More Pounds than a BET Meet and Greet..The Plight of the Skinny Fat

8:35 pm - Thu, Dec 29, 2011: 16 notes

More Pounds than a BET Meet and Greet..The Plight of the Skinny Fat

      As the shame and regret of a week filled with cookies, spiked eggnog, and other festive fattening foods washes over me, I realize this is the first Christmas I have ever been worried about holiday weight gain. My entire life I have been embarrassingly skinny, imagine Jimmy Fallon with a devastating case of Sars. Growing up, I had a physique that could only be described as that of a preteen Filipino girl. My fatter friends would always say, “You are lucky now, but wait till your metabolism slows down, you’ll see.” Well, in the last year I have gained 30 pounds. 30 pounds! I looked it up, that is the weight of a 14-foot canoe or an average human’s legs. So essentially, it is as if I am carrying around a canoe or have four legs at all times, but I am actually slower on both land and water. My metabolism was supposed to slow down gradually, you know, like a laptop infected with SpyWare. Instead it screeched to a halt like a laptop infected with Aids. My metabolism was supposed to slowly fade into obscurity, not abruptly die overnight. It was supposed to be an Andy Rooney instead it was Heath Ledger. No one saw it coming until it was too late.

     I first started noticing my new pounds thanks to my Tempur-Pedic bed. You know, those memory foam beds made from NASA material. I just kept sinking further and further into the bed. In the beginning, it was just a few subtle inches, but now it is ridiculous. I’ve sunk down so far into the bed that I draw in all the stuff that is on the bed like a whirlpool every night. By the time I wake up, all the things that were on the bed are now on top of me. Which means I wake up buried in bank receipts, loose change, and small confused Taiwanese boys. I no longer let my dog sleep in my bed. I just imagine my poor Boston terrier in the middle of the night desperately clawing and scratching uphill, fighting a losing battle with gravity as he falls towards me backwards like he’s being sucked into a wormhole. At this rate, I’m going to need my girlfriend to extend a broom or rope to me to pull me out of the bed like Indiana Jones caught in quicksand. A friend suggested I try flipping the mattress but then it’d be like sleeping on a hill. This would create a whole Humpty Dumpty-like situation and that seems way more dangerous.

     Coming to terms with my new found fatness has not been easy. People that are skinny and get fat, are not fat in the same way as people born fat. People who are born fat are round, like a beanbag, which can be charming in a jolly butterball kind of way. Skinny people who get fat, get “weird fat”. I am weird fat. I am not round. I look more like a laundry bag stuffed with cardboard boxes. Some areas stayed skinny and others got fat. Shapes just jut out and protrude from me like a poorly constructed snowman or a figure in Tetris if your directional buttons were broken.

     Being skinny fat is also awful because you cannot even complain about it. If a skinny fat person calls himself fat, actual fat people will despise that person. And they would be right to do so. It’s like complaining about the horrors of war when you are still in basic training. It’s like walking into a cancer survivors support group and talking about how you “beat cancer” cause you had an abnormal mole removed. It’s just not accepted. Your skinny-fat cross is yours to bear alone.

     Us skinny fat people are an underrepresented minority in our culture; lost in a limbo between true obesity and health; outcasts to both the fit and the fat. So this holiday season, as you shove piles of Christmas food down your gullet like a ravenous seagull at the dump, I ask you to remember these sweaty-breasted men, men who have been deserted by all.

Mmmmm… deserted. That sounds delicious.

Ryan is a comedian and writer from Philadelphia. You can find more of Ryan at his Tumblr: RyanPurtill.com. He is available for children’s parties, not to entertain; he just has a lot of free time and enjoys cake.