Father’s Day Food
A Time for Gross Excess
Nothing was safe as I ate anything that didn’t move or eat me first, starting with a breakfast of three scrambled eggs, four sausage patties, a potato pancake, two English muffins slathered with butter and a fruit bowl and two cups of coffee, followed later in the day by cheese and crackers, large quantities of steak, potatoes, kale, two different kinds of cake and overly ample supplies of beer. But it was Father’s Day, that one day in the year when fathers around the nation can make themselves feel sick and bloated with food and drink.
It is the day after, and then and now I feel as if I am a pig being ready for slaughter and it is not a good feeling, so why then did I feel obligated to eat more than any man needs, other than maybe Shaquille O’Neil, and I bear no resemblance to Shack. The way I feel, I would welcome a C-section to forcably remove all the contents from my distended midsection. At least then I could breathe as I am unwilling to loosen my belt a notch or two out of vanity although it would make for easier respirations.
I don’t normally consume such obscene quantities of food and libations but throughout the pandemic I have eaten way too much and have gained weight, largely around my stomach and that is why I use the mirror above the sink that doesn’t reflect the bad news lower down. Gaining weight is insidious because it doesn’t make my face look bigger and I can easily wear clothes that conceal the corpulence and even my wife said I don’t look like I have gained that much weight, mostly because she rarely sees me butt naked but rather I usually wear pajamas which largely conceal my growing whale-like appearance.
Don’t blame me, that damn COVID-19 made me do it, I had too much time on my hands, my actions were severely limited and I felt I had no options but to eat too much and to exercise too little and now that the pandemic has abated, I find I am still eating too much and exercising too little. As my paunch has blossomed, I have noticed that many people have too much extra flab and while that doesn’t thrill me, it does make it a bit easier to accept my own fatness, while I eat too much and exercise too little, as I get heftier or huskier, as my mother would put it.
It’s like smoking, when I smoked, I would go to bars or baseball games and it seemed that everybody was puffing. I thought it was perfectly normal to light up while shaving, to light up after eating, to light up while relaxing, to light up to ease tension, etc. etc. etc. Then when I quit, I had more realistic eyes and observed that, in fact, most people did not smoke, especially today when smokers have to sneak to darkened, distant parts of the parking lot. Correspondingly, most people are not that overweight, regardless of what the world may look like since I gained unwanted girth. I have developed the most unsightly signs of added weight, coupled with aging, a double disaster in the making and that includes the bulging stomach and spare tire, the beginnings of breasts, the unsightly crepey skin under my once bulging biceps and of course the most disturbing, vexing and prophetic sign of all, the dreaded turkey neck which has caused many people to conceal the turkey by wearing aptly-named turtle neck sweaters and shirts or as they were called, dickeys, which was a shirt that lied and was a turtle neck with no sleeves that was relatively comfortable in the summer.
I’ve never been obese, although according to the Centers for Disease Control, a person of my height of around 5-feet-seven, should weigh between 118 and 159 pounds, and I weigh around 180 pounds, giving me a body mass index or BMI of 28.2, meaning I am defined as “overweight” although I’m pretty close to the BMI of 30 or above that is defined as “obese.”
In my younger years, I vacillated in weight but always believed that there was plenty of time to lose unwanted inches and there was, as I frequently dieted and increased my exercise regimen and toned down. Now I am older, the stakes are higher and the time is shorter as I don’t have years to lose weight and get back in shape and as a bonus, the added weight and lack of conditioning can be a rather ominous combination in later years. In short, a spring chicken I am not and rather I am a person of advanced years, approaching my expiration date. Much of this is rationalization wrapped in excuses veiled in bullshit, I know that, and I will today begin eating and drinking less and exercising more, except on Father’s Day.