Absolutely Fabulous

I recently started following Augusten Burroughs on Twitter.  If you don’t know who Augusten is, you might have seen a movie of which he wrote the book to, Running with Scissors.  He has also written a number of other popular titles such as: Dry, Possible Side Effects, and A Wolf at the Table.  Not only will his prose make your brain do mental gymnastics when you read his works, but you’ll actually enjoy the mental fatigue and learn something!  Augusten has also undertook amateur photography; except his work really isn’t considered amateur.  You can check out his Flickr and see what I mean.

Now if you want to be sold on Augusten’s writing (if you’re not already), please take the time and read this guest article by Augusten; it’s Absolutely Fabulous…

Whatever it takes – even if that means eating nothing but green leaves and air - getting washboard abs is his new addiction.

I am a month away from having abs.

At the moment I have a flat stomach, etched with shadows that imply musculature - but only when I stand, which I do frequently, at a three-quarter angle in front of mirrors, with my shirt lifted.

Elsewhere in the world bombs explode, villages flood, mothers and children are tortured to death and their bodies abandoned to rot in the sun. But here in the mirror before me remains a resilient layer of blubber over the muscle. Probably five pounds. And they are stubborn, these last five. These inner five. They are like they Secret Service, tightly cloistering the president.

But I will reach that prize muscle. If I have to give up every four-carbohydrate almond I currently enjoy (two a day), I will. If I have to choke down my dry salad without the grilled chicken, i will. If I have to throw up after consuming one of my hateful, meager meals, then throw up I will. In fact, I have asked some women I know, “How do you make yourself vomit after eating?”

At First my question is met with looks of horror. Not only have I been politically incorrect, it’s as if I have entered their private space - the women’s restroom - and am banging on closed stall doors saying “What’s going on in there?” The women also feel the question implicates them. Well, how on earth would I know? Their awkward laughter says.

But a handful of them do know. So an instant later, when we have turned a corner and are walking down a hallway; when we have exited the elevators; when the person who was walking behind us has ducked into a store, these women whisper something like “The trick is to drink a lot of water.” Or “You have to eat a lot. You can’t just have some little salad and barf it up. Volume – bloating - is the key.”

There are many keys, I learn.

But none of them will unlock the contents of my stomach. I was both bemused and appalled a few weeks ago to find myself with most of my hand spidering down my throat, my fingers slick. I was spitting up and gagging into a 200-year-old toilet after breaking my perverse madman’s diet by eating one of the bread sticks that arrived, unasked for, with my austere dinner. And no matter how far down my throat I plunged my fingers, I could not vomit. It Infuriated me.

I hadn’t intended to eat the stick of bread. I only wanted to examine it: a specimen. People actually eat these? Yes, weaker people. The old me would have eaten it, I thought, smug, superior. And instantly, shockingly, the stick was in my mouth and I was chewing with the kind of fierce, male determination that builds bridges and skyscrapers. The bread vanished in an instant and I ran to the bathroom. If I don’t get this thing out now, I was thinking. I will never get the abs.

If a doctor had appeared before me, miraculously, and said, “You have cancer,” I would have said, “Do I have one more month to live?” Because my only thought would have been I can get the abs in four weeks.

Two months before this madness began I was 30 pounds overweight. I found a decade-old photograph of myself and noted with horror that my face had had actual planes back then. Bevels. Angles. I had become used to my doughy, swollen, carbohydrate-infected face. The rest of the 30 pounds had gathered around my middle. I had belly fat, flank fat, and, most appalling of all, back fat.

How long had it been, exactly, since I’d seen the inside of a gym? Since I’d been in handsome shape and had, very nearly – but not as nearly as now - abs? Four years. Had it been that long? Yes. It had.

Seeing my reflection that afternoon, I decided: This is the day. Today. Right now.

At first, I could do exactly four minutes on the elliptical trainer at my gym. And my heart was hysterical inside my chest. It was spasming and screaming. “Oh my God, what have you done with the sofa?”

So, like a ruthless executioner atop a Mayan pyramid, I beheaded from my diet anything and everything that made me happy: Lusty brownies, earthy and chocolaty and with the tiniest crackle when you bite into them, shattering the glossy, shellacked surface. Cookies. Candy bars. French fries, bread, butter, meat, cheese, pears. All that was left were greens, drizzled with air.

The next day I was able to do four minutes and 20 seconds.

Each day, after the elliptical trainer, I would do crunches, gently, the way my chiropractor had taught me. Raise your torso just 10 degrees, Adams’s apple pointed at the ceiling. I never counted. I continued until I couldn’t.

Weeks passed. Facial bones began to break the surface. I ordered new jeans online, and by the time they were delivered I needed a smaller size. I inspected my stomach constantly. I inhaled to see the convex lines. I exhaled and saw the softness that remained above the muscle and felt my face flush with rage. I knew something was distorted; I sensed that I had lost all perspective. But I did not care. When I looked down? I needed to see only ripples.

Friends gasped when they saw me. “My God, you look wonderful,” they’d say, followed by the “Are you okay?” I noted that blurry line between beauty and sickness - how beauty came first.

It has been almost two months. When I lift up my shirt I see that the abs are coming. If I continue to starve, if I continue to channel my rage into kinetic energy, the abs will come. The law of physics promise this. We are, if we do the math right, owed abs, each of us.

And yet? I do not require abs for any rational reason. I’m not single. I’m not 22. I’m not a model. I don’t go to the beach. Never will somebody eat whipped cream off my stomach.

But one doesn’t chase after abs or thinness of plump lips because one has thought it through. One chases because one needs. The need is vigorous and all-consuming. It is blind and it is mindless, too: Ask “But why?” and the need will reply, “You disgust me.”

Funny, but I would never be with somebody who had abs. I like a little extra padding on a person. I like a man with a bit of belly - a football players build. On a woman, I like something a little more 19th-centrury - curves and bulges, voluptuous mounds and promising, elegant hills.

Admitting this lifts the veil, and I get it. It has been almost 10 years since I stopped drinking. The need knows it won’t get a martini. So it seduces me though my stomach - “Psst, feeling empty? Abs, dude, abs” - like I’m a dog on a chase, oblivious to the reasonable call of my master and the swiftly approaching car.

And, with the full knowledge that I am again addicted to something and that all addiction is toxic, is circular, erodes and controls, I stop eating for four days, and unleash my resentment on my stomach though crunches, and raise the intensity on the elliptical trainer. And one evening very soon, possibly even tomorrow, there they will be: abs. I will stare at my reflection, at my achieved goal. Abs. I am not that guy with the stomach. I am him.

And I know exactly what I will feel. I will feel: oh.

Because in the pursuit of beauty, there is no finish line. Nothing about us will ever be perfect. The need will always, always be there. There will always be just one more thing we could do. Or get. Or loose.

It is a fool’s marathon. But I don’t care. I will run it anyway.

Augusten nailed something deep within me with this article.  As a triathlete, and often-joked – the fat triathlete – I have a vain desire to have an impressive, visible 6- to 8-pack.  I have a well-defined 4-pack now; and my abdominals are large, so it looks good (did that sound egotistical?).  But I also have a huge pelvic girdle which accentuates my ghastly love-handles.  I was once told that I have body dysmorphic disorder because I see myself as fat, and the people around me see me as extremely fit and healthy. I guess as Augusten points out and unlike the sport of triathlon, in this pursuit there is no finish line.