At twilight a full moon has just risen over the terminal in El Monte, bringing in the tide of commuters. Buses hiss and the platforms fill, and the people spill down the concrete steps toward the kiss-and-ride, looking for their connections, the final leg home.
Out on the avenue, a left-turn arrow clicks green. A Toyota crosses the intersection, enters the terminal parking lot, listing ponderously to port as it goes. it is a white Corolla hatchback, a hand-me-down from the mother-in-law. With the motor home out for repairs, the Van Dykes are sharing the Toyota. He must park it somewhere she can find it. She's going to be late; he's having dinner with a friend, following at the moment a little distance behind.
A speed bump is sighted; the Toyota stops. Then, ever so slowly, the front tires creep over the little asphalt berm. At bottom, the chassis sags, the springs complain -- a deep, mushy bounce that scrapes the belly of the car, setting up a series of jiggling aftershocks.
Back wheels clear, left turn, then right. He has a certain space in mind. After twelve years of marriage, you designate such things. It may be the terminal where thousands from this particular incorporated patch of Southern California sprawl come each day to ride buses between lives and livelihoods, but that one parking space, over time, has become theirs. She will be looking to that spot. He is hoping it is empty.
It is important for him to come through for her. He has always been her rock, her mountain. She relies on him, takes cues from him, even talks like him, very slowly, forming each word precisely, explaining everything completely. Her voice-mail message at the office is a three-act play.
They met over drama, in fact, in eleventh grade, when they were both 17, the subjects of an English teacher's matchmaking. It was an inspired pairing of misfits. He was on the AV squad, the leader of the nerd clique. Some types of people have always looked up to him, have always come to him for guidance and information. Others have always reviled him, been scornful or mean or rude for no reason other than his appearance.
She was tiny, five feet tall, ninety pounds. She'd contracted rheumatic fever in first grade, hadn't gone back to school until she was 12. The youngest child of two overprotective schoolteachers, she tended to see herself as fragile and impaired, with scar tissue around the heart, the way her parents saw her. The kids in class considered her stuck-up and brainy, but in reality she was incredibly withdrawn.
Late though it is, 7:30 or so, the terminal's parking lot is active. Wives, husbands, whole families are waiting on the shore of the home front. They sit inside their cars, perch on trunks or hoods, lean down to talk through an open window, to fit a pacifier into a bubbly little mouth. Left turn, then right. There it is! The Van Dyke space.
There is the ratcheting sound of the parking brake, and then the Toyota goes dark and silent, the engine ticking off heat.
After a moment, the door squeaks open, the tinny cry of a tired hinge. A sneaker appears, bright white. Size 15, quadruple-E. It is followed by a pink expanse of skin -- hairless, a bit mottled, slightly dry and flaky, maybe eighteen inches around, an ankle. The machine-sewn cuff of a blue jean is next, model No. 2115 from King Size, the Classic 5-Pocket Jean, size 72, the largest in the catalogue. The material, well-worn at the calf, strains a bit at its double stitching. It could be hiding a good-sized ham.
The sneaker plants itself on the asphalt, followed soon thereafter by its twin. Each of the shoes is thirteen and three-quarters inches long, six and five-eighths inches wide. A knee appears, pulling behind it a forty-two-inch thigh, the denim encasing it kind of lumpy. It could be a Christmas turkey.
Now, pushing down on the door frame with a very big right hand, emitting a slight groan, sharply exhaling air like a weightlifter, he stands.
Around the parking lot, the talking and fooling around come to an abrupt halt. Everyone stares.
"Dios mio!" exclaims a gray-haired woman, her head poked out the window of her car for a better view.
Charlie Van Dyke closes the door of the Toyota gently, with a neat little click, and then aims himself toward his friend's big Chevy Caprice, waiting nearby. He's never been in the car before. He is hoping he can get in.
It is the nature of Charlie's life to have to accommodate and jigger. to plan ahead. The world just doesn't fit. His Timex Indiglo has the largest band available, ten inches, but it's impossible for him to use the watch's light: The push button is covered by a fold of flesh where the band bites. Even with the watch off, it's a struggle: His fingertip is too big to press the little button.
Sometimes, Charlie doesn't fit himself, either. Because of the sheer size of his body, he has trouble reaching things. His fingertips just touch the Toyota's steering wheel, which kind of rubs against his stomach. He keeps his hands at nine and three when he drives, working in quick, tiny strokes to make a turn. In the bathroom, he uses long brushes to wash himself, and a specially designed portable personal bidet. As for sex, well, suffice it to say that where there's a will there's a way. It helps, he says, if your wife is five feet tall and is limber from practicing aikido. Kathie is, as they say in fat quarters, a committed cellulite surfer.
Charlie is required by law to buy two seats on an airplane. When he eats out, he needs a chair without arms, a fairly sturdy one. Usually he is kept waiting for some time. Invariably, he is seated with the crying babies. The tables must be far enough apart for him to walk between them. And though a movie seat usually fits -- "Fat flows," Charlie explains" -- he can't sit in a booth at a restaurant or pass through some turnstiles.
Charlie's stride is short, effortful, stiff-jointed, a bit breathless and, it must be said, penguin-like -- dense forearms pumping from the elbows, palms flat and facing backward, propelling him along. People gawk and point and laugh. He doesn't notice. Or so he says.
In medical parlance, Charlie is morbidly obese, more than 100 percent over his ideal weight. About 4 percent of Americans are morbidly obese, one out of every twenty-five people. Sixty-one percent of Americans are over their recommended body weight; approximately 30 million could be considered obese. Charlie likes to say that if he would just lose enough to be 99 percent over his ideal, doctors would reclassify him as grossly obese. That is a worthy objective, he deadpans, upgrading your status from morbid to merely gross. To reach plain obesity, he'd have to lose half his total body mass.
Charlie Van Dyke is a very fat man stuck in a low-fat age. Once upon a time, fat meant jolly and prosperous. Today, a different climate reigns, and fat has become something to be ashamed of -- a sign of weakness and lack of discipline, an antisocial statement.
According to surveys, about 40 percent of women and 25 percent of men are trying to lose weight at this very moment. An additional one third of both sexes are struggling to maintain. They spend $40 billion a year on everything from fat-free Fig Newtons to surgical stomach stapling. In a poll, fat people who've had their stomachs reduced -- a major procedure requiring an incision from sternum to groin -- said that given a choice, they'd rather have a leg amputated or go blind than be fat.
Scientists say that two thirds of people who lose weight regain it within the first year. Ninety-five percent will rebound within five years.
 Most cars aren't constructed for people Charlie's size, but the Toyota Corolla is a surprisingly good fit. |
The last time Charlie weighed himself was fifteen years ago, at Weight Watchers. He was 550. At six feet three, he has a target weight, he was told, of 190. That was what he weighed in fifth grade, when he was five feet tall.
The first week on his Weight Watchers diet, he lost twenty pounds. The second week, ten. After a year, he was down a hundred. He was starving. He was frustrated. He wasn't even cheating. Finally, he quit. One year later, he'd gained back what he'd lost and put on about fifty pounds more.
Charlie, who's 44, has been overweight all his life. He was a twelve-pound newborn, a fat kid, a really fat teenager and is a supersized adult -- shirt size 8XL: eighty-four-inch chest, twenty-nine-inch neck, thirty-six-inch sleeve, three full feet between the shoulders. Charlie is an expert in the area of fat and dieting. He has lost hundreds of pounds. And each time he's lost, each and every time he's gone on a diet, he's eventually gained back that amount plus an extra 50 percent or more.
Yes, once in a great while, Charlie will eat four Cadbury chocolate eggs at a sitting. Yes, he likes macaroni and cheese, and potato soup, buffalo wings with gobs of blue cheese, lots of bread. He will soak his lobster in the cup of butter for a few minutes before eating it. And. yes, he drinks prodigiously, a Big Gulp-sized coffee (ten Equals, five creamers) and at least four peach Snapples a day. He is a sucker for a good buffet. He cleans his plate so utterly, so completely, that there's no evidence of what he's eaten, not a sesame seed left behind.
But, no, he doesn't eat between meals. He doesn't eat a gallon of ice cream at a sitting, though he will have a large yogurt. He eats regular-sized portions. He's no pig, though he does manage to soil his shirts fairly regularly, the distance between the average tabletop and his mouth being what it is. In fact, Charlie has eschewed red meat for many years. He eats healthy food, has a well-developed palate, due to extra nerves in his nose and mouth, he says. The owners of the cafe around the corner have enlisted him to help with their new menu. He can eat 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day and gain not an ounce.
Today Charlie weighs.. .well, like he says, he hasn't been on a scale in fifteen years. But he does have a ready knowledge of fat. For example. he can tell you that fat does not exist solely to torment its host. Fat has a purpose. If the body can be seen as a complex factory on a twenty-four-hour production schedule, then fat is the energy supply it constantly draws upon to run the machine. People cannot eat twenty-four hours a day, so the body converts raw fuel to fat and then runs off that.
Under a microscope, adipose tissue looks like a bubble bath. At a slightly higher magnification, it resembles tapioca, packed globule to globule in a stringy intercellular glue, streaked with narrow filaments of connective tissue, blood vessels and nerves. Gram for gram, there is almost twice as much nourishment in fat as there is in carbohydrates or protein. In other words, faced with the challenge of how to power its creatures -- needing a biochemical Eveready Energizer to store the most energy in the least amount of space -- nature chose fat.
The problem shared by the millions of Americans who are overweight is that nature didn't account for refrigerators or
 Santa Claus playing Buddha: Charlie teaches a kinder, gentler form of yoga to a group of friends. |
Just some things to think about.
So how much does Charlie weigh? If you need a specific number, think of Konishiki, the American-born sumo wrestler Charlie so admires. Konishiki weighs 600 pounds. That's about right, 600. Charlie's weight varies, but not a lot. He's been wearing the same custom-made pinstriped suit for special occasions for nine years now, and it still fits perfectly. How many 44-year-old men can say that?
In fact, Charlie hasn't gained any weight in fourteen years.
His secret? He gave up dieting.
In a three-room office-warehouse fifteen minutes from his home, Charlie sits at a drafting table, soldering on a circuit board. A friend of his, Elaine, five feet ten, probably 250 pounds, is stuffing pieces of tiny technology into on the green boards, the kind found inside a computer. Charlie straddles a pneumatic task chair, his legs comfortably akimbo. His stomach dips down in between, as if he has a medicine ball adjoining his thighs. His zipper is twenty-one and a half inches long. Though he has lost his lap to his stomach, he has gained a kind of desk. He'll sort his mail atop his stomach, rest things there a moment -- an arm, a book, the remote control for his boom box. Charlie searched high and low for a box with a remote. One less reason to have to move. He tires easily. His back is bad. Though he can bend and pick up something from the floor, he prefers using a pair of grabbers. He has two: one for paper, the other for cans.
In anthropological terms, Charlie's body has a barrel-chested pouter-pigeon shape. His forearms and legs are as solid as rocks. When you think about it, Charlie probably lifts more weight daily than Mr. Universe. Each time he rises from his chair, he is squatting 600 pounds. Scratching his head is like lifting a fifty-pound barbell. It is the stomach that is so obviously constructed of fatty tissue, sloshing a bit with every pothole.
Often a little kid will walk up to Charlie, poke him in his belly and say "You're fat!" Usually, Charlie will ignore him. Once, fed up, having a bad day, Charlie turned to a kid and replied "You're ugly!" People like to tell Charlie he has a handsome face buried beneath all that fat. People also like to look in his shopping cart. Or they will walk across the parking lot to sell him diet products. "The problem you have -- " they will begin, and Charlie will cut them off: "Excuse me. The problem I have is people like you."
Behind Charlie's glasses, above his Santa Claus cheeks, are sparkling brown eyes that Kathie thinks are very sexy. He has a cute little pug nose, always stuffy, making him tend to breathe audibly through his mouth, past teeth that are slightly bucked. You can imagine him as a kid with luminous pink skin and freckles: Fatso Van Dyke, son of LaVerne and Shirley Van Dyke of Moline, Illinois.
LaVerne Van Dyke ran a gas station, was known as Chub. Today, Chub lives near Charlie. He weighs 324 pounds, though in his prime, he was more than 400. Charlie's mother was raised in an orphanage. She ran about 250. It is Charlie's burden to have smashed his mother's kidneys during gestation, or so the family story goes. He remembers her having a tantrum, stomping up and down and saying it was all his fault. It is a painful memory. Charlie tries to remind himself that he didn't ask to be born, that he wasn't fat on purpose. Mom died at 54.
Charlie's salt-and-pepper beard covers his face, neck and jaw, tangles down to the second button on his shirt. From shoulder to shoulder, the material of his shirt rises and then falls, following the contour of his back, the characteristic fatty pad behind his neck. He didn't use to have much choice in clothes. He'd find a store that carried his size and take whatever fit. Now he orders from King Size, a big-and-tall-men's catalogue targeted at America's 18.7 million obese men. King Size not only offers more variety but also saves him from having to shop. In most big-and-tall-men's stores, the largest size is 60. Even the salespeople gawk at him.
A freelance electronic engineer specializing in microcontroller design, Charlie is working at this moment on a PC board that runs a computerized, magnetic truck-door lock, invented by a partner and himself. With any luck it will be patented, will revolutionize the truck-lock business. With any luck, Charlie will realize some of the profit -- he's invented things before and lost out -- and he will finally be able to buy a nice new vehicle, to stop screening his phone calls for bill collectors, to repair the earthquake-and-fire damage still evident inside his house.
A CD of Gandharva-Ved music is playing while Charlie and Elaine work. The front door is locked; the windows are shuttered. There is a meditative quality of busy stillness in the conditioned air, the two working together wordlessly to sitar and tabla.
After a while, Charlie puts up his soldering iron. His words come slowly, the mouth and jaw laboring under the weight of his jowls. "You know," he says, "sometimes I feel like a black person walking into a bar in southern Georgia filled with white people."
"Oh, yeah," says Elaine, bending a resistor to stuff into a board. "You can't tell a black joke or a Polish joke, but you can sure tell a fat joke."
"And every other commercial on TV has a fat guy as a punch line," says Charlie. "Like that Sega commercial? The dumb fat kid is playing the shitty black-and-white video game, and he hits himself in the head with a dead squirrel and starts seeing colors. Then they show the skinny normal kid playing with the great full-color Sega."
"Remember that real nice karaoke bar we went to?" says Elaine. "Me and Dale and Rachel and Jeff? We walked in and everyone turned around and stared. I turned around and left. I think we ended up at Denny's."
"You just gotta get used to it," says Charlie. "The Lifestyle Police. It gets to a point, sometimes, that you just want to hide. But most of the time I don't pay any attention. What it basically comes down to is that they're the ones with the problem, not me."
"It's good you can get to that," says Elaine.
"It's a long process," says Charlie.
A lifelong process for a kid who was born weighing twelve pounds. When he was in the nursery at the hospital, someone asked what a three-month-old was doing with the newborns. Growing up the only child of fat parents, Charlie was tormented by his father. "You want to grow tits like a woman?" he'd say. Charlie's mother always had him on a diet, yet she was always making pecan pralines, divinity fudge and peanut-butter cookies, dozens at a time.
From his early youth, Charlie was reclusive. He read a lot, built models; the events of his childhood kind of blur together. He does remember teenagers in his neighborhood beating him up and kids throwing rocks at him. Once, they split open his head with a brick.
After a while, Charlie learned to use his superior strength. If he could get hold of someone, he could just sit on him and whale away. He was thus regarded as a behavior problem at school. In eighth grade, the gym teacher made Charlie run extra laps up a huge hill. He got a kick out of putting Charlie on the "skins" team so that he'd have to take off his shirt. The locker room was also a problem. Even if you have a normal-sized penis, it's going to look small compared to a large stomach.
When the Van Dykes moved to California, things began to change. Excused from gym, Charlie joined the AV squad and discovered electronics, found a nice niche among the misfits, a tiny girlfriend named Kathie. It was weird, maybe attributable to the era of free love, but girls were always coming on to Charlie. Once, he was in the nurse's office and a girl on a cot across the room exposed a breast to him. Another girl, a hall monitor, would lift her skirt and show her panties as he went by, late to class. It may have been some form of prank, but hell, Charlie didn't mind.
As a teenager, Charlie flipped burgers at Jack in the Box, scooped ice cream, delivered papers, made snow cones at the county fair. After a few years of community college, pursuing a major in electrical engineering, Charlie went to work as an electrical draftsman. For the past two decades, he bounced from job to job, gaining experience as he went, moving up the ladder, becoming a supervisor, an engineer without a sheepskin. Sometimes, during dry spells, he has had to take other work. He's been a census-taker, a carpenter, a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman -- an interesting range of jobs for a guy with an IQ of around 140.
Though Charlie is an excellent employee, a monumental anxiety has always accompanied what he calls "the interview thing." He knows he's going in on the defensive, trying to say "Hey, folks, I'm just an ordinary guy like the rest of you." But to some people, "I'm a freak, something that shouldn't exist, an aberration of nature. It's like I'm their worst nightmare -- that they'll wake up someday and be me," he says.
One prospective employer turned him down because the company's drafting tables were lined up too close together. Another company that gave health-club memberships to employees told him he wouldn't fit in. A firm that did hire him instructed him not to sit on the new sofa in the waiting room. A petroleum company said he'd have to shave his beard. When he agreed, they remembered that they didn't have a fireproof suit large enough for him.
Surveys show that fat people are underemployed and less likely to be promoted than thin people, regardless of their job performance. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine firmly linked being overweight to being economically disadvantaged. Other studies have found that overweight people make 10 percent to 20 percent less than their thinner colleagues.
This type of discrimination is beginning to be called "fatism," part of a larger category called "looksism." While federal civil rights laws specifically bar discrimination based on race and sex, people with physical characteristics such as obesity, ugliness and shortness are not protected.
Charlie's reaction to all of this has been to go freelance. As he always says, don't let the idiots get you down; find your own solutions. Now, picking up his soldering iron once again, bobbing his head to the tabla, he is reasonably happy. He is in his own space, away from dress codes, gawkers, prejudice, fat jokes. People ask him to do work, and he delivers. Sometimes he gets paid. He feels lucky.
"I'll tell you one thing," he says. "Being fat teaches empathy. The blacks have had this same problem, the Jews, the Arabs, the handicapped, people who have disfigurements or burns....
"Let's face it: Everybody's a cripple. They just show it different ways."
Late afternoon in a living room in Whittier, California. Charlie sits on a chair wearing a sweat suit. His eyes are closed, his hands rest upon his thighs, palms upward; he looks like Santa Claus playing Buddha. Sitar-and-tabla music wend through the air. At his feet sit three very fat people and his very tiny wife -- some of the members of the Every Other Sunday Yoga Class and Potluck Supper Bunch.
To his friends, all of whom he has met through the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, Charlie is known as the Guru, the Dean of Fat Men, the Answer Man -- though he prefers just plain Charlie. This is one group that admires and respects him, looks to him as a role model, seeks his guidance and advice.
This afternoon, Charlie is showing them a new discipline, something he calls "chair yoga," designed for people who can't pretzel. This adaptation goes along with his general philosophy: to recognize the way things really are, to flow around walls instead of trying to break them down. It's about working with yourself instead of fighting against yourself, a kinder, gentler, more understanding form of self-control.
The living room belongs to Dale, a corporate headhunter who weighs nearly 400 pounds. Elaine, Charlie's board stuffer, is Dale's girlfriend. They've been together for about six months. The third in attendance is Rachel. Rachel's age, she says, is 29. Her weight, she says, is 129. Then she laughs -- rafter-shaking, infectious, a little too jolly. You'd probably classify her as supersized.
Charlie has been meditating for twenty years, practicing yoga for about ten, is a "citizen Siddha." He's read Baba Ram Dass, Deepak Chopra, Carlos Castaneda, the Hindu Vedas, much more. Without this spiritual interest, he says, he would probably be a very angry fat man. As it is, he seems rather enlightened, one of those rare people who appear to be at home in their own skin. At the moment, as Charlie sits on a chair at the front of the room, his voice has taken on a calm, hypnotic, meditative quality.
"The postures I will be teaching are called asanas," he is saying. "If you can't do a posture all the way, that's okay. Just picture it in your mind. If you move only an inch, then that posture has been completed for you. As Professor Mohan said, ÎWe must always choose the hat to fit the head; not choose the hat and make the head fit it.' "
It is an interesting thought. Wear the hat that fits. It seems simple enough, very wise. But what do you do when the hat that fits is bigger than the biggest one available at any store in the mall? That is what these members of the Yoga and Potluck Bunch have been dealing with all their life.
Take Rachel. Her mom was tall, thin, blonde -- a princess in the Rose Bowl Parade. Her dad was a tackle on a football scholarship to Georgia Tech. As it turned out, their two sons looked like Mom. Rachel looked just like Dad.
Rachel started her first diet at 5. For lunch, she'd get a lettuce-and-tomato sandwich, no bread. She was allowed no sweets. Her mom kept all the potato chips and Ding Dongs and whatever for the rest of the family in a locked box on the kitchen counter. Rachel learned to pick the lock with a bobby pin. Then Mom got wise, bought a combination lock. Rachel cracked the code.
At age 7, Rachel was on the Mayo Clinic diet. The first day, she remembers, she was allowed a hard-boiled egg and a grapefruit. Then there was the banana-and-skim-milk diet; a protein-powder--and-water diet; Dr. Ding's diet -- 900 calories and lots of pills, including amphetamines. During this diet, Rachel's room was the cleanest it had ever been. She suffered hallucinations when she was taken off it. Next came the diet on which she received weekly injections of urine from pregnant women.
Over the years, she has tried Weight Watchers, Pritikin, Jenny Craig, Nutri/System, Slim-Fast. Rachel is an excellent dieter. She has lost literally thousands of pounds. When she was dieting, all she could think about was food. She cut pictures of food out of magazines and put them in a folder. The day she'd hit her target weight, she'd go immediately to 7-Eleven and celebrate in the Ding Dong department.
The book that changed her life was called Compulsive Eater No More. There was a story in it about a fat girl who loved M&.M's. The doctor told her mother to give her a pillowcase full of M&M's to carry around with her, and to let her eat as many as she wanted. The first month the girl gained eleven pounds. The second month, two. The third month, the girl started losing weight.
And so it was that Rachel, a grown woman with a teenage son, got herself a pillowcase and loaded it up with Ding Dongs. She carried the Ding Dongs around for three months -- in her car, to the office, even to the gym -- and what she discovered was that all the Ding Dongs in the world weren't going to fill the hole she felt in her gut. She wasn't hungry for Ding Dongs. She just hated herself.
What she needed, she says, was permission. Permission to eat all the Ding Dongs she wanted. Permission to weigh how much she weighed, permission to be what she is: fat. When things are prohibited, she discovered, you desire them even more. When they are accessible, you can sample them and the mystery dissolves. You tend to chill out, to self-regulate. Your craving goes away, as did hers.
Rachel is back up to supersized now. But she is happy and healthy and well-adjusted, and her weight is stable. She works out at a gym, and her blood pressure is 120/80. Charlie's is 140/90. Both Dale and Elaine are in perfect health.
As Dale and Charlie and Elaine will tell you, empirical evidence seems to indicate that some people are just born to be fat. And if you are born to be fat, there is going to be a lot of attendant dysfunction, and you are probably going to end up being really fat. If such is the case, you must accept one more thing: There is nothing much you can do about it.
Last fall, scientists at Rockefeller University, in New York, pinpointed and cloned a gene that appears to be involved in a signaling system that regulates body weight. The gene, called "ob," tells fat cells to secrete a protein to signal that the body has stored up enough fat to rim the factory. The brain and other organs respond to the signal by altering the body's metabolism, telling it to stop storing fat. Some people are programmed to store more fat than others.
Given these findings -- and studies of identical twins, which show weight as a function of genetics 90 percent of the time -- science seems to be telling us now that fat is more the result of nature than nurture. Yes, our society exhibits a lot of pathology associated with eating, but that's another subject. The fact is, it is not Charlie's fault that he is fat. He was born that way to Chub and Shirley.
Recently, medical researchers have begun to confirm what Charlie has believed all along: that dieting may actually cause obesity. Some conclusions:
- Nondieters who overeat occasionally tend to gain very little weight.
- People regain pounds very easily after a weight loss, and the regained weight is mostly fat.
- Obese people gain weight much more easily than non-obese people.
- Health risks and mortality rates currently associated with obesity may actually be the result of yo-yo dieting, the stress on the body of gaining and losing so much weight.
- There is evidence that each person has an individual set weight. One oft-cited expert suggests that the best weight for most people is simply the lowest one they've been able to maintain for a year as an adult without struggling.
Just some things to think about.
Charlie Van Dyke was leery about opening his life up to the media, offering himself as a target for curiosity and ridicule. But with the risk of humiliation comes a chance to say something important. This is what he wants you to know:
"I was born fat," says Charlie. "I've always been fat. I don't know what it's like to be thin. It's like being blind or something -- you have no idea what sight is. Or maybe it's like being born black. You can't do anything about it.
"It becomes a quality-of-life question. Do I want to spend my life struggling and going up and down? Do I want to end up gaining even more weight by dieting? I've seen people put themselves through oral surgery, stomach stapling. People have part of their intestines removed. They end up not being able to absorb certain minerals. They're on supplements the rest of their life. Not to mention the tremendous problems with gas. There's something like a 20 percent mortality rate on the surgery. Why don't they just line us up and shoot us?
"The thing is, nobody chooses to be fat; nobody really wants to be outside of society. if there was a way that I could safely be the proper size for my body, a little smaller, probably right around 250 or 300, something like that, I'd be tickled pink. But, hey, you know what? They haven't found a way. I haven't found a way. I have to live my life now, as I am. I have to make the best of it. You have to wear the hat that fits."
In his case, it is a 5XL, size 8 1/2.
Mike Sager is a GQ writer-at-large.
