Man Rant -- This Week's Exercise -- Dieting

Fuck it.  I've just about had it with dieting.  There once was a day, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when I could eat the caloric equivalent of an overturned ice cream truck in one sitting, go outside and play kickball for twenty minutes, come back in and polish off half a barnyard.  And there was always room for jello. Always.  Now, I'm in my early forties, deep into self-loathing on a bite-by-bite basis.  Pasta and I had such wild times in the eighties.  Now we can't even look at each other.

I remember the day when I convinced myself that I needed to lose weight.  I was with the kids at the Air & Space Museum, admiring the days when Americans shot phallic symbols into space with amazing regularity.  In the Geico "15 Minutes Can Save You a Lot of Money on Car Insurance" Hall of Planets, or whatever they call it, there is a scale that lets you know how much you weigh on the moon and other planets.  The kids weighed about as much as a box of Kleenex on most of  our solar system's heavenly bodies.  I got on and was surprised at how much I massively weighed on Jupiter.  Except it was Earth.  My reading comprehension abilities apparently had deteriorated as much as my metabolism.  I waddled off the scale, determined to make some changes, no matter how much I had come to appreciate and treasure food as a comforting, understanding booty call, who always answered the phone no matter how late or drunk I was.  I don't know if it's having kids or getting divorced, but at some point, food became something more than just mere sustenance.  Eating food and a good bowel movement are now prime directives.  They define the entire day.  I can see why people become "foodies" as they get older.  Watching PBS cooking shows is like softcore porn now.  I used to eat macaroni & cheese mixed with whatever condiment was available, tabasco, ketchup, relish, mustard, graham crackers, whatever, out of the pan, over the sink, washed down with beer that kills plant life.  Now, I'm wondering if sesame oil or olive oil would make the risotto taste better.  Just start hammering me with the anal sex already.

So I go to the doctor, and complain about my persistent and consistent lardosity.  He puts me on the Atkins Diet.  The sales pitch sounds great.  Meat. I like meat.  Eggs.  Sure.  Cheese.  Bring it on.  Nuts.  I turn my head and cough.  Lots of leafy vegetables.  Eh.  I'll drown them in cheese.  Everything's going great for the first couple of weeks, and then my body starts to go, "Dude, I think I'm going to start looking for a new roommate."  Turns out the Atkins plan is to scheme your body and brain into thinking it's starving.  Since there are no carbohydrates coming in, the body goes into the auxiliary supplies, i.e., the rest of your ass, to keep the lights on.  Corpulent fat gets converted into energy.  And it works.  If you have the discipline to push away bread, pasta, potatoes, cereal, most fruit, any and all sugars, orange juice, and generally everything that isn't either found in an animal or an animal's stomach, you're golden.  Remember, though, you're playing Three Card Monte with your brain.  I used to treat my brain like a red-headed step-child.  If it could be smoked, drank, chewed, and occasionally sniffed, well, the night is young.  As I've gotten older, my brain is now a feared and respected adversary.  I need my sanity a lot more than I used to.  I really would be so appreciative if I didn't get a panic attack during this job interview.  I will so make it up to you, brain.  So dicking around with my cerebral cortex by convincing itself that it was starving is an interesting career move.  I had wonderful lustful dreams of pizza.  I would see a friend or two in my dream, and they turned into pizza slices and bowls of pasta like a desert isle-based Bugs Bunny cartoon. 

A year and a couple months of pretend-starvation later, and I've gone from fat to less fat.  But I've eaten pasta again.  And donuts.  And pizza.  And they tasted like they were baked in the Holy Ovens of Heaven.   Brain like.  Belly like.  So now it's a waiting game because  I'm back on Atkins again.  We'll see how long I can last this time around.  Because despite the joy that eating brings me, I still like the opposite sex.  And at my age, I'm that old crusty lion on Animal Planet who gets his ass kicked by the younger lions and has to slink out of the pride to hang with the hyenas.  Yes, women love guys for their sense of humor, personality, kindness, blah, blah, blah, but if you look like Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau your options are going to be limited to the fetish crowd, the blind, the equally or exceedingly more fat, and occasionally the horrifically drunk.  Men were cursed with body issues from birth.  We may not stress and binge and purge like the feminine persuasion, thank god, but very few of us look good naked.  That's just a fact.  There's hair in weird places, in patches like a hirsute archipelago on our backs, shoulders, arms, and legs, and as we get older our hair purchases timeshares in places like the ear and nose.  Our balls droop, our chins sag, and for some reason our asses get flatter, so we end up hiking up our pants to our armpits.  The supposed ideal of mankind, Michealangelo's David, is hung like he just swam out of a glacier.  Add fat to the mix, and the results are rarely pretty.  It's a wonder we ever get laid.  I think women feel sorry for us.

So bring on the bacon and the Stairmaster.  I'll keep dieting even if it kills me.