I used to be skinny, too

Posted on June 16, 2011

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Skinny me in lederhosen

And to think it was the skinniness that embarrassed me.

I used to be skinny.  No, really, I did.   You’re going to be skinny too, I can tell already.  Mom was, I was, and you will be.  I didn’t beat 130 lbs until well after college.

Some of it is genetic.  You’ve already demonstrated an ability to eat half a gallon of ice cream without gaining an ounce.  As you get older, girls are going to hate you for it.  By the time you’re in the college dorms, the girls will look upon you as an ungrateful and undeserving bastard, blessed with such a gift, yet unappreciative of its significance.  A gift utterly wasted on a boy.

I should point out that girls often think they have to be skinny to be worth much. The reason is complicated, but pretty much everything that girls see on TV, in movies and in magazines tells them that.  I’m not sure any of their magazines, makeup or clothing companies ever stopped to ask us guys what we actually like. If they did, they’d know that supermodels don’t attract us;  they scare the hell out of us.  We’d actually be quite content with a girl in jeans and a tee shirt, with cheeks that are actually capable of movement and the color of real skin, and a body that doesn’t require a paperweight to keep it from blowing away.

While girls–the ones with the slow metabolisms–are told by their own favorite magazines that they’re supposed to be skinny, the boys—with the turbo powered metabolisms–are told not to be skinny.  Or fat, for that matter.

We’re supposed to be big, but muscle-big not fat-big.

All of that means that if you’re going to be like I was as a kid, you’ll be embarrassed by your skinniness and you’ll wear a jacket all day, every day, to cover it up.  Ironically, you’ll sweat so much that you’ll just lose more weight in the process.

I hope you won’t.  I hope you’ll be happy with the body you have. Honestly, when combined with that awesome personality and sense of humor, it makes a pretty great package.

As you know, I did eventually gain weight. And when you pointed at me recently and said, “Fatty”, part of me felt an odd sense of accomplishment.  Granted, the weight isn’t distributed exactly the way I had preferred, but hey I’m not complaining.

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