riding my motorized
wheelchair to the Twinkie aisle.
