Fat Chance

by Nick Spalding

  Seventy-five.

  It’s getting harder and harder to breathe. I can hear the hoarse rasp in my lungs even over the cheering crowd.

  Fifty metres.

  Thirty.

  ‘They’re neck and neck!’ Will bellows. ‘It’s too close to call!’

  Twenty.

  Ten.

  Five.

  Zero.

  I cry out in a combination of pain and relief.

  ‘And it’s over! The race is over!’ I hear Elise say. She shouts something else but I’m so exhausted I miss it. The world’s gone a bit fuzzy around the edges.

  I feel Greg’s arms around me, helping me off the bike.

  I put my head on his shoulders. ‘Who won?’ I ask him in a hoarse whisper.

  I feel him squeeze me tight. ‘You did, baby. You won.’

  What a lovely combination of five words that truly is.

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He kisses me with a passion I don’t think I’ve felt in a long time.

  The ferocity of the kiss brings the world around me back into focus. I look up into the crowd to see people actually standing on their feet.

  For me.

  People are standing on their feet for me.

  I see both Elise and Will run over.

  The rest of the couples are clapping and cheering my victory. Well, those who are capable, anyway. Shane is still on the oxygen mask and Pete is doubled over his own bike looking like he’s about to pass out with Lea punching him on the arm, no doubt in disgust at his failure to beat me.

  ‘Congratulations!’ Elise shouts. ‘Well done, Zoe! Well done, Greg!’

  ‘That was absolutely fantastic!’ Will adds. Both of them are so excited now it’s a wonder their heads don’t pop off.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Elise says and thrusts the microphone in my face.

  ‘Mrfble,’ I reply helpfully.

  ‘We’re great!’ Greg interjects, seeing that I’m in no fit state to speak right at this moment. ‘Zoe did a fantastic job. I’m so proud of her!’

  ‘I bet you are,’ Elise says, before turning to the crowd. ‘And I bet you guys all agree, right? Didn’t she do a fantastic job?’

  The crowd, happy for the chance to make a contribution to the proceedings, screams and hollers its most heartfelt affirmation.

  As I continue to regain full consciousness, I notice that Adam Edgemont and his suit are making their way over to us. He’s got a look of delight on his face that can only be because of all the free advertising he’s had this morning.

  ‘And here comes our sponsor Mr Edgemont to congratulate our winners,’ Will says to everyone, as if it were actually important. ‘He’s got those wonderful two-year passes to Fitness4All to give to the Miltons in his hand.’

  Oh yes, the wonderful two-year passes. I’m sure they’ll look very nice tucked away in the kitchen drawer for the next decade.

  ‘Congratulations!’ Edgemont says, beaming a smile of colossal insincerity our way.

  ‘Thanks,’ I half mumble.

  Before I know it, Edgemont has got himself between Greg and me. I see a photographer line up a shot of the three of us, with Elise and Will on either side.

  Great, now I get to have my picture taken. What a delight it’ll be to see myself hot, sweaty, exhausted, and nauseated in tomorrow’s newspaper.

  ‘Here are your free passes to the gym for two years,’ Edgemont says, trying not to breathe in too much. Greg and I are pretty ripe, so I can’t say I blame him.

  The world swims out of focus again as I take the passes from his immaculately manicured hand. ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘How did you enjoy riding the bike?’ he asks.

  ‘Whaa?’

  ‘The bike? It’s state of the art. Did you enjoy riding it?’

  ‘I guess,’ Greg replies.

  ‘Excellent!’

  Elise thrusts the microphone under my nose again. ‘Anything else you’d like to add, Zoe?’

  I look up at her. A fierce wave of nausea washes through me.

  ‘Yes, Elise. I think I might throw up a bit, if that’s okay with you?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Adam Edgemont wails in horror as I up chuck all over his expensive shoes. I hope for his sake that there’s a dry cleaner’s open somewhere, so he can get rid of the contents of my stomach, which are now swilling around in his trouser cuffs.

  And so here I sit, some twenty-four hours later.

  My thighs ache terribly, my chest feels incredibly tight, and I’ve burst a blood vessel in my right eye. Basically, I look and feel a right fucking state.

  On the table in front of me is a copy of the local paper. On page four there is the story summing up yesterday’s challenge, featuring a picture of me throwing up over Adam Edgemont, along with the headline ‘FAT CHANCE THROWS UP A WORTHY WINNER.’

  All of these things should conspire to make me feel awful about myself.

  I should be crying my eyes out with embarrassment, humiliation, and pain.

  But I’m not.

  In fact, I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time.

  Because I won.

  Because Zoe Milton didn’t give up, give in, or give out. I started something . . . and I finished it.

  For the first time I’m actually starting to enjoy being part of Fat Chance.

  And to top it all off, the Fitness4All passes are up to three hundred quid already on eBay!

  GREG’S WEIGHT LOSS DIARY

  Thursday, May 29th

  17 stone, 11 pounds (2 stone, 5 pounds lost)

  Well, I’ve done the one thing that no straight man with any ounce of self-respect should even contemplate.

  Dieting.

  Urgh.

  Even writing the word down makes me cringe.

  Yes, I know I don’t sound particularly twenty-first century, but I don’t care. I come from a time when men simply did not allow the concept of dieting a place in their prefrontal cortex. It was also a time of crippling emotional detachment and repressed feelings about anything other than the football scores, but we’ll try our best to gloss over that.

  As far as the cavemen of my generation are concerned, the word dieting goes hand in hand with words such as sissy and poofter.

  And yet, fifty thousand of your finest English pounds are at stake, so I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to have to undertake some kind of dietary change, if I’m ever going to lose the required amount of weight and win all of that lovely money.

  I certainly can’t do more exercise than I am already. In the few hours between work and bed I manage to squeeze in at least an hour of jogging—or various indoor aerobics like sit-ups and press-ups if the weather is nasty. I’m following a less restricted version of the regime Alice Pithering put me on for that week from Hell.

  The weight loss has been noticeable from all of this, but I’m still not dropping the poundage as fast as I’d like.

  More and more as the weeks have gone by I have come to realise that strenuous activity alone is not enough to shift the fat: you also have to cut back on the calorie intake.

  This is irritating in the extreme.

  It’s one thing to have to haul your arse round the park for an hour a day. It’s quite another to deny yourself some of life’s absolute necessities—such as bacon sandwiches, a prawn biryani with chips, and the After Eight Mint McFlurry.

  Nevertheless, I’m committed to this now, so have to bite the bullet and accept that—like a prostitute who works the docks—I will enjoy nothing I put in my mouth for the foreseeable future.

  The main problem is that I don’t want to try any diet that might make me look even the slightest bit effeminate. As most diets are geared around the fairer sex, this is not easy.

  Obviously I’m not getti
ng within five hundred miles of any diet where you have to go to a meeting on a regular basis. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than sit in a circle with a bunch of other fat people talking about how my girth has ruined my sex life. People would be crying, of that there is no doubt. I know some people attend these horror stories for motivation, but I have the carrot of fifty grand dangled in front of my chubby little cheeks, so am as motivated as I could possibly be, without having to listen to Tracey telling us all that she can’t mount her husband any more for fear of suffocating him.

  Then there are all the diets they talk about in those strange women’s magazines that anyone with a penis has trouble understanding at the best of times. You know, the ones that are always named after their inventors. For example: Atkins, Dukan, and Stillman.

  This sounds like the kind of legal firm you’d have to employ to sue said inventors for the damage done to your vital organs thanks to severe starvation caused by their stupid diets.

  I can’t get behind any of the weight loss programmes designed around eating one particular kind of food either. The cabbage soup thing was right out of the window the second I smelt Zoe’s first night-time fart, the grapefruit diet sounds like a recipe for severe stomach acid reflux, and the cookie diet just sounds completely counter-intuitive, given that I can consume an entire packet of Maryland Double Choc Chip with no trouble whatsoever.

  I was beginning to despair of ever finding a manly, serious, no-nonsense diet to call my own.

  Then, like buses, two came along at once.

  Both of them sounded about as hard, manly, and tough as is it possible to get: The Russian Air Force Diet, and the Israeli Army Diet.

  When it comes to being hard-nosed, severe, and completely free of frilly bits, you can’t get much better than the Russian and Israeli armed forces. One spent years frozen solid on the eastern front protecting it from the Germans, while the other has spent decades in the baking heat dodging explosive devices lobbed at them by a bunch of surly Arabs. Such hardships breed real men—and real diets, dammit!

  Looking at the two options, I decided to try out the Russian Air Force one first, as it looked the slightly less awful of the two.

  I say slightly, because neither is exactly what you’d call pleasant. Both call for a severe restriction of calorie intake, along with the consumption of an extremely limited number of food types.

  One thing that both share in common, however, is that you can drink a shitload of black coffee. I can only surmise that avoiding German patrols and Palestinian RPGs at night calls for a lot of caffeine.

  Breakfast on the Russian diet consists of coffee and toast. Dry toast, mind—don’t be thinking you can sling some peanut butter on it or anything.

  Now, I normally drink only one cup of coffee or tea a day on average, but when your stomach is still rumbling like a freight train because you’ve only eaten a solitary slice of dry toast, you have to fill it up with something, so my coffee intake immediately went up to three cups before even getting into the car for the drive to work.

  The commute is a lot more stressful when you’ve got a massive hit of caffeine running around in your system, it has to be said. I’m usually fairly placid about dealing with bad driving (for a man, anyway) but after three cups of your finest java, I want to tear the fucking head off every single bastard on the road beside me, whether they’ve done anything to incur my wrath or not.

  By the time I roll into the car park at work I’m livid with the entire universe. I usually give Malcolm the security guy a friendly hello on my way into the building, but on this day I can only summon a low grunt. Xpert—the electronics company I work for—is one of those progressive organisations that likes to foster a laid-back atmosphere in its offices, like a great many Silicon Valley tech firms in the USA. As I said, I’m normally a pretty laid-back kind of guy, so I fit in quite well. On this caffeine-riddled day, though, I’m finding the soft furnishings and attractive wall art to be incredibly annoying. You know you’re in a bad way when inanimate objects have the power to irritate you just by their existence.

  Even my usually comfortable office chair feels hard and unyielding as I lower my big backside into it.

  I simply am not used to having this much coffee swilling around my system, and as the clock reaches 11 a.m. I’m just about ready to batter myself to death with one of the cushions from the lime-green sofa that sits in our office relaxation area.

  I’m also not used to being this starved of sugar. Usually by mid-morning I’ve eaten a big bowl of crunchy nut cornflakes, a bacon sandwich, and a donut from the cafeteria.

  It really is quite amazing how profound an effect the chemicals we put in our bodies have on our day-to-day well-being. No sweet stuff and too much fast stuff have turned Greg Milton from an amiable fat bloke into Mussolini’s less tolerant younger brother.

  Still, at least I have lunch to look forward to.

  . . . Oh no, wait. I don’t have lunch to look forward to because I’m on the Russian Air Force Diet. This means that my lunch will consist of two dry scrambled eggs and a tomato, microwaved in the plastic container I’ve brought them to work in.

  ‘What the hell is that, Greg?’ Crazy Debbie asks me in the kitchen when I produce my plastic container of eggy disappointment.

  ‘It’s my lunch,’ I reply.

  ‘It looks like something my cat brought up last night,’ Crazy Debbie informs me.

  I don’t know why my lunchtime ritual always seems to coincide with Crazy Debbie’s. It’s like her stomach and mine have become psychically linked over the years I’ve worked here. This has led to many conversations with the woman as we stand in front of the microwave waiting for our meals to warm through. Given that up until this stupid diet I used to have a rather large microwaveable lunch, these little chats would go on for quite some time, as I’d usually be nuking at least a couple of burgers or kebabs to keep me going through the afternoon.

  It’s the contents of these conversations that have convinced me that Crazy Debbie is in fact crazier than a box of squirrels.

  Oh, she looks fairly ordinary, with her dowdy work clothes and lank brunette hair, but underneath that librarian-like exterior beats the heart of a raving lunatic.

  For instance, I know all about her obsession with llamas. The llama books she reads, the llama t-shirts she wears at the weekends, the llama stuffed toys she has around her house. None of this sounds particularly crazy, I’ll grant you. People fall in love with all types of animals, and llamas are no more or less attractive than horses when you get right down to it.

  Then Crazy Debbie told me she’d eaten a llama’s heart raw while on a walking holiday in Tibet, and I began to have grave misgivings about her mental state. ‘It tasted rubbery,’ she said as my chicken shish sizzled its way to edibility. She then spent ten minutes explaining that she ate the raw heart as she wanted to ingest the soul of the llama to better understand its place in the universe. I had to leave half of the chicken kebab in the end.

  Crazy Debbie also likes to have sex with strangers in a car park, owns a collection of samurai swords, and speaks fluent Yiddish. She’s not even Jewish.

  No one really speaks to Crazy Debbie much around the office, so I know I’m the only one who understands the depths of her insanity thanks to our lunch time microwavey chats.

  ‘Where’s your usual lunch, Greg?’ Crazy Debbie asks me, her eyes squinting.

  ‘Er, I’m on a diet, Debbie.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Um, yeah. Haven’t you noticed I’ve been eating a lot less recently?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’ve lost nearly two stone.’

  ‘Oh. I hadn’t noticed.’

  This is both demoralising and surprising.

  Not surprising that she hasn’t noticed my weight loss, but surprising that she wasn’t aware that I was on a diet. My inclusion in Fa
t Chance has been the subject of much water cooler talk around the office. Despite her lack of communication with her fellow workmates, I’m amazed that Crazy Debbie hasn’t heard about it, given that I don’t seem to be able to walk two paces through the building without at least one person mentioning it to me. Even Gunta, the Latvian cleaner who hardly speaks English, knows that ‘big mister Gregory is on fat radio show.’

  ‘You don’t listen to Stream FM, then?’ I say to Crazy Debbie.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The local radio station.’

  Crazy Debbie’s face darkens into a suspicious scowl. ‘I don’t listen to the radio,’ she says flatly.

  For a second I almost ask why, but then it occurs to me that anyone who speaks Yiddish for no reason and eats llama hearts probably has a reason for not listening to the radio that I really don’t want to hear about.

  Crazy Debbie pokes a crazy finger at my plastic container. ‘What is it?’ she asks.

  ‘Two eggs and a tomato.’

  ‘Not much of a lunch.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why no salad stuff? Or a Ryvita? Or some vegetables?’

  Or a llama heart?

  ‘I’m on the Russian Air Force Diet.’

  ‘The what?’

  I explain to her that for seven days I’m having nothing but coffee and toast in the morning, followed by a tiny combination of meat, eggs, vegetables, and fruit for my other two meals. I am allowed to douse the whole lot in Worcestershire sauce, pepper, and mustard, though, if I so desire.

  It occurs to me that explaining the diet out loud makes it sound completely barking mad.

  ‘I see. Sounds sensible to me,’ Crazy Debbie says when I’ve finished. She pauses for a second. ‘Did I ever tell you about my Russian friend Uri? I met him in the car park at Sainsbury’s one night last summer. Big chap he was. Drove an old Mercedes Benz. It had a really big, comfortable back seat that we—’

  Ping!

  I’m saved a lurid description of Crazy Debbie versus the mad-dogging Russian by the microwave informing me that my eggs and tomato are ready to be consumed—whether I want them or not.

  ‘Oh, look! My lunch is done,’ I say a little too quickly, opening the door. The smell that emanates from the microwave is like a triumphant fart.