Fit for Fall

This week must be a week of epiphanies for me. As I was helping my Grandmother clean out her garage the other day, I happened upon a scale. So, naturally, I stepped on it. “Holy shit!” I gasped under my breath, and, had my Grandma not already turned off her hearing aid out of boredom from my B.S. reasons for not yet being employed, she definitely would have heard this. I quickly looked around to make sure nobody had seen, let the scale recalibrate to 0, and tried it again. Damn. I stealthily snapped a picture on my camera phone for evidence. Ladies and Gentleman, as Ed Harris would say in The Rock, “I shit you not.” This was the reading on the scale:

Wow. I am officially the size of an NFL running back.

If you will pardon my French for a second, when the fuck did that happen?? Although, because of the team’s epic losing streak, it is somewhat embarrassing for me to admit that, my freshman year in college, I played a sport that required you to make weight twice-a-week below 172 pounds. Granted, that was quite a stretch for me, and because my playing weight in high school was around 185 I was forced to spend many a morning running in sweats and spitting in a trash can to shed the last few ounces, but still. Fuck me if I’m wrong because I’m not a genius or anything, but if you do the math here, that means I have put on 40 pounds since the end of my competitive athletic career.

Once again, please excuse the language, but holy shit! Do you know how much that is? That’s almost 25% of my old body weight. Do you know what weighs 40 pounds? A full sack of dog food. A 5-gallon bucket of water. A 40-pound dumb bell. A 5 year-old kid. Think of that. Think of taking a 5 year-old, and swallowing him whole with no digestion. That's essentially what I did. Weird.

I was talking to a buddy of mine from school on the phone tonight who has been complicit in this non-stop, 24/7 life of hot-and-cold-running eating, sleeping, partying, and being in the “supine” position since we handed in our theses, and he came up with a good idea: “Hey Wilos,” he said. “You can look at it as though you are getting ready to hibernate for the winter! I watched a show on Animal Planet about that today. Basically, think of it as though you’ve been going around, gathering berries for your great winter slumber.” Come to think of it, he’s basically right. I (have been, and) am preparing for a long winter to be spent hibernating in my parents’ basement (which we call the “Womb” because of its soundproof walls and dearth of windows that would allow any natural light to seep in) wherein I will probably breeze through a season or three of a TV show on DVD each winter week.

I guess it makes sense. All weekend, my dear sweet Grandmother, who, at 86 years-young, still skis 14 days over Christmas, plays tennis with far better consistency than yours truly, and lifts her small weights every day to stay in shape, was dropping subtle hints that I finally realized were not just cute coincidences but were aimed at saying, in so many words, “Wilos, lose some fucking weight!!” Some of these included: after my sister and I explained to Grandma that the old golf cart was running very slowly, “Well, dear, that’s because there’s so much weight on it…” and, (twice) after playing tennis, “Well, dear, the reason you are so sweaty and need to put down a towel on the chair for lunch is because that’s probably a lot more exercise than you’ve gotten in a while…” As Adam Sandler once so aptly put, “whoa, you gotta love your Grandma.” Bless her heart.

Basically, after taking a step back (waaaay back, so I could properly fit in the mirror) and looking at my reflection, I realized that, with the exception of the occasional jog or exercise-bike ride at school, and perhaps a few 1-2 week stints of lifting weights, I really hadn’t worked out much since the winter of my freshman year of college. In hike skewl I played three sports and was always training for those, and, in fact, like any meaty high school jock in America, I loved to lift. I got pretty big senior year, and my friends jokingly called me “God the Bod” (did I mentioned that I was The Man in high school?). I was even such a tool that I would wear wife beaters underneath my shirt and would jump at any opportunity to remove said shirt (I also enjoyed rocking the occasional lax pinney at the beach like a complete chatch), but that is for another entry that I will write in the near future.

Anyways, since I am a man and, therefore, am as inherently lazy as a sloth, I basically rode out my physical fitness for almost the whole four years of college. And, to be honest, I stayed in alright shape. Sure, I got a tinge of the “frat fat” – a thin layer around what used to be a 6-pack, the patented Galvin Double Chin, and experienced a bit of the redistribution of muscle weight into fat that allows for the transition into a prime example of a washed-up athlete’s body without putting on any significant weight. However, come the time of my senior spring, the jig was up. I had hung on to the fruits of past labors for too long, and the well of metabolism eventually ran dry.

I remember hitting the Big Deuce (two hundo) upon returning from my post-graduation trip to Greece, and, as one my friends noted, “Wilos, you have hit a benchmark that is, for an athlete who is trying to bulk up, one of the happiest days of his life, but for an ex-athlete, one of the most dreadful.” In light of my frame and the circumstances, two bills wasn’t all that bad, and I thought I could turn it around pronto. But, as the dog days of summer wore on, apparently the lbs started to add up.

And sure, I guess I look a little bigger (a number of people this summer have said, “Wow, Wilos, you’re lookin’ thick man, you been hittin the weights?” and I chuckle a bit on the inside), but in reality I’m not that fat. I guess I like to look at it as more along the lines of the “Phat” (pretty hot and tempting) that Chris Tucker popularized in the classic Rush Hour. I do not need to heed Dante’s warning and “all hope abandon” as I enter the fall of 2009. I think as long as I stop sleeping 14 hours a day, eating loads of crap, imbibing large quantities of highly-caloric alcohol on a nightly basis, lying down all the time, and if I add in a little bit of exercise, I should be fine. That, or, maybe someone can sign me up for Nutrisystem for an early Christmas present.