Naked? WHAT was God thinking?

"Do these clothes make me look fat?"

A question I asked my wife recently.

Of course the real answer would be, "No, your clothes don't make you look fat. You are fat." Thank God my wife knows how to choose her words carefully.

I don't know how it happened. Or when it happened. But, last year, I came across a photo that showed me stuffed into a sweater like a tightly packed sausage. Yow!

YAH! That CAN'T be me! Right? RIGHT?

The scales lied, claiming I rang in just under 300 pounds. No way! How come I never saw this in the mirror? Surely, we bought our mirror from the local carnival fun-house!

So, my wife stuck me on a hellish diet. Thus far I've lost sixty pounds with another twenty-five to go. Ye gads.

There's good news and there's bad news. 

I've been exercising like crazy. So crazy one of my knees wants to pack it in and my back hates the act of standing and walking now. 

Clothes no longer fit. "Look, honey," I said to my wife while parading around in an old sweater, "this sweater somehow got longer."

"Yeah, that's not what happened."  (Okay, sometimes my wife does ignore her inner censor.)

The other down side to losing weight is I have to go clothes shopping. I'd rather have root canal surgery than try on clothes. In the past, I'd just pick something up off the rack I thought might fit and go with it.

"And that's why none of your clothes fit right," says my wise wife. "Ever."

The problem is I'm still a work in progress. So we can't get a ton of clothes that currently fit. Which sucks because in three more months it's back to trying clothes on. Ugh. Still, it'll be nice to have jeans that don't, you know, fall down around my ankles when I walk.

So I've lost sixty pounds. That's good. The clothes we bought look pretty snazzy. That's great. When I get nekkid, though, I still look fat.

"Honey! I look fat when I'm nekkid!" I screamed to my wife. "I look better with clothes on!"

"We all do, dear. That's why clothes were invented."

"No, they were invented because Adam and Eve botched it. They really screwed the pooch on that one. Stupid Adam and Eve," I groused.

Which got me to thinking about the state of being clothed. If Adam and Eve had never taken a bite out of the infamous apple, would we be a civilization running around nekkid? I'm having a hard time thinking what public transit would be like. The health issues alone boggle, absolutely boggle!

What about restaurant servers? I'd probably rather not have soup brought out by some guy with his junk hanging out. 

In Winter, would coats be acceptable? Or would we be so accustomed to nudity, coat-wearers would be seen as aberrant streakers and we'd just accept freezing as natural. 

God's original plan for mankind's natural state of nudity definitely had some potholes in it.

On the other hand, if nudity was the norm, would there ever have been such a thing as body shaming? Would people even understand which bodies were pleasant to behold and which crossed the line? Would we be a nicer society, one where anorexic super models weren't the "norm" people aspire to?

Maybe. But every day I thank God for clothes. Um, even if that wasn't the original plan.

Speaking of nudity, pity poor Wendell, protagonist of my comic thriller, Chili Run. He spends the book in his tighty-whities due to an encounter with some bad hombres. It's too complicated to get into now so just read the book.

Clickety-click-click for nearly nekkid thrills and laughs.