He’s the Reason You’re Fat
To hell with genes. Screw willpower. Your weight "problem" started in ancient Rome, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
COME ON, FESS UP.
If you’re reading my Substack, bulging with all sorts of fatty-fat-fat recipes and writings, chances are one of the resolutions you wrote down yesterday, either in your BuJo (bullet journal) in hopeful purple ink or in the Notes app on your iPhone in an expectant mint-colored font, had to do with weight: either lose it, firm it, suck it, or disguise it. I’m certainly guilty.
I don’t know when it happens to you, but for me, the stake is plunged into the hopeful heart of my resolution sometime around Valentine’s Day. I can feel the pull, the siren’s call, “Come to me, bend to me!” of personal pan lasagna, lobster fra diavolo, and linzer heart cookies.
My ruin tends to be titanic, not just in size, but in progression–slow, sprouting leaks of willpower that soon turned into uncontrollable hemorrhaging of resolve, eventually resulting in the sinking of what was—this time—the greatest, most airtight resolution ever made.
Yes, there is the Ozempic / Wegovy / Zepbound road, which I have gone down. But unless I sell my organs, I can’t continue to afford them.
If, like me, you’re of the gustatory persuasion and find that it’s nigh unto impossible to lose or keep weight off after the holidays, double chin up. I’ve discovered the reason: it’s not you; it’s the calendar that’s all wrong.
We have King Numa Pompilius, who ruled Rome from 715 to 673 BC, to thank for this. Until NP came along, March was the beginning of the year. He added January and February to the calendar for shits and giggles, a kind of free gift with purchase. And with that, he once and for all sealed the fate of fatties everywhere.
As I see it, if God wanted us to lose weight as we tossed off the yoke and shackles of the prior year, He, in all His knowingness, would have made not January or March the beginning of the year, but May. And He would’ve smote any king, Roman or otherwise, who disagreed. Why May?
Because that’s when almost everyone wants to eat all sorts of crinkly greenstuffs. Starting in May, even I enjoy veggies (as much as that’s possible) and all those foods that chittery little animals delight in.
Instead, what are we saddled with at the unnatural start of the new year? Thanks to Pompous Pompilius, a completely natural God-given desire to stuff ourselves to bursting throughout the cold months so that we have enough subcutaneous food supplies (AKA ass fat) to make it through to what should be the real beginning of the year: spring.
And what are the foods we yearn for during the ushering in of the new year? Pot pies, daubes, mac & cheese. At least I do. And every time The One (who suffers from the same compulsion but has a few Elizabethan-size banquets left in him before he has to worry about his weight, damn him) spies me almost shorting out my computer as I drool over recipes on my site, he chastens me with a cheery, “Don’t you want to have a salad for dinner tonight?”
“NO, NO, I DON’T, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.” And that’s usually followed by, “IT’S NOT MY FAULT; I’M A VICTIM OF PRE-CHRISTIAN TYRANNY.”
That tends to be enough to throw him off balance so I can get to the job at hand of cooking winter-appropriate dishes.
I passed this by Dr. M, my internist, last January when I was having my yearly physical. Ha! Yearly physical! Yet another travesty to the metabolically challenged. What medical sadist decided January would be the ideal month to wipe the slate clean, to strip ourselves bare, literally, and pony up for our sin of six weeks of holiday gluttony?
“Just think how gloriously thinner and healthier I’d be in April,” I said to Dr. M. He ripped the blood pressure cuff off my arm with a waggle of his head. Apparently, the medical establishment wasn’t buying my premise of calendric sabotage. For him, it’s still the old mantra: calories and exercise, calories and exercise. (Did I mention the fucker is rail thin?)
Tsk-tsked by friends, ignored by the white-coat community, I’m turning to the one person on earth who might be able to exert the needed force on the apparently skinny keepers of the calendars to bend them to my will. The Pope. Il Papa. If His Holiness Pope Francis, the clear and logical trump to any old-timey Roman king, can move the new year to May 1st, we might have a fighting chance.
Just think: Resolutions might make it all the way until August as we ride the wave of fresh produce and earthy-smelling, unrecognizable plants we would normally roll our eyes at during the dark winters of our discontent.
If you’re with me, the Pope’s address is:
His Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace
00120 Vatican City
Not in the mood to figure out international postage? You can always e-mail His Holiness.
Right now, 1,311,539,278 people in the world are obese. I reckon if we get just one percent of them to write, that’s 13,115,393 people, we could definitely get some damn good grassroots traction from that.
Chow,
P.S. Won’t you consider tapping the ♥️, restacking this post, and/or leaving a comment? It takes but a moment, but its impact is enormous! xx
LOL! I share the same problem. I try to lose weight, but it always finds me! I love winter foods - the cookies, candies, tree-shaped iced vanilla cakes, soups, meatloaves, etc. I'm not fond of vegetables, generally. I do love corn, but I could never, ever be a vegan or vegetarian! When I tried to get more veggies into my diet, I was rewarded with diarrhea, so that effort ended real quick! Too much roughage! That roughage was rough! As for the calendar, the real reason Pompilius added the two months was that the older Roman calendar only contained 304 days and got out of sync with the seasons, which confused farmers and a lot of other people, so he added 50 days. That brought it up to 354, which was still way off, so Julius Caesar revised the calendar again in his day, keeping it fairly accurate by adding a leap year every four years. Even his fix was inadequate, so Pope Gregory made a correction in 1582 by eliminating 10 whole days to bring the calendar back into sync with the seasons. So, a Pope WAS involved with fixing the calendar! As I see it, I don't think Pope Francis is going to go along with your idea, David. I sincerely hope that no one really writes to him about it. He's old, and he's busy. At best, he might have a good laugh! Anyway, I like the calendar the way it is, and I have accepted my own porkiness as my fate. Maybe you should, too? LOL! It was a fun read! Happy New Year!
Thanks for the chuckles.
Buon appetito!
In solidarity, David.