Friday’s Featured Blogger – Jeff Peters of Change for a Year

Subject – Jeff Peters of Change for a Year

Location – A Gym in Wisconsin

My mémère had a saying; “Horses sweat, men perspire, women merely glow.”

If that’s the case, I’m glowing like a neon sign. I find myself in an alien environment. Everyone around me is sweating and grunting like they are in pain. Their faces are red and they are all grimacing. No one looks happy, but the weird thing is, they are here voluntarily. Hell, they pay to be here.

I’ll never understand people who go to the gym.

I turn my head slightly and seen the man I came to interview. Jeff is gliding effortlessly on a treadmill. He makes exercising look easy, even graceful.

I stumble off the StairMaster I just spent the last 4 minutes on, gasping uncontrollably. I trudge to something that looks like a Medieval torture device and collapse on top of it. Jeff finally notices me.

“You know you’re on that thing backwards, right?” He’s not even gasping as he speaks.

I try to fake it. “Yeah, I know.” I give the machine I’m sitting on a skeptical glare. “I’m just used to the one at my gym. It’s a, um, different model. A, ah…” I search for any model of gym equipment I can think of and come up empty. “ A C3PO,” I finally finish triumphantly.

“Isn’t that a robot from Star Wars?” Jeff, crazy bastard that he is, continues to run as he speaks to me.

I sigh helplessly. My complete lack of athleticism has been found out. I shoot for a subject change. “You ready for your interview?”

Jeff cranks the treadmill up to an incline comparable to the one at Everest and winks at me. “Sure am.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out my tape recorder.

***

Tell us about your blog, Change for a Year. What’s your goal for it? What inspired you to write it?

I think I had an early midlife crisis. I was sitting around watching some Kardashian bullshit on TV, weighing almost 400 pounds and working all the time. I thought to myself, “How fucking stupid is this,” and decided to make a change. I started my blog and decided to pick a new adventure every year. The first thing I wanted to do was lose some weight and get healthy, so I picked the opposite end of the spectrum and decided to go vegan for a year (no animal products at all). It’s only been three months, but I love it and dropped 40 pounds so far. I’ve got a ton of other yearly challenges for myself. I can’t wait to try them all.

You recently decided to quit your job despite having worked for years to make it to the position you were in. Why did you do it and what are you planning for the future?

I was a manager for a couple of group homes for disabled adults. I’d spent my drunken days in Florida and came home broke to live in my parent’s basement with nothing to my name. I worked pretty hard the past few years to get back on my feet and become an adult with a real job and with real benefits. But it was mind-numbing. I’ve wanted to write since I was kid, so I’m officially stepping down next month and going to work at freelance writing. That’ll be another adventure. It all started with the blog. I realized I’d rather be broke and practically homeless if it meant I could be happy and write. So that’s what I’m doing. I even got my first recurring gig on Elance based on the weekly column I started writing, “This Week in Vegan News.”

Tell us about your fiction writing, including your short stories.

It’s awful. I wrote half of a novel once when I was sixteen. I was deep into Dean Koontz and Steven King, and I wrote the most awful piece-of-shit you can imagine. The other day my computer crashed and I lost everything on it. Thank God for that. I got to start fresh. That’s why I turned to journalism in college. I love it. There’s nothing more satisfying than spending a few days collecting interviews and statistics and stories and then trying to piece them all into something that works.

Fiction is hard. Things like personal essays are easy. One off my college professors read an essay I wrote out loud to the class once, and they were amazed. She encouraged me to go into journalism, and I’ll always thank her for that. An essay I wrote on my dreams was also freshly pressed. I’d been blogging less than a month when that happened, so it was pretty exciting. But that’s all self-indulgent crap and easy to do compared to fiction. Fiction on the other hand is painful and awful and makes me hate myself because I’m so bad at it. I’ve become fascinated with List Stories. I first came across them at LittleFiction.com. I tried writing a murder mystery based only on a detective’s notebook for their last collection. I like the idea of being able to say so much in so few words. That’s why I love short stories. Hell, I can write a list story in a day or two. So if it’s god-awful I can just shrug off as an afternoon. A novel can take years. When I interviewed Patrick Rothfuss he told me he spent ten years writing, “The Name of the Wind.” I really admire fiction writers. Right now I have just one fiction story on my blog–a story called “Angel.” It’s really more of a scene, but I’ve gotten good feedback on it. I hope to add a few more this year.

You decided to go Vegan. What was your motivation? How hard was it and what do you miss the most about being a carnivore?

Being vegan is easy. Everyone thinks it’s impossible. The other day I was bowling with my friends and ordered a vegan calzone. The cook comes out completely dumbfounded, “You don’t want cheese in your calzone?” Yeah, I said. “Just veggies and bread?” he asked. And some sauce, please. It was fucking delicious. It’s amazing how cheese and milk are in almost every single thing you eat. You can’t even buy a loaf of bread with finding milk and honey and all this other crap in there. It’s fascinating once you look into it. No one believes me when I say this, but I really do not miss anything. I still eat black bean burgers and taco salads and burritos and pizza. Hell, I eat more pizza now than before. I do miss being able to walk into a restaurant and order anything off the menu. I try so hard not to be the stereotypical vegan douche I’d always pictured in my head. It helps being over 300 pounds and looking like a grizzly bear. The other day I finally accepted what I am and wrote a blog, “On Becoming a Vegan, Hippie, Liberal Douche.”

If you had to choose an eating disorder of some type to lose weight, which one would you choose and why?

I once saw a huge guy–I’m talking like 500 pounds–wearing a shirt that said, “I beat anorexia.” I still laugh about that. I have always thought about becoming a drug addict. A lot of people are addicted to food. I just found out they have Overeaters Anonymous groups just like Alcoholics Anonymous. Have you ever seen a fat person strung out on meth or heroin? No. Meth-heads are not fat. I figure a good six-month meth binge would be the best weight-loss plan out there. Hell, I could write a book and get rich, “How to lose weight and everything else (including you teeth!) in six months.” I’ve never had the balls to do hard drugs. Years ago I had to guess what one of our friends had done the night before. “Cocaine,” he said. People are fucking stupid. I’m not against drugs. I’m just going to wait. If I make it to 80 I plan on having a total bender and going out in style.

Is running as terrible as it sounds?

Yeah, pretty much. It’s awful. You can’t breathe. You sweat. You smell. Your legs hurt. Your chest is pounding. I got into running a few years ago. Something kind of amazing happens after awhile though. Eventually, you get used to running. I got to the point where I’d jog 3-4 miles every morning and it was peaceful. I’d run in the winter at like 5 a.m. The whole town was asleep, and I’d run right down the middle of the road. The air was cool and my feet crunched on the snow as I took in the silent world. I remember thinking this is how our bodies are supposed to work. Then I got really fat again. I just ordered some running shoes and imagined having that same feeling, even years later and 60 pounds heavier. I went for my first run. It was fucking awful. There was no bliss. I wrote about it in “Thoughts of a Fat Man During His First Run.”

You can bring one person back to life and ask one question. Who do you bring back and what do you ask?

I’d go for the king of all celebrities, Jesus, and demand he perform a miracle. Religion fascinates me. Or why people are religious. I know many religious people who are truly exceptional. But I’ve seen plenty who are full of hate as well. It’s amazing how much hate and horror can come from people using religion. I mean “God Hates Fags” Really? It’s one thing to believe that, another entirely to take time out of life to actively hate and make people miserable. I can just imagine that asshole asking his boss for a vacation day and going to Kinko’s and sitting at home with his poster board and crayons and coordinating with the other crazies he found online so they didn’t get embarrassed by having the same hate-filled slogans on their signs.

Or maybe I’d ask if he could fix my entertainment center. It’s so hard to find a good carpenter these days.

What celebrity would you kill with your mind if you could?

I’ve had that damn James Blunt, “Your Beautiful,” song in my head for years. After five years it finally wiggled its way out of the back of my mind. Then I heard it yesterday, and it went right back to the center of my brain. But if I killed him the radio stations would go crazy like they did when Michael Jackson died and play his songs on repeat. I would lose my mind.

No matter who I killed I’d make sure it was public, and I’d declare myself one of the real life X-Men before I did it. Then no one would ever mess with me again.

You have a choice. You can eat whatever you want for the rest of your life, but you have to walk around with Steve Buscemi’s face. Would you do it?

Hell yes! Steve Buscemi is awesome. His face has got character. Plus I could pretend I was him and tell everyone I got killed by Tony Soprano. That would be awesome.

***

I put my tape recorder back into my pocket as we finish the interview. Jeff literally skips off the treadmill. My mémère would be proud of his glow. My ‘glow’, on the other hand, is dripping off my face and onto the floor.

“What are you up to now?” I ask as he takes a sip from his water bottle.

“Meeting my friends for lunch. Want to come?”

I perk up. Eating is definitely something I can do. “Where are you going?”

“This vegan place that serves low gluten, low sucrose, no fat, meat-free soy burgers.”

I close my eyes and shake my head. “Jeff, I have to tell you, that sounds like my idea of hell.”

If you want to check out Jeff’s blog, he can be found at Change for a Year.