Weight

We’ve already lost the war on drugs…

…and we’re about to lose the war on obesity. (Maybe we should stop declaring war on abstract ideas.) America is more interested in letting companies addict citizens to copious amounts of sugar. The same way they’re fine with letting assault rifles in schools, the same way they’re fine with companies charge as much as they want for life-saving drugs, the same way horrific deplorable violence on TV is okay just as long people don’t say any naughty words, the same way they rail at illegal immigrants but don’t mind them doing all the hard labor and blue collar jobs.

Everywhere I look I see women with biscuit dough thighs waddling down Main Street in Disneyland. Men with thick neck rolls and beer guts licking ice cream at the state fair. Fat is so ubiquitous we now have to make heroes look like what the average American looks like–heavy–like Homer Simpson, Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, Rose Quartz, Dumplin’, Samwell Tarly, and Bridgerton.

And I’m one of them.

I mean, techically, I’m obese, according to the BMI scale, though I don’t feel obese. Obese is like the guy in The Whale. Obese is the guy on “My 600-lb Life” or whatever the show is on A&E. Obese people need walkers to get around. They can’t breathe on their own because the fat weighs their lungs down. They can’t get out of bed because their bones would break under their own weight.

But according to the scale commonly accepted, I am “obese”. But this must mean that a LOT of people in America are technically obese. I weigh 252 pounds. In order to get down to “healthy” (by which I mean just on the boundary of health, not the middle) I would have to weigh 183 pounds. That’s a difference of seventy pounds to lose, just to be on the cusp of normalcy.

We are all fat. We are all overweight. Every average man and woman living a normal lifestyle and eating normal things is too fat. We have to fight against the norms of society just to be normal. America is not interested in preventing Americans from making bad decisions, so we have to be.

The odds are stacked against me. It’s not a fair fight. The world, America at least, you can’t eat anything not loaded with sugar and fat. Anything I eat counters any exercise I might do. Spent thirty minutes walking? Congratulations, you just blew it all by eating a single cupcake. Two bites of food wasted half an hour of your life.

Food is a toxic environment in this country. Despite all the efforts to make ingredients and calories transparent, there are ways to subterfuge that, to fool the mind into what you’re eating is, if not healthy, then at least harmless. If not harmless, then meaningless. There are three or four different ways to say “sugar”. You look at the number of calories, but that’s for, like, three chips. No one eats just three chips and then is done for the day. Two servings of soda in one can? What, do you expect me to drink half and then put the rest in the refrigerator for the next day? They don’t even list all the allergens. My wife is allergic to sulfites, but nothing tells you that there are sulfites on that, not seafood, not lettuce at a salad bar, not wine.

Not to mention all the advertisements that get you as a kid. I grew up in the eighties and by commercials alone, you would think we subsisted on Gushers, Kid Cuisine, Surge, Ecto Cooler, Trix yogurt, Planter’s cheese balls, fun fruits, fruit snacks, Fruitopia, fruit roll-ups, fruit-by-the-foot (like if you had “fruit” in the title, that made it healthy), Lunchables, Squeez-its, Jell-O pudding, Capri-sun, Kool-aid. It’s candy. That’s all it is. And if it’s not sugar, it’s fat. If it’s not fat it’s some other carb. And don’t get me started on the purple ketchup.

For another, it’s me. I have a weird relationship with food. I have all my life. One of my heroes growing up was Garfield. Terrible role model, but aimed squarely at me with the cartoon and “screw authority figures” attitude and network specials. But it gave me a mentality that “fat was where it’s at“. And somehow, either tangentially or independently, I got this idea that I had to clean my plate. That I had to eat everything in front of me because I’ll never know where I’ll get my next meal from, like a wandering assassin. Even though that was ABSOLUTELY NOT a thing in my house. I didn’t grow up in poverty. We didn’t have to shop at the food shelf or use WIC checks or anything. So why do I feel like I have to consume everything I can, pack it on like a hibernating bear? And it’s gotten me in trouble before–there are times I’ve eaten so much it made me sick.

The other day my uncle sent me an picture of myself when I was five. We’re in my grandparent’s backyard and I think it was summer, because we’re all shirtless. My grandfather has a gut. My father has a gut. I have a gut. At five. It’s genetic. And I’ve had this damn thing all my life. I hate it. And it’s not going away. It never has, no matter what I’ve done. Even at my peak–seventeen years old doing Tae Kwon Do, aerobic exercise twice a week.

And I’m just tired of fighting it.

I’m tired of looking pregnant all the time. All I want to do is get rid of this, arms and legs and neck can stay the same. But I hate not seeing my penis everytime I pee. The self-loathing, the degradation.

I’m already fighting myself with depression and anxiety. Spent years of suffering since puberty, heart racing whenever I just had to talk to someone I knew. Worrying every night before bed. Obsessing over things. Cringing at every awkward thing I ever said. Don’t talk to me about suffering. I carry my own worst enemy with me wherever I go. If I could sue myself for mental anguish, I would.

And speaking of depression, I can’t get myself out of it just by strength of willpower. My brain doesn’t let me. In the same way, I’m also incapable of getting rid of fat despite anything I do. Not only is my biology working against me, but so is my lifestyle. Every article I read about how to get rid of belly fat, they only ever suggest two things: diet and exercise.

Exercise doesn’t work. For two reasons. I don’t get anything like a runner’s high or endorphins or things like that (probably because of the depression). The only joy I get from exercise is the relief that it’s over. And I can get that without having to exercise in the first place. The simplest thing I could do would be running. But I hate running. Hate it. Hate it like AM hates humanity.

I hate it because it causes me pain (as does most other aerobic activities). And if I experience pain doing something, I’m going to avoid doing it, it’s that simple. Pain isn’t worth it. I’ve lived long enough and suffered enough in my life that I’m now of the mind of why should I torture myself anymore for any reason. I’ve done that. It sucks. My entire life has been ruled by pain and fear. I’m not going to embrace it anymore. I’m tired of doing painful or unenjoyable things just because they’re “good for me” or “healthy”. Fuck that noise.

It just hurts. It hurts my feet, it hurts my lungs. Maybe there’s something about my body that resists strenuous activity. I always feel like I can’t intake enough air. I got yelled at in Phys. Ed. in middle school in swimming because I couldn’t do the front crawl right because I couldn’t do the breathing correctly because I needed more air than I was getting from a single breath. Maybe because when I was born I had “meconium aspiration syndrome” resulting in bronchitis and maybe my lungs underdeveloped. I’ve tried asthma inhalers and they don’t make a difference. Maybe I have narrow nasal passageways. For the first time ever, my new doctor told me she could hear me breathing through my nose and that’s not normal. Maybe my feet aren’t wide enough to support my tall weighty frame. I can’t ice skate because it hurts too much–too much pressure on my skinny feet.

Besides that, running is a fine exercise… until you tweak your knee or get shin splints or a sideache. Then you have to not run for days, weeks, and you go back to being fat. This is what I mean when I say your body is working against you. Or at least it’s certainly not working for you. Your body is good at keeping you alive, it’s not so good at keeping you happy.

The other reason exercise doesn’t work is because I already do it. I go to Snap Fitness every other day for two hours. I do stretches, weight lifting, and 46 minutes of cardio on an elliptical. I’ve done this for the past four years. I am STILL 252 lbs. I’m a little stronger, but I’m certainly not lighter.

Diet doesn’t work. And the reason is simple–I don’t have the willpower to give up tasty things.

I don’t have many pleasures in life. I don’t do drugs and never have. I don’t smoke tobacco and never have. I don’t smoke weed and never have. I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any sexual desire because the anti-anxiety drugs have knocked that out and the only thing they do is get me to normal, get me to so I’m not drowning. Weeks go by before I have a soda. Even roller coasters don’t thrill me. So all that means I don’t have any bursts of joy in my life.

Except food and alcohol. Food is one of the few things I can look forward too. Something I can anticipate and sink hope into. I’m always interested in new kinds of foods, interesting flavors. Always looking at the sodas or chunky soups to see if there’s anything new. I’ve got a half-gallon of “orange creme” milk in my fridge right now. I’m not eating entire pizzas like I used to. I’m not eating $20 worth of Taco Bell every week as my “little treat”. I’m already being good.

But I am not psychologically set up to starve myself. It’s not that I get hangry, it’s that I HATE being hungry. I was hungry in college–I would only eat every other day to conserve my meal plan. It was bad for me. I couldn’t concentrate on my work when I was hungry.

I do not have the willpower to stop snacking. I’m always hungry. I always could eat. I’m never in a state where I couldn’t use a little smackerel of something. I’m hungry even as I write this. I’m light-headed, my fingers are tingly (handicapping my ability to type), shaky. I can’t function like that 24/7. And eating ten stalks of celery every day is not going to cut it. I know, I’ve tried it. My body rejects eating the same thing over and over. It says “you can’t have any more celery, you’re full on celery, you need to eat something different or you’re going to throw up.” Willpower isn’t going to work–it hasn’t worked for forty-three years.

And my lifestyle is simply not suited to burn calories, in terms of time and activity. I am a software engineer. That means I sit down for nine hours a day and type. And click and type and click and type and click and type. This does not burn calories. So that’s 33% of my day with more energy consumed than spent. Then after that I have to make dinner? And then spend two hours exercising? Where is my free time? Where is the time for my family? I might as well be a hamster, trapped in a cage, running on a wheel. In short, unless I’m actively worshipping at the iron church, I’m not doing anything that’ll burn more calories than I spend.

I don’t have much time left.

Everyone in my family has long lives… except the men. I had a great-grandmother until 2009. My grandmother is still alive and I’m forty-three. My daughters have a great-grandmother. My daughter had a great-great-grandmother for her first year of life. There are no male blood relatives on my mother’s side since 2018 when my grandfather died That’s all on my mother’s side.

On my dad’s side, my grandfather died when I was 13, at the age of 73, after a long drawn out decade fighting the consequences of alcoholism with diabetes and multiple strokes. I remember him having a kidney dialysis machine in his house, and watching him inject himself with syringes of insulin. And I thought “No way could I give myself my own shot.” My dad died at the age of fifty-eight. He was a football player, but he was large and had a gut like me. And he sometimes criticized me for my sedentary lifestyle–AOL surfing, video games, no sports.

And parts of my body are already breaking down. I’ve been to orthopedics a few times for neck, shoulder, and sciatica pain as a result of sitting for hours, then going home and sitting for more hours. My gall bladder is operating at less than peak efficiency (17% I think?). They thought they might have to take it out, but I’m experiencing no other symptoms, so shrug.

So I’ve made the decision I need to do something about this that’s not diet or exercise, because neither my body nor my mind is set up for that. Like most Americans, the battle is just too difficult. There is a time when you just can’t keep banging against a locked door. The biggest problem is, where do you go? Who do you talk to who knows all the possible solutions and which one is right for you? If you go to a tummy tuck specialist, they’re going to recommend a tummy tuck. You go to a liposuctionist, they’re going to recommend you get liposuction. Bariatric surgeon’s only going to be concerned if you qualify for bariatric surgery or not. Which kind of doctor can get a prescription for Ozempic? And so on. Every place is going to say “our way is best, I don’t know about any of the other ways.”

If it sounds like I’m trying to lose weight without going through the difficulty of diet and exercise… yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. But not because I don’t want to go through that misery (which I don’t) but because I’m already doing those, and it’s not working. Or I should say, it works, but only to an extent. It’s plateaued. And I’m not willing to sacrifice my happiness for my potential health. To lose more weight, to get to the ideal 180, is going to take stronger weapons. I have a +1 dagger, I’m going to die before this boss is slain. I need a +3 Masterwork Great Sword.