Ladies: go git yourself a fat guy

It kinda sucks that fat guys don't have a lot of fashion options. As much as having too many options can lead to its own kind of crazy, women have more choices when it comes to finding clothes that flatter their form. TV shows like What Not To Wear and How To Look Good Naked teach women to love their bodies and show them off with the right clothes. But chubby guys don't get the same kind of media treatment.
And that's not limited to clothes, either. There's abundant praise for women of abundance, but outside of a certain subset of the gay community -- a phenomenon I've documented here before -- you don't hear much about fat men being sexy. Oh, they're cute, cuddly, adorable, bla bla bla. Just not hot.

But there is ... or may be ... a minority of women who don't just "accept" chubby guys. They want chubby guys.

One of them wrote an article in the UK Times:

I'm convinced that we unconsciously think of powerful men as being physically substantial, too -- like the classic image of the Victorian male, paunch protruding from under a waistcoat, thick tree-like legs planted solidly on the ground, hands held behind the back: John Bull. I think of the solidity of Donald Trump, the formerly weightier (and sexier) manifestation of Bill Clinton and Charles Saatchi (Nigella's husband): all sexy, sophisticated guys (OK, maybe not Trump, but he has charisma). Physiques such as these suggest a jovial comfortableness, the confidence of a man secure in his own skin, and an expanding hedonism as well as defiant sensuality. Whether you agree or not, I suspect that the association of girth with status might be genetically hardwired in us all -- and despite the blandishments of Men's Health magazine and others to idolise the six-pack, the female of the species is deeply susceptible to such wiring.

An interesting perspective, for sure.

So, for fat guys who are either a) not interested in becoming un-fat, or b) in transition but still definitely in the fat-guy category ... how to be sexy? Is there such a thing as sexy fat guy fashion?

I'm still at a loss. All I can remember is Homer Simpson shopping in the fat guy store in Episode 3F05, "King Size Homer":

Salesman: Well, sir, many of our clients find pants confining. So we offer a range of alternatives for the ample gentleman: ponchos, muu-muus, capes, jumpsuits, uni-sheets, muslin body rolls, academic and judicial robes.

Homer: I don't want to look like a weirdo. I'll just go with a muu-muu.

How's that diet going, anyway?

It's been almost a month since I stumbled upon the Hacker's Diet in a pre-weekend fit of self-flagellation over my weight. How's it all going? Well, here's my chart as produced by physicsdiet.com:

The points are my daily weigh-ins. The top wavy line is the rolling weighted average. The straight line is the trend line.

This shows a slow but steady weight loss of 1.39 pounds per week, courtesy of a daily caloric deficit of nearly 700 calories.

This has not been difficult. I have not been exercising all that often -- taekwondo about once a week, walking home most days ('cept for the past week), and regrettably I've yet to ride my bike -- though I did buy a tire pump last weekend while on an excursion away from Amanda's hospital bedside. There's room for more drastic weight loss, but I'm off to a steady start so far.

Some difficulty will be introduced in one week when the Big Ass Summer Tour 2008 begins. We'll be hitting Bradford for a bit, then Stratford, with a day trip to Toronto, back to Stratford and eventually on to New York City and a return haul through Maine and New Brunswick. I'll be away from my regular scale, so any weight measurements I can manage to take will likely vary a little from my regular. But the benefit of the rolling average is that little variations in the weight from Foreign Scale Syndrome may be smoothed out. It still won't correct fluctuations caused by Eating While On Vacation Disorder.

Hacker's Diet links, articles and resources

• A dude who ate a lot of cheeseburgers and drank a lot of Mountain Dew. A good summary of the basics of the diet, with a graph.


• A guy who lost ten pounds in ten days with the Hacker's Diet and other tools.


• Five things to know about the Hacker's Diet


• The Physics Diet is a charting and logging site inspired by the Hacker's Diet -- gives fancypants graphs for people following the math principles behind the plan


• "Weightloss for Nerds" discovers both


• eHow articles focusing on the diet


• A group at the Daily Plate for HD followers


• Lifehacker has a look


• A Wordpress plugin for people who use that blog software


• MetaGrrrl takes on the diet for a while

That's just a few. Throw in a good calorie counter site like http://www.thecaloriecounter.com/, http://www.calorie-count.com/ or the epic http://www.calorieking.com/ and you're good to go. I've also heard good things about http://www.fitday.com/ for food logging.