If you’ve read a few of these journal entries, you’ll have learned a few key things about me - chief among them that i am perpetually overweight, and constantly hatching doomed schemes to fix that. i’m like the Wil E. Coyote of healthy active living. Instead of just eating healthy food and exercising regularly (the Wile E. equivalent of walking into a restaurant and ordering roadrunner cordon bleu), more often i end up ordering a big wooden Acme crate and burying myself under a boulder at the end of it.

A few years ago, i joined a dragonboating team. It did not go well. My dragonboating goals were to drop 25 pounds, to sit at the front and drum, and to get a picture of myself with the team so that i could prove to my then-unborn daughter that at one time in his dark, distant past, Daddy did actually try to lose weight. i only accomplished one of those three goals, and my teammates weren’t happy about it.

Hop in your DeLorean and taking a brisk 88 mph drive to now. i’m about 10 pounds North of my holy-crap-am-i-actually-this-fat watermark. i’ve been through two pregnancies (second-hand). There was a brief breakthrough last year when we resolved to have mywife stay home with the kids, and send me to work every day smashing rocks with a hammer. Since the life of a housewive consists, of course, of putting your feet up on the ottoman while eating bonbons as your children skip and laugh and play and live out their very wonderful existences in perfect harmony around you, we’d amp up the difficulty a little. My wife would now be responsible for hunting for food and making meals.

In the early months of last year, this plan worked out very well. We stopped ordering out. We saved a ton of money. i dropped a bunch of weight. The pillowy fat around my pincushion-like face began to recede, and you could almost see my beautiful hazel eyes, glittering like mystical gems, therein. But since, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men end up getting that retarded guy shot in the head, so too was our meal plan cranially aerated and left to fester in a slump on the barn floor, as my analogy completely runs away from me. We were no longer ordering fast food, but rather my wife was somehow cooking fast food. We stopped short of installing a deep fryer and wearing little paper hats. My home-cooked diet now consists mostly of pizza, pasta, milkshakes, and the occasional, labour-intensive batch of french fries. Would you like pointlessness with that?

My wife uncharacteristically took up the charge late last year and started taking fitness classes to hurt her body back to pre-dual-pregnancy form. The classes were very expensive, and she took a lot of them. You could buy an awful lot of Peanut Buster Parfaits with that money. And i would have, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your lousy dog (and my wife and her fitness classes). The fitness class franchise here in the city is called “Booty Camp”, which is unfortunate, because i’m not an ass man. That’s where poo comes from. If it had been called “Perky Titty Camp”, i may have been less reluctant to cough up the dough.

Nevertheless, my wife took a ton of these classes, season after season. She yo-yo’d back and forth according to her commitment level. i definitely noticed a positive change when she went, and i could see her slipping back into loose pants between seasons. But she would constantly RAVE about how great she felt when she exercised, and how she wished i could feel the same way.

So last week, she ran out and registered ME for fitness classes. They weren’t called “Booty Camp”, thank Holy God, but i knew they may as well have been. i knew it would be filled with women who i’d feel guilty for ogling. i knew it was going to start at some hilarious hour in the AM. And i knew that it was going to hurt like a split nipple on that first day.

My classes are run by a pair of brothers. One brother, the leader of the two, is called Mr. Tits. i call him “Mr. Tits” because that is the only name i could possibly call him. He has very disproportionately-developed pectoral muscles that look like a very soft lady-bosom that i alternately want to cuddle up against, or motorboat, in equal degrees. When i arrived at class the first day last Friday, at 5:45 in the friggin’ morning, it was his brother Bert running the class. i call his brother “Bert” because he kinda reminds me of that Muppet.

Bert and Mr. Tits are not, happily, members of The Hated. They both do physiotherapy, and have worked with enough miserably gimpy people that my inability to raise my arms straight above my head is unlikely to shock them. It was probably par for the course, as well, when on the first day of class, i did three lousy exercises, and then started feeling so unbeliveably nauseous that i thought i was going to vomit Planet Earth. i stopped exercising. Bert tapped two fingers to his shoulder and said something about “make” “vomit” and “badge of honour”, but the ringing in my ears and the overwhelming urge to throw myself out the second-story window and end it all made him difficult to hear. Between near-heaves, i asked him to clarify: “You’ve never had anyone puke in your class [huff huff hwaaargg], and that’s your badge of honour??”

“No,” he said, “HAVING people puke in my class IS my badge of honour.”

Oh, crap.

The rest of the class went downhill from that point. i walked through the shuttle runs while the two ladies in the class glowered at me, through their panting. i held the plank exercise for about three seconds before collapsing on my own face. And i abandoned the forward lunges to take an enormous dump in the middle of class. i could barely croak “goodbye” to Bert as i left the dance studio to stagger back home, desperate for bed. At the top of the stairs, ominously, sat a wheelchair. i remembered joking on my way in if that was to wheel me out when we were done.

That were no joke.

My wife warned me beforehand that exercise was going to feel GREAT, but that the first few classes were going to suck. That was an understatement. Exercising - i mean really exercising, instead of putting some time in on a cross-trainer - after all this time is less like getting into the swing of things, and more like kicking heroin. The key difference, and i mark it as an important one, is that i didn’t get to experience the joys of heroin.

The taste-memory of large fries and a gallon of high-fructose corn syrup ring hollow. My only recourse to make this all worth it, is to somehow figure out a way to inject Boston cream into my neck.

i stopped writing here a few years ago because my life completely changed.

i put in a token post about once a year, in the vain hope that i could rekindle a dead journal and get excited about writing again, but the new demands that were placed on me were too consuming to give myself up to the same schedule as before.

My wife and i had a baby, and my posts narrowed to a trickle. Then we had another, and they stopped altogether. In between, i left my job and started my own company - technically our third baby. And yea, there was much nipple-sucking and cleaning up poop and vomit. And that was just the new company.

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