Fat (7 page)

     “Shit!  It’s shit!”

     “What the fuck, he shit!”

     Everyone scattered and halted their running.  Michael just collapsed onto the grass.

     Word was that Michael threw it into the infield grass.  That stress shit must’ve been in his shorts for at least a little while before he got the nerve to reach into his shorts and try to toss the evidence into the grass.  Hey, it’s just goose shit, or someone must’ve walked their dog here sometime.  A gallant try to rid the proof of his acutely increased parasympathetic tone, but that’s when he got caught.  He might have been better off keeping it in his pants, but then again, he still had more than half a mile to run and a shorts-full of the sloppy slurry from his sweat, shit and friction would’ve been intolerable.   It was the epitome of a no win situation – the mind hazy from lack of oxygen, the body weak from maximal exertion, and fresh shit in the tightie used-to-be whities.  He got sent to the nurse, and then sent home.

     Michael was not too popular after that.  Didn’t matter how much weed he smoked or sold, he became the kid that shit his pants.   Someone also started a rumor a week later that he pissed his pants during a Social Studies exam.  Since it was proven he was able to become totally incontinent of stool, it was only a small leap to take to peg him as incontinent of urine too.  And in light of him recently shitting his shorts, he had no credibility in denying any excrement related stories, even though I have yet to find anyone that actually saw his piss on pants.  He did eventually amp up his drug use to coke.  He got arrested in high school for gun possession and went into the juvenile justice system.  Last I heard was that Michael is locked up in the state penitentiary serving ten to twenty for dealing heroin.

     The slight bit of good news here was that only drug Xander looked to be on was cheeseburgers.   

     “Xander, did you run the mile in gym?”

     “Last week I did.”

     “Did you poop your pants?”

     “What?  No.”

     From his tone I could tell he really hadn’t.  I guess Xander is just a shitless Fat Ferry.  He hates gym because he just sucks at gym.

     “You know Xander, marine biologists need to be in good shape to get down to the wildlife they want to study.  Swimming, climbing ocean shorelines, exploring deep waters – you need to be fit in order to do all that.  And gym class is a great opportunity to get some exercise every day to start getting healthy for a career in marine biology.”

     I thought that little pep talk was pretty good for just having made all of it up in streaming thought.  Kate perked up.  “That’s so true, honey, and you want to be a good marine biologist, right?”

    Xander just nodded.

    “Jacque Cousteau was a fit guy, and he was one of the most famous marine biologists ever.”  Another stroke of inspiration.  Who knows if that’s even true, but I always picture Captain Nemo from the movie “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” when I think of Jacque and that captain was a fit enough guy to beat on a giant squid and survive an angry tentacle grasp.

     Xander finally looked up from his book.  “I will try harder in gym.”

     That’s nice.  It’s a bunch of crap, but it’s still nice.  The world could use another Jacque Cousteau.  Even an overweight one.  But the amount of time and effort it would take for Xander to even get back to average fitness was massive, certainly dwarfing the medicine droppers of help thirty minutes of half-hearted gym class activity would ever add.  It’s a vicious circle for fat kids in gym: so big they can’t compete with the other kids, so they don’t put in as much effort as the other kids, so they become even less competitive, then they get tossed to the sidelines, then they put in even less effort, so that eventually gym becomes thirty minutes of standing against padded walls on hardwood.  Not enough activity to even burn off a can of soda.  And having a teacher whose primary credentials are being able to wear shorts and inflate various balls doesn’t help with instilling motivation.  Neither is the seeping sentiment that gym is extraneous – it’s always the first to meet the axe with any significant district budget cuts.  Gym was not going to crack Xander’s case.   

     Obviously, Xander’s physical exam was not good.  Belly skin full of stretch marks.  His midsection looked like pulled peach play-doh.  The back of his neck had dark velvety skin --  acanthosis nigicans – a sign of insulin resistance, a stop on the road to diabetes.  Most of his teeth were more fillings than native tooth, and new festering cavities gave his exhalations a sour punch.  He sounded like he was out of breath from just hopping on and off the exam table.  He was marinating in a thin layer of sweat that made him feel clammy all over, and look greasy as if he’d been manning the fry station and absorbing the oil splatter at McDonald’s all day.  He smelled subtly of old world cheese.

     “Well, Kate, I’m not going to say anything new…”

     Sighing, “Yeah, we know, Xander has to lose weight.”

     “And I’m going to send Xander for some blood work today: fasting blood sugar, lipid panel, insulin and liver enzymes.  And thyroid function, too.”

     Kate brightened a bit.  “You think that could be it?  Hypothyroidism?”

     The dream is that all Xander needs is a pill once a day to fix all of his ills.  Just like most parents, she is holding on to hope that her child’s abnormality is due to some disease outside of her or the child’s control.  It’s much better than acknowledging that he’s just fat because he’s fat.  How convenient would it be to shift personal responsibility to some tangible condition beyond a person’s control?  The next stop will be to say Xander has an addiction to food, that he has the “disease” of addiction, to compare him to a hypothetical heroin addict that has to use a little bit of heroin three times a day to get nutrients.  Total crap.  A person can get all their needed nutrients eating flavorless greens and meats if they wanted to do so.  I have yet to meet the obese person claiming a food addiction that got fat eating dry salad and boiled skinless chicken.  Xander is not addicted to food.  He just enjoys the feeling of food that tastes good to him, just like everybody else, but he has chosen to forgo common sense and eat ridiculously high amounts of processed and instant gratification calorie dense foods because they taste the best to him and are more easily consumed, consequences be damned.  He made a series of poor decisions that morphed into a bad habit consisting of nothing but continued poor food decisions.  Obviously habits can be hard to break, but habits are just habits and are not ingrained into his DNA like his sex, so they can be eliminated with a convicted decision to modify behavior.  If Kate was really serious about helping to rid his problem with food, she could just eliminate the overvalued highs that Xander has placed on tastiness.  If certain foods cause problems, make the decision to eliminate them.  Keep them out of the house.  Make it harder to find those foods.  Don’t let him have a taste, then decide to limit the problem food; the decision for control has to be made beforehand.  Just have him eat home prepared meals only.  Just have him eat raw vegetables and legumes every meal – not as delicious as bacon cheeseburgers, but it will stave off overeating, provide daily nutrients, and begin the journey of weight loss.  But that would mean difficult sacrifice with only an abstract promise of a future healthier life – too much work for an unseen reward.  So he will never give up his diet of deep fried fats.  Kate would rather look for medical conditions that could be blamed for his weight and continue to allow him to wallow in his woe-is-me obesity. 

     This hope for a medical disease diagnosis is the same as when Xander started doing a bit worse in school earlier this year.  Kate cried it was ADHD.  Again, total crap.  No kid develops ADHD for the first time at Xander’s current age. Furthermore, though some kids really do have the disorder, nowadays, it’s a reason attributed by any parent for their kid with poor school performance.  It’s easier to say their kid has a disorder that prevents focus, rather than admit the kid is just not that smart.  By simple normal distribution curve, more kids are going to be average to below-average than above-average; not everyone is going to crack physics and organic chemistry, most are going to do well to balance their checkbooks and read checkout line magazines.  But ADHD can be treated with a pill, so parents would rather have their kid labeled with a condition that can be ameliorated with medicine than be labeled as just being average.  The ideal diagnoses for a dumb, fat kid for most parents would be ADHD and hypothyroidism, where a couple pills once a day would transform mind and body from Shrek to Captain America.  There is no pill that will ever cancel out Xander eating as much crap as he wants.  

     “No, I don’t think that hypothyroidism is that likely, but I think these labs are worth checking at this point.”

     “Ooh, let’s hope that’s what it is.”

     “Kate, most of these labs are to see if he’s got some other medical problems related to his obesity, not really to look for a reason for his obesity.  We know he consumes too many calories and lives a sedentary lifestyle – that’s going to be the real reason.”

     Xander hadn’t looked up from his book the whole time we were talking, but now his head shot up to meet his mom’s face, “Can you guys please shut up?  I’ll try harder in gym, okay?”

     Kate just stared at him.  They stared at each other for a while.  I stared at them.  I guess his mom’s unbridled glee at the prospect of him having some endocrine disorder was too much even for his teenage apathetic disposition. Time for me to end this visit.

     “Okay, so, I’ll have the nurse come in and get you those lab requisition forms.”

     Xander returned to his book while Kate continued staring.  I left the room fast and quiet.  Just as if he was a jar of mayonnaise left out in the midday sun, this fatty was starting to sour.

FAT FROSH?

     “What the hell happened to you, Xander?”

     For his freshman physical, I expected to see a pizza faced blob with a curtain of greasy hair 360 degrees from scalp to shoulders in an attempt to cover up the facial train wreck, and clothes baggy and black to camouflage his girth.  Adding hormones to a pot of fat is usually never pretty.  Instead, Xander was tall and only mildly overweight, and with a more muscular frame.  His hair was short and tousled in place with gel.  And he was in jeans and a Matt Forte jersey.  He looked like a fitter Chicago-bred Yogi Bear.

     “I cut out soda and Gatorade, and I joined the football team.  Those two-a-days were brutal.”

     Kate was smiling ear-to-ear.  She was looking at Xander as if gazing upon him for the first time after he emerged from a 15 hour labor.  “Albert played football in college, so Xander thought he’d give it a try, and he’s doing great.”

    She was glowing.  Her hair was up in a tight bun, she had on rimless glasses, a cashmere turtleneck, wool skirt and knee-high leather boots.  She looked like the sexy librarian that could draw men to rehearse small talk on the Dewey Decimal System.  Too bad I sent her out of the room.  Xander was fourteen; he doesn’t need his mommy for his physicals anymore.  There are going to questions that most teens will never answer honestly in front of their parents.  Plus, no teenage boy wants his mom to catch a glimpse of his weiner during the hernia check.

     I wish I could take some credit for Xander’s lifestyle change and weight loss, but the truth is that all my warning and lecturing and pleading with Kate and Albert, and repeating the same diction to Xander himself, probably penetrated like bullets into Wonder Woman’s bracelets.  No one really gives a shit what their doctor says; words from a lab-coated nerd are not motivation to do anything.  The motivation to lose weight is usually comes from a small catalog of possibilities: getting sick of shame and ridicule, realizing life is getting shittier and shorter because of fat, or getting a taste of something better than food.  Sometimes that tipping point comes from being led off an amusement park ride in front of a winding line of snickering, impatient people because even with the efforts of multiple attendants, the safety belt just couldn’t get around.  Or keeling over with crushing chest pain while walking to work during the morning rush, and because it takes multiple attempts by two paramedics and three passerbyers to get loaded into the ambulance, and because time is cardiac muscle, a minor heart attack gets delayed into a major one and produces lengthened time for in-hospital contemplation.  Xander changed because he got a taste of something better than food.  Xander got a taste of being a jock, being part of a team, and didn’t mind passing on a few cheeseburgers to have more peeps, parties and panties roll his way.        

     “Alright Xander, I’m going to start by asking you a few questions I ask all teenagers.”

     “Okay.”

     “Ever use alcohol?”

     “Nope.”

     “Tobacco?”

     “Never.”

     “Drugs?”

     “Nope.”

     “Any of your friends use drugs?”

     “Unless you count Xbox as a drug.”

     “How about supplements?”

     “No, I don’t think taking some weird herb can actually make you better at sports.”

     “Steroids?”