The crime of being skinny

It’s uncommon in today’s society to hear complaints about food from a skinny guy. Everybody is big on fad diets, glycemic indexes, magic powders and miracle supplements for losing weight.

There’s even a new supplement called hoodia, which is supposed to make the pounds “fall off.” First of all, weight falling off doesn’t sound very appealing. Nobody wants pieces of their beer gut sloughing off at inconvenient moments. Plus, the name “hoodia” just sounds shady. No self-respecting supplement would let itself be called something so unmedical-sounding. It should probably be called “hoodwinked.”

But no one ever addresses the needs of us perpetually-skinny folks. We may not struggle with our weight, but we have our own problems. For instance, we have to live with all the people who despise our very core just for being thin without trying. All that animosity can really give a skinny person an anxiety attack–or an eating disorder.

First, let’s identify the kind of person we’re talking about. The skinny-haters, or people offended by our lack of weight, are not necessarily fat. They are just people who are incessantly concerned about keeping their weight down and are a little bitter about all the crazy diets and strange exercises they’ve gone through to do it.

Since the skinny-haters already have a chip on their shoulder, we need to keep them appeased. Let me share a few steps to better eating relations with those who hate our high metabolism.

The first trick is a hard one because most truly-skinny people don’t watch what they eat; they just eat a lot of it. But when eating with a skinny-hater you really do have to watch what you eat. If you eat like a starving grizzly bear the skinny-haters will become so offended that they will immediately start making loud comments about how they wish they could eat like a pig. Nobody wants that; it brings up too many funny mental pictures.

The best policy is to eat miniscule amounts of food. The rule of thumb is generally to eat less than the skinny-hater. Then the conversation will turn to, “No wonder you’re so skinny! You hardly eat anything!” They will feel sorry for you and start worrying about anorexia and the like. They’ll demand that you eat more, and when you do they will feel like they’ve averted a disaster.

Another important tactic is the “conversation changer.” Whenever the conversation turns to calories or nutritional value of the food, warning flags should be going off in your head. Any talk of fat, calories, or carbs will eventually lead back to the way we burn through them like a marathon runner on fire. The only recourse is to change the subject of the conversation to something benign.

Conversation changers need to be carefully chosen. It would be disastrous to avoid talking about carbs, only to bring up the TV show “The Biggest Loser.” If you work in any kind of food-related industry, be careful not to bring work up either. Even seemingly innocuous hobbies like stamp collecting can cause problems because you can gain calories by licking stamps. Yeah, they’re that extreme about it.

And make sure that you provide yourself some opportunities to eat alone because if the skinny-haters don’t kill you, eating like them will.