Pump it up! Part II

When people come to me and ask what then need to do to change their bodies I tell them this: You will have to lose all your friends.

This isn't strictly true, of course.  But more times than not things work out that way for those who really want to have a say how their physical plant looks and operates.  The first thing that happens to people who start working out is they get depressed.  This is because your life, your body, whether you love it or hate it, is Yours.  Dasein is Mine!, writes Heidegger.  And even if your body is too fat or too skinny and causes you anguish, that anguish belongs to you as you do it, and you'll miss it when it starts to go.

The next thing that happens is that your friends step back from you, or, in the worst cases, begin busting on you.  Everybody inside the gym has a story about this.  You are part of a social group that operates around you being the fat girl, or the skinny guy.  The group has habits, often the very ones you're now abandoning.  You can't just do that without taking some shit.

-- A couple of years ago a brilliant (and quite beautiful) female student with a nasty eating disorder asked me to help her lose some body fat.  She would come into the gym with me and some other students, and without fail, after the workout, all her friends in the dorms would have pizza and soda waiting for her when she got back.  They were heavily invested in the routines on which the friendship was based and began to resent her for wanting to diet and work out.  She ate the pizza and kept the friends.

-- A snowbird I met in Gold's gym lost 80 or 90 pounds after his first heart attack.  He was having terrible fights at home because his wife resented that he didn't want to eat ice cream and pop corn in front  of the tube any more, and finally began to fear that with the fat off he would start wanting to fuck more attractive women.  (Well!  Hyy--yeah!)  He ditched the wife. Or she ditched him.

-- My beloved friend and long time workout partner, Chula, lost 138 pounds after her marriage broke up.  Her girl friends got pissed because she no longer wanted to spend a "girls' night" over nachos and cheap white wine, talking about how "there are no good men left."  This was when she was 50, and she is now a total hottie who can date anybody she wants.  But those friends are gone along with the nachos and cheap wine.

The list goes on.  One of my colleagues got way up in my face when I stopped drinking.  "What?  You won't drink with me?  What?  Are you too cool to drink with me now?"  After my body began to change all this turned into, "Oh, yeah.  He works out.  He has issues."   Or, "he's afraid of getting old,"  or, "he's trying to be the cool professor."  As if I did it all for them!

The things people say in these cases are all pretty much the same: "you're narcissistic," "you're fine the way you are!,"  "learn to live a little!"   Once, three weeks out from a show, somebody who works at my school followed me around a faculty party with a slice of chocolate cake on a paper plate, trying to get me to eat it.  "Come on!  What can it hurt?" she said.  She pushed a plastic fork at my mouth and I think was genuinely pissed off when I wouldn't eat it.  In her more satiric moments Sue likes to say, "What's life without a donut?"  You also get the self-help-philosophical responses: "you have complexes," "nobody lives forever."  And my personal favorite: "Look at me: I eat whatever I want and I look fine."

Mostly, people who go regularly to the gym and who follow training diets aren't thinking about "how they look."  They like feeling the blood come into the muscle, they like being hard and having their clothes fit.  In exactly the same way a person with a Ph.D. trains the mind, gym rats like to train their bodies, to take control of and to form the living tissue that gets out of bed with them every morning. 

In fact, I have trouble understanding why you would train your mind, go to all the bother of getting a Ph.D., and then let your belly hang out over your pants.  After having her second a kid and then gaining 40 pounds a learned colleague of mine said, "I've reproduced twice.  Do I really need to have an attractive body too?"  Well. . . no.  But the fact that you can ask that question means you're already thinking about it and you're already feeling bad about yourself.  Will this change by declaring, even in "smart" language, that only unlearned and egotistical people have lean bodies? 

People have reasons for taking cooking classes, going to wine tastings, collecting stamps, electric trains, baseball cards.  The people who work out are usually thinking about how good it feels to have a very specific, learned, focused, and intensive relation to certain body habits most of us take for granted. 

The idea that anybody works out for YOU is just stupid.  Oh. . . and narcissistic!

I"ll come back to this again.