Bacon and Tits, On Infinite Repeat
Food never really interested me. Not the good stuff, not the fast stuff, not the volume of it. A sandwich and an apple at school, lentil soup or fish fingers or mushroom ragout at home, cheap fake Fanta in cans when we were running around outside—and I was fine. Whatever hunger was, I fed it without ceremony and moved on.
Now I lie awake thinking about food. In the middle of sex I think about food. Fat bacon burgers with extra peanut sauce. Fried egg noodles with double meat. Dripping tuna pizza with cheese in the crust. I live to eat, visibly, measurably, in ways that show up in photographs I’d rather not examine too closely.
I’ve tried diets, obviously. And I’ve always known I was smarter than everyone following those magazine detox plans—it’s just calories, just carbs, fewer noodles and rice and bread and eventually the wiry body I had at twenty comes back. I understand the mechanism exactly. Understanding the mechanism and operating the mechanism are, it turns out, two completely different skills.
Tits and bacon. Those are my two best friends now. Both the thing your body wants at three AM, both requiring some negotiation to obtain, both worth more mental real estate than they probably deserve. You know things have really gone wrong when you start jerking off to old photos of yourself—not because you miss being young, but because the body in them looks like a stranger. A leaner, more functional stranger you could’ve treated better.
Tits and bacon, tits and bacon, tits and bacon.
Theoretically, losing the gut I’ve been carefully accumulating for the past several years shouldn’t be that complicated. Willpower. A bike. Running shoes. A gym membership that actually gets used. How difficult can it be? And yet here I am.
I don’t hate exercise—I want to be clear about that. When I was a kid, moving around wasn’t a choice; it was just what you did. We played football and swam in gravel pits and cycled between villages because sitting still was its own punishment. Nobody called it sport. It was just life. A genuinely good one.
Now sport is a lifestyle for people I find insufferable. The detox crowd. The running clubs. The tracking devices. The self-optimizers who treat their body like a startup—a platform that needs to perform on measurable KPIs and return a better career in quarterly increments. They don’t move because it’s fun. They move because their body is infrastructure, and infrastructure requires maintenance schedules.
Fitness has become a class marker, which is the most depressing thing it could have become. The startup types at the gym at six AM, posting their macro splits and resting heart rates with the same tone they’d use to announce a funding round. They’re not getting healthier. They’re performing health at you.
None of my friends growing up ever cried about being fat. Now everyone does, regardless of what they actually look like. The fashion bloggers with stomachs flat enough to use as a chopping board are out here posting body-image content with the same existential dread as everyone else. If you’re fat, I’m the moon—now go back to your matcha smoothie.
Fat is my cocaine. This would be less of a problem if fat were actually illegal—I’m too much of a coward to score real drugs, so I’d presumably be equally useless at finding contraband lard. "Hey, you got the good stuff?" "I sell flowers. Get out."
The older I get, the more insistently my body demands calories, and the more I think: life is short. I could spend two years eating only salad and light fish. But what if I get hit by a bus on day 729 and my last thought is baked cheese? That would be the worst possible ending—not the dying, but the dying hungry.
Every thin guy with a fixed-gear bike and an ironic cap is photographing sweet potato fries for Instagram from some cool neighborhood, beautiful light, gorgeous composition, absolutely delicious. You haven’t tasted an actual potato in years, I want to shout at the screen. Meanwhile I’m calculating how to steal the food with one hand while throttling him with the other.
The brunch people—the ones who meet at places with concrete walls and single-origin coffee and order two fish eggs with a smear of carrot purée and leave half of it—how do they not scream? Is there no animal part of them that just wants to destroy a full plate of something? How do they sit across from real food and make responsible decisions?
Other people run marathons. I feel like a winner when I stop at half the bag of chocolate hazelnut bars. The health obsessives who want to abolish fast food are just people who can’t allow themselves a triple cheeseburger and have decided that therefore nobody else should have one either. Pure puritanism in activewear.
I got sick once after a Burger King run—Chicken Wings and a Double Steakhouse in quick succession. Haven’t been back since. Maybe the solution is to systematically poison everything I love until only celery and tofu remain and my body gives up wanting anything interesting. Cold turkey via bad memories. It might be the only intervention that actually works on me.
Why are dogs happy? Because they don’t know what a bacon burger tastes like.
So what does a fat self-indulgent mess like me actually do—the kind who’d wallpaper his apartment in schnitzel if he could and fantasizes about shoving smug joggers into hedges? I don’t know. I want the time back when food didn’t matter, when I’d go without meat for someone without even thinking about it, when I wasn’t running calculations on how many animals had to die to get me through a Tuesday.
Food never really interested me. I was fine with the sandwich and the copied Fanta. Maybe I need someone to feed me and monitor what goes in my mouth, like you would with a toddler. Or a pensioner. Or a dog. The dog doesn’t know what it’s missing. That’s the whole thing, right there.
While you’re logging your morning run—"nice lunchtime jog, winking emoji"—I’m here with a bowl of full-fat cornflakes drowning in honey, trying to figure out how to end my relationship with food without moving my body. If I die tomorrow, don’t mourn me. I ate double-loaded salami pizza while you spent the best years of your life in overpriced vegan cafés. Fennel lemon soup can go fuck itself. Now excuse me—I need to check whether I can still see my cock from above.