Losing Proposition
My wife suggested I go on a diet. I wasn't going to suffer alone.
 (Illustration by Kim Rosen) |
The breaking point came, as it often does, after a long night of drinking in the woods near a cabin in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Sitting around a campfire, my friends noted my black shirt and sweater. " Yeah, I'm wearing black because it's slimming," I said. A friend narrowed his eyes. " Nah, it just makes you look like a fat ninja." Immediately, a "Fat Ninja" theme song was composed and performed, arming the hero with bratwurst instead of nunchuks. A month later, I was on the South Beach diet.
I've long had awful eating habits, something my now wife has battled since we started dating in 2000. Up until a few years ago, though, it never had any effect on my weight. And then people began to pat or poke at my stomach as part of their greeting.
My wife's concerns also became louder. During our Pre-Cana sessions (think spring training for Catholic couples) before our marriage last year, we met with the priest and were tasked with separately answering an SAT's worth of questions concerning our hopes and fears about marriage. My wife stumbled on a question asking whether she wanted anything about me to change after marriage. First she penciled in a "no," then erased it and filled in the "yes" oval. She later explained to the priest that what she wanted to change about me was my diet. And not, she said, because I was dangerously drifting into that unattractive Kevin James/ Homer Simpson cliche territory, but because she was worried about the long-term effects on my health.
The gauntlet was thrown down in September, a few weeks after our first anniversary. I am fairly certain that my wife joined me on the South Beach diet more out of solidarity than anything else. (She noted that she, too, had gained a few pounds since our wedding, blaming my habit of stocking our kitchen with the kinds of food products typically endorsed by cartoon animals and mythical creatures.)
We got The Book, with its rules and lengthy explanations. She read all of it. I just demanded to know what I could eat, mentally transposing the smiling face of diet creator Dr. Arthur Agatston onto Big Brother posters.
The sad moments during the diet - she carefully counting out my number of allotted pistachios, I pulling down the brim of my hat at the checkout line, as though to disavow the pile of South Beach diet frozen meals - signaled a real loss. My loosely cultivated Hemingway masculinity had been crushed. But maybe, I thought, equating machismo with Taco Bell is kind of a stupid idea anyway.
During the first two weeks, the suspicion that the other had cheated hung over everything. "What did you have for lunch today?" we'd ask each other, at first as a casual aside and eventually with our arms folded and brows furrowed. If we were gonna be miserable, we were damn sure gonna be that way together, united against the carb devil traitors that put out bowls of candy and gave us bread with our salads.
After a month and a half, we reached our goals. (I took off weight twice as fast as she did. She must have known this was because she weighed about half as much as I but never said so.) We celebrated by breaking our promises to Dr. Agatston, going for a one-time splurge. Now 20 pounds lighter, I have become a better cook, forced to be inventive to get by on the diet. There's been some significant enlightenment. I have made peace with being a post-childhood purchaser of low-fat string cheese. I am no longer perplexed by the appeal of The Food Channel. I have made meals that involve planning and lists.
So my wife got her wish, though she had to suffer to get it. And I learned (for the 1,000th time) that my wife is willing to suffer for the good of us both. But I can't help feeling that the world is really getting shafted: The next time we are all threatened by a force that can only be defeated by a slow-moving ninja swinging sausage links, I'll probably be at Whole Foods buying something soy-based.
Dan Morrell is a writer living in Natick. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
