Why Being Fat is the Worst Sin of All.

Recently, a trip to a new doctor confirmed what I had been suspecting.  I am fat.  My blunt Indo-American doctor was very clear about this fact.  In his zeal to “heal” me, he used about every clinical term, frowny face, and over-exaggerated notation to “inform” me about this physical malady that I had been cleverly concealing.   Unlike my Nintendo Wii Fit, though, he failed to go so far as calling me “obese.”  Thankfully, I have thick skin (a nice byproduct of fat), and this isn’t even the thousandth time I’ve had to deal with insulting comments. 

My friends in high school used to call me “chunks,” cause they all had the luck of possessing body altering tape worms.  I get called, “big guy,” by people thinking it’s a playful moniker.  When playing sports I get told I am “misleadingly fast.”  I withhold the urge to tell them they are “deceptively nice,” or “ambiguously intelligent,” and it’s not even hard.  Being insulted for weight is a part of every fat person’s DNA.  And most of us aren’t even that fat. 

I dare you to call Gerard Benderoth, the "White Rhino" fat, when not competing for the world's strongest man.  

            

          Fatness, or obesity, is the one thing we as Americans can still mock in open air without the fear of political correctness.  Politicians have waged war on obesity, and it’s probably about time, as we Americans do have a problem with weight.  Skinny people, especially, have a problem with all us plus sized creatures, as if we are a plague on earth, ready to eat them at first signs of a fatty-food famine.  We, the immoral fat people, would run roughshod throughout the earth gorging ourselves on whatever leftover food was in people’s kitchens. Mississippi is over 33% obese, and as everyone knows, Mississippi, is the worst state in the Union.  So using that logic, fat people are the worst American’s alive. 

           
            As if we didn’t already know. 

Please sir, may I not have any more.  

I have one vice: food.  I was born with over-stimulated taste buds.  Where some people find flavor in Mueslix cereal, I taste earth.  Those same people who effortlessly gave up deep fried food, and curse corn syrup, I willingly ate their portions.  Where'd the last slice of pizza go?  Oh, I ate it.   And I liked it.  Or at least I used to.  I’m ready to change.  I admit I have a problem.  I’m a horrible person.  You all judged correctly.  I've been pushing my weight around, and destroying this nation with my sick longing for flavor and fullness.  

Wow, were you writing my life
history in that paragraph?

I wish I had simply started heroin instead of eating DiGiorno pizzas.  I could conceal my track marks so much better than my extra twenty pounds.  I might’ve robbed you to get my next hit, but if that’s the price we pay to only see beauty (heroin addicts are beautiful people), so be it.   I wish I had become a sex addict, instead.  Diseased, but experienced, I could say.  The ladies would love my body one day, and curse me years later when dealing with my offspring that I had no intention of raising.  Or cigarettes, as they have survived the media onslaught of the 80s/90s and become almost okay again.  I’d only smoke outside, never in anyone’s way.  A victimless crime.  Or even better, just get stoned.  Blaze out my mind, and make philosophical statements that nobody cared about.  I could drink heavily, wreck my liver, and fall out of graces with my family over the belligerence I said while intoxicated.  But no.  I choose food.  I choose fat.  I choose wrongly.  According to everyone. 

It doesn’t matter to my doctor that I didn’t check any of those other vice boxes.  He has to save my life, or at least extend it until my seventies.  He has no time to praise me for my otherwise clean living life.  I ate ice cream, so I am going to die.  It doesn’t matter that I sat in the waiting room with a patient who’s face showed obvious signs of methamphetamine use, cause I choose wrongly, I decided to stuff 2800 calories a day into my body instead of hypodermic needles with brain altering chemicals. 

Next to fat people, nobody parties like old people.  So
Hip Hop Hooray, Ho, Hey, BINGO!!  

And sadly, they are all right.  Heart disease kills earlier than almost any other vice.  I--we--as Americans need to get in shape.  The sad thing is, is I’ve hung around a lot of types of people.  Stoners, addicts, sex crazed frat boys, workaholics, intellectuals, and they all have their issues.  But fat people, by and large, are good people, and the conversation is always fun, the events entertaining, and the dining; exquisite. 

It’s hard to water down my diet.  It’s hard to change my routines.  It’s hard to give up things I crave.  It’s hard to change one’s DNA.  But maybe instead of praising people as they drop the pounds necessary to live a longer life, maybe we should praise them for all the characteristics that always made their existence so interesting in the first place.  So to all the fat people out there desperately trying to lose weight, I hope we can laugh, and talk, and enjoy each other’s company just as much around a table full of Hummus, as we did at Applebee’s. 

*Intellectual Health Guru: “Actually, Hummus is composed of 46% polyunsaturated fat; you’d be better off…”

         
           *Me: “Shut up, nobody invited you to my dinner party.”