My quest for 3,000 Calories a Day is about accountability for what I eat and for maintaining moderation. I tend toward the extreme in everything I do and I’ve learned that obsession skews rational judgment. We tend to live in an extreme, either/or culture where we look upon ourselves as winners or losers, rich or poor, home-owners or renters, skinny beautiful people or fat ugly ones. The irony is that when often pursue what think is the right side of the ledger with such intensity that the image we assume is desirable is often grotesque. I’m reminded of a story I once heard in the gym. I was in the middle of an earnest six-mile treadmill run at the gym when Laura, my former composition student who works as a personal trainer, came up to me and said she had a story she knew I’d like. I slowed down the treadmill considerably so that I could fully listen.
The story happened a few days earlier in the women’s locker room. Laura saw a seventy-five-year-old, artificially-tanned, bleach-blonde woman stripping out of her gym tights, and as she did, she revealed her spectacular, smooth, milky white silicone breast implants. Laura said that about ten other breast-augmented women, mostly in their early twenties, had their eyes fixed on the seventy-five-year-old’s nude body and all at once their jaws dropped.
It wasn’t the upward-pointing, massive artificial breasts that made the old woman such a remarkable and frightening sight. It was the stark contrast of those missile-like breasts, the appendages of a nineteen-year-old, with the woman’s nicotine-coated, wrinkled, leathery body, her skin’s creases and grooves reminiscent of an aged elephant’s sun-cracked hide. Laura said there was this moment of collective terror, evinced by the shared glances of the young women, because they knew in that instant that they were, thanks to their chain smoking, their breast-enlargements, and their frequent trips to the tanning booths, on the same path as the old woman. They had in that instant, I inferred from Laura’s story, access to a sort of nicotine-stained crystal ball that afforded them a snapshot of themselves a half century later, and what they saw inside that crystal ball made them gasp and shudder with horror.
I suspect most of us for whom moderation
is not part of our vocabulary have some variation of a nicotine-stained,
silicone-breasted figure, some lugubrious, repellant doppelganger that we are
molding ourselves into. Perhaps that is the ultimate quest of fitness fanatics.
To become their very own worst nightmare.
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