Slaughterhouse 32 - Book Excerpt

Slaughterhouse 32
Book Excerpt
641 words

HEROES - Richard Simmons

Forget, for a moment, the striped shorts, the tank tops, the perm that's traveled decades, the high voice, the talk show appearances, and the cliches. (Forget that you already know who I'm talking about even with that one sentence.)

What you need to know is that Richard Simmons started out as Milton Teagle, selling pralines in New Orleans, and before you knew him from television, he'd lost 123 pounds to get where he is. He hated the fact that gyms were devoted to pretty people and people who were already in shape, creating one more barrier to the average person starting out. It didn't matter to him that someone was heavy or what they looked like in their workout clothes. He wanted to help them anyway. His fitness center, originally called the Anatomy Asylum and now called Slimmons, continues to teach aerobics and fitness to damn near anybody who wants to show up, and he’s teaching two nights a week when he’s in town.

His website claims “30 years and 30 million pounds.” Tens of thousands of people have collectively lost literal tons of weight through working with him. You may gag at the pathos or make fun of the methods, but the guy gets results. He reaches out to people who wouldn't feel comfortable walking into Bally's or Gold's, striated palaces of Lycra and bulk where the top one percent are attempting to make themselves the top one-half percent.

Sweatin' To The Oldies may not be for you. It's not SUPPOSED to be. It's for someone your mom's age, who's one slip and fall away from being bedridden and in a nursing home - or better after a weekend's rest on the couch. Someone who isn't going to feel comfortable next to an aspiring MMA fighter and some stripper-type on the elliptical machines next to her. And if someone is uncomfortable going to the gym, it makes it that much harder to go in the first place. And Mr. Simmons doesn't act like he's any better than these people, or that they don't have the power to change. He's been there. Some of the people who follow his program start at over 400 pounds and get AMAZING results; quite frankly, I'm hoping if you're reading, you're half as driven as some of his clients.

I'm from Las Vegas, and I've seen it all when it comes to health club denizens. I've seen people on so many steroids they look like they're going to pop like weenies on the grill. I've seen women wearing tops that look like they came out of fortune cookies. And during the peak of the nightclub boom out here, there were always postcards under my windshield wiper inviting me to parties at Prive, OPM, Light, and Rain - thinking that I looked like one of those other type of people, the sort of bodies that people go to nightclubs to see. I imagine they would have been rather surprised if I showed up in my typical "industry night" outfit of khakis and a polo shirt.

The only reason I kept going to that gym is what I've already told you; I had a crazy goal and I wasn't going to let anybody stop me from achieving it. The reason that I was in that gym with all of those people had nothing to do with the fact I didn't look like any of them, it's that I didn't want to look like ME any more, and nothing would change if I didn't show up. There are occasionally people there now who recognize me from before and ask how much weight I've lost. Those are nice moments. You deserve them too.

Eat sensibly and exercise, don't take yourself too seriously and have a great time. Does any of that sound like bad advice?