Crunch Weight

Here’s a topic you don’t see covered often: Crunch Weight Gain. Here’s how it works.

You got in at 9am, and you’re planning to work until 9 or 10 tonight. The food is ordered by the company, but it’s not from Bob’s Organic Salad Co. It’s from a Chinese place that has amazing General Tso’s chicken, and you’re going to have that along with the steaming pile of rice. It’s been a long week, and you deserve it, right? Tomorrow night, there will be more of the same from a different place (pizza, anyone?), and if the crunch if a good long one, you can expect donuts or bagels in the morning. You’re too tired to go work out, so you skip it. After the crunch is over, you reason, you’ll get right back into it.

Then it happens – 10, 25, 30 or 40 pounds later, you’re not quite the man or woman you were when crunch started. I have seen ripped guys become pudgables (I just made that word up, and I like it) within the space of a single game. You feel it on your face. Your jeans get tight. Next thing you know, you’re at an office party, and the pictures people take horrify you. WTFat?

The shack machines at the office are stacked with chips and candy and pork rinds. Some enterprising person orders pizza at midnight, and offers you some.

It’s not much better when you’re alone working on a job, because you still can’t leave and you can order anything you want. For some reason, when that’s the case, it’s 10-to-1 odds that whatever you order is going toward the heavyweight end.

So, damn it, when the work is done and the game or whatever else had you in crunch is through, you have to lose the weight. That’s where I find myself now. In my fantasy world, there would be fat farm for game designers where they locked you up for 3 months with a ton of games, and fed you 3 squares a day. Exercise machines would be available, but each day, a different designer would get an opportunity to devise a game for their use, and we’d all have to agree to a meta-game to keep track of the overall score. At the end of the day, we’d be able to collect our prize, a gold coin that we could turn in for some sugar-free, fat-free ice cream flavored air the next day. After the end of our confinement, we’d be released thin and healthy with our play piles played and all our books read.