Size 46 Walmart

By Paul Hughes / March 21, 2012

There was a time when my weight goal was to fit into size 46/30 khakis from Walmart, and that time was last Thursday, when I bought them.

I weigh some 334 pounds. I am 42 years old, heading to 43. I am officially diabetic, per my doctor’s adjudication of some recent unfortunate blood tests.* The flu I now get the spring of each year (it didn’t used to happen) this year left me coughing and hoarse for, and I am not making this up** at least six weeks after the flu itself was gone. I have red and grey inhalers for widening my airways now.

I am fat fat fat. My BMI is above 50. My BMR is 2700, if I lie in bed all day, and north of 3200 if I sit at a desk. I can have nearly as many calories as an athlete in recovery mode. If I start moving, I close on 4,000 pretty quickly. I can eat for two, and have for years.

I get winded on one flight of stairs, and take the elevator to the second floor at work. I’m in that place where I don’t think I look that bad until I actually look.

As a late Atlantic Monthly editor once said of America at large, I am some kind of fat.

I Am The Fat Guy.

* Full disclosure: I actually have good blood pressure, and one of my cholesterols is OK. Blood sugar is just past the threshold, and, as I may have mentioned, I am extremely fat.
** As Dave Barry used to say, when it was still funny. He said it after it was funny, too—but by then it was his signature line, and if he didn’t make it up, I’m pretty sure he used it most, and to most effect. It’s good to be #1. Ask Apple or Coca-Cola.

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.] One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Random

Subjective, Objective

The other day I wrote on a wing and a whim … and misremembering. Or as Prufrock put it, quoting Woman — That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all. Nearly nothing I recalled happened in that way. Except of course the recalling. And a bit more. Wasn’t a

Not For Teacher

There’s an unfortunate instructor-y thing where the guy on stage [I’ve found it’s usually a male doing this] asks a question he already knows the answer to, one of the people in the audience … err, classroom … is the target, the answer given is wrong, and the stagehand just goes and gives the answer

Touch

In Boston in the Back Bay on Boylston the Trader Joe’s looks built for the bite-sized. The storefront is not one-third the size of the usual glass portion of a TJ’s and far less than the width an entire layout usually commands. There is one set of double doors covering both entrance and exit —

People do the Craziest Things

Adam — did he do what he did for love? Did he say, ‘I will join her; I can’t bear to be without her.’ — is that how it went down? He at after Eve; was it because he’d rather skulk around the earth a sojourner and pilgrim at the mercy of the people in that

Related

The Fat Guy and Sex

The Fat Guy and Buffets

The word is buffet, and it is 300 years old, from the Old French, of “obscure origin” as the kids say, if the kids wrote etymological dictionaries. Obscure origin, but the word is more than making up for it three centuries later. They are everywhere. Everywhere the Fat Guy lives, and everywhere he has been. I

The Fat Guy And Food

The Fat Guy does not particularly like food. There are gourmands, who also are likely to be massively obese — think Mario Batali, who can be easily envisioned in one of those old “Faces of Death” videos, hammering the monkey trapped in the middle of the dining table and scooping brains out of the not-yet-dead

The Fat Guy and Buttons

Buttons are the bane of the Fat Guy’s existence. Buttons leave gaps when the Fat Guy’s fat rolls jiggle around and peek through them. Buttons catch on drawer pulls, come undone at the belly, and are generally uncooperative. Buttons are generally on costlier clothing, which means the Fat Guy is spending too much money on