New Year Fatty

I am a Fatty. I don't want to be a fatty, but I am. My 4 year old daughter chants, "His name is Daddy, and he's a Fatty!" whenever she's in the mood for convulsive laughter. Clearly my secret isn't so secret. My few friends who are heavier than me are not even close to being Fattys because being "fat" isn't the only qualification to being a Fatty. Nope it's truly a whole mindset.

My permanent status as a member of the Fatty Club has been developed through some simple steps for you all to follow at home:

1- Self Image: Here are the type of people that I have exposure to on a weekly basis in order by quantity:

Seriously?

• Scrawny middle school and younger children. Kids by nature are twiggy but if they swim every day, they have a negative body fat and are see-through.
• National level high school athletes. Take a scrawny kid and now add muscle. I recently had a pull-up contest against a high school kid with the stipulation being that he had to weigh the same as me. Watching him try to do pull-ups with a 45 lb weight strapped to his waist was freakin' great for the self-image.
• Masters swimmers. These are people mostly in their 40s and 50s who are swimming to try and get their Ironman times faster. Enough said.
• My wife- She had a meltdown when she hit 127 pregnant. Side note- for those of you looking for marriage advice, posting info on the web about your wife's weight...not great.

Stock photo right? Ah nope,
that's really them.

But the good news is, I took a little break for Christmas and got to spend time with my anorexic in-laws and 2 models. So that was fun too.

2- Gain weight despite the odds: My wife is responsible for 90% of my diet and the fact that I can still gain weight is a true testament to my determination. For starters, white flour, nitrates, nitrites, pesticides, fat, high fructose corn syrup, refined sugars and artificial ingredients are not allowed through the door. Secondly, everything that we eat is locally grown and well treated. If we do get a piece of meat, it's been lovingly caressed by a hippy farmer its whole life and died of old age. Yesterday I guilted her into adding ground organic never-scolded beef to her egg-plant chili. In fact the closest we came to divorce this year was when she discovered that one of my friends had bought me a grilled cheese, pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, sandwich. 

3- Maintain a exercise routine designed by a lunatic: I pretty much operate on a 10% professional athlete 90% coma schedule. I'm an exercise bulimia sufferer where I binge for a couple of days and then purge my body of all that silliness for a couple of weeks. I find this one step forward and three steps back approach really keeps me solidly not solid. 

Evil

Enter the Fitbit. For those of you who aren't aware, this is a pedometer that you wear on your wrist that counts your steps, your flights of stairs, your sleep patterns, your water intake and other stuff that I haven't bothered to check. It's like having a little mother-in-law with you at all times (mine is in absurdly good shape of course). Further more, your stats are public knowledge for all the non-Fattys in your life to make fun of. So I now live in terror of letting my Fitbit down. I go to bed most nights exhausted and ready to vomit from the 64 ounces of water that I had to drink right before going to bed. And in fully predictable Fatty style, I have shot out of the gate like my ass is on fire trying to escape my Fattyness all in six days. I'm currently leading my Fitbit friends in steps taken but that has, oh, zero percent chance of holding. 

So 2014 has started with me sweaty and with only one real hope; that my Fitbit will miraculously break before I do.