Ripped and Tanned 1

You know, sometimes you notice stupid shit. Like when you're in a hotel

in Europe and you see a pocket-calculator-sized patch of brail on the

wall next to the toilet, leading you to suspect that some apparatchik

has been paid some large sum of money to recommend that the hotel be

"friendly" to the "differently sighted", presumably in the off-chance

that some blind fellow in the know about brail policies at the hotel

can fumble his way around the perimeter of the establishment

attempting to find the one brick among ten thousand that contains the

bit that says, "toilet here", avoiding him the trouble of

having to ask staff where the toilet is.

Here's some other stupid shit: The other day I was walking along

the corridor at my sports club minding my own business when I bumped

into this dude that had dared me to enter a

fitness modelling competition some months previously. So the next thing I knew I was doing what any run-of-the-mill-super-closet-genius would do and avoiding an embarrassing moment by committing myself to a more embarrassing moment. 

I walked away from the encounter with a sinking feeling in my stomach,

the kind I imagine you get when you've just discovered that Muammar

Gaddafi's your biological dad. 

I got home and looked at myself in the

mirror and thought, "Sheesh, how the hell am I going to get this

shabby carcas into shape in 3 weeks?" I got online and looked at some

Youtube videos of people competing in the same

beautiful-when-you're-naked category I would be entering into:

"fitness model". For you beautiful-when-you're-naked ignoramuses out

there, this category is the skinny-guy-category, the one where you

don't have to look like Arnold Swazzenegger before he could speak

English. In fact you're supposed to just look like a regular dude.

Sort of. Maybe a regular dude with like 4% body fat, with freakin abs

like something out of an anatomy book, and with striations on your

ass. But other than that, you know, normal.

The fitness models are followed by the "muscle models". These guys are

also at about 4% body fat but look like someone took a fitness model

down to the local garage and inflated him with an extra 2 bars of air.

They're bigger, but not nearly as big as the next category up, the

real-deal body-builders like Ronnie Coleman, who weigh in at about 135

kg and compete at 3% body fat.

So I would be entering into the "fitness model" category, the "normal" skinny-guy section.

A moment for my personal stats before competition:

height: 6 ft

age: 35

weight: 82 kg

body fat: 10% (I think, ish)

colour: sheep-white

I had 3 weeks to drop down to about 6% fat, meaning I would have to

lose almost 1.6% of my body fat per week in order to compete. My

challenger gave me a diet of 2900 calories to follow religiously,

containing meals of egg-whites, broccoli, asparagus, chicken

breasts, sweet potatoes and salad (or some combination thereof). I did

some calculations:

1 x average daily male base metabolic burn = 2500 calories

2 x 1 hour workouts per day = 1000 calories (approximately)

Total calories out = 3500

Total calories in = 2900

Calorie deficit per day = 600

Calories in 1kg of fat = 7000

Number of kg lost per week = approximately 0,5

Weeks required to burn 3.2kg (or 4% of body fat) = 6

Weeks available before competition = 3

Yikes.

Given the above envelope calculation I thought my chances of not

humiliating myself were small. But I figured I'd just give it a bash

anyway, humiliating moments in my life featuring more like background radiation than the kind of jarring memory-etching events they're supposed to be . 

I exercised religiously twice a day and ate only the food that was

prescribed. To my surprise my body changed as a mathematical certainty

every 2-3 days: my stomach got tighter, new lines of definition began

showing on my stomach, chest and legs.

I had assumed that the diet would make me feel ill but instead, for

the first 2 weeks, I felt stronger, fitter and healthier. I had a

pleasurable spring in my step. Finally in the last week I sensed my body

protest: my energy levels dropped, my muscle began wasting away

alongside the fat, I began to feel tired. My face looked

drawn.

Then there was the question of a tan. Being sheep-white I

decided to book myself into a tanning salon two days before the day. I

was in fact surprised to discover that Harare had a tanning salon at

all (In a place with 320 days of sun a year? What?). A young

20-something woman in what looked like a surgeons gown met me at the

hospital-like reception. She led me upstairs to a room. "This place is

way too sophisticated to be in a banana republic" I thought.

"Would you like a thong?" she asked.

"No thanks", I said. "I've got my swimming costume. "

"Ok, when you're in your costume lie over there", she said, pointing

to the bed in the middle of the room.

"So", I said, clambering onto it, "do you get men in this place often?"

"You're the first one!" she said. "Oh great", I thought. "My fellow

Rhodie countrymen are running around the countryside beating small

animals to death with their naked penises, and here I am getting a

fricken gay-boy tan. Let nobody ever know about this."

She slapped some creamy looking substance onto her hands and began

rubbing my body with it. It was abrasive. My skin quickly started

burning. "What is that stuff?" I asked.

"It's an exfoliator" she said.

At that moment I remembered an article I'd read in a filthy British

rag (the Guardian) about how exfoliators in the cosmetics industry

usually contained mirco-particles of plastic (the bits responsible for

the abrasive action) that were extraordinarily bad for the environment

because they ended up in oceans and rivers, bio-accumulating in fish

and other organisms and slowly poisoning them by virtue of the fact

that they are themselves toxic, but also because they attract, bind and therefore concentrate other poisonous chemicals. I felt a tinge of guilt

that I was doing something as needless as having my skin exfoliated so

I could be orange for a few hours. And then it occurred to me that

there were literally a billion women on this planet exfoliating their

skins with these crazy products every day. "Women really are an

environmental catastrophe", I thought. "Like Jeremy Clarkson with

tits."

As the spray came out of her strange contraption there was

a very acrid and unpleasant smell. "Is it safe to breathe this stuff

in?" I asked.

"Yes", she said.

"How does this stuff tan you?" I asked.

"It's got some chemical in it, natural of course, that reacts with

your skin after some hours."

"Well isn't it going to give the insides of my lungs a tan too, then?

I mean, what kind of reactions are they? What exactly are these

'natural' chemicals and what will they do to my mucus

membranes?"

"I don't know", she said. "But it's very safe, we get this stuff from the USA."

"Oh great", I thought, "that makes me feel better, know I can always

trust the FDA to be on the side of okes who are freakin' ripped and

tanned. I'm sure it's in the small print on their mission statement:

Thou shalt not yield in the face of commercial conflicts of interest and use chemicals that might poison okes who look awesome when they're naked with the products responsible for making them look like that in the first place."

All sorts of other things raced through my mind as the stinky spray cooled my skin. "What if this stuff is absorbed into my bloodstream? Do I really need a freakin' tan on the insides of my arteries? And if it does get into my bloodstream how is it going to be detoxed by my liver? It's not like the poor organ has had evolutionary preparation for fake-tan molecules in its 5 billion year journey from primordial soup." 

I looked at my legs. "It's not doing anything. I need to be dark, very

dark, like chocolate!" I said.

"Oh, don't worry, it'll get dark this evening."

"Are you sure"

"Yes, in fact, I've sprayed so much on you now I'm worried you might

be too dark."

"And it won't actually just turn me some ghastly shade of orange?"

"Oh, no, sir", she added, giggling.

I finished just as white as I had started, paid 70 dollars that could

have paid for a brail toilet-sign at an orphanage of disabled, blind child soldiers, and then pranced off to the car making sure nobody I knew was in the car park to

observe what I'd just done. I quickly got home and put on a long sleeve

shirt and long trousers in the middle of a 30 degree October. Then I put on a hat and dark glasses and went to my usual cafe to actually do some ***ing work (argh!)!

To my frustration and exactly as I'd feared: By evening I was orange. Not

slightly orange. Just orange. "What the hell was that chick on about?"

I thought. "Look at me I look like some kind of down-and-out fricken

wanna-be-porn-star who just weighed up poorly his options between penis

enlargement and tan for his first job interview."

Now that I have described myself let me bring up something else

relevant to the story. First, imagine a Silver back gorilla. Now

imagine it without hair, any hair. Now imagine it super brown, like it

new a secret place where it could get a proper brown tan for almost no

money at all. Now imagine it has a vocabulary consisting almost

entirely of the words, "yeah bro".

To be continued...