By the Numbers

He always envied the tall guys; the big guys—they didn’t look fat.

He was fat, and at 5’7” it showed. He would stand in front of the mirror in his briefs after showering and he would pose. But not like most guys: he grabbed his folds of skin, looked at them, and hated. Sometimes he worried that this loosened his skin and made it look like even more fat was hanging off of him, but he couldn’t stop. It was almost a compulsion, to stop at the mirror and inspect his personal lard pouches.

He read, devouring libraries of information. Books. Magazine articles. Women’s magazine articles. Online articles. Diet pill ads. Ads in women’s magazines for online books about diet pills.

He learned that wrestlers used saunas to lose weight, but lost interest when he heard that it was only water weight. He tried eating only celery, only grapefruit, only grain, only protein, only mint and parsley leaves, nothing at all. He read about Buddhist monks who lived on one grain of rice a day for months, and picked up yoga for five weeks. Nothing worked. He couldn’t not eat. His body ignored the pounds and pounds of excess fuel it carried, and tortured him for more. His willpower was strong, but the best he could manage was a high proportion of salad and diet food, and that just wasn’t good enough.

He tried exercise. He read that running was the most efficient way to burn calories. He stretched and jog-walked a mile right then. Then again the next day. Although he persevered, it didn’t seem to help. A month later, he could still barely go a quarter-mile without feeling exhausted, light-headed. He was always tired.

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Even after all this, he could still feel everyone looking at him. In fact, it got worse as time went on and he became more desperate. His acquaintances began making sarcastic comments, so he stopped seeing them. Other runners were asking questions that upset him—in kind voices, but he could almost smell the superiority that bolstered their kindness, as if he were a child, to be pitied rather than laughed at openly. He stopped going to the track, and panted around his neighborhood after dark.

One day he met his ex-girlfriend at the grocery store. She was pushing a cart with deli meat, bread, bags of fruit, whole milk, chips and cookies. Ice cream! His weak arms lugged a basket of Slimfast, bottled water, and a head of iceberg lettuce. She stared and stared, cutting his greetings off. It hurt, the way her stare cut through his skin to the ugliness underneath.

He went home and tried harder, pouring his entire being into the attempt to shed flab. But no matter how hard he tried, every time he went back to the scale (before and after each meal), it still read in the triple digits.

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