The other day, I was floundering around the park on my daily jog – my lungs wheezing, my face puffed up like a swollen tomato, my belly sloshing around like a trash bag full of pudding – and all I could hear were three little words banging around in my brain like shoes in a dryer:
I'm still fat.
I've been running for four months now, and boy are my legs tired ha ha ha. But for real, it's been four months, and as far as my scale is concerned, I've spent that entire time dumpster diving behind the Krispy Kreme factory. Which is hardly even true.
I can't help but wonder if there isn't something inherently wrong with the design of my body that I can spend hours of my week lumbering around my neighborhood and actually gain weight. Seriously, that happened one month. I don't even know why I bother to jog at all. I'm about as fit to run as John McCain. (Zing!)
All my 23-year-old coworkers need to do is think about exercising and they get skinnier. They lose an average of 15 pounds a day just by breathing. They lost another five in the time it took for me to type that. But not Old Man Royer. I just sit here writing bitter columns, eating my Lean Cuisine and swelling up like a bee sting.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being fat, other than the health complications, the self-esteem issues and the social stigmas. And the premature death. I'm just saying that being fat doesn't work for me. Because you never know when someone might walk up and say, "Oh, hello, 31-year-old dude with a receding hairline and zero fashion sense. I'd like to give you a multi-million dollar record deal!" When that moment comes for me, I'd like for my profile to look a little more Michael Phelps and little less Michael Moore.
But there is some part of my genetic makeup that refuses to not be fat. Which is how I know I'm related to Dick Cheney.
Sometimes I think about the world's very first fat person – specifically, what made him fat, and how it might explain my present situation.
I mean, someone had to be first. Somebody somewhere, at some point in the history of the human race, was the very first person to get a little junk in his trunk. Who was that guy? Where did he come from? Did he have a record deal? Did he like to put words in italics?
Simple logic tells us that fat people date back to at least 2004, when the first "Biggest Loser" aired. However, after consulting several top scientific resources, including Wikipedia and TMZ.com, I discovered that obesity can actually be traced back as far as Meat Loaf.
But the truth is, no one really knows for sure, so I'm forced to take the Fox News approach and just plain guess. What my gut tells me is that obesity actually extends back to the time of the caveman. I believe this in part because I Googled the words "fat caveman" and got a bunch of hits. I also believe this because I conducted a scientific poll among my friends, and not a single one of them has not ever not seen a fat caveman.
Cavemen, as we learned from the classic 1970s series "Land of the Lost," were small, angry, chimpanzee-like humanoids with jutting underbites, excessive body hair and little to no grasp of language. So basically, they were Nickelback.
Cavemen can also be identified by their extremely skimpy clothing and sexual promiscuity, as is illustrated in detail in 2004's direct-to-video classic "Bikini Cavegirl," in which a young female cavebunny accidentally transports herself into the future and, in order to get back home, takes the logical route of having sex with lots and lots of pasty white dudes with moustaches.
Cavemen lived a grueling day-to-day existence full of constant struggle. They had to hunt and gather, fight and kill. They had to scrounge for every meal. It was a dangerous, terrifying world full of hazards – from saber tooth tigers to tyrannosaurus rexes to seriously spotty cell phone reception. In summary, survival in prehistoric times took every ounce of a man's strength and energy. He had to be a lean, mean, death-avoiding machine. And that's what cavemen were.
Until one day, when one of them got fat.
How did this happen? It couldn't have been hereditary, since neither of his parents were fat. But he was the very first fat guy. Ever.
And it couldn't have been laziness. A caveman had to be on the move every day just to survive. Plus, if he stayed home, he knew Mrs. Caveman would never stop nagging him about how he should be out hunting for food like the rest of the men and how everyone else on their block had nicer cave paintings than theirs and how a strange charge showed up on their cable bill for a movie called "Bikini Cavegirl."
So why wasn't this caveman out hunting and gathering and burning lots of caveman calories? Was he on some sort of caveman disability? Was his union striking for higher caveman wages? Did he become the CEO of a caveman oil company, get rich, install himself as vice president of the cavemen government, start a disastrous war, pass a tax cut for the top one percent of the caveman population and get richer, fatter, balder and uglier while the caveman economy was on the brink of collapse?
Possible, but not likely.
And there are other questions, like how did the first fat person's friends react? Did they even have a word for obesity? "Hey, Thog. Have you seen Ogg recently? He's getting really … something."
If anything, I know even less now than when I began my research. I don't know who the world's first fat person was. I don't know why I gain weight when I jog. I don't know why you are still reading this column. All I really know is that my fatness is like 30 pounds of story fodder wrapped around my mid-section, and I'm going to milk it for all it's worth. Who knows – maybe one day it will help me become vice president.
I'm still fat.
I've been running for four months now, and boy are my legs tired ha ha ha. But for real, it's been four months, and as far as my scale is concerned, I've spent that entire time dumpster diving behind the Krispy Kreme factory. Which is hardly even true.
I can't help but wonder if there isn't something inherently wrong with the design of my body that I can spend hours of my week lumbering around my neighborhood and actually gain weight. Seriously, that happened one month. I don't even know why I bother to jog at all. I'm about as fit to run as John McCain. (Zing!)
All my 23-year-old coworkers need to do is think about exercising and they get skinnier. They lose an average of 15 pounds a day just by breathing. They lost another five in the time it took for me to type that. But not Old Man Royer. I just sit here writing bitter columns, eating my Lean Cuisine and swelling up like a bee sting.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being fat, other than the health complications, the self-esteem issues and the social stigmas. And the premature death. I'm just saying that being fat doesn't work for me. Because you never know when someone might walk up and say, "Oh, hello, 31-year-old dude with a receding hairline and zero fashion sense. I'd like to give you a multi-million dollar record deal!" When that moment comes for me, I'd like for my profile to look a little more Michael Phelps and little less Michael Moore.
But there is some part of my genetic makeup that refuses to not be fat. Which is how I know I'm related to Dick Cheney.
Sometimes I think about the world's very first fat person – specifically, what made him fat, and how it might explain my present situation.
I mean, someone had to be first. Somebody somewhere, at some point in the history of the human race, was the very first person to get a little junk in his trunk. Who was that guy? Where did he come from? Did he have a record deal? Did he like to put words in italics?
Simple logic tells us that fat people date back to at least 2004, when the first "Biggest Loser" aired. However, after consulting several top scientific resources, including Wikipedia and TMZ.com, I discovered that obesity can actually be traced back as far as Meat Loaf.
But the truth is, no one really knows for sure, so I'm forced to take the Fox News approach and just plain guess. What my gut tells me is that obesity actually extends back to the time of the caveman. I believe this in part because I Googled the words "fat caveman" and got a bunch of hits. I also believe this because I conducted a scientific poll among my friends, and not a single one of them has not ever not seen a fat caveman.
Cavemen, as we learned from the classic 1970s series "Land of the Lost," were small, angry, chimpanzee-like humanoids with jutting underbites, excessive body hair and little to no grasp of language. So basically, they were Nickelback.
Cavemen can also be identified by their extremely skimpy clothing and sexual promiscuity, as is illustrated in detail in 2004's direct-to-video classic "Bikini Cavegirl," in which a young female cavebunny accidentally transports herself into the future and, in order to get back home, takes the logical route of having sex with lots and lots of pasty white dudes with moustaches.
Cavemen lived a grueling day-to-day existence full of constant struggle. They had to hunt and gather, fight and kill. They had to scrounge for every meal. It was a dangerous, terrifying world full of hazards – from saber tooth tigers to tyrannosaurus rexes to seriously spotty cell phone reception. In summary, survival in prehistoric times took every ounce of a man's strength and energy. He had to be a lean, mean, death-avoiding machine. And that's what cavemen were.
Until one day, when one of them got fat.
How did this happen? It couldn't have been hereditary, since neither of his parents were fat. But he was the very first fat guy. Ever.
And it couldn't have been laziness. A caveman had to be on the move every day just to survive. Plus, if he stayed home, he knew Mrs. Caveman would never stop nagging him about how he should be out hunting for food like the rest of the men and how everyone else on their block had nicer cave paintings than theirs and how a strange charge showed up on their cable bill for a movie called "Bikini Cavegirl."
So why wasn't this caveman out hunting and gathering and burning lots of caveman calories? Was he on some sort of caveman disability? Was his union striking for higher caveman wages? Did he become the CEO of a caveman oil company, get rich, install himself as vice president of the cavemen government, start a disastrous war, pass a tax cut for the top one percent of the caveman population and get richer, fatter, balder and uglier while the caveman economy was on the brink of collapse?
Possible, but not likely.
And there are other questions, like how did the first fat person's friends react? Did they even have a word for obesity? "Hey, Thog. Have you seen Ogg recently? He's getting really … something."
If anything, I know even less now than when I began my research. I don't know who the world's first fat person was. I don't know why I gain weight when I jog. I don't know why you are still reading this column. All I really know is that my fatness is like 30 pounds of story fodder wrapped around my mid-section, and I'm going to milk it for all it's worth. Who knows – maybe one day it will help me become vice president.
