"Yes," Sifkitz said, attempting to lace his fingers across his own chest and discovering he could not do it. What he discovered-or rediscovered, more properly put-was that he had a pretty good set of br**sts. Not, so far as he was aware, part of the standard equipment for men in their late thirties. He gave up his attempt to lace and folded, instead. In his lap. The sooner the lecture was begun, the sooner it would be done.
"You're six feet tall and thirty-eight years old," Dr. Brady said. "Your weight should be about a hundred and ninety, and your cholesterol should be just about the same. Once upon a time, back in the seventies, you could get away with a cholesterol reading of two-forty, but of course back in the seventies, you could still smoke in the waiting rooms at hospitals." He shook his head. "No, the correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease was simply too clear. The two-forty number consequently went by the boards.
"You are the sort of man who has been blessed with a good metabolism. Not a great one, mind you, but good? Yes. How many times do you eat at McDonald's or Wendy's, Richard? Twice a week?"
"Maybe once," Sifkitz said. He thought the average week actually brought four to six fast-food meals with it. Not counting the occasional weekend trip to Arby's.
Dr. Brady raised a hand as if to say Have it your way...which was, now that Sifkitz thought of it, the Burger King motto.
"Well, you're certainly eating somewhere, as the scales tell us. You weighed in on the day of your physical at two-twenty-three...once again, and not coincidentally, very close to your cholesterol number."
He smiled a little at Sifkitz's wince, but at least it was not a smile devoid of sympathy.
"Here is what has happened so far in your adult life," Brady said. "In it, you have continued to eat as you did when you were a teenager, and to this point your body-thanks to that good-if-not-extraordinary metabolism-has pretty much kept up with you. It helps at this point to think of the metabolic process as a work-crew. Men in chinos and Doc Martens."
It may help you, Sifkitz thought, it doesn't do a thing for me. Meanwhile, his eyes kept being drawn back to that red number, that 226.
"Their job is to grab the stuff you send down the chute and dispose of it. Some they send on to the various production departments. The rest they burn. If you send them more than they can deal with, you put on weight. Which you have been doing, but at a relatively slow pace. But soon, if you don't make some changes, you're going to see that pace speed up. There are two reasons. The first is that your body's production facilities need less fuel than they used to. The second is that your metabolic crew-those fellows in the chinos with the tattoos on their arms-aren't getting any younger. They're not as efficient as they used to be. They're slower when it comes to separating the stuff to be sent on and the stuff that needs to be burned. And sometimes they bitch."
"Bitch?" Sifkitz asked.
Dr. Brady, hands still laced across his narrow chest (the chest of a consumptive, Sifkitz decided-certainly no br**sts there), nodded his equally narrow head. Sifkitz thought it almost the head of a weasel, sleek and sharp-eyed. "Yes indeed. They say stuff like, 'Isn't he ever gonna slow down?' and 'Who does he think we are, the Marvel Comics superheroes?' and 'Cheezis, don't he ever give it a rest?' And one of them-the malingerer, every work-crew's got one-probably says, 'What the f**k does he care about us, anyway? He's on top, ain't he?'
"And sooner or later, they'll do what any bunch of working joes will do if they're forced to go on too long and do too much, without so much as a lousy weekend off, let alone a paid vacation: they'll get sloppy. Start goofing off and lying down on the job. One day one of 'em won't come in at all, and there'll come another-if you live long enough-when one of 'em can't come in, because he'll be lying home dead of a stroke or a heart attack."
"That's pleasant. Maybe you could take it on the road. Hit the lecture circuit. Oprah, even."
Dr. Brady unlaced his fingers and leaned forward across his desk. He looked at Richard Sifkitz, unsmiling. "You've got a choice to make and my job is to make you aware of it, that's all. Either you change your habits or you're going to find yourself in my office ten years from now with some serious problems-weight pushing three hundred pounds, maybe, Type Two diabetes, varicose veins, a stomach ulcer, and a cholesterol number to match your weight. At this point you can still turn around without crash-diets, tummy-tucks, or a heart attack to get your attention. Later on doing that'll get harder. Once you're past forty, it gets harder every year. After forty, Richard, the weight sticks to your ass like babyshit sticks to a bedroom wall."