Authors: James Keene
“Man, it sure is hot out here,” as he wiped away streams of perspiration from his forehead. It was maybe seventy-five degrees with a slight breeze -- very pleasant. I was even wearing a light jacket. Kate was just in a thin formfitting white dress shirt and khakis. Xander was in a pitted-out Shedd Aquarium T-shirt and baggy jeans. This guy has the eat-sweats. He was in a state of gustatory bliss where his body was pumping so much pleasure catecholamines on the inside to the point of needing to pour liquid chlorides from every pore on the outside.
No anti-perspirant was going to contain that onslaught. When downing barbeque becomes a near maximal aerobic activity, the body starts to react as if it were perpetually exercising. Sweat becomes a second skin. Sweat on a beautiful woman is glistening dew; this sweat is juice escaping from a cooking sausage link, the pepperoni pizza oil seeping through a paper bag. And it is perpetual. Sweat collects in countless flaps and crevasses, and marinates the body in salty exudate, so now the fat guy is the clammy, smelly fat guy. Those dark, humid and rarely cleaned fat roll pockets must be feeding bonanzas for all sorts of foul bacteria and fungi. Luckily, I was upwind so all I smelled was the smoke from the grill.
Kate fished a napkin from her purse and blotted Xander’s forehead. “Pace yourself, honey, the grill is going to be cooking all day until the fireworks, so take it easy. No need to rush the plates. You’re really sweating.”
“Okay mom I’ll try, but come on, it’s the Fourth.”
He was right; it was the Fourth of July. And since it was a holiday, it was one of the socially excused days to gorge for most people: New Years Eve filet and crab legs, Easter champagne brunch buffet, Memorial Day barbeque, Fourth of July barbeque, Labor Day barbeque, Thanksgiving turkey with all the fixings, and Christmas ham with all the fixings. And the Super Bowl spread every year. And don’t forget all the birthdays of family and friends and the friends of family and friends to be celebrated. And engagements and weddings. And graduations. And getting pregnant and being pregnant and then celebrating having the actual babies. And new jobs, and leaving jobs, and doing something good at your job. And the end of the week and the start of a new week. And vacations. Pretty much at least once a week there is an excuse to spend a day doing nothing else but eat massive quantities of delicious, unhealthy food. An extra hundred calories a day makes for a gain of about ten pounds a year; just an extra can of soda, an extra two Oreos, an extra few bites of pizza that are not burned off each day will get the average guy to three hundred pounds in about ten years. But no one overeats by just a handful of M&M’s. It’s more likely that it is overeating by a few handfuls of M&M’s on top of each handful of M&M’s. Just these occasions to over consume make for at least a thousand extra calories, and that is in addition to the every day, non-special occasion surplus consumption of calories, so a few thousand extra calories a week can easily become the norm. It is as if consumption was assumed to be a God given right. As if God had commanded every warm-blooded human to go forth and multiply their fat cells in perpetuity. And any effort to challenge that entitlement is met with mind-boggling resistance, as if trying to advise healthy diet and exercise is an intrusion into some Constitutional freedom. It’s no wonder most of the men here at the club were wearing tent-sized Lacoste polos with most of the women sporting a billowing tablecloth in the vague shape of a dress.
I had to get out of watching any more of Xander stuffing his face. “I am going to try to get in line for the buffet before all the good stuff is gone, I will catch up with you two later, maybe when you’re less sweaty, Xander.”
“Ha, Dr. Grant, don’t count on that.” Xander smirked as he forked another mouthful down the hatch.
Kate took out another napkin from her purse and continued patting Xander’s forehead sweat. “Geez Louise, you are so embarrassing, Xander. Dr. Grant, you should definitely get something to eat before the buffet dries out, we will catch up with you later. Maybe catch the fireworks together?”
“Sure, save me a seat.”
I left towards the buffet. Those ribs really did smell great. Something about charring sugar and pork in the hazy humidity made for a Siren song that drew its end at stacks of white china. The buffet line was long. On one side was a line of food, and the other was a mass of mass -- so many protuberant bellies in so many styles. Some were overflowing over a low belt; I guess keeping a low belt can offer the psychological benefit of a numerically smaller waist size. Why not just belt the pants off at the knees and claim a 22 waist while weighing three hundred pounds? Others secured their pants on the other side of their abdominal globe with a high belt, cinching pants just underneath the nipples, attempting to blend the belly into a lower wall of flesh curtained behind wide but anatomically implausible long pants. Why else would someone five foot eight wear pants sized 50W, 50L? Most of the females looked impossibly pregnant – everyone from little chunkster girls to post-menopausal grandmas sported an eight month gestational paunch. All these bellies were swinging awfully close to the food. This buffet line didn’t need a sneeze guard; it needed a belly guard to prevent bellybuttons from dipping into potato salad and pork ribs. As I stacked my plate with barbeque, I had to look around to see if any mayonnaise or BBQ sauce had been displaced from the food and smeared on any of the surrounding bellies. Thank God, only one rack of ribs was missing some sauce, and it looked like it was on a guy who was in a previously clean looking dress shirt, and not on the frayed smock of the old lady who looked like she was wearing the only article of clothing that still fit her triple XL size and who looked at least three days off from her last laundry day.
These obese people were obviously well-off country club folk – a mishmash of big time stock brokers, successful businessmen and women, management executives, lawyers and doctors, all with their families. So by appearances, they must dine on aged New York strips, lobster tails soaked in drawn butter and crème brulees on a daily basis and the weight is just another outward sign of prosperity. They’re adopting the way of some bygone cultures where it is a status symbol to be overweight, as if to show “I have so much material success that I can consume more than I need and wear my excesses in a massive skin suit”. It is no surprise to see overweight, affluent people; extra money has to go somewhere, and why not use it to get padded in luxurious, fat dense delicacies. But, the means to obesity has to go deeper than just money, because on the drive over to the club, as he is every day at the same exit off the Eisenhower, there was this homeless guy pan-handling with a sign that read: “No werk, no home, help, I am hungrey.” I call him Hobo Heavy. This guy is easily three hundred pounds. Impressive for someone who claims homelessness, no money and spends his days begging on the side of the road to relieve his self-proclaimed hunger. Calories are calories, whether they cost a hundred dollars a pound or if they are free in a trash can outside a Burger King, whether they are put together by a culinary school prodigy or slapped together by a high-schooler at his after school job, whether eaten by someone in Hugo Boss or by someone wrapped in newspaper sleeping under an overpass. Many of my own patients are on public aid, and even as their parents beg me for prescriptions for over-the-counter medications to get Dollar Store Tylenol paid by the state or for a note to the electric company to override stacks of unpaid utility bills with some vague medical need to get their power turned back on or wrangling free advice over the phone instead of paying for an office visit because of their economic plight, I can see that their stated lack of money has not prevented dad, mom and kid from eating to such an excess that their extra calories could sustain another person each. A common excuse is that healthy food costs too much and junk is often the cheapest meal available. Yes, the calories per dollar in junk food is much higher, and there is a logic to maximizing calories per dollar when dollars are limited, but in obesity, an inefficiency of calories per dollar is not the problem. Buying a few less calories per dollar should be preferable for most. Buying a few thousand extra calories on top of the required daily calories should be supplanted with simply buying the required daily calories in better quality. Most people cannot turn down paying just five dollars for one grease filled value meal, as being the much easier way to meal plan. Instead of planning a meal from ingredients to recipe, they can just pick a number off a well-lit menu while idling in their car. The easy way is the lazy way, and the worst way. You can feed a whole family with about five dollars worth of potatoes, frozen veggies and ground beef (shepherd’s pie, beef stew, sloppy joes), and save about five hundred calories per person. Water is the cheapest and lowest calorie beverage around, drinkable and flowing freely from any tap, but everyone will pay any amount to hydrate with the elixirs of soda and juice. Sure, some fruits and vegetables can be pricey, out of season especially, but so are diabetes medicine and heart attacks, which are always in season with obesity. Money is not a limiting factor in excess calories; not giving a shit is what buys the calories.
I spent the rest of the day setting a personal record for pork and corn-on-the-cob ingestion seated under the willow tree off to the side of the main lawn. Today was one day for me not to give a shit. I can’t even imagine how some people live eating like this every day. I was feeling bloated, nauseous, and, periodically, a splash of bilious foodstuff would lip up to the back of my tongue to give me a mucoid, acrid taste of what was being slowly digested. My stomach can only digest what it can per hour, and this load was way above its threshold, so pounds of pork butt has to wait in line to get at my digestive juices, intestines, colon and toilet. A punch to the stomach would’ve burst me open like a piñata to spew half digested pig out to all the partygoers. The obese must be able to push aside these feelings of over-satiety, like a they do to bowls of steamed organic vegetables, and just ignore the discomfort and regurgitant to keep on eating. The body has the defense of discomfort to try to regulate maximal intake, but when those defenses are ignored for so long, the body has to adapt by just turning off the discomfort sensor, so the gullet gets a constant green light. My discomfort was making me feel so tired. It must be a way for the body to sleep through the worst of digestive overloading. This willow tree provided the perfect shaded spot to doze off this bomb of a meal. Plus, it was a great vantage point to watch the Xander show.
After that monster lunch, he took a long nap on a pool lounge chair, using two adjacent sun loungers to support his haunches. He snored loudly and stopped breathing a few times, only to jostle out of REM and resume sucking in air each time. When he finally awoke after two and a half hours, Xander wiped his mouth, rocked back and forth to get momentum off the sagging lounge chairs, and strolled back to the buffet to spend the next few hours trying to eat another whole pig by himself. He also started wearing down the grass in between the buffet and bar to continually fill his plastic cup at the keg. Beer seemed to be his new breast milk. Now he was tanked up with the smoked meat of two pigs and a full pony keg. He was exactly like when he was a baby, happily guzzling calories through unintelligible babbling, though now he was feeding himself and peeing in bushes. He had discovered another easy way to down a few hundred extra calories every day with minimal effort. And if he becomes like most people, he will never think of alcohol as calories, just as something to drink for good times. When he goes back to college in the fall, he’ll start packing on the pounds exponentially quicker while eating the same diet and wonder why. His fat will become more concentrated about his abdomen, and he’ll start joking that his pot belly was becoming a keg. Never to blame weekends spent at frat parties and bars. Then when he grows older, he will never blame the happy hour drinks or the post-dinner cocktail or the twelver while watching the Bears vs. Packers. Unless the drink is made from a blended bacon cheeseburger, its calories will never count in Xander’s mind.
Dusk was now settling in quickly, and the Xander show was winding down. He was stumbling around the lawn, sloshing his beer from his plastic cup, shirt untucked with sweat saturated around the collar and both armpits, and swiveling his pumpkin head from side to side looking for his parents, his head seemingly sitting directly on his sternum, as any neck was long engulfed by the thick scarf of fat wrapped around jawline to chest.
“Mom, where the balls are you sitting, when are the fireworks freakin’ starting?” Xander was literally shouting. His chest mass insulating his lungs and vocal cords created a cave effect which made his voice bellow as if sounded by the combined echoes of a dozen spelunkerers.
Kate ran up to him and started steering him towards their seats near the lake. She grabbed his arm, and as she speedily backpedaled to lead him, I could see the brisk pace was starting to nauseate him. Xander’s face tensed briefly, he grabbed for his mouth, and then he vomited all over Kate’s frontside, the spaces between his sausage fingers having formed a series of small nozzles that caused a wide spraying of vomitus onto her chest rather than the typical no-handed upchuck of one thick sloppy brushstroke. I guess pork, barbeque sauce and beer make for something that looks like diarrhea. Kate’s white dress shirt was a clean canvas to display this Pollock of gluttony. Her breasts were really evident now, but this was one awful wet T-shirt contest. Kate took a few steps, grabbed for her mouth, then proceeded to form hand blinders and direct a stream of vomit onto a patch of lawn in between two families of picnickers; it looked like she had drunk her share of strawberry daiquiris. Albert rushed in and rescued them both. He grabbed them by the arms and ran them away from their bile soups, somehow without vomiting himself, though he dry-heaved a few times. The whole Xander family was now disappearing over the grassy hill and towards the parking lot.