I’m worried that I’m fat now. Because Nikol is dating a guy who is a professional bicycle racer. He must maintain an absolutely lean physique at all times, burns 8000 calories a day or something. This guy has abs, real abs, not a mushy six pack with a little pooch at the bottom like mine. When you talk about an ideal male body you’re talking about a guy whose stomach doesn’t fold when he’s sitting down. You’re talking about 5 per cent body fat. Michael Phelps. You’re talking about people who have that for a living. Merely flirting with single digits body fat isn’t enough. Looking good lit from the side with high contrast lamps while flexing down isn’t enough. You gotta look like the cover of Men’s Health even when there’s Vaseline on the lens and you’re in the fetal position with all muscles relaxed. So that is my new fitness goal. I’d been lifting a lot; put on a few pounds of muscle. Now it’s time to drain the remaining fat so you can see striations. Tendons. Fat blue veins snaking over my forearms.
Physically this can be done, but it’s the psychology that gets you. It burns out some fuse that tells you how much to eat. You are constantly hungry as shit and constantly just thinking don’t eat don’t eat don’t eat, 16 waking hours per day. The smells coming from restaurants become something primal, like the musk of a cow’s cunt to a rutting bull. Don’t eat don’t eat don’t eat and it’s one of those things– you fuck up once and suddenly you’ve thrown down 1600 calories worth of ice cream. If you use cardio machines you begin to appreciate the horror that is calorie math. You can be on a Stairmaster at a full sprint for an hour, it won’t burn off food that takes you two minutes to put down. Continue reading
