Taco Bell’s New Gymnasium

I’m 48, single and have never married.  Most would consider me decent looking and, although I am a bit chubby at 5’11” and 220 lbs., I am far from being a candidate for weight loss surgery.  Just the same, my extra weight seems to prohibit me from finding love in middle age.  As a lifelong bachelor, I enjoy my fast food, especially Taco Bell.  I probably eat there five times a week.  If Taco Bell had a membership program, I’d likely be a member.  It doesn’t.  LA Fitness DOES, however.  In fact, it is one of the few businesses in my area that offers a membership.  Want to hear something amazing?? I’m a MEMBER!!!  Now, before you start envisioning me as a recent middle aged fitness convert who has spent the last month sweating bucket loads on the treadmill with my 80’s style fluorescent sweat band and forcefully held in pot belly telegraphing a desperate need to FINALLY find an attractive sex partner (to the hot, athletic lady jogging beside me at about 4 times my speed) you have to know something:  I rarely GO to the gym.  Why do I have the membership??  Easy.  It gives me an excuse to go to Taco Bell.   After all, there is always “tomorrow”, and just as the sun will most definitely come out (I live in Florida, after all!!), I just MIGHT make the decision to actually GO to the gym tomorrow, so why feel guilty about eating four Doritos Locos Taco Supremes right now??  Oh, and by the way, I once spent an afternoon getting to know Aileen Quinn, who played Annie in the 1982 film of the same name (loooong story) .  “Tomorrow” is now a religion to me!! 🙂

Tomorrow always comes and I am still fat.  Obviously, since it’s a new day, I have a new appetite.  I work at home so I can really go anyplace I’d like for meals.  I don’t cook, but my freezer is usually stocked with a nice supply of “diet” meals from Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, etc. and I do not make very much money doing what I do, so the smartest idea would be to eat at home, save money and not get fat.  There are 21 meals in a given week (7 days times 3 meals). The diet meals average about 450 calories each.  OK, I’ll now admit I eat four of those a day (a concept I learned from Taco Bell in its “FourthMeal” campaign).  So, lets revise and update: 4 meals a day, 28 meals a week.  Sticking to those frozen diet meals would put my caloric intake at about 1,800 calories a day/12,600 per week, which is well below the recommended maintenance intake for my age/size/weight/activity level (2,071 calories per day/14,497 per week).  In fact, sticking to those diet meals would mean I’d be 1,897 calories under my recommended weekly intake for weight maintenance.  I SHOULD be losing weight, but there’s that wonderful fast food joint called Taco Bell.  Now, keep in mind that MY average Taco Bell meal is at least 800 calories.   Making this worse is the fact that, rather than SUBSTITUTING a Taco Bell outing for one of my frozen diet dinners, I instead do something Taco Bell will probably get around to advertising eventually: I do what I call a “FifthMeal” (what it lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in sheer decadence).  My 1:00 am FifthMeals are some of the happiest moments of my life, and must be more important to me than finding a date or having sex. So, what am I complaining about??

Taco Bell needs to have a gym at their restaurant.  Yep, a HUGE building with treadmills and weight machines on one side and a restaurant on the other.  The gym membership costs could be comparable to other gyms in the area, but there would be a membership feature that would blow all the other gyms out of the water:  as a member, you would save money on your Taco Bell meals on a given day by burning a certain amount of calories on that same day.  Perhaps 10 percent off a meal for every 1000 calories burned??  Or maybe $1.00 off your next month’s Taco Bell gym membership for every 1,000 calories burned, up to the actual cost of the gym membership (and yes, you’d have to buy at least $5.00 worth of food each time you exercised).   I suppose the Taco Bell accountants would have to figure out exactly how the costs/rewards would work in this kind of system, because I realize in the end, no business survives without making a decent profit.  But, as expensive as gym membership are nowadays, I can’t imagine it would be too difficult to make lots of money with such a business model in place.  After all, it’s quite a bit of work for a middle aged guy like myself to burn 1,000 calories.  Even better for Taco Bell is the fact that, after I’m done burning those 1,000 calories, I am going to be SUPER hungry and maybe even order FIVE of those Doritos Locos Supremes!!  And since I’ve already burned the 1,000 calories that the five Doritos Supremes put into me, I leave the Taco Bell gym/restaurant no worse than I was before, effectively erasing my “FifthMeal” and allowing the diet dinners to do what they’re supposed to do in the first place, which is to LET ME LOSE WEIGHT!!! Taco Bell gets a loyal customer and I become an active, good looking middle aged guy who is feeling better and probably dating a decent looking gal!! Sounds like a WIN-WIN, huh????

The only problem with this plan is that there is a Dunkin Donuts right next to the Taco Bell.  I get really intense sugar cravings after I exercise. Hmmmmm. How many treadmills can you fit in the average Dunkin Donuts store???

~William Scull Jr~