My Father's Diet by Adrian Nathan West

Author:Adrian Nathan West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bodybuilding;muscles;abs;weight;weights;weightlifting;training;self-help;new age;dieting;fathers;sons;dads;suicide;divorce;recession;blue-collar;Stallone;existentialism;loneliness;lonely;masculinity;toxic;single mother;translators
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2021-12-13T18:36:39+00:00

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He went to the car and brought back a magazine called Total Body Development. He had dog-eared a six-page insert detailing the history and purpose of the competition. It encouraged entrants to “take the first steps in a lifelong journey away from the self-defeating behaviors that have kept you from having the body you’ve always wanted—and the life you’ve always dreamed of living.” Competitors spent twelve weeks dieting and working out with the aid of supplements from Paradigm Fitness, the nutrition branch of the Total Body Development Corporation. They were judged on their physical progress, the goals they had set, and a two-hundred-word essay describing their motives for entering the contest and “the lessons they had learned along the way.” Throughout were dubious before-and-after photos of entrants from previous years: on the left, they were hirsute and dejected, their faces sallow on gaunt necks drooping between hunched shoulders; on the right, they were shaved and striated, their limbs hard swells the tawny sheen of saddle leather, and their incandescent teeth glowed in truculent smiles beneath new hairdos, which were gelled stiff and golden, like the fins of fried fish.

He sent his form off the next day, and a week later his starter kit arrived. It included a Paradigm Fitness mail order catalogue, a booklet entitled Secrets of the Champs, with capsule biographies of previous winners and details of their workouts and diets, and a video: Who We Were, What We Became: The Body You Choose Story. It followed the lives of the four finalists in the first Body You Choose competition: Mack Richards, an ex-convict and janitor, who had entered, he said in an Alabama drawl, to give his mother a reason to be proud of him, because he’d disappointed her all her life; Earl Emmett, a drunk whose friends called him the life of the party—“That’s the hardest part of it,” he said, “knowing I’ll have to leave all them behind and go it alone”; Tiffany Mistings, whose husband had died in a boating accident and who had spent the five years since living off his life insurance, eating ice cream, and watching soap operas for eight hours a day; and James Kremin, HIV-positive but “determined,” as he said, “to beat this thing.”

There were pitfalls, triumphs, and acrimony: Mack surpassed his end goal of fifteen chin-ups with four weeks in the contest to go. On their twentieth wedding anniversary, Earl’s wife was sent to the hospital with seafood poisoning, and in desperation, he had “turned to the bottle.” The cameraman interviewed him the following morning. He was shirtless, his body gone from corpulent to blocky and wading tentatively toward muscularity; but his dark eyes, into which he kept twisting his small, wizened fists, expressed horror at his looming failure. His chin shook, and he said this might be it for him; perhaps his alcoholism was stronger than his will to change, as he’d glumly feared all along. The next day Nathaniel Sweezey, CEO of Total Body Development, flew in his private jet to an airstrip in Earl’s hometown of Norman, Oklahoma.

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