The brain is the body’s chief chemist, regulating appetite and making it difficult for many people to shed pounds and keep them off. The brain determines how much fat it wants people to carry.
The Wall Street Journal
It happens every weekend; I make it through Friday, exercising when I can, but most days it’s just a walk to and from the train station. I get by on pseudo-healthy snacks from the office lunch room–juices, granola bars and allegedly low-cal chips. I never met a bag of “healthy” snacks I didn’t like. Except quinoa chips, which have less taste than the box they box they come in.
So I look forward to the weekend for two consecutive days of working out; one day of swimming, one day riding my bike. Afterwards, I feel much better, and more important–look better; the gut that had formerly started to drip over my belt is back in its proper place for a man my age, God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world.
But then the vicious cycle begins again; I’ve burned a lot of calories, and I find myself famished, eager to re-fuel. I start stuffing my face with burritos, nachos, honey-roasted peanuts–all the good bad things I think I’ve earned by being such a diligent physical fitness dweeb.
But at least I’m not to blame. I read in The Wall Street Journal–“The Daily Diary of the American Dream”–that it’s not my fault, it’s my stupid lard-butt brain. Apparently the brain decides how fat he wants a person to be, so he’s to blame for my inability to keep weight off. I decided to have a little “chat” with him about it.
At this point, the cognitive scientists out there in internet land are asking themselves–can one actually have a conversation with his brain? Is this sort of ventriloquism of the intellect even possible?
I lean back in my rocking chair, let out an exhale of gratitude, and thank my lucky stars that I was a philosophy major in college. I recall Rene Descartes, who said “I think–therefore I am.” If he can appear on both sides of a proposition like that, I figure I can too.
I walk down the hall to my brain’s office and knock softly. My guess is he’s taking the first of many naps for the day, or if he’s awake, he’s playing video games. He’s got one of the cushier jobs in the brain industry–indoor work and no heavy lifting, as they say in Massachusetts government circles. My life-long habit of spacing out leaves him plenty of free time.
“Come in,” I hear him say from within.
“What’s up?” I say by way of affable introduction. I don’t want him to rile him up unnecessarily as I will have to rile him up necessarily on the subject of my diet.
“Not a whole lot,” he says as he looks up the multiple monitors he has going for my stream of consciousness. There are sports highlights from the 60s, words to country songs I haven’t written yet, fantasies about women I’m not married to–I never said I was a genius. “Are you still on the Ken Boyer-for-Baseball Hall of Fame kick?” he asks as he reaches into a family-size bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
I look up at a screen that shows a recurring memory of mine; me meeting one of my boyhood heroes, the Cardinals’ great third baseman, at the Missouri State Fair where he was selling some kind of gizmo that, the manufacturers promised, would improve your batting average.
“No, I’m too old. I don’t have time for every crusade that once caught my eye.”
“How ’bout this chick?”
He clicks on a file and an image of blonde girl pops up on the middle screen. It’s Sherry Divine, and boy was she divine. Somebody told me in 8th grade she had a crush on me, so I went over to her house and hung out for awhile, trying to make conversation.
“Let’s just say that no sparks flew,” I said. “I wanted a girlfriend who had personality, not just someone with a humongous pair of . . .”
“Eyelashes?”
“Precisely. So I said ‘See ya later,’ went down to the corner store to get a pack of baseball cards, then went home.”
“Your loss, chump.”
“It’s funny, I have absolutely no regrets about her,” I say. “I chalk it up to my lack of personality, or maybe the policy of honesty that the Boy Scouts had drilled into me. I just couldn’t fake it with her.”
“You could’ve asked her to a Hayley Mills movie and felt her up.”
“But I didn’t feel like feeling her up.”
“Ok, to each his own. So what brings you down to my neck of the woods?”
“I . . . uh . . . wanted to talk to you about my caloric intake.”
My brain looked at me like he was a junior high school principal and I was an 8th grade boy trying to explain my unexcused absence from the day before. “Not sure what there is to talk about–I’m in charge of that.”
“I know, I read about it in The Wall Street Journal.”
“Yeah, nice article–front page too.”
“But not above the fold.”
“They save that for weird or fashionable diseases.”
“Can’t blame ’em. Anyway, is there any chance we could come to some sort of compromise?”
His face is a mask of immobility, like a poker player sitting on pocket aces. “What’s in it for me?”
I have to think of that for awhile. I don’t have a lot to offer my brain–he is on call 24/7 for those times when I’m struggling to remember the difference between Manichaeism and Antinomianism, the number of teams that have left St. Louis for greener pastures (Browns, Hawks, Rams, football Cardinals), Sonny Stitt’s real name.
“I tell you what . . .” I say.
“What?”
“I’ll start taking my statins every day, so I don’t have a stroke–how’s that?”
He looks up at the ceiling–a “tell,” as far as I can tell. He’s at least interested.
“How about liquor consumption?”
“I’ve got that under control,” I say.
“Yeah, right. Until you fall off the wagon in the middle of the week and drink a whole bottle of red wine by yourself.”
“I’ve got a tough job!”
“I’ve got a tough job!” he says, mocking me in a mincing tone. “When you’re hungover, you make my job twice as hard.”
He’s got me there–so I start to beg. “Look–what have you got against me recovering the slim girlish figure of my youth?”
“I like who you are just fine,” he snaps. “I’m comfortable with the image of your body I have in mind.”
“Let’s not get philosophical here,” I say, throwing down my trump card. “If we go there, you know you can’t keep up with me.”
“You mean you can’t keep up with me.”
He has a point, and I take a moment to collect my thoughts.
“I can see you collecting your thoughts,” he says, “so it’s not like you’re going to pull a trick play on me.”
I inhale deeply. “Look–what is it you can possibly like about a beer gut, even a light beer gut?”
He gets misty-eyed. “It reminds me of when we turned 21,” he says. “Suddenly, all the sneaking around, trying to find bums or college students . . .”
“You repeat yourself.”
“. . . to buy us liquor, to help us relax–they were over! We could drink as much as we wanted. You put on a healthy ten pounds of carbohydrates. Yes, you looked like a putz, with an incipient double-chin, but you were happy. None of this light beer and quinoa chips self-flagellation.”
“I looked like a putz, and I was a putz. Minimum wage job, no girlfriend, snapping at my parents.”
“But you got over that,” he says as he puts down his video game controller and looks me straight in the eye. “I don’t want you to grow old as a scrawny old miser. I want you age gracefully, as a corpulent fat cat who’s lived a good life, piled up a mound of money for retirement, and isn’t always sucking in his gut whenever he sees Stephanie . . .”
“The temp secretary on the third floor?”
His left eyebrow shoots skyward. “Remember,” he says, “I see all of your fantasies.”