Fat and Happy

I was waiting to come up with something, so I could respond to this prompt, but damn it I am a writer, not a waiter, so let’s do this.  I wish that I never got fat and out of shape, but this happened because I never ate healthy foods and I wasn’t interested in working out.  My motto was always, “If you don’t have any fat, then you are not having any fun.”  When I was young, I had no idea about what I wanted to do with my life, so I never planned anything.  I lived in the moment and now I realize that was a big mistake.  I was not fat when I was in High School, and my beer belly came later, from drinking too much beer.  I enjoyed partying which included smoking joints, drinking beer and listening to music, mostly the Grateful Dead.

It is possible that my metabolism had something to do with me getting fat, but I have to think that drinking beer contributed more to this.  I drank to excess every night and this was something that I was good at.  We used to go to this bar, two carloads of guys and we would sit at different tables and drink pitchers of beer.  It was a competition to see which table could consume more beer and the table that won, wouldn’t have to pay for the drinks, which was a big encouragement for me to drink as much as I could.

Another night in a different bar, this guy bet me that I couldn’t drink one glass of beer every minute for a whole hour.  The glass was only 4 ounces and I knew that I could chug that down in a few seconds, so I accepted the challenge.  Over the one-hour period this came to 240 ounces, which equaled 1.875 gallons of beer.  If you break this down into 12-ounce bottles of beer, that meant that I had to drink 20 bottles in an hour.  I did it, but the worst part was that since I have to drink that glass of beer every minute on the minute, I didn’t have time to go to the bathroom during this period.

Once you get fat, there is no coming back.  You can go on a diet, but most people who diet rarely have their bodies return to their former shape.  You can try to cut calories and start exercising, but most of the time this ends up as a losing battle.  Most people will go through stages where they will lose some weight, only to regain it later.  When I decreased my calorie intake, it triggered my body to go into starvation mode, which reduced the amount of energy that I naturally expended, making it even harder for me to lose weight.  My body like everyone else’s is continually creating new fat cells and the number of fat cells that a person has remains constant through their life.  New fat cells grow because of our genetics, this is a result of preventing people from starvation where our ancestors would store energy in times of famine, so it is not my fault that I am fat. It got to a point for me where I accepted that I am a hippopotamus and I know that I am supposed to be enormous.

Written for Fandango’s Provocative Question #129 which asks, “What is the one thing you would like to change about yourself?  What would it be and why?”