Skinny Genes

My life as an extra slim.

My wife, J, and I were eating dinner with our friends Chris and Inga when Chris mentioned that he’d recently started taking Ozempic.

“It’s only been a few weeks,” he said, “but I’m already down fifteen pounds. Imagine what I’ll look like six months from now.”

We were at P.F. Changs, and our waiter had just brought out our edamame. Everybody I know is crazy about edamame, but I’ve never seen the appeal. I don’t like foods where some of it is secretly inedible, and you’re just somehow supposed to know that. The first time I ate edamame, I put the whole thing in my mouth, thinking you ate it like a snow pea. Instead, I chewed on the husk like a stick of gum for a minute or two before spitting it out in front of everybody at my table.

“So...” I said, suddenly realizing that everybody had been watching me. “I guess that’s not how you eat those things, huh?”

And they all shook their heads, saying, “Nope.”

I was picking through our edamame now while J asked Chris what made him decide to try Ozempic.

“Oh, I dunno...” he said, unwrapping his chopsticks and rubbing them together. “I guess I was just tired of being fat?”

I was only vaguely aware of Ozempic, having heard it mentioned on the Dax Shepherd podcast. I knew that it had something to do with weight loss, and I knew that all the celebrities were taking it, including Serena Williams.

“You have to inject that stuff, don’t you?” I said, selecting a piece of edamame and moving it over to my plate.

“Yeah...” Chris said, and here I noticed a small look pass between him and Inga.

“What?” I said.

“Go ahead,” Inga said in that sweet, sing-songy voice parents sometimes use to extract confessions from toddlers. “Tell them what happened.”

Inga squeezed a lemon wedge into her water. Then she shrugged and dropped the whole thing in.

“Well,” Chris said slowly. “I might have accidentally injected it into my thumb.”

“Tell them how many times,” Inga cooed, stirring her water with a butter knife. And Chris hung his head, saying, “Twice.”

Inga didn’t hesitate before she pounced.

“Twice!” she said, laughing and pounding the table hard enough to make the silverware rattle. “He injected Ozempic into his thumb twice!”

“The kids keep stopping me in the hall and demanding I hold up my hands,” Chris said. “They think one thumb is going to be skinnier than the other.”

I sucked the salt off a piece of edamame and left the husk on the side of my plate.

“Is it?” I said, and Chris said, “Not yet.”

I’ve never had a problem with weight, so I don’t have any opinions when it comes to weight loss. I’m what my friend Emily calls “skinny fat.”

“What’s skinny fat?” I asked her, and she looked me up and down before saying, “You are, basically.”

Later I learned that skinny fat means you’re skinny on the outside but on the inside you’re actually pretty unhealthy. That might be true, I guess, but I’m not the type of skinny anyone aspires to. I’m the type of skinny that’s alarming and invites questions.

“Say, man. Can I ask you a question?”

I was on the DART heading to Downtown Dallas when a homeless guy called me over. Usually when a homeless guy on the DART calls me over it ends with me giving him money for an imaginary bus ticket to San Diego or buying him a hot dog from 7-Eleven. In this case, the guy looked over both of his shoulders like he was going to ask me for drugs. Then he whispered, “Tell me something. How do you keep yourself so...petite?”

I’d never been called that before — petite — and I was so charmed by it I forgot to let it hurt my feelings.

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I just have one of those body types, you know? I’m just lucky, I guess.”

He was big, this guy. Not huge, exactly, but definitely on the heavy side. He eyed me for a few seconds before letting out a long, quiet whistle.

“Lucky, huh?”

[][][]

For a long time, I chalked my skinniness up to having a fast metabolism. Then, in my early twenties, I was diagnosed with a genetic condition called MODY, and it turns out that probably has more to do with it. It’s a rare form of diabetes. Or, as my mother-in-law calls it, “diabeetus.”

“I told the pool guy, ‘I need this pool water sparkling,” she’ll say. “’My son in law has diabeetus, and he needs his swims.”

Later, she’ll make dinner.

“I’m making us chicken broccoli casserole with cheddar cheese and white rice,” she’ll say. “Is that okay, Mike? For your diabeetus, I mean?”

“I don’t understand why she has to keep saying it like that,” I complain to J at night. “It’s diabetes. Not diabeetus. Or better yet, say, ‘My son-in-law is diabetic.’”

“How is that better?” J says.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It just has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

[][][]

Because most people associate diabetes with being overweight, nobody ever thinks I have it. For the most part, I keep it to myself, but every once in a while I’ll bring it up if I think I can get some special treatment out of it. That, or a laugh.

“Do you want my cookie?” an elderly woman asked me a few years ago. We were on an American Airlines flight to Seattle, and the flight attendant had just handed out our refreshments.

“Are you crazy?!” I shrieked at the sight of her cookie. “I’m diabetic!”

I thought this would be funny for some reason. Instead, the woman just touched my arm sweetly and said, “Are you really? So am I. What’s your A1c?”

Later on that trip, I visited the Starbucks near the Pike Place Fish Market. When the barista asked if I wanted to try their new chai latte, I took the opportunity to try my joke again, slightly modified this time.

“Are you crazy?!” I said. “I’m chaiabetic!”

The barista had a nose ring and one of those blank looks on her face that people in Seattle sometimes get after living there a few years. I think it’s from staring at the ocean too long.

“Chaiabetic, huh?” she said. “How long you been sitting on that one?”

“A minute,” I said.

After I was diagnosed with MODY, I started taking an insulin called Humalog. It helped me put on a little weight, but not as much as I’d hoped. At six two, a hundred and fifty pounds, I’m still skinny enough that total strangers feel free to give me nicknames.

“How’s it hangin’, Slim?” I hear in hardware stores.

“Whatcha need there, Stretch?” I hear at restaurants.

I can’t imagine them doing this with other body types, but at this point I’ve gotten used to it. And besides, it’s not like being skinny is such a burden. The hardest part is probably the shopping. It’s almost impossible to find anything that fits right. Height-wise I’m basically a large, but widthwise I’m easily a small. Maybe not even. Recently, at thrift store I like called Uptown Cheapskate, I found a bright yellow jacket made out of jeans. It fit me perfectly around the middle, and when I checked the tag, I saw that it wasn’t just a small but an extra small. It only came half-way down my torso, but somehow the sleeves went all the way to my wrists.

I said to J, “Was this jacket made for a monkey?”

It was only ten bucks, so I bought it. Then, a few weeks later, I went back and found another jacket, also an extra small. This one was made out of dark blue canvas and made me look like the type of guy who wanders around a city doing pen and ink sketches of the local architecture. I’m guessing it was meant to hang down past the knees of a much shorter person — to be a trench coat, basically — but on me it just looks like a regular jacket.

“It’s like it was made for you,” J said, touching my shoulders with her fingertips and leaning back to marvel at it.

“I know, right?”

[][][]

Because it’s so hard to find anything that fits me, I thought it’d be a good idea to buy another jacket just like it as a backup. The tag said it was made by a company called Wallace & Barns, a sub-brand of J. Crew, and when I finally found it on their website, I learned that it cost $325. It wasn’t an outrageous price for a good jacket, but it was more than I was willing to spend. Ten bucks is usually my limit. Twenty if I’m feeling wasteful. As I scrolled through the website, I was reminded of something I’d been told years ago by J’s cousin, Steph, who was studying fashion at UNT.

“Lanky guys like you really need to shop at high-end stores,” she told me. “Otherwise, you’ll never find anything that fits right.”

I’d meant to ask what she meant by high-end — “You mean like Old Navy?” — but instead I just thought: Lanky?

Looking back, it’s not the worst thing I could have been called. I’ve since been called worse, although it doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’ve come to terms with being a skinny guy. I’ve accepted it, I think. And really, isn’t that the best any of us can hope for when it comes to our bodies? To feel comfortable in them at some point?

These days, I don’t mind when someone refers to me as “gaunt.” Or “wiry.” Or “skeletal.” Or “nothing but skin and bones.” I don’t flinch at being called “gangly.” Or “vaguely emaciated.” Or, as my doctor recently put it, “extremely underweight for your height decile.”

Given the choice, though, I think the term I’d go with at this point is “petite.” It’s not any more or less accurate than the others. It’s not any more or less offensive. It just has a nice ring to it. Don’t you think?