Just as i was never picked to play an “important” baseball position in gym class when it came time to choose teams, i was also never picked for Jesus in any church passion play during Easter.

That’s because i am fat, and Jesus was not. And i’m not talking about the historical Jesus here - no one really knows what He weighed, but given His nomadic lifestyle and diet of loaves and fishes, i wouldn’t put Him past 150 pounds wet. No, i’m talking about White Guy Jesus - about American Bible belt bearded hippie trucker hair Jesus. The guy you see on commemorative plates and airbrushed posters, hanging out near waterfalls and rainbows, surrounded by wolves and unicorns. That’s the Jesus people in my culture are really into. The vaguely swarthy, white blue-eyed roadie for Nickelback Jesus. i’m definitely fatter than that guy.

So no one’s ever suggested i should play Jesus at church. When it came time to handing out roles for Christmas and Easter productions, i was always cast as “fourth wise man” (??), or “evil king”. i played “evil king” a whole bunch. One time i played evil king Nebechudnezzar in the children’s musical, and i got to pace around the stage, cackling and sneering and generally being a big dick. And the set was made of these two huge 10-foot columns, and at one point in the play, all the little kids from the church were sitting under the stage left column, and out of nowhere it started falling, and there was this loud scream from the audience, and all the little kids scrambled away just in time as the massive set piece came crashing down, nearly taking out a few four-year-olds.

A horrified silence fell across the congregation. And i ground my teeth and furrowed my eyebrows, and in my nastiest “evil king” voice, i bellowed “Well?? PICK IT UP!!!”

And the whole church laughed and they told that story to each other for ages, because they weren’t allowed to tell each other penis jokes.

So i got to play evil kings and vile tax collectors, and maybe once i got to play Joseph in the Christmas play, but only under a thick bathrobe so the audience didn’t think i was the pregnant one. And the guy who was picked to play Vanilla Jesus was always the guy in the church who actually had his own carpentry practice … usually the same guy who built the rickety set for the children’s production. He was always the guy who, despite not having long hair, had a decent set of washboard abs that were worth removing his shirt for.

That was partly the reason. Nobody wanted to see me with my shirt off. i remember one church, one year, where Jesus was crucified wearing a T-shirt, but i think some of the emotional impact was lost.

So a big part of it was aesthetic. And the other part was practical: it was much safer to pin a wafer-thin guy to a homemade cross than to drape a chubby guy over it and watch the wood bow. Even with the skinny guy getting vaulted up on the Big T, i remember there was always this moment where the whole congregation held it collective breath, as the population of Roman guards seemed to triple so that the good men of the church could get their chosen Christ up on the cross without incident. The cross was built by the same guy who made the columns, after all.

So now that it’s a New Year and the rest of the world is going through the tired motion of making impossible resolutions, i thought i’d go through the same tired motion and join them. And this year, it’s the same old thing: lose weight, exercise more, eat right, kick heroin, yadda yadda yadda. But this year my wife decided to throw a tangible twist into our goals, by introducing an actual quantifiable proviso: no take-out for a year.

i like this plan. This is a resolution that i can actually try to adhere to. The rules are clear. We cannot buy any convenience food from a restaurant or a grocery store, whether eat-in or take-away or gosh-that’s-sticking-out-of-the-dumpster-but-it-sure-smells-good. Nothing. Everything we eat will be a meal home-cooked or cobbled together from proper grocery store ingredients.

Naturally, this puts nearly all of the pressure on my wife, who suggested this plan to begin with. We had our second child last September, and with the price of child care in Toronto, she wasn’t earning enough to cover two kids in care. So she’s been home with the baby and the toddler, our eldest, playing house and cleaning up and causing me to feel like an enormous male chauvinist despite myself.

So her take-out ban has forced her to take some pretty drastic measures - namely, shopping for food more often than biannually, and keeping the kitchen clean enough so that you can find the sink without chipping through eons of caked food strata.

For my part, i’ve been milking my new role as the head of my own company by leaving every day at 4:30 and hitting the gym for an hour. Since the fifth of the month, i’ve kept up at least four weekly visits at an hour apiece of pure old boring, blue-blooded cardio. And so far, i’ve seen results.

It’s an enormous disappointment that the key to weight loss all this time has actually been diet and exercise, and that the experts weren’t kidding about there being no magic bullet. It really is that hard. My poor wife has to cook even when she doesn’t feel like it, which is always, and do the extra laundry that i generate by gushing sweat all over everything when i collapse in the closet after an hour of cardio.

The result, so far, has been about eight pounds of weight loss. Not a bad start, but it doesn’t make me Jesus.