Spooning

It all started with a spoon. I know that now. It took me decades to figure it out.

I have fought a losing battle with fat my entire life. From a chubby junior high boy who wore “Huskies”, to the rotund man I became later in life — I’m a fat man and I’m sure I’ll always be.

When I started playing in a rock band during my high school years, fat was out. If one was fat you were out. I wanted to be bigger than The Beatles, bigger than Elvis, bigger than any rock star ever. Unfortunately for me, I was fat and other than Fats Domino and Mama Cass, I didn’t know of any other fat person who was even a tiny rock star let alone big rock star – no pun intended – than The Beatles or Elvis.

It was in to be thin. My belly rolls, enhanced by jelly rolls and other sweet, fatty, salty treats and other bad-for-you stuff, grew bigger. Determined to become thin on the road to stardom, I discovered eggs. And that’s all I ate. Eggs. I figured eggs have about 70 calories each so I could eat 20 eggs a day for 1400 calories. Twenty eggs is a lot. Of course I couldn’t eat fried eggs, so I ate hard boiled eggs, and learned to love poached eggs and soft-boiled eggs — and I resisted the temptation to dip toast into the runny yellows.

Sure enough, over the course of the summer my weight plummeted from over 200 pounds – Hey! I was only 14 and 200 pounds was a lot) down to a svelte 155 pounds. I’m certainly rock star material now, I thought.

During my years as a rock star — and I use the word star in its most liberal definition –I was able to remain a fat boy who lived in a thin body. But the fat boy was alive and well inside – and I was all right with that..

You know how life goes — you get married, have kids, settle in for the long haul and a lot of people, during this phase of life; life gets boring. And it’s in the boredom that many people discover comfort foods. Comfort food is a nepenthe and an escape from the boredom of married life, kids, little league baseball, school plays, jobs we hate, and so forth. To escape boredom, rich people have affairs and poor folks eat Twinkies. Everyone has their own vehicle of escape from boredom. And this is regardless of how happy and fulfilled they look. You might think your neighbor’s happy because he or she is always smiling, but in most cases it’s a ruse, or just gas. They’re not happy — that’s why wife Jane is fooling around with Sam at work, and hubby Mac is out in the garage restoring a 1957 Chevy.

You might think I’m crazy and cynical and you may deny what I’m saying is fact, but facts are facts.

I digress. As the years rolled by, I became really good friends with spoons. I was so promiscuous I didn’t really care which spoon, any spoon would do. I think my grandfather called is spooning but I think he meant something different.

The fat guy who lived many years inside a thin body yearned to be free. It all began with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. There is nothing better or easier to make than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It’s fast food. It’s comfort food. It’s a childhood memory. It’s yummy. And not only is it yummy, you can create many different varieties — I’m thinking at least 1246 different combinations:

Strawberry jam with creamy peanut butter on white bread
Strawberry jam with crunchy peanut better on white bread
Strawberry jam with crunchy peanut button on wheat bread
Strawberry jam with creamy peanut butter on wheat bread
Strawberry jam with creamy peanut butter on white toast
Strawberry jam with crunchy peanut butter on wheat toast

Just to name a few. And you can further experiment with different loads of peanut butter or jelly — you know, go heavy on the peanut butter and light on the jelly or go heavy on the jelly and light on the peanut butter.

And peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, while delicious, are not really all that fattening. I’m guessing around 300 calories – better than a Whopper at 760 calories each – and with a lot less fat and salt. Plus Whoppers require french fries.

The only problem I have with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is milk. If I am going to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I have to have milk. I started innocently enough: As a child I would eat a peanut butter and jelly — usually grape — sandwich my grandmother had made for me and I would drink a glass of milk with it.

When I got older and figured out how to hide things better, I didn’t use a glass for the milk nor bread for the sandwich – it was the spoon that started it all.

This is how spooning gets started — innocently.

My recipe for fatness began with a counter, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jam or jelly, and a gallon jug of ice-cold milk — and a spoon, of course.

Open the jar of peanut butter, open the jar of jelly or jam, take the cap of the ice cold milk, and grab the spoon. Now take a big spoonful of peanut butter and put it in your mouth. Then do the same with a big spoonful of jam or jelly. Repeat one more time. Now, pick up the gallon jug of milk and take a big long pull of the ice cold milk. Just be sure to lick the spoon clean between dips in the peanut butter and dips in the jelly.

Now go back to the jar of peanut butter and eat a couple big spoonfuls, do the same with the jelly, then swig several huge gulps of ice cold milk straight from the jug.

Just keep repeating this over and over until you are full and can’t eat anymore. Always do this right before you go to bed. You will sleep better.

This is called spooning and it’s extremely addictive. Do not try it at home or you’ll be sorry.

You are probably thinking I’m making this up; nobody would ever do something like that…but you’d be wrong, because spooning has been a way of life for me for more than 1000 nights of my life — and what’s more, I’ve been known to do this before bed and then again if I happened to wake up in the middle of the night. And all of it because of my addiction to spooning.

But at least I was in harmony. A fat guy in a fat body again. But I could only be a happy fat guy until I got to a point where I couldn’t fit in my fat clothes anymore — the point where I couldn’t button my pants and had to wear my shirttail out to cover up the unbuttoned condition of my over-sized pants.

You think I’m joking but I’m not. Spooning my friends, is a very addictive thing.

When I got to the point when even my big old fattest pants could no longer be buttoned, I would feel bad that I had allowed the fat guy that I am, ruin the thin body he once lived in. So, like my high school days, I went on a diet of one thing only — one time it was spaghetti, the next time I ate nothing but cheese and meat, the next time nothing but grains….

Here’s an example: Eight years ago I weighed 230 pounds – most of those pounds the result of spooning, so I went on the Adkins Diet and lost weight because you can’t spoon on the Adkins diet. But I soon got sick of all the meat, cheese and stuff like that. So I switched to a low-calorie diet. I got down to 157: Everyone told me I looked sick.

I had a hard drive with the spooning withdrawal. The jar of Jiff kept calling my name, and Smuckers stared at me each time I opened the refrigerator.

Sure enough, spooning got me again. Eventually I was back to the peanut butter, jelly, and milk bedtime routine. Spooning. During my last plumping period, I woke up in the middle of the night and ate an entire half-gallon of Breyer’s vanilla ice cream. When I awoke in the morning, I was sure I had only dreamed that I ate that half gallon — until I looked in the sink and saw the empty carton.

The fat guy I really am, won again. And once again I had gotten so fat that I couldn’t button those 44 waist pants — I covered up my gaping pants with shirts with long tails. I really didn’t want to slip into the 46-inch-waist-pants club. I felt guilty and fatter than ever. A fat guy in fat body should be congruously harmonious — but I was a blubber mass and getting sicker.

The onset of true self-awareness can come suddenly – like a bolt of lightning. Stepping on the scale is a no-no if you know-know you’re too fat. I guess seeing my weight on the scale is harder than not looking at my fat naked body in a mirror. I decided to buy another new scale (I threw the last two out for not being very good friends.) I stepped on my brand new digital scale and it said 215.4 . I thought to myself — thank goodness I’m not the whale I was the last time I got fat — I’m a full fifteen pounds “thinner”.

What motivated me to buy a scale? If you must know – a baptism, OK? I was supposed to dress up nicely — you know, church and all. But nicely is hard when you’re fat. None of my clothes fit right so I was basically living in sweatpants -extra large – and sweat shirts – extra-extra large. So to the baptism I wore a big oversized button-down collar shirt hanging out over some elastic-waisted dress pants – size 44.

All this because of a spoon.

The fat guy was getting sicker and sicker and I was growing even sicker of diets. There must be a way to be a fat guy inside a slimmer body without going on a diet. A lifestyle change is what I needed. The spoon had to go.

The morning after the baptism — my fat-aware epiphany — I decided that I would never drink an ounce of milk again. I don’t need it. And without milk there would be no peanut butter, no jelly or jam, no cakes, pies, Twinkies, cookies, etc.

It’s been eleven months since that fat-awakening. And I haven’t had any milk since. I haven’t starved myself — I’ve been eating well. The things that I associated with milk have been eliminated from my diet and supplanted with strawberries and/or blueberries, almond milk, club soda, whole-grain pastas etc.

Nah! I’m not going to write a diet book — but now that 215.4-pound fat guy weighs around 160. And I got there without dieting.

I’m still a fat guy, but I’m a fat guy in a slimmer body. And if I ever get fat again, I’ll blame it all on a spoon. But i do know it’s not really because of a spoon that I blubber up — it’s because I fell in love with spooning.

I’ll always be a fat guy, but I’m going to try to remain a fat guy trapped in a slimmer body. And if I do that, I will have to give up spooning the rest of my life.

No more spooning for me.

I hope.