Fat-tastic

This may sound odd, but I've been thinking about fat a lot lately. Mostly because I have been watching my love handles aggressively expand into real estate worthy of their own zip codes. As far as I can tell this annexation of my obliques by the lipid monster is due to a combination of forces worthy of perfect storm status. The first force at work is my wife, who is an amazing cook, with a fatal (for me) flaw. She will make 3 dozen cookies (this week it was Boston creme pie cup cakes) with no intention of eating more than 2 over the course of the next week. Now, we all know that there are starving kids in Africa and that chocolate chip cookies go bad after 72 hours. So, I don't know where she expects them to go, but I can't stand to see them go to waste.

The second force at work is my lingering back injury that makes it all too easy to skip my thrice weekly runs. Running for the sake of running is one of my absolute least favorite things to do, but I feel obligated to try to do something to turn the calorie deficit in my favor. Give me something to chase like a ball or a Frisbee and I'm like a greyhound at the track (but slower and hopefully without a muzzle). They say that if you run long enough you'll get "runner's high" and all your pain and problems will disappear. I guess I have never run far enough, because the only high I get is when I take a shot of my asthma inhaler and feel oxygen finally return to my brain. Or maybe runner's high really just makes you feel like your legs are made of jello, your lungs are slowly shrinking, and what vision you have left is doubled. If that is the case, I get runners high going to the mailbox. They say married people want their single friends to get married so they will be as miserable as the married folks. Perhaps runners just want everyone else to be miserable like they are, so they made up runners high and sadistically watch they rest of us stumble down the street towards an imaginary escape.

The last force at work is entirely my fault and I am willing to admit it. I am on a quest to find the best chicken wings in the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) area. This has obviously required me to ingest an unthinkable amount of saturated and unsaturated fat, but it is clearly for a good cause. While I am grateful to those chickens that gave their lives for the effort, I am afraid it has been in vain thus far. Even as I type I can smell the fragrance of inferior wings wafting off my fingers. This time I am thankful that I didn't find the place with the best wings because I don't know that I have the courage to go there on a regular basis. Deep in downtown Durham, with nothing but a walk up window is a little wing shack that also sells cigarettes and 40's of malt liquor (convenient, I guess, if you live in the neighborhood). This place makes Buffalo Chips look like Chucky Cheese's. Buffalo Chips is my hometown wing dump where I once watched a man get thrown through a glass door and limp away a bloody mess into the darkness. It is also the mark by which all wings are measured. So until I find a wing that makes my lips tingle the way the suicide wings from the old Buffalo Chips, the search goes on.

The other reason I have been thinking about fat is a comment made by my wife after a trip to Walmart. Yes, we shop at Walmart. I know some people are against Walmart because they drive out small businesses and maybe they employ low wage workers in other countries and blah, blah, blah. To that I respond, was Walmart not a small business at one point and maybe they just did it better than everyone else? Are low paying jobs better than no jobs? Is it possible to get a shopping cart at Walmart without a wobbly wheel? The truth of it is, I don't really care about all that stuff because things are cheaper there and they offer unmatched people watching opportunities.

So my wife comes home and says, and I quote, "I hear all this stuff about Americans and obesity and I think that there isn't a lot of fat people running around...and then I go to Walmart." After I stopped laughing I thought about it, and besides being a Mecca for dental work, I'm pretty sure it's a tough place to be a coronary artery.

With all this focus on fat lately I've been wondering what's is the cure? How can we avoid being called, "Fatty" and, "Tubs" and having to pay for two plane tickets when we fly?

Coincidentally, the answer came to me when I was walking into Target. I watched a tone and fit looking chap as he crossed from my right to my left passing 3 sets of perfectly good double doors in order to walk through the automatic doors. He probably walked 20 or 30 feet out of his way in order to avoid having to open the door. My first impression was that he was lazy. In fact, I thought to myself, "Only in America would someone walk out of their way to not have to open a door." Then it occurred to me that maybe this guy had the answer to America's obesity problem, and I bet he didn't even know it. In fact, I was so wrapped up in thought that I read "pull" on the door and ran into it as I proceeded to "push."

If you haven't figured the solution out for yourself yet, I'll spell it out for you. Put the automatic doors on the sides of the Walmart away from the parking lot and bingo! The draw of the automatic doors will be too much to resist and America will walk themselves to a healthier and trimmer future.