Chubby

I gained 15 pounds during the holidays.

That is the same weight as a bowling ball, a 40-inch flatscreen television and, ironically, a dining room table.

I knew I had gained some weight. After all, I decided to go off the diet plan, throw caution into the wind and eat whatever I could grab with my fat greasy fingers.

But fifteen pounds? In just 60 days? That’s like gaining the weight of a hamster every day.

So I guess I should not be surprised when somebody noticed. And it happened this week.

No, it was not from my lovely and eternally complimentary wife. She would never come right out and say such a thing.

“Baby, you know, you’re getting a little fat. Maybe you should cut back on the hamsters.”

No, she has much more shrewd ways of letting me know that I have a bowling ball around my middle.

“Don’t sit in that chair. You’ll break it!”

Most people don’t come right out and say right to your face that you’re putting on pounds. Maybe if they did, we’d say ‘No’ when the person at the Burger King drive-thru asks us if we’d like to supersize that Triple Whooper Meal- with cheese.

But sometimes, we do hear it. And it stings a little.

Which brings us to this week’s tale of woe.

I am involved in a youth mentoring program. We meet a few times a year and I have lunch with some high school students and I share advice about how to grow up and become filthy rich. (That’s a joke- I actually tell them how hard it is to get rich)

One of those meetings was this week.

After our luncheon, I went to the restroom to wash my hands and as I was standing near the door, trying to get a paper towel out of the crappy Chinese-made dispenser, I heard a lively conversation from the other side of the door.

“So, who did you have lunch with?”

“This guy from the bank. He was pretty cool. What about you?”

“I don’t know. Some chubby guy who shoots videos and stuff.”

I froze.

She was talking about me. I was the chubby guy.

I looked down at my waistline and then took a step back so I could view myself in the mirror.

Okay, I thought, so I put on a few pounds over Christmas, but doesn’t everyone? Certainly, I am allowed a couple of months out of the year when I can indulge in ice cream and cookies and pizza and drink sodas the way Jesus made them- with real diabetes-inducing corn syrup.

I stepped back towards the door and listened to see if the group of girls were still out there. I certainly didn’t want to exit from the restroom and have the topic of their conversation prance by like a slovenly moose.

When I was sure they were gone, I sucked in my gut, cracked the door open to make sure the coast was clear, slinked out of the bathroom and dashed down the hall before anyone had the chance to yell, “there goes that chubby guy now!”

I grew up chubby. I remember all through grade school my mother buying me ‘husky’ jeans.

That was the name somebody in the Sears marketing department came up with to describe their jeans for fat kids.

Every fall, my mother would load up us kids in our Country Squire station wagon and head to Sears to pick up our annual order of Back-to-School clothes.

Sears didn’t shy away from displaying sizing on their packaging. My sister’s package was stamped ‘SLIM’, my brother’s was labeled ‘REGULAR’ but mine was different. It was neither slim nor regular. My package was always stamped with big, five-inch tall red letters that screamed ‘HUSKY.’

I could just imagine the glee with which the guy back at the Sears Distribution Center must have had while stamping that word onto my bag.

“Here’s another package for one of those little fatties!” I could just imagine him saying as he grabbed the HUSKY stamp, created with letters ten times larger than the other stamps and designed to drive home the cruel shame of my overweight condition.

I slimmed down a little in high school and college but after getting married, the husky tribe found me and tried their best to reclaim me as one of their own.

When I got up to a size 42-inch waistline, I knew it was time to do something so I went on a radical diet plan created by my doctor and lost over 75 pounds.

But as the years have rolled on, the huskies are always hanging around so they can tempt me time and time again.

“Hey, little fat boy. Don’t you want to come out here and play with us? We’ve got Twinkies and root beer!”

I fight them but it is often a losing battle.

I haven’t really thought much about my ‘husky’ days until I heard someone call me chubby through that bathroom door.

Suddenly, I was that little fat kid again. Feeling the hot embarrassment of walking through the Sears store with that husky bag under my arm.

There are some people who never fight this battle. But there are a lot of us who do and for all of my fellow husky folks out there, I can say this.

I know how you feel.

Being chubby isn’t fun. Being called chubby is even less fun.

But that is not who you are. It’s not who I am, despite what some teenaged girls think.

Yeah, this year I am going to try to cut back on carbs and drink more water. And you probably should, too.

But if I don’t get skinny and you don’t get skinny, it’s okay. There’s always next year.

So, be strong my fellow chubbies. And remember, we’ve got something skinny little 17-year old girls will never have.

High blood pressure.