The great divide

Let's talk about physical beauty, but first let's talk about hunger.

I'm writing hungry today.

I'm hungry a lot these days.

When Lent began in mid-February, Teri went on a diet and I went along for the ride. The diet is working. So far I'm down 10 pounds from my winter hibernation high and Teri has lost a similar amount. Not that we're competing with each other or anything.

Teri's diet is simple and easy to remember. The staple is brown rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Our little rice cooker has been in overdrive for the last month.

To the rice we add fresh veggies and a few condiments--usually hot sauce or spices. Occasionally we have a piece of fish or other seafood. We get to eat an apple, orange or some strawberries a couple of times a day. And we get all the raw carrot sticks and celery we can stand. That's it. No alcohol, candy, breads, cakes, chips, fast food, dairy or anything else that makes life worth living.

Once a week we declare a "feast day" and treat ourselves to an adult beverage and a dinner without brown rice, usually a seafood pasta. I also indulge in dessert on feast days, but we've both sworn off meat completely until Lent is over.

As motivation, I have a rule that I allow myself fish sticks for lunch on any day I hit a new record low weight for the year. I'll whip up lunch as soon as I finish this post and it's a fish stick day. Woo hoo!

Between the rice diet and a ramped up exercise program, the weight is coming off faster than I expected.

Today I had to retire a pair of blue jeans that fit perfectly well a couple of months ago but now won't stay up on their own. A few months before that I donated a couple of pairs of my "really fat boy" jeans to the thrift store. That's so much fun.

I'm an obsessive weigher-inner. For the last 10 years I've kept a log of my weight on every day that I worked out. I'm such a geek that I even keep graphs using this data. Today I'm 15 pounds lighter than I was on the same date last year. I have a goal weight in mind that is 51 pounds below today's weigh-in, so I still have a long, long road ahead, and many more bowls of brown rice to eat.

It's hard to watch television these days. Any time a commercial for any restaurant comes on, Teri and I start drooling like Pavlov's dogs. It doesn't matter if we like the restaurant being advertised. We call the closeups of the menu items in these commercials "food porn". Last night we were tortured by food porn from Red Lobster, Logan's Roadhouse and Sonic. None of these are places where we dine, but it was all we could do to keep from jumping in the car and heading to Sonic for a late-night snack of a double cheeseburger and tater tots.

Teri had a spoonful of peanut butter on a rice cake the other day and couldn't believe how guilty she felt about this tiny bit of rule bending.

There are several reasons we're dieting. Improving our health is the main reason. At 50 years old and on blood pressure and cholesterol meds, it just makes sense to shed a little excess baggage. Practicing a little self-discipline is another reason we're doing this.

Then there's the hotitude factor. To put it simply, we both want to look better. Don't get me wrong, Teri will always be my little hottie, and I'm sure she'll always love me, even if the scale doesn't.

If we face facts, it's not likely either of us will be posing for the covers of Glamour or GQ anytime soon, no matter how much weight we lose. At 50, we're past the point of youthful hotitude. But it would be nice to be a little more attractive to my wife and others. I can't do anything about my looks, but I can do something about my weight.

We live in a time and place where a whole lot of us are fat. Despite what we tell ourselves about being comfortable in our own skins or how we rationalize our weight gains by telling ourselves that putting on a few extra pounds is natural "at our age", the fact is that some of us have been putting on those few extra pounds every year for the last bunch of years. And I've got the detailed charts and graphs of my own weight for the last decade to prove it.

Perhaps it's unfair that we as a culture think thin people are more beautiful than fat people, but we do. Statistics and studies show there's a strong negative correlation between weight and income--the fatter you are, the less you make on average.

Beauty is a subjective thing. Or is it?

Apparently men and women agree that thin people are more attractive than fat ones, but my unscientific studies of our species have shown that men and women in our culture have different ideas of what constitutes beauty, especially in women.

I call this the Sarah Jessica Parker Divide. Most women I know find Ms. Parker to be extremely attractive and assume that men do too. My informal surveys on this topic show that most men find Ms. Parker much less beautiful and many are mystified that she is presented as a kind of sex symbol in films and television.

For some reason, many women are oblivious to how men judge female attractiveness and assume that both genders are using the same criteria.

Teri was stunned to learn of my theory of the Sarah Jessica Parker Divide when it came up the other day. She immediately demanded to know which side of the divide other female stars stood. I used the cast of one of her favorite guilty pleasures, Desperate Housewives, as an example--Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria were on the "good" side of the divide as I saw it, while the rest of the housewives were on the "bad" side.

Teri was shocked and even a little angry when I went on to explain that most straight men of my acquaintance have a simple and crude acid test they use when judging female beauty. I won't elaborate since she was becoming agitated with men in general and her husband in particular, and I don't want to have the same effect on every female reader of the BYE blog. That's why I didn't go on to explain that the test involves a sliding scale affected by circumstances and alcohol consumption. I didn't introduce her to the expression "beer goggles" because she was already annoyed with me for my crime of being male.

Then we moved on to the topic of male beauty. We both agreed that George Clooney is impossibly handsome, but I had to explain that beyond a handful of exceptions, straight guys simply don't care how attractive other men are or aren't. John Goodman, Pierce Brosnan, Billy Crystal, Pee Wee Herman, Will Smith and Johnny Depp are all just guys as far as other guys are concerned--there is no male counterpart to the Sarah Jessica Parker Divide. The looks of the actor don't matter nearly as much to men as whether the performance they give is compelling, funny or moving.

Wait, I forgot all about Hugh Grant, who is Ms. Parker's male equivalent and is all by himself on the other side of the male attractiveness divide.

To sum up; when it come to beauty men are dogs, women are misguided and double standards abound.

And the truth is, real beauty has nothing at all to do with looks.