I find myself in an odd predicament. The guy who loves to swim against the tides of public opinion and follow his own just rules has found himself among the majority of Americans. Not just once, but twice.
In the first instance, it seems I missed being in the minority by quite a bit. I am not even close to being the 1% in this country. I am somewhere in the 99% of those who are pissed off at the wealthy and a Congress that could care less about any of us or our respective plights. I figure within that 99%, I’m somewhere in the 50th percentile. Damn I hate being average.
In the second instance, I am among the 130 million Americans who are either overweight or obese. I prefer being overweight in this regard, so I won’t tell you which side of the fat coin I am actually on.
I wasn’t always this way. There were a few fleeting years when I was actually on the skinny, almost too skinny side. On this 6′ 1″ frame there was at one time only 135 pounds. If you’re gasping, I don’t blame you. I looked like a Holocaust victim.
As I’ve written about before, I was a victim of boobonucleosis – the “kissing because I wanted to see boobs” disease. That, along with a buffet of other maladies, caused me to drop 30 pounds that I really couldn’t spare.
The road back was a delicious one. My doctor’s prescription – apple pie. He told my mom, “If he likes pie, let him eat the whole thing. He needs calories. Lots of them.”
I don’t think that I ever heard that this was just a temporary prescription. I can only gauge by my current state that this is one piece of doctor’s advice that I really glommed onto, for I have obviously overdosed a bit on the prescription ever since.
I used to really blame myself for this. Now I blame McDonalds. Yes, the evil bastards who created the Big Mac, golden brown, sugar coated fries and strawberry shakes colored by tropical beetles.
I blame McDonalds, and all other purveyors of fatty foods for the brian damage I have. Actually, we all suffer brain damage every time we indulge in a high-fat diet, it seems. The damage comes on like gangbusters, often within 24 hours of attempting fatracide.
Remember the old saw, “A minute on the lips, years on the hips?” It should be “a minute on the lips, a year on the hypothalamus.”
If you continue to dine on a high-fat diet over time, this area of the brain becomes inflamed and suffers structural damage. It is known as a hypothalamic neuron injury. I just like to call it a McInjury.
This McInjury is why you keep gaining weight. It seems that your brain damaged body craves to return to its set weight, that weight your body desperately wants to be at. With a McInjury, you are in essence defending the elevated body weight. In other words, you are screwed.
How does this happen? According to the McResearch, your damaged brain has experienced fundamental changes in the circuits that control energy balance.
So what happens when you lose weight through Weight Watchers or your own diet? You will lose the weight artificially and perhaps for some time. But eventually your brain will send out the signals that you’re underweight and you’ll start to make late night runs to the supermarket, or worse, chug through the drive thru at McDonalds craving a Big Mac, super-sized.
OK, so we’re super-screwed.
The good news, for all of us who wish to remain delusional, is that these findings are just tentative. There’s no absolute cause and effect between the damage done to the hypowhatever in your brain and the fact that you’ve taken a sudden liking to elastic waistband pants and have actually begun to think they are actually a sensible fashion statement. Talk about delusional!
But that doesn’t stop me from blaming my own McGirth on McDonalds, Checkers, Jack In the Box and those damned Italian Wedding Cakes that keep finding their way home from Publix (yes, there are remnants of one in my refrigerator right now).
None of this is my fault. I have obviously been unknowingly brainwashed and brain damaged by the evil marketers of high-fat food and cursed by an addictive weakness to delicious foods that tantalize my taste buds in a way that broccoli and rice cakes never could.
Wow, now there’s a load off my mind. Here I was blaming my own bad habits and ill-advised dietary choices for the six-pack that has become a pony keg over the years. I feel so much better about myself.
And no, I still don’t have any expand-o-matic pants in the closet, at least not any that I wear out in public. Being a stay at home kind of guy in my work life, I do get to wear sweats to work every day. I live a secret expand-o-matic existence that no one in public ever has to see.
I do admit that I don’t go out to the beach anymore, thanks for the McInjury. The last time I did three members of Greenpeace tossed buckets of water on me and tried to return me to the ocean.
Out on the Treasure Coast, convincing myself that it would be totally self-sacrificing of me to polish off the rest of the Italian Wedding Cake before it goes bad,
– Robb