Desperately avoiding exercise, obviously for the right reasons

Jason Offutt

New years are horrible things. Like Adam Sandler movies, but with more snow.

My new years are even worse. Like Will Ferrell movies, only with more groans.

As most married men understand, if your wife wants you to do something, you do it, regardless of how silly, time consuming, and potentially emasculating it may be. I’m looking at you Refinishing The Basement project.

What a new year means to my wife is exercise — and not normal exercise, like walking to the fridge and lifting cold cuts.

She wants a fat-trimming, sweat-pouring, soul-crushing regimen of repetitive motions that make me look really, really silly.

That’s why we keep our drapes closed.

She gets in moods like this at the turn of each year after all the holiday candy’s gone.

Admittedly, she’s right.

I need exercise.

Everybody needs exercise.

When Richard Simmons had flabby, mall-walking Baby Boomers sweatin’ to the oldies in the 1990s, he was onto something.

Exercise has been proven — by people in lab coats — to alter our natural aversion to physical exertion by flooding our system with endorphins, an opiate produced by the human brain.

Opiate, opiate. I should know what that is.

Oh, yeah.

Heroin’s an opiate.

However, not everyone is in the Human Body Heroin Club.

Like me.

Instead of mumbling incoherently like a 1960s rock musician after working out, exercise makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.

Horribly, horribly wrong.

Let’s look at my attempt to improve my overall health.

Day 1: Quinoa pancakes with scrambled tofu and turkey bacon for breakfast. Butt, thigh, and inner peace workout.

Salad for lunch. Walk two miles in the afternoon. Kale chips and salmon patties with Greek yogurt dressing for supper. I slept great.

Wow.

I can’t wait to do this every day.

Day 2: Oh, dear Lord. I hurt.

My legs feel like they’ve been broken and pieced back together with hot glue.

What’s for breakfast? Millet? What the hell’s millet and why does it taste like warm socks?

Today’s workout is what? A High-Intensity Interval Training Booty Slap?

I don’t care about supper. I cry myself to sleep.

Day 3: I wake up just like I’ve done the past three stupid mornings, but today I have no idea what time it is because I can’t move my head.

My exercise plan now is to simply get out of bed to pee, although I DON’T SEE THAT HAPPENING.

Tears try to form, but my body has used all its fluids to keep me alive, so my eyes remain dry.

About 5:52 p.m., I can now feel my toes and after my wife helps me stand, I stagger to the couch to continue my love affair with Ben and Jerry, Anheuser-Busch, and Netflix.

I’d prefer full-body flagellation to exercise. Wow, that sounded a lot dirtier than what it is.

The only new year my wife didn’t push me into exercising was when she discovered she was pregnant.

Hmm. Maybe I should get her pregnant again. Is avoiding exercise a good reason to bring another baby into the world?

Yes it is.

Jason Offutt’s novel, “A Funeral Story,” is available at amazon.com.