Food, Fitness, Fatness and Failure

Food is brilliant. It's the best thing ever invented.

As far as life-sustaining necessities go, it's second to none. Oxygen is alright. Don't get me wrong, breathing is jolly good fun and I'd miss it if I couldn't do it any more...if only because it'd take away my ability to sigh. Sighing is fantastic. A wonderful little action that can quickly and simply signify all of the important emotions. Disappointment, frustration, relief when something awful that's been happening has stopped happening. It's great.

But food is better.

I would quite happily spend 24 hours a day eating. If you had to ingest a cream cake as often as you drew a breath, I would be ecstatic. Left to my own devices, I would eat myself into a coma. I would eat until my head disappeared into my neck, my stomach enveloped my limbs and I became a massive sphere of blubber. And even at this stage, I would still keep eating. I would simply roll face-first onto cakes. I would become a filter-feeder. And I would be happy. At least my id would be happy. My ego and super-ego would be arguing over which one of them was the least happy and the most ashamed. With these kind of deep-seated conflicting natural tendencies it's difficult to maintain a good weight.

My Wii fit cheerfully informs me that I'm obese and that I should probably try to remedy this by swivelling an invisible hula-hoop around my waist or by making spastic jerking movements as I attempt to head pretend footballs into a pretend goal. If there's anything I hate more than real exercise, it's exercise that pretends to be fun. You're not fooling anybody. Like those audio tapes that put times tables to music - putting something horrible in a fun context doesn't make it fun. Painting Auschwitz pink and dressing the SS in squirrel costumes wouldn't have made a stay there any more pleasant.



Exercise + Computer Games does not = Enjoyment. It's still horrific. In fact it's even worse. It's wrapping something awful in something comforting, familiar and wonderful. It's like watching a variation of 2 Girls 1 Cup where the girls are played by Mr Spoon from Button Moon and Bagpuss. It's nightmarish.

In the case of Wii Fit, the playing experience is particularly reminiscent of a nightmare as characters or "Miis" you have created in the console take part in the games. I often find myself heading footballs kicked to me by Hitler whilst my mother referees. All I need to do is look down and realise I'm naked and the picture would be complete.

So Wii Fit can fuck off. Wii Sports is tolerable, but only because I can sit down and eat crisps whilst I'm playing it.



I'm sure it all stems from my hatred of sports at school. I wasn't by any means an athletic child. I was nearly always a good foot taller than my classmates and built like a nuclear chimney stack. I was always more comfortable with moving heavy furniture than moving myself. Shifting my body at any speed was like trying to push a Lancaster Bomber up the M40. This meant that my participation in team sports was not celebrated by my peers.

It wasn't like in other disciplines where your failures could be hidden. There you could hide the "D" on your essay beneath your pencil case and tell your classmates you "Did OK." Not so in P.E. Here your failures were all too apparent. You were naked (not literally...at least not after Mr Parker was fired) and worse still, your shortcomings would impact on the success of your peers.

If you were shit at football, in a 5-aside match your entire team was doomed to failure. It was like writing a joint-essay with 5 other people knowing full well that you were entirely illiterate and didn't know a pen from a peperami. The prose would flow beautifully until it came to your section where it would suddenly become unintelligible shaky scrawls and crayon doodles of farmyard animals. That was how I played football.

Consequently I have no interest in sport in either an observational or participatory capacity. Tell some people that you don't follow football, let alone support a specific team and they'll look at you like you've told them that you don't breathe oxygen.

But fuck them. I'm my own man these days and happily no longer fettered by their asinine standards or expectations. And anyway, I do breathe oxygen. It's my second favourite thing and it's more than enough exercise for my liking.