Every potbelly tells a story

Don't snicker. The male potbelly is as American as apple pie, as diverse as our great country (Girth of a Nation?) and is cultivated with pride by the afficionado.

©Washington Post
June 25, 2002

[Times art: Brandon Jeffords]

You don't have to be a father to have a potbelly. But if you're a well-fed American male older than 40, chances are you do have one, even if you happen to be hiding it beneath a Hawaiian shirt or that baggy, raggy old XXXL T-shirt that your wife keeps threatening to throw out.

There's a reason for this: Men tend to store excess fat in the gut, while women tend to store it in the butt and the thighs. Medical researchers don't know why this happens but it does.

There are, of course, women with potbellies. Frequently they attribute them to the aftereffects of pregnancy, even if they last gave birth during the Ford administration. Men have no such excuses. They can blame their bellies only on chowing down or drinking up.

"Mine is beer," says Jerry O'Brien, 63, a Rockville, Md., barber. "It's all beer in here."

He pats his belly, then slaps it a little. It responds with a friendly noise, like the sound you'd get if you thumped a nice, ripe cantaloupe packed in blubber.

"My father always said it should sound like you're patting a horse's neck," O'Brien says. "My dad had a big one. He looked like he was about eight months' pregnant. He was a plumber and he drank a lot of beer. My dad could shake his belly like Santa Claus and it would roll in waves. I can shake mine, too, but I can't make it wave like his."

Potbelly once signaled prestige For much of history, the potbelly was a mark of distinction, proof that God had bestowed his bounty upon you.

Wave or no wave, O'Brien has an impressive belly. It's large and firm, billowing out in front of him like the mainsail of a clipper ship.

"Kids like it," he says. "They want to rub it for good luck."

Somewhere between a third and half of his customers have potbellies, he says.

"They don't like to talk about their bellies, but they'll talk about mine," he says. "They say, "You have to stand back when you give me a haircut, Jerry, because you can't get any closer.' Or they say, "I bet you can't see your privates unless you stand on a mirror and look down.' And that's true."

The potbelly is a many-splendored thing. It is as diverse and multifaceted as this great nation, coming in all colors, sizes and shapes.

There are little potbellies that look like cannonballs and bigger ones that look like bowling balls and jumbo guts that resemble a basketball. There are stately, plump potbellies and enormous potbellies that make the owner look like a man shoplifting a watermelon. There are potbellies that remind you of sacks of flour and potbellies that swell like the biggest bubble gum bubble ever blown. There are those flabby potbellies that inspired the oke about Dunlop's disease -- Your belly done lopped over your belt -- and tight, taut potbellies that look like a subcutaneous suit of armor. There's the "Puttin' on a few pounds, eh, Joe?" potbelly and the "Jeez, Joe has really let himself go" potbelly. And there's the top-of-the-line potbelly that makes you sigh with awe, saying "Whew, that thing's probably got its own Zip code!"

Every potbelly is unique and each has its own story, like the good-belly-gone-to-seed described by Zora Neale Hurston in her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God: "Joe wasn't so young as he used to be ... His prosperous-looking belly that used to thrust out so pugnaciously and intimidate folks, sagged like a load suspended from his loins. It didn't seem to be part of him anymore."

In America, there are two main varieties of bodybuilders -- those who lift weights and those who hoist beers. The weightlifter's biceps are a monument to asceticism, narcissism, self-denial, strength, gyms and dumbbells. The beer guzzler's potbelly is a monument to great dinners and fine wines, to Mom's meatloaf and the wife's home cooking, to the corner bar and the keg party, to the simple American pleasure of basking in the Barcalounger with a Bud and bag of chips, watching athletes sweat on TV.

The potbelly is 100 percent natural. Babies have them. So do such prominent Americans as comedian John Goodman, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Redskins announcer Sonny Jurgensen, D.C. police Chief Charles Ramsey and the singer-rapper Cee-Lo, who wraps his naked belly in a feather boa and slaps it affectionately in his Closet Freak video.

The potbelly is as American as apple pie, the Big Mac, the Big Gulp, cotton candy, hot dogs, corn dogs, chili dogs, the Hungry Man's Breakfast Special and the all-you-can-eat buffet.

The potbelly is as much a part of the landscape of America as amber waves of grain. Our noble yeoman farmers advertise their food-producing prowess by cultivating their bellies along with their crops.

"Men wear their belts low here, there being so many outstanding bellies, some big enough to have names of their own and be formally introduced," Garrison Keillor wrote of his mythic Minnesota farm town, Lake Wobegon. "Those men don't suck them in or hide them in loose shirts; they let them hang free, they pat them, they stroke them as they stand around and talk. How could a man be so vain as to ignore this old friend who's been with him at the great moments of his life?"

The potbelly forces men who detest shopping to go out and buy new pants, new belts, loafers to replace the shoes they can't quite bend down to tie anymore, and new shirts to replace the ones whose lower buttons abruptly popped off under the unrelenting pressure of an expanding abdomen.

The potbelly has been the subject of countless scientific studies. In Boston, researchers identified an enzyme that causes fat to accumulate in the abdomen. In England, scientists are hunting for a "beer-gut gene." And Swedish researchers found that stress causes the body to produce cortisol, a hormone that encourages the storage of fat in the gut.

Unfortunately, having a few drinks to relieve your stress doesn't help: Alcohol also causes the body to produce cortisol.

All these scientists agree that a potbelly is unhealthy. In fact, a fat gut is far worse than a fat butt.

"The abdomen is probably the worst place to store fat metabolically," says James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado, "because it increases the risk of diabetes and heart disease."

More research needs to be done. Scientists have not yet discerned the difference between beer guts created by drinking beer and those whose origins are from products elsewhere on the food pyramid, Hill says. Nor have they discovered why some potbellies are taut while others suffer from Dunlop's disease.

But there are men who claim to know these things, men who have studied the potbelly closely by living with one for decades -- men like Jack Germond, the veteran political reporter and author of an autobiography titled Fat Man in a Middle Seat.

"There's a difference between a pot created with good steak and good whiskey and one you get eating lemon meringue pie," Germond says.

What's the difference?

"It's firmer."

And how did he create his?

"It wasn't eating pie," he says.

Chris Zimmerman, a wine salesman who lives outside Seattle, claims that his potbelly has actually begun to resemble a case of wine.

"My gut is about the size of a 12-bottle case -- with rounded edges on the box," he says. "The wine-case gut is a different gut depending on what kind of wine you drink. I sell exclusively Italian wines, so I have a gut that was developed by drinking copious quantities of Barolo and Chianti and eating pasta and risotto. Basically, it sits higher than the beer gut, and it's firmer than a gut created by eating chicken-fried steaks and lemon meringue pie."

Occasionally, Zimmerman announces to his wife and kids that he's decided to shrink his potbelly by dieting. This is not popular with his daughters, who are 4 and 7 years old.

"My daughters like my gut," he says. "They call it "the big pillow.' They think of it as a place to cuddle up while I read a story."

His wife may have a different opinion. "I think she'd probably be happy if the big pillow was a little pillow."

When it comes to caring for the big pillow, Zimmerman believes in the wisdom of the Potbelly Credo, formulated by his friend Todd Ruby, a wine importer who lives in Silver Spring.

"Get out in the sun because tan fat looks better than white fat," Ruby says. "And do a modest amount of stomach-strengthening exercises because fat in a cardboard box looks better than fat in a Hefty bag."

"The perfect potbelly has to have shape, form, presence, firmness and most of all character," says Jim "Hoolie" Decaire.

Decaire should know. He's the Bert Parks of the potbelly, a man who organizes the annual Ultimate Beer Gut contest and serenades the audience with his song Beer Gut, an anthem with a rousing chorus:

Your beer gut is your buddy
It's a friend who's always near
And all you ever have to do
Is feed it lots of beer

Decaire, 56, is the founder of Da Yoopers, a comic musical group, and the proprietor of Da Yoopers Tourist Trap, both based in the U.P. -- Michigan's Upper Peninsula, home of the Yooper. Male Yoopers tend to like snowmobiling, deer hunting and beer drinking, Decaire says. They also tend to be the proud possessors of major-league beer guts, which is why Decaire started holding the contests in 1999.

"You'd think these guys would be shy," he says, "but when you get them up onstage, they go crazy."

Contestants wear shirts at least two sizes too small and cakewalk across the stage striking heroic poses designed to show off their asset. The man who gets the most applause wins -- unless Decaire doesn't like his potbelly.

"If we don't think the audience is right -- if they're just voting for some guy because he's the mayor or something -- we step in and choose the right guy."

The right guy is a guy whose gut has character. "It can't just be a fat guy ... We look for a guy with thin legs and a nice firm beer gut that's got the perfect form."

The winners are immortalized in photos on Decaire's Web site, dayoopers.com. But be forewarned: These photos are not for the weak (or flat) of stomach.

Meanwhile, Decaire is constantly searching for the perfect potbelly. "It's got to say something when you see it," he says.

What does the perfect potbelly say?

"It says, "God, that guy's got a great beer gut,"' Decaire declares. "I saw a guy with a great gut in the store today. He had on a Hawaiian shirt and white shorts. The Hawaiian shirt just gave great form to his gut, the way a good bra gives form to breasts. It was just perfect. It was holding itself up -- nothing was hanging over the belt. I said, "Great gut.' He said, "Thanks.'

"It was beautiful."

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