Fat, Sick, and Nearly Divorced

July 1 would have been my seven-year wedding anniversary, but it doesn’t look like my wife and I are going to make it that long. And it’s not because of the seven-year itch or anything like that—it’s the goddamn scale in our bedroom.

On the second day of Kwanzaa my wife and I watched the juicing documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. She decided then and there that she was going to juice for the entire month of January. Naturally, I agreed to juice as well. Not because I wanted to juice or was unhappy with how I look, but because I knew that if she lost a bunch of weight and I didn’t, it would be the beginning of the end for us. And I was right.

I barely made it a week on the strictly liquid diet before I needed to eat something because I am human and that’s what humans do. I am not a sunflower; I cannot live off liquids. Still, I was rather happy with my success in such a short amount of time: 15 pounds and two pants sizes shed in a week. Good enough, I thought.

Then I sat back with my glass of wine in one hand and cheeseburger in the other and watched my wife transform before my eyes over the course of the next three weeks. By the end of January, she’d lost 30 pounds and weighed less than when I married her, or even when I met her.

“What do you think?” She asked.

“I’m fucked,” I replied. I got my suitcase and started packing my belongings.

Over the past decade, the question of what a stunning woman like my wife is doing with the likes of me has arisen many times. I used to simply tell people that I thought she suffered from a mental deficit resulting from a car crash. But now, with her looking like a bikini model and us forming the number 10 when we stand side by side, she will eventually succumb to the pressures of society, open her eyes, and walk out on me. Or rather make me walk out because she knows I need the exercise.

I sensed she’d already moved on to someone thinner, someone more in tune with her new healthy lifestyle. I’d been hearing the ironic name of her health guru, Drew Canole, all through January but paid it no mind. Instead, I just thought, Mmmm, cannolis… every time she brought him up.

I have thought my wife was beautiful from the moment I first saw her. I also feel indebted to her for getting me off the drugs that would have surely killed me. No matter what her body shape was, even when it was full of fluid and fetus, I always told her she was gorgeous. But for 2013, that was the wrong stance.

“How do you think I look now?” she asked, dancing about in her birthday suit.

“Great,” I said. “But I also thought you were hot before.”

“Drew thinks I look better now.”

“Uh… who?”

That’s when I stopped thinking about delicious Italian cannolis and started paying attention. Next thing I knew she had won some weight-loss contest on Drew’s Facebook page, and he was texting her to do an interview.

“You know what that’s code for, right?” I asked her.

“What?”

“HE’S TRYING TO GET IN YOUR YOGA PANTS!”

“You’ve wanted to have sex with everyone you’ve interviewed?” She asked.

“Yes!” I said, in hopes of adding some validity to my argument.

“You’ve done, like, 10,000 interviews! You’ve wanted to bang them all?”

“Yes, all of them!”

“Even the ATL Twins?” she joked.

“Yes, of course! Every last one of them!”

She said I was being childish and jealous for no reason.

Then Drew posted her before and after pictures on his page, and the floodgates opened.

Dozens of men were suddenly messaging my wife.

“They just want weight-loss tips,” she insisted.

“No, they want to lose just the tip inside you!”

Then she and her fellow trainer, Yvette Salva, started making softcore exercise porn. For the past year my wife has sat across from me at the table, her on her laptop and me on mine, watching this busty trainer chick on YouTube named Zuzka Light. Every time she watches it, I ask if she’s watching porn, even if she has one of our sons on her lap, because of the way this Zuzka breathes and moans while working out.

Now here was my wife flaunting her new body, breathing heavy, and soliciting sex on the internet with these ten-minute workout videos. My fat, bloated world was crumbling around me.

Have you ever seen Better Off Dead with John Cusack? You know the scene with the teddy bear? Where he buys his girlfriend a tiny little bear and another guy buys her a human-size one?

That’s how I felt when she told me that Drew was sending her a juicer.

“But we already have a juicer,” I said, “and I spent a lot of money on it.”

“But this one is better,” she said, “and it’s more expensive.”

“Oh…”

“And it’s from Drew!”

“Awesome…”

I was going to need another suitcase.

And possibly a U-Haul truck because all my stupid skateboards weren’t going to fit into my ’72 El Camino.

But I didn’t want to move. Where would I go? My mom’s? To my skate shop’s storage room? No. I have worked too hard for this house and this marriage to just quit. I decided to win back my wife with some good old-fashion romance. As a reward for her meeting her goals, I told her I’d take her with me to the Dominican Republic for my Red Bull ESPN assignment. I had it all planned out. We’d get back to the fundamentals: I’d woo her with flowers and sunset strolls on the beach and all the other Hallmark moments I could muster.

I was ready to come home after the first morning of drinking wine at 9 AM, while she worked out for an hour. She ate salad for every meal. I could feel her disappointed stare burning a hole in my head every time I took a bite of my pork-filled rice-and-bean platter. My plan was a complete failure.

I’m almost out of ideas. As I write this I’m on hold with my plastic surgeon’s office, trying to set up an appointment for a tummy tuck. If that doesn’t make me appear healthy enough for my wife’s liking I don’t know what else to do. She’s suggested I work out and stop drinking and eating so unhealthily, but I can’t wait for those results. It’s only a matter of time before the sight of me sickens her. I need to take drastic measures.

I wish we never saw that stupid juicing movie. It ruined my marriage.

For more videos of my wife go to http://blog.yvettesalva.com/.

Previously - Hip-Hop Isn't Dead, It's Just Repackaged

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko