Fat Boy and The Battle of Anaconda

pjdillon@attglobal.net
A few weeks back I was blogging on at the gross of numbers and passwords that inhabit our everyday lives. Phone numbers, government numbers, website password alphanumeric combinations, addresses, ages and the like.
Today I’ve another series of numbers, gross on to add to the list.
After much emmming and ahhhing I’ve finally started on a regular routine with a personal trainer, I’ll call him The Pope, lead Inquisitor at The Club of Pain.
I know the whole personal trainer things is so, like, 1988 but I’ve always lolly-gaggled a couple blocks behind the cutting edge, admiring the view, making leaf dams above the sewer grates and taking he piss out of $1,000 Armani’s, automatic transmission and anything remotely Hollywood. So, the 15-year lag is nothing exceptional: I’m still waiting to catch Philip Glass in concert…. ooops.
Of all the numbers I’m now faced with there’s a single that rises above the rest, it’s a number that reflects, for the first time accurately, what exactly has been going on in my life for the past six months. For you slower kids (leave those soggy leaves alone and pull up a stump) who might not have been keeping track, back in November I came down with a wicked double dose of malaria, falciparum and vivax together, that kinda threw me for a loop. I’ve not written about the experience yet (see para above if you’re still confused as to why) but my friends will tell you I’ve bored them to tears with the whole experience, one shared by 10 per cent of humankind annually, though perhaps only a select few hundred thousand get a double whammy.
Since my close encounter with the other side, for I have it on the doctor’s authority that I was one chat away from a free trip to the great concrete half-pipe in the sky, I’ve discovered a renewed taste for life (ahem) and have vigorously applied myself to enjoying it. Which is to say that I’ve done little else but eat since the MDs cleared me to go home back in mid-November and the results are there for all to see.
And so there are two new numbers: the first is 104 kgs (230 lbs for any American Neanderthals out there), my body weight as of 1 pm Monday. And I was no Slim Jim before.
My second new, and terrifying number is 28.8. Actually, it’s 28.8 per cent. Body fat. As in, almost a third of my body is fat. I am in fact a walking, talking, blogging deep-fried, chocolate-coated banana. I should go on tour.
I am John Earl Hughes (check Guinness Book Of World Records… or Ripley’s). In six short months I’ve gained four pant sizes and frankly, even getting into the parachutes I’m wearing now is getting to be a chore. I have actually developed gravity: small objects like Bic lighters, cocktail peanuts and crack vials actually rise up to circle my moon as a pass, tiny pathetic satellites about a malevolent planetary body that might devour them given half the chance.
On a more personal note, I’ve noticed that as the size of one’s gut grows so the relative size and menace of one’s unit appears to shrink. Though I’m not one to obsess about this kind of things (editor: too many hours between the ages of 13 and 24 doing that, methinks!), I have noted a recent medical story that as men age, they can expect to see up to a 30 percent loss in, ummm, real estate, south of the border. Now, I’m no mathematician (or real estate agent) but the combination of tectonic shifts creating vast new tracts of land and shrinking ‘points of interest’ is troubling to my inner dirty-old-man.
I’m not sure how exactly it happened. I eat rice, fish and veggies, admittedly with some real tasty deep-fried items like tempe and perkadel jagung, almost exclusively. I drink beer, enough to account for a bit of a gut, but not the Anaconda wrapped about my waist at the moment. I even get exercise, and was hitting the gym fairly regularly, working my way up to half a dozen three-minute rounds with the heavy bag and pushing railcars worth of weight around several times a week, particularly through February and March, before tailing off.
Maybe it’s because I eat everything on my plate. Maybe because I use as that plate a serving dish fit for a suckling pig… kidding… and Mom taught us to finish our meals on account of the poor starving kids in Africa (editor: sure doughboy, blame yer mother).
More likely it’s the combination of eating really big portions, a lack of commitment to cardio workouts over those forgiving Universal weight contraptions, quitting smoking after two decades on the pipe stirred into a body that’s 38 and running a bit slower than the earlier 16-year-old model that used to wolf down an entire of loaf of bread and half a kg of cheese at a sitting.
Whatever the reason (and if one more person suggests beer I’m gonna blow), it’s about to end. The Pope and I have gone to war with The Anaconda. It’s only Day Three but I’m pretty confident that an aggressive plan of attack, good intel about the snake’s plans and a commitment to keeping rice, deep-frieds and the like off the daily menu is going to make a different over the next few months.
I won’t blog you to death with my progress, this is not some friggin’ masculine version of Bridget Jones Diary, or an out-take from Details or Men’s Health (30 Days To Rock Hard Abs!!!) going on here, but I will on-pass the high points along the way.
Wish The Grinch luck.