Free The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing Loh Page A

To his horrified (and yet still-not-uncheerful WASP) amazement, the number he sees is 195. “I’m stunned,” he reports upon returning to the table. He refills his wineglass to calm himself.
    “Is 195 a lot?” I ask. I have no idea what Mr. Y should weigh. He looks fine to me, for a man whose idea of exercise is stooping down over his welcome mat to pick up the Wednesday New York Times (the one that contains the Dining section). I’m at the stage of life where I’m not going to hold anyone—including myself—to any sort of punishing bar.
    “I feel technically that I should weigh 175,” he muses. “I mean in theory, I like to. Back in the day. For me 165 is probably almost too skinny—”
    “When were you 165?” I ask, truly surprised.
    “Oh, college,” he says vaguely. “On the other end of the dial, 185 feels chubby, definitely chubby. That always feels like a lot. But 195! Nelly! Whoa! ”
    “Then again,” I say, “maybe you dodged a bullet by not seeing the dreaded two hundred.”
    “Perhaps so,” he agrees as we clink glasses.
    Upon thinking it over, I found this whole conversation extraordinary for two reasons. One was how, as opposed to women, a man might jump on a scale in the middle of dinner with no preparation at all (dieting, voiding, or making out a will in case of seeing a truly frightening number). Second was how, also as opposed to women, men measure their weight in ten-pound increments. Mr. Y’s assessment of his weight was similar to that performed by most of the men I know: While they consider a weight of 165 skinny (even for middle-aged men, the reference point always seems to be college), they don’t generally care either (too much) to bounce around in the low two hundreds. By my estimation, for a normal-size man, that is almost a fifty-pound “normal weight” range, and that’s without giving birth to a baby or small heifer in the middle.
    The take-home was that Mr. Y was concerned enough to think that he himself might like to begin exercising, and so, based on another more humane Groupon forwarded by Isabel, we decide to check out Equinox. If you don’t know Equinox, let me tell you that these glittering, slightly overpriced, urban yuppie gyms are marvelous. It’s a brand that just works. Our local Equinox was located in a luxury condominium complex that also included a microbrewery, a J. Crew, and a Gelson’s gourmet supermarket, all one needed for life in one fell swoop, provided you were a microbrew/J. Crew/Gelson’s person, which I could well see myself becoming. (Persimmon nail polish—and why not?)
    More than a health club, Equinox is a sparkling ship of fun, a kind of Holland America Line cruise ship designed for anxious middle-aged professionals (like moi!) with zero attention span. Upon entry into its eucalyptus-scented interior, we immediately saw a gleaming hive of incredibly fit fifty-something people humming, humming, humming on their tendon machines, as though in some sort of fitness military academy. Almost all looked keenly Lance Armstrong–like (too bad about the steroids) with incredibly lean thighs and papery skin and feathered three-hundred-dollar haircuts. They were in better shape than most twenty-year-olds. Have you seen Kelly Ripa? In contrast to how perfectly petite and sculpted she looks today, twenty years ago she looked like a large blobby muffin.
    I have become an expert on Kelly Ripa because of all the midday television playing at Equinox on twenty, thirty monitors at a time, hanging in banks above all the treadmills and the cycles. These flickering eyes into midday America show a nation in a frenzy of activity. Amid the usual windows into the exploding Middle East or the plunging Dow or gaggles of football players mauling one another, you can see ordinary people remodeling homes, hand-making pasta, and competing against one another as they frantically bake cupcakes before a giant red digital timer. One memorable commercial showed a man