Pizza Day...

Hello Friends.

I am writing to you this afternoon on my lunch break at work. After a fairly hectic week, my boss has ordered pizza for the office and we’re waiting for it to arrive. I can only think of pizza. Anything could happen right now and it wouldn’t take my mind of pizza. Joan Pizza could be brought back to life and hit the pizza carpet with her fashion zingers and I’d still be all, “Pizza!”

The trouble is, my gut, ass, thighs, and upper arms are also pizza. Upper arms, that’s the cruelest fat depository! I was feeling so pleased with myself at the gym yesterday doing shoulder presses. The machine faces a mirror and I saw what I thought were muscles bulging under my shirt, but it was only goddamn pizza. If I can grab and manipulate the flesh on my arm, It’s not muscle tissue, it’s DiGiorno.

Notice how I aggressively inserted that “In the gym yesterday” bit? Yeah, so did I. After parting ways with my Big City Gym when I moved, I was content to just go swimming at the university for any kind of fitness, but now that classes have started up again, the pool is so goddamn full of youths that I can’t be bothered to go anymore. Instead, I found a good gym and a pretty good rate and thought, “Now everything will change! Goodbye, fat guy underwear!”

Anyway, one of the “perks” to this gym membership is a consultation with a hunk employed by the facility. I dreaded my consultation because I knew I’d fail terribly at all of the tests and I was right. But beyond sweating, humiliated, at the machines, I also had to have a chat with him about nutrition, during which I lied through my goddamn teeth.

Dream: Eat better.

Goal: Achievable. The hunk explained that diet was responsible for like 70% of achieving a successful fitness goal, to which I wanted to ask, “Could I counteract some of that with aggressive pooping?” I don’t eat garbage food, I cook at home a lot, but I cook red meat, and chicken, and pasta, and dishes where the only vegetable is mushrooms, and the only side dish is more of the entrée. But at the same time, my own lightning-fast metabolism has slowed down because I’m too old to figure out how Instagram works.

Plan: Adopt the following strategies to eat better, get healthier, and buy thin guy underwear again.

Cook and eat more nutritious foods. That’s definitely something that works better in theory than in practice. Have you guys had nutritious food lately? It’s fucking gross. Kale? Gross. Quinoa? Gross. Spinach is okay, but only because you can wilt it in garlic and toss it in some goddamn noodles. I think I’m going to try to integrate healthy components into unhealthy dishes. I’ll put an orange segment next to my steak, for instance, or a broccoli floret will garnish my tumbler of Baileys.

Eat less. It would really be a win-win if I could do this. I would have less food to eat, but more food leftover for lunches. As often as not, however, I’ll make a big dish of something, justify a second helping, eliminate all possibility for leftovers. I guess I could just make more at suppertime but I feel like I’d just keep eating, like one of those awful competitive eaters, expecting a prize at the end.

Not care what I eat. Man, I wish I could do this. The Doc appreciates my cooking, which is lovely, but he could also just as easily eat a frozen dinner, a plate of beans, a slice of bread, a piece of string. He’s the rare bird that just eats because he’s hungry and doesn’t recognize the truly enjoyable experience of eating really good food. Consequently, he has no guilt about what he eats or whether or not he gains weight (though he doesn’t). That’s the way to go. Also, he’s great to live with because if there are chips in the house, they’ll usually stay in the house until I eat all of them.

These are all very first world problems. I’m lucky to go to a grocery store, or eat at a restaurant, and get whatever I want in unlimited quantities. It’s only good genes and being raised by health-conscious parents that keeps me from tipping the scales. Plus, I know age is only going to make me gain weight faster and restrict food further, so why am I kvetching now?

In elementary school, we had Pizza Day. I don’t know if that’s still a thing, but I remember regarding them as akin to days off from school entirely. “I don’t have to pay attention in class today, it’s Pizza Day!” As if all of our activities would somehow be pizza-related. Now, of course, all food decisions are stupidly fraught, and tied to all kinds of feelings of either superiority (“Just a salad”) or shame (“Can I get a side of mayo with the fries?”). But all I’m really serving up is a helping of gluttonous vanity, which is the first thing I have to shed before stepping on the scale. But now I have to go. Pizza’s here.