Food Is Better Than Sex
Food never really interested me. A brown bread sandwich and an apple at school, lentil soup or fish sticks at home, cheap soda from the corner store with my friends—I was satisfied with all of it. Happy even.
Now I’m lying in bed thinking about bacon cheeseburgers with extra peanut sauce, fried noodles stacked with meat, tuna pizza dripping with melted cheese. This is what I live for. Not the other way around. And you can tell.
Breasts and bacon. Those two thoughts have become my best friends. When I’m trying to fall asleep, when I’m jerking off to my own old photos from before I turned into a grotesque parody of myself—breasts and bacon, breasts and bacon, breasts and bacon. That’s the loop I’m stuck in.
I know how to stop. Obviously. It’s not complicated. Fewer noodles, less bread, less of everything, and I’d get my thin body back from when I was twenty. Willpower, they call it. Buy a bike, some running shoes, a gym membership, use them. How hard can it be? Exactly. But.
I’m not against movement itself. When we were kids we ran and rode bikes and played football like someone had deleted the TV from the world. We swam in the quarry and raced from one town to another. It wasn’t exercise, it was just living. A genuinely good life.
But now fitness is a lifestyle for people I hate. The self-optimizers with their detox schemes and running clubs and their tracking apps, the startup guys breaking their existence into metrics and career advancement, moving not because it feels good but because their body is a machine that needs to function better and serve them well. Sport became an elite thing, something owned by assholes. The kind of people who make me want to strangle them.
Even back then, if my friends had complained about being fat, I wouldn’t have understood it. Now everyone does it, regardless of gender. Even the skeletal fashion bloggers, whose flat stomachs are the star of every carefully composed photo. You’re posting your sweet potato fries from some trendy neighborhood, acting like you’ve never tasted a real potato, and meanwhile I’m sitting here choking down a burger. Other people run marathons. I feel accomplished if I only eat half a box of cookies.
How do they even do it, the ones who meet for brunch and eat a few fish eggs and a smear of carrot purée—then leave half of it on the plate? Don’t they want to scream? Don’t they want to throw themselves face-first at the food? It makes no sense to me. The thin ones would abolish McDonald’s entirely if they could, as if their preventing themselves from deep-throating a triple cheeseburger means nobody else should get to do it either.
I threw up once after Burger King. Wings and a steak sandwich. Haven’t gone back since. Maybe I should systematically poison everything I love until only celery and tofu are left. Maybe that would cure me of this.
I want back the time when food meant nothing to me. When I could transform myself for someone else without thinking about it. Before I started calculating how many animals died so I could live another day to eat more of them. Before this became a war with myself.
What’s a fat, self-hating guy supposed to do? The kind who’d wallpaper his apartment with schnitzel and shove joggers into bushes if he thought he could get away with it? I don’t know. I’m sitting here with my cornflakes and whole milk and honey, trying to figure out how to erase the fat without moving. Hoping I’ll suddenly care enough to stop. Knowing I won’t.
If I die tomorrow, don’t grieve for me. I’ll have eaten double-loaded pepperoni pizza while you wasted your best years in some overpriced vegan café drinking fennel and lemon soup or whatever bullshit. So now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check if I can still see my cock from above.