Like many men my age, I fight a constant battle with my weight. For the past decade or so, I've had a round-trip ticket between 195 and 24o pounds, and it's been tough to keep it on the low end. If I'm diligent about my diet and exercise, I can get the weight off pretty easily, but the minute I stop working at it? The swallows come back to Fat-ass-trano.
Maybe it's self-delusion, but even though I'm on the high side of the scale right now, I don't think I'd quite qualify as "fat". Overweight, certainly. Out of shape? Guilty. To keep myself in the right frame of mind, I've developed a standard of measurement that I find to be fairly foolproof.
I call it the "Bald Guy/Fat Guy Scale".
If you were to see me walking down the street . . . okay, unlikely . . . if you were to see me sitting on my ass at Dairy Queen scarfing a Thin Mint Blizzard, your first thought would most likely be, "Hey, look at the bald guy eating ice cream." As long as you're thinking, "That's a bald guy who's a little chubby" rather than "That fat guy is bald", I'm in the clear.
Let's look at a couple examples. First, we have George Costanza. A bald guy who's a tad overweight.
On the other hand, there's boxer Eric "Butterbean" Esch. Butterbean is a big fat guy who also happens to be bald.
A fine line, perhaps, but I find that it works.
As long as I'm on the subject, here's something else I've had to come to grips with. I've started buying shirts at Casual Male XL which is, for all intents and purposes, a big-and-tall store. But it's not because I'm a "Fat Guy". It's because I'm 6'3" and I have a long torso. This means that shirts that are XXL will fit me just fine, but due to the torso thing, they'll be a little short. It's not because the excess belly and love handles require a larger garment.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
When I last visited Casual Male XL, I made the mistake of taking my teenage son with me. He took a look around, sized up the situation, and said, "You know, Dad, I'm not trying to be rude here, but not only have you moved up a size, you've moved up a whole store."
I've altered my will accordingly.
But really, the store carries sizes all the way up to 7X. So as far as I'm concerned, 2XL(Extra Long) is the equivalent of "small".
Self-delusion is a beautiful thing, isn't it?
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