Fat (4 page)

     “Sounds like he’s doing great, what else have you guys been up to?”

     This dinosaur shaped meatloaf was comically large but admittedly delicious – soft and moist, seasoned lightly with thyme and topped with a tangy sweet tomato based glaze.  The mashed potatoes were fork-drippy creamy, as if they were more butter than potato.  This was going down so smooth that, for a second, I envied the heavies that ate like this every meal and got to enjoy more quantity of this goodness.  This place was an assembly line for the obese. They were filing in through the restaurant’s front entrance, advancing to their seats crabby and antsy, lumbering to have kilocalories added to body at every course, and exiting out patting bellies and burping.  And in a curious stroke of hotel planning, at the exit everyone had to trundle right past the hotel’s fitness center, situated behind full length windows across the causeway of the restaurant.  Large glass fronted lonely treadmills and ellipticals, resistance machines were noticeably dusty and the free-weights looked rusty – this was a microcosm in the battle for fat.  Super-size portions at every restaurant, candy and chocolate at every checkout counter begging for that impulse buy, and portions becoming so outsized that eating a foot-long sandwich becomes the “healthier” choice; salad and yogurt choices placed alongside those Super-sizers, gyms hanging bright banners advertising discounted memberships at every corner, bookstores with shelves and shelves of fad diets.   In that battle of good and evil, good always wins, as in what feels good going down the hatch. 

     This meatloaf is really good but I can’t finish it.  Xander had already long cleaned his plate.     

     The rest of dinner was blur of vacation tales to Disney World and grandma’s house in Arizona, and of cleavage, both in a pert female and saggy boy variety.

     Dessert?  Pass for me.  I doubt I will be hungry again until late afternoon tomorrow.  Xander begged for and got a chocolate sundae with the works.   

     Yes, the dinner check, the official end to dinner out.  The dinner check is also a time for reflection, to think about the cost of the evening.  Encased in a faux-leather sheath, it is a chronicling of the events of the last hour -- appetizers, drinks, main courses, desserts.  How much did it cost to become full?  How many rounds of food did it take to be full?  After all this, am I even full?   The number next to the food item is the final dollar calculation of providing all this consumption: finding suitable land, buying the land, clearing the land, tilling the land, planting the land, fertilizing the land, watering and watering and watering, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, gassing up, transporting some more, opening a restaurant, advertising the restaurant, hiring chef talent, hiring hosts and servers, lighting stoves and ovens, buying the food, cooking the food, presenting the food, serving the food and finally finding someone to eat the food.  Today, the dollar cost of all that effort was a little over $50.  The real life cost was growing a fat kid a little fatter, and snipping more time from the end.  For me, it would be more appropriate if the check came inside a barf-bag.  I had eaten way too much.  Fifty bucks must be the going rate at the Dinostaurant to feel like yakking.

      Xander ordered the same meatloaf dinner as I did, and he was leaving his plate clean.  I had a third of my loaf and mashed potatoes in a doggy bag and felt sick.  And I didn’t have a Hershey bar aperitif or a chocolate sundae finisher.  The puzzled inquiries from obese patients as to why they are obese are always deluded, as essentially they’re insinuating, “
I’m doing everything I can and yet I’m still paradoxically fat
.”  The reason is child placemat puzzle simple.  Pick any aspect of your diet and there’s the answer.  Three meals of charger plate-sized portions every day, or snacking on the many versions of sugared butter in between each of those meals, or washing it all down with gallons of juice and soda, or taking in more calories in one meal than seconds of cardio over the entire day?   

     I picked up the check, thanked Kate for her company, and excused myself with a comment of an early start in the morning.  Xander gave me a hug around the leg. 

     Great.  Now my khakis smell like chlorine and there are probably chocolate handprints behind my knee.  But at least I was finally going back to my room.  I was looking forward to sleeping off this bomb I just ate, but not looking forward to tonight’s probable dream.  My subconscious had just been flooded with food, breasts and near vomiting.  What can come out of that mix? 

     Probably something along the lines of an M&M ejaculating chocolate syrup onto bare breasts.  I’m going to skip the continental breakfast tomorrow morning.

THE FAT KID IN CLASS

     I’ve seen this coming for a long time. 

     Fat little babies and chubby toddlers have little real world consequences while they wallow in calories in front of their parents’ eyes.  They might even be considered cute rolys.  But once they hit school and are around other kids, it’s a different story.  Kids are cruel.

     Picking on the fat kid is childhood’s oldest sport.  It’s history reaches deep: imagine the strained grunts when a fat cavekid struggled up a rock hill with all his cavemates already gleefully at the top, then the grunting laughter as Chunky Caveboy slipped and tumbled back down to the base, or the embarrassment when a fat Athenian kid bent over to pick up a stone ball and ripped his toga to bare ass, or Lil’ Tubby never being picked to play kick the can because he has never been able twenty-two skidoo fast enough or long enough to kick any can.

     Xander’s problems really started around the time of his first grade physical.

     “Dr. Grant, Xander is really having a tough time at school.”

     For the first time, Xander was quiet in the exam room, seated on a stool, playing a GameBoy.  No more manic puppy dog exuberance, rather, he was just a sluggish hippo wading in mudwater to avoid the midday sun. 

     “What’s going on in school?”

     “He says he doesn’t like it.  And he doesn’t want to go outside and play.  He just sits around and watches TV or plays video games.”

     It’s a common complaint with this generation of kids.  When Kate and I were growing up in the old neighborhood, all we did was play outside: baseball in the summer, basketball in the fall, football in the snow. We could spend hours throwing rocks at a tree stump or playing Marco Polo in the pool at her house.  The only kids we didn’t know in the neighborhood were the pale, overweight home-schooled kids that got tired too quickly for any sport and always just wanted to bike to 7-Eleven to get Slurpees and Snickers.  We got those kids to stop hanging out with us real quick using the simplest of methods: “Beat it, lardbutt”.  Nowadays, kicking out the fat kid from play would mean dissolving whole neighborhoods. 

     “Dr. Grant, I think it’s because Xander is shy.”

     Shy of what, two hundred pounds?  How can she not see what’s going on here?  She must be too close to the fat.  Like when my fat grandmother would hug me when I was a kid and bury my face in her belly’s cavernous muffintop -- I could barely breathe much less know what the hell was going on around me.  I guess Kate needs to hear it straight out of Xander.

     “Xander, what’s going on at school, little buddy?”

     “Nothing.”

     “Are kids picking on you?”

     Silence.  Kate chimes in firmly, “Xander, Dr. Grant asked you a question.”

     “Yeah, kids are picking on me.”

      It’s no wonder.  Xander is big.   Kate is tall, slender and in a cashmere turtleneck, wool dress pants and leather boots today, and I am betting six year old Xander weighs as much as she does right now, even with all of her fall clothing. 

     “Kate, you and I both know kids can be cruel, so it’s just one more reason to get Xander in better shape before the kids really get mean.”

      “You’re so right, Dr. Grant, I guess Xander just got sucked into this national childhood obesity crisis.  Did you see Dateline last night?  It’s really a problem.”   

     So a growing collection of fat kids are what constitutes an epidemic nowadays, a national crisis?  It is an epidemic and crisis as much as credit card debt is an epidemic and two pack-a-day smokers dying of lung cancer is a crisis.  It has become common culture to be overweight and the minutiae of how and why or who’s responsible has become background noise.  The collective of obese has become its own entity, separate from the individual gluttons that comprise it, effectively shifting the mindset of responsibility from person to some sweeping crisis.  The Cuban Missile Crisis was a crisis, the beginnings of HIV was a crisis, kids going hungry is a crisis; kids eating double bacon cheeseburgers, large fries, and chocolate milkshakes every day is not a crisis.  It is just simple overconsumption.  The elephant in the room needs a bigger spotlight. 

     “What do you feed Xander, Kate?”

     “Oh, a pretty balanced diet.  He loves chicken and I always serve some vegetable with his meals.  He loves fruit.”

     She said it as if Xander was just eating three ounces of grilled chicken with a small side salad and an apple every meal.  As if he had grown wider because of a diet of lean protein, fresh vegetables and fruit.  No one has ever become morbidly obese eating a balanced diet in proper portions.  No one.  The evidence of poor dietary constitution is in the constitution of double chins, accordion folding bellies and an appearance of perpetual unisex pregnancy. Parents are always going to gloss over the bad reality, either with doublespeak or outright lies, to deflect any suggestion of their negligence or their child’s shortcomings.  

     “Chicken or chicken nuggets?”

     “Chicken nuggets, I guess.”

     “And potato for a vegetable most of the time, right?”

     “Oh, come on, Dr. Grant, it’s not only potatoes.  He likes corn too.”

     “French fries and creamed corn?”

     “Sometimes.”

     “And fruit cocktail or fruit roll-ups?”

     “I guess both usually.  I admit it, yes, he likes to eat some junk, but he likes good food, too.”

     “Give me just one, and I will be one happy doctor.”

     “He loves broccoli.”

     “Really? Broccoli and what?”

     “Are you talking about cheese?  Because how can you eat broccoli without cheese?  That would just be wrong.  Broccoli doesn’t taste too good on its own.  Cheese is part of the food pyramid, isn’t it?” 

     “Does he take seconds?”

     “No, only usually at dinner. And I guess it would be considered seconds at breakfast too because sometimes he’ll sneak a few extra pancakes at breakfast.  But it is his favorite food.  I swear, Xander would eat nothing but pancakes if we let him.  But we try to push blueberry pancakes, though, for the fruit.”

     Then she smiled proudly, as if I should have written into the newspapers to alert them about this bit of ingenuity.  Smiling about pushing fruit in the form of sprinkling dots of berry into pan fried cake batter drenched in maple syrup and butter?   At least now I know that she draws the line of bad eating short of a nonstop orgy of berry-less pancakes.

     “So what does Xander drink?”

     “He loves juice.  I only give him the one hundred percent fruit juice.  And usually he has chocolate milk with dinner.   And usually with his after school snack.  He’s got to get his calcium, right?”

     “After school snack?”

     “He loves nachos, or those little pizza puffs.”

     Geez, this kid has no chance.   Double stacks of pan fried batter swimming in congealed sugar sauce right after waking, deep fried breaded chicken chunks with deep fried potato slivers and corn swimming in cream on the side, all times two at dinner, and interspersed snacks of fried tortilla shards and cheese, and downing glass after glass of liquid calorie concentrate.

     “Listen, Kate, you’re going to kill Xander by letting him eat all that junk.”

     “He really will only eat that stuff.  I mean, I can’t force feed him like when he was a baby, and I don’t want him to starve.”

     “You’re his mom, you can choose the stuff he has available to eat.  Trust me, he will not starve himself.  Look at him, he can probably live for months without eating another bite.”

     Xander didn’t even flinch from his game.  He had a quadruple chin looking down at his handheld screen.

     “Maybe I will switch him to those 100 calorie snack packs?”

     “Changing his diet does not mean only making him eat smaller amounts of the bad stuff.  Sure, if I’m choosing between eating a dumpster of garbage versus just a trash can full, I would choose the trash can, but it’d be best not to eat any garbage in the first place.  Xander just needs to eat more of the good stuff.” 

     “Dr. Grant, what should I do then?”

     “Modest portions, no seconds.  Lean meats, try them grilled or baked, not fried.  Only water, skim milk or diet drinks for him.  No juice, no chocolate milk.  Make snacks of raw fresh fruit or vegetables.  Make him eat a colorful plate of food, not just browns and darker browns.”