I’ve put on a lot of weight since I left graduate school and started working as an assistant professor of English at a small, liberal-arts college.
I think my situation is not uncommon. It’s just the capstone of a series of rite-of-passage expansions in my waistline: instead of the “freshman 15" (the average weight gain experienced by many students during the first year of college), I am experiencing the “faculty 40.”
I used to get a lot more exercise when I was in graduate school. I didn’t own a car, so I walked about a mile to the campus and back, usually with a backpack full of books. With no car, I never ate drive-thru fast food. I used to walk home from the supermarket once or twice a week, carrying several heavy bags of groceries. (During one particularly good sale, I bought about 60 pounds of frozen vegetables and lugged them home with a plastic bag looped around each finger.)
Now I live too far from campus to walk or bike to work. I have research assistants who handle a lot of my library lugging. I have three kids now, so my house is full of tempting junk food, and every car trip seems to end up at McDonalds. I spend more time than ever seated at a desk (though I have a comfy Aeron chair, size C, to accommodate my enormous bottom).
More and more, my heroes are other fat men: Samuel Johnson, Walt Whitman, Orson Welles, James Earl Jones, John Goodman, and Pavarotti.
There’s something romantic about being fat. Fat people are rebels against Puritanical, bourgeois values like parsimoniousness, rectitude, restraint.
Not for me. I am Bacchus. I am Dionysus. I am the Ghost of Christmas Present, partake of my Horn of Plenty! Eating two Happy Meals, bestowing the toys on my children, my mouth stuffed with French fries, I preside over the great festival of 21st-century American abundance.
I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and think of Rodin’s bronze of Balzac. Folded arms above my protruding paunch, I exude physical gravitas.
Majestic in my corpulence, I recite Father Mapple’s sermon from Moby-Dick in a booming, stentorian voice: “Delight is to him ... who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.” My vibrating jowls accentuate the basso-profundo depths of Melville’s words. I am formidable and robust.
The words begin to slip my mind, though, as I recall the character Flaxman in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying:
He was really horribly fat. He filled his trousers as though he had been melted and then poured into them. But of course, like other fat people, he never admitted to being fat. No fat person ever uses the word “fat” if there is any way of avoiding it. “Stout” is the word they use -- or, better still, “robust.” A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as “robust.”
Once people become obviously overweight, they have to go around admitting they are fat all the time, so as to diffuse unspoken criticism. All the fat comedians have perfected this brand of minstrelsy: Fatty Arbuckle, Jackie Gleason, John Candy, John Belushi, Chris Farley. Hi, I’m fat! Did you know that I am fat! Look at me, I’m fat! It’s all part of the cultural demand that fat people have to be jolly about being the object of mockery.
It doesn’t surprise me anymore when I go to academic conferences and people I’ve known for years don’t recognize me immediately. My new beard and flowing black clothes probably compound the problem. Conversation inevitably veers toward my appearance. Being fat makes people feel they have the right to give you advice: “Buy a treadmill.” “Try jogging.” “Cut out the carbs.” “You’re young, the weight will come right off once you get your act together.”
I notice that there are almost no fat people at the top of the academic profession, or, if there are, they do a good job of concealing themselves from public scrutiny. I know I could not face the possibility of a televised media appearance in my present condition. The camera adds 20 pounds, but anxiety about your appearance adds 40.
Plus, it’s very difficult to find flattering clothing. After my waist became larger than my inseam, I was exiled to the no-man’s land of strange sizes. I have to haul my pants out of piles of absurd remainders: 50-inch waist with 20-inch inseam; 20-inch waist with 50-inch inseam; shirts so large they could be used as automobile covers.
At this rate, there’s no way I’ll ever appear on the Newshour With Jim Lehrer; I’ll be lucky to share a platform with the modern equivalents of the Wild Man of Borneo, Chang-and-Eng, and that man who stops cannon balls with his stomach.
I’ve become Sherman Klump from The Nutty Professor -- and worse. I remember the gigantic fat man, Mr. Creosote from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, who finally explodes after eating a thin, after-dinner mint, showering the room with adipose fragments and undigested food. I shudder with revulsion at how I must look to other people these days.
I could take comfort in the thought of withdrawing into teaching if I didn’t know that attractive teachers get higher student evaluations. Maybe instead of polishing my CV, I should be polishing my abs and bulking up my biceps.
I wonder how my colleagues would regard the newly muscular, cut, and vascular me, spouting slogans from Pumping Iron in a faux-Austrian accent: “In the final tenure review there will be no judges, only mute witnesses to my greatness”? In faculty meetings, I could intimidate rivals by alternately flexing my pectorals like Hans and Franz: “Behold my muscles, puny girly man.”
It’s fun to consider, but I am given to extreme moods, and physical perfection is just too much work. Instead, I’ll buy more polo and guayabera shirts that do not need to be tucked into my pants.
I’ll reconceptualize myself as a cuddly, ursine professor -- someone more approachable, more ready to smile benevolently on the tiny people who come to see me. But, in the classroom, I can’t help wondering, every time I turn to the board to write something, “Do they assume I am lazy? Are my flabby buttocks giving them permission to slack off?”
At the end of every spring semester, when I have time to brood, my fat-affirming defenses finally succumb to self-loathing, and I experience a conversion. I am lazy. I am an eyesore. I am a walking environmental hazard. I must change! I rush out and buy some free weights, an exercise bicycle, and a case of SlimFast. I begin an exercise program that lasts, sometimes, for 10 or 12 weeks.
I walk through the faculty cafeteria like Savronarola in Renaissance Florence, half-shut eyes peering sideways. To my right someone slurps a slimy pile of creamed, chipped beef on toast. To my left someone devours a bratwurst that squirts grease when he bites it. Before me a chafing dish filled with congealing pigs-in-a-blanket reminds me of my formerly bulbous thighs. I feel unclean, as if my skin is slathered with lard. The bonfire must begin!
I jog for miles every day, burning away my excess flesh in the friction of the road. As the weeks go by, I can see my thinner self emerging in the bathroom mirror like Michelangelo’s “David” stepping free from its marble hiding place.
But a weight-loss program takes up a lot of mental energy (and not just the brain cells used for crafting silly similes). I look at a cupcake and think: three miles. Food is the enemy, and the enemy is everywhere, infusing my precious bodily fluids with sticky fat globules.
The minute I slow down, the weight-gain demon is going to leap on my shoulders and slap pizza slices all over me like slabs of modeling clay: “C’mon. Enjoy life, will ya?” (For some reason, the demon talks like Tony Soprano.)
Weight loss is usually presented as some kind of road to personal fulfillment and salvation through self-control. But the thinner I get, the angrier I feel. The more I conform to the morality of slimness, the more I want to lash out at people.
Perhaps I decreasingly feel the need to compensate for my appearance by being nice. The last thing I want to be is some fey, hyperkinetic, academic version of Richard Simmons in crimson hot pants.
Or perhaps I want to attack society for the pressure it places on me to conform to some arbitrary ideal: “Here, look, I’m thin and miserable. Are you happy now? Can I come out of hiding?”
Inevitably, though, my determination to lose weight collapses under the mounting pressure of writing deadlines around the beginning of the fall semester. And as the academic year proceeds, almost all of my mental energy and physical resolution are consumed by teaching, advising, and committee meetings.
Around the middle of September, a voice whispers to me that it would be so luxurious, subversive, liberating, and humane to just embrace the self that genetics, opportunity, and inclination are calling me to become: “Order the cheesecake.”
It’s so wonderful to let go, to become fat and happy, but this freedom comes at the price of shame, my health, and, I suspect, professional limitation. And so the cycle continues.