Food for thought for the gym guy

I’M not sure you can still claim to be carrying puppy fat when you’re approaching middle age.

Puppy fat implies that you’re simply going to lose it at some point without even trying, kind of like baby teeth.

I tried passing off my podge as puppy fat for years. I don’t know who I was kidding. Only myself as it turned out. I actually started believing my own spin and just expected it to fall off without even breaking a sweat.

Then a couple of years ago, as I was slipping into a more sedentary lifestyle, I caught a glimpse of myself in a well-lit mirror and realised it’s not puppy fat you moron, it’s just plain old fat. Something had to be done. So I joined a gym. I’d never been a gym guy and I still don’t consider myself one (I’m sure you wouldn’t either if you saw me huffing and puffing about there).

Besides, my main form of exercise there has been in the pool swimming laps. So if anything I’m more budgiesmuggling pool guy than gym guy. Anyway, following a six-month hiatus after I moved towns my ballooning body told me I needed to get back to it. So I signed up to the local health club and last week I celebrated my one-year membership. I still don’t have a sixpack but my beer belly hasn’t turned into a keg and I’ve greatly reduced the urgency for my wife to get her forklift licence. Gym membership doesn’t come cheap, though, especially if there’s a pool included, and it’s lightened my bank balance by about $1000. I’ve had to tighten my belt in more ways than one but it’s been money well spent. However, sometimes when I’m swimming laps or running on the treadmill I think about what I could have splashed that dough on. And I don’t mean practical things like electricity bills or mortgage repayments.

I mean food. It’s wrong, I know, but I’ve done some rough calculations anyway.

For the cost of my health club membership I could’ve bought 200 packets of Tim Tams and washed it down with 250 litres of choc milk. Or 120 Big Macs along with 333 litres of Coke.

I even could’ve had the godfather parmi from Irish Murphy’s every fortnight for a year with $20 left over for a beer now and then.

I guess that could be seen as exercise: trying to beat my time to devour the 1.2kg beast sounds like a pretty good workout to me.