A Husky 26%

Not to be a Type-A Bride, but I very much want to be at my fighting weight on my wedding day. Something about the fact that fifteen hundred box cameras and any number of digital camcorders will be trained in my general direction makes me want to eliminate my multitude of bodily sins.

I've been working out at the gyms of the colleges where I taught, a four-time-a-week exercise in humility. The next time you want to truly embrace your flab, get on a treadmill between an eighteen-year-old and a scholarship athlete. Feel the burn.

I got a temporary membership at a local gym, which included a free! training session with Justin, who would very much like to become my personal trainer. Oh, how he cared. Justin weighed me and said "That's it, huh?" when I fell down after merely 59 seconds in a deep squat position and finally handed me a small machine, telling me to hold it at arm's length. Apropos. The machine announced that 26% of my body is fat.

Justin looked at the number, sighed sorrowfully, and announced that 26% body fat for a woman was average, but... didn't I want to be fit? Because he really, really wanted me to be fit. For eight hundred dollars, he could make me fit. He felt that I would be much happier if only 20% of my body were fat.

I stared back at him; wasn't 20% Calista Flockhart, neck bones bursting through the upper chest like a xylophone territory? Didn't women need some fat, to grow Padawans and fill racks and make Sir Mix-A-Lot happy?

No, 20% was fit. He sensed my resistance, signed heavily once more, and announced that he didn't care what his district manager thought, he would now make me fit for only seven hundred and fifty dollars. I told him where to shove his calipers, and hauled my great gobs of blubber to the general direction of the ellipticycles.

Well, of course I could be in better shape. Who couldn't? My very favorite Olympic athlete is one I saw profiled during the Winter Games; she was shown hosting a barbell in the air that outweighed me and my ellipticycle together, and as she braced herself against the bench, I caught a very definite flash of cellulite. But a reporter with The New York Times was once sent to test various body fat measuring systems, and she sniffed at her own 27% reading as "husky". And apparently I could never fit through the door of an airplane on my way to becoming a U.S. Marshal; according to those standards, I have a "poor" glob-to-muscle ratio, and the service would prefer me to be somewhere under 13.5%.

But given the Times' reputation as an unbiased beacon of fact-checking and reliability, I compared elsewhere. I went to the Army. You know what your body fat needs to be under if you're a thirty-year-old woman in the Army, after boot camp? Thirty percent. The Air Force demands 32%, and the Navy 33% (I'm guessing the Navy allows more so you can be your own personal flotation device, if need be.)

But what about the Marines, the original tough girl mo-fos? The by-God Marines place the limit at... twenty-six percent.

anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns, hon at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com