50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 22
An 18-year-old man requires roughly 600-1,000 more calories per day than an 18-year-old woman of the same activity level. The Naval Academy had not yet done this math in the mid-1970s.
USNA served the Brigade, some 4,400 midshipmen, family style, averaging 3,500 to 4,200 calories a day. It was built for men who sustained heavy academic, military, and physical loads. The nutrition science of the era wasn’t what it is now, and sports teams got their own tables to eat even more. In the earliest years of coed midshipmen, the math didn’t work: the food caloric intake outpaced what a woman’s body needed to hold the Navy’s weight standards, no matter how hard she trained.
I trained hard. Varsity swimming, daily PT, and still I couldn’t make weight. I’d been attending Weight Watchers before I even got to Annapolis. To try to stay at weight, during my younger siblings’ evening swimming workouts, my mother would bring a tuna fish sandwich from home and meet me in the USNA parking lot, where I could eat it instead of the calorie-loaded dinner waiting for me in King Hall.
Plebe year, I couldn’t stay under the radar. I landed on a diet table, which turned out to be the worst possible place to be. Shame at being overweight served up alongside upperclassmen who had their own shame and needed somewhere to put it.
One Wednesday meal on that diet table stands out.
Wednesdays meant grease uniform inspection at noon meal formation, full dress, uniforms creased to a mirror finish. Most of us would carefully take these specially prepared uniforms off after lunch and hang them so the crease is preserved without any extra ironing.
That particular noon meal on Wednesday was also Quarter Pounder with Cheese Day.
At my diet table sat Mr. K., a First Classman who was angry at life in general and looked like he’d earned his own seat at a diet table more than a few times. Mr. K was as crusty and ready to find someone to thrash as any first-class I had met. My plan was simple: keep my head down, get through the meal, and get off this table as soon as humanly possible.
Then something set him off. Mr. K rose to his full, formidable height, words already flying, and brought his fist down on the table to make his point.
Underneath his point, however, sat a packet of mayonnaise. Real mayonnaise.
The irresistible force of Mr. K’s fist met the unmovable object of that closed mayonnaise packet, and force won over object. It erupted, a clean white arc of fat and egg white landing squarely on his dress shirt, working uniform blue alphas, now thoroughly greased on grease-inspection day—justice, delivered by condiment.
I shot my fist out and, in front of me, requested permission to leave the table immediately. Please let me leave, I prayed silently, because underneath the effort to keep a straight face was a laugh I could feel building with real structural integrity. I don’t remember how I got out of that mess hall. I remember being very motivated not to end up back at a diet table for the rest of my time at USNA — and I didn’t.