The energy drink company Vemma is being built by a fleet of charismatic young people, but is its business model ethical? There is something about the combination of money, caffeine and fraternal support that wrestles hopes and dreams up out of the benign depths of the adolescent imagination. In this student house in uptown Toronto, that’s as true on a Sunday night as it is on any work day. Cars fill the driveway and line the curbs for a few hundred metres on both sides of the street. People are constantly walking in and out of the front door which is just open enough to make you feel ridiculous for knocking. Inside, the walls around the entrance are plastered with the same sort of hideous wallpaper you’d see on the set of a 70’s sitcom. The meltwater from the pile of shoes is soaking the carpet. After a quick “hello” with an acquaintance on his way out, I notice a young man on his cell phone in the living room, pacing like a caged bull while he recites a well-rehearsed sales pitch. It soon becomes obvious that everyone in the house is either giving or receiving this same pitch. This is the hive. There was supposed to be a big meeting here today—“a house event,” as they’re known—where two very successful young people from Michigan would drive hundreds of kilometers to personally deliver this pitch to anyone interested in Vemma, a nutrition company best known for its healthy energy drinks and multi-level marketing business model. It was cancelled after they were turned around at the border—“some shit with their papers,” I was told—but people are still showing up. Instead, I’m here to meet Emilio Nafarrate, a friend and former highschool classmate of mine. He is a Vemma affiliate; someone who both sells this drink and recruits new affiliates. Back when he was still relatively new to the company, he offered me a chance to join, pitching me some variation of what I was now overhearing in the living room. It begins with a claim that with some elbow grease, a can-do attitude, and the proper guidance from the now wealthy young people who recruited you, it will be within your power to achieve the financial freedom known only to movie stars and professional athletes. They’ll tell you you’ll make residual income after you’ve done enough legwork to establish yourself; like how Donald Trump makes money when you play on his golf course without actually joining your foursome. They’ll tell you when (rarely “if”) you hit a certain rank, the company will provide you with a leased Mercedes Benz or BMW. They’ll tell you this is a product that you—a young person who presumably drinks Redbull, Rockstar, Coke, Sprite, Powerade and Gatorade—should be drinking. They’ll tell you it’s been on Dr. Oz and is the official drink of the Phoenix Suns. If you don’t know any better, you’ll start looking for the dotted line on which to sign. If you don’t know any better, you’ll see the piddly getcha started fee as a worthy investment. And if you’re like me, before the end of your first meeting, you’ll be deciding whether to personally pick up your first batch of product or get it ordered to your house. * Like many businesses though, the reality is a little different than the pitch. It’s all right there in Vemma’s annual affiliate earnings.[1] Last year over 90% of active affiliates earned under $12,200 which is less than one would make working 20 hours a week at minimum wage. These affiliates were also required to order a certain amount of product every month—about $150 worth—which means that only about 12% made any money at all. For this reason, Vemma has drawn fire from critics saying it’s a pyramid scheme, an illegal business model where no new money is brought in and members within the company are paid with money that comes from those who are losing money. The truly discomfiting bit is that in these models, people are paid based on how well they can recruit others into the business. But, for reasons that have been enshrined in economic law and common sense, the vast majority cannot make money.[2] People caught up in pyramid schemes will tell you that some new recruits will succeed and, in more sophisticated models, even make more than some of those above them in the hierarchy. That’s true, but the fact remains that the entire framework would crumble if everyone could succeed as promised. In other words, the problem is not that there are more losers than winners, it’s that the winners unknowingly stand on the backs of the losers. * William Keep is the dean of the New Jersey business school. He has served as an expert witness in the prosecution of pyramid schemes for several years and has co-authored a number of papers with a Peter J. Vander Nat, an economist employed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. While he has not personally taken an official stance on the Vemma’s legitimacy, he did issue a warning to his college students about Vemma, saying that they “should know that some MLM companies have been identified as illegal pyramid schemes where almost everyone who joins loses money.” He says that Vemma “has a tendency to rewrite history” insofar as it “presents some logical arguments that have some huge logical flaws.” With a very tiny bit of digging, I learned that these arguments were equally common in the $8 billion MLM giant Herbalife. For example, both Herbalife and Vemma have partnerships with professional sports teams and according to one member of the hive, “organizations like the NBA just don’t partner with scam companies.” It is treated as bulletproof fact that because David Beckham has Herbalife pasted across the front of his L.A. Glalaxy soccer jersey, the company must be legitimate. Or there’s the well-perpetuated myth that any company with a viable product—or a good product, even according to non-affiliates in Vemma’s case—cannot possibly be a pyramid scheme. Not so. “Even though the company is selling a viable product and their message is one of developing a retail customer base, companies found to be pyramid schemes were operating businesses where buying in involved purchasing the product and the purpose was to be rewarded when you got people to buy in,” says Keep. While Vemma has approximately nine different methods of compensating its affiliates, the business model is built around those two fundamental points: affiliates must purchase the product on an ongoing basis and they are rewarded when their recruits do the same. There is nothing that requires any of these purchases come from people outside the company. And Herbalife? The company recently came under intense scrutiny when Wall Street hedge fund manager Bill Ackman made a $1 billion bet that the company would collapse. As of the time of this writing, it hasn’t and the company has mounted a defense. But even after operating for 34 years, Herbalife has been unable to shake the claims that their business model is—to put it politely—questionable. Vemma has been operating for only 10. How then, if there are potentially legitimate legal issues with these businesses, do they continue to operate unfettered under the proverbial noses of massive government bureaus like the Federal Trade Commission? Keep wrote a piece for CNBC where he explained that MLM companies “could be legitimate” if they placed an emphasis on its true retail customer base and limited rewards for recruitment. Yet it’s very difficult to prove Vemma affiliates aren’t selling to unaffiliated customers, even though there is zero incentive to do so. According to the numbers released by the company last year (see above), there was an nearly exact[3] 30/70 split between affiliates and customers respectively. No other information about these particular figures was released publicly, and the only other information the company offered after being pressed is that “at no time were customers ever affiliates.” In other words, the company was less than forthcoming about where the money is coming from. None of this has stopped Internet commenters from trying to hash out this dispute in a predictably mean-spirited manner. Even the more articulate blog, article and video comments are just regurgitated spiels, copied and pasted from elsewhere on the Web. And any commenters that don’t feign cool indifference[4] viciously attack anyone who dares question company wisdom. Here, as in real life, everyone who encounters the business model—and thus, the sales pitch—is swept up in the debate, forced to believe that they are either being duped or presented with a great opportunity. There is no in between. Apathy is alien. * It’s getting late and I’m sitting across from Emilio in Andrew Hood’s bedroom. Hood is Nafarrate’s upline, the young man several levels above him in the company or, as Emilio first introduces him with a sarcastic smirk, the “pyramid leader.” He is an unexpected listener for the first part of the interview, leaning against the back wall while he absently plays with earbuds hanging around his neck. At first, the baby-faced 20-year-old is both quiet and unimposing: someone who wouldn’t seem out of place playing the voice of reason in an American Pie movie. Emilio, by contrast, sounds like a sped-up recording (I know because when I slowed down the recording, he didn’t sound like he’d been shot with a tranquilizer dart). This would be surprising if I was meeting him for the first time or didn’t already know how much product he’d consumed. They give me one of the drinks to try, just to get a sense of how it stacks up against more ubiquitous pick-me-ups. It’s one of the company’s original products, Verve, a red-bull sized can of orange fizz with a slightly sour medicine-y taste. It brings to mind like a chewable multivitamin for kids. I enjoy it and when I tell Andrew and Emilio this they seem unsurprised. When Emilio leaves to take a call, Andrew sits in his place and begins answering questions, “educating” me in defence of the company. Both are a part of a movement known as the Young People’s Revolution or the YPR which includes all Vemma affiliates under the age of 30. In a news release from January 2013, the company publicly credited this massive body for being “one of the driving forces behind the [30 per cent] increase in sales” in 2012. Last year, that increase jumped to 89 per cent with sales rocketing from $117 million to $221 million[5]. If you’re a young person and you’re a part of Vemma, you’re part of the YPR. It’s made very clear to every potential recruit that success is impossible without the help of your upline. Opting out is just another avenue to failure. “There are three aspects for enrolling somebody in Vemma,” says Hood, “knowledge, credibility, and trust. You and your friend trust each other, but what you lack is the knowledge and credibility.” Hood reckons that at first, any potential affiliate will ask the recruiting affiliate two questions: “how does [the business] work and how much money have you made?” If you’ve just signed up, odds are you don’t really know how the business works nor have you made any money, at which point the pitchee will promptly tell you to fuck off. But, if you can coax them into a house event, where they will meet people who have made money and who do know how the business works, then they’re likely to change their minds. “In fact, I’ve had literally hundreds of people come to my events thinking it’s a pyramid scheme and left enrolling,” Hood says. Here at the hive it’s easy to see why: the heartfelt camaraderie, the promises of mutual success, and dreams of making more money at 25 than the vast majority of the population could squeeze out of their savings at 50, people (like Emilio) have a tendency to “dive right in” with a resounding “fuck it!” That’s just the effect the YPR has. Of course, following these caffeine-fuelled gatherings, it’s hard to imagine these young people ever consider the more labour-intensive route to success: getting out there and actively selling some drink rather than waxing poetic to other impressionable adolescents about Rolexes and company cars in hopes of cashing in on their recruitment bonus. The YPR fosters this outlook. Plain and simply, their purpose is to put the dream on display. A more cynical reader might see that and say the YPR’s membership has grown fat feasting on the insecurities of young people, luring them away from jobs they don’t want to do, misrepresenting a long shot as a viable means of dealing with mountains of student debt. But such a conclusion is not for the journalist to make.[6] * There is one young man who has recently become the Internet’s foremost authority on all things anti-Vemma. He is a self-styled pariah[7] of the YPR who runs a blog that brings in over 1,000 views a day. In his posts, he methodically dismantles claims made by the company and its affiliates citing research, personal experience, and anecdotes from defected corporate employees. His articles routinely appear near the top of Vemma-related web searches and he says that veteran affiliates have instructed the newbies to avoid his blog. He himself left the company after a friend and mentor confided that many must fail for a few to profit. “You know what I’m talking about man,” YPR pariah later wrote of their conversation, “some of us hit gold the rest pay up.”At the time of his remarkably civil break, he was positioned atop a team of a few hundred affiliates making several hundred dollars a month. But not all members of the YPR have the same constitution or wherewithal to leave like he did. And that’s not their fault. In fact, this blogger maintains that he’s still friends with many affiliates. While some newcomers approach the business with a Machiavellian mindset, ruthlessly cutting down those in their way in hopes of achieving success, the consensus among successful affiliates is that those people fail even more often than everyone else. They can’t function in the system. Most of the successful people in this business are well-intentioned and hardworking young people who’ve come to believe that this drink is the key to their financial freedom and are actively committed to evangelizing (or “educating” as they prefer to say) other people. They aren’t trying to fool or mislead potential recruits. Each of them is tangled up in a web of distant promises where the only hope for their own success is to embrace others into the sticky warmth of the fold. That’s why when Andrew says the only way for him to really succeed is by helping others below him, he’s telling the truth. When Emilio punctuates his sentences with business-building aphorisms—like “we’re not hunters because then people feel hunted, we’re farmers because we grow relationships”—he means it. It’s not that they are being intentionally misleading; it is that misrepresentation has been built into the business model, obscured by the same hopes and dreams that brought these young people onboard in the first place. When I first signed up for Vemma, I told Emilio that I wanted to do some research before I ordered $500 worth of product and became an active member. Like a good salesman who believes in his product, he didn’t break eye contact and he didn’t get discouraged. “You’re just going to see a bunch of stuff about it being a scam and shit.” * The gap in viewpoints between Vemma’s supporters and critics essentially comes down to odds of success. If you ask Andrew Hood, there is nothing wrong with selling the opportunity to make substantial sums of money, no matter how unlikely. After all, everyone has the same compensation plan.
“The only X-factor is you,” Emilio says repeating a well-worn cliché of the self help genre. It means if you don’t succeed it’s your fault rather than that of any business model that may or may not depend on the failure of the vast majority of its members. Here’s another analogy often used to expound this mantra of personal responsibility: “It’s like if you go get a gym membership but you don’t go into the gym and a month later you go back and say ‘you guys scammed me, I bought this gym membership and I’m not jacked.’ No dude, you didn’t work out, you didn’t run on the treadmill, you didn’t lift weights,” Hood says. Alex Morton is this viewpoint personified. He’s become the unofficial poster boy of the YPR and at 25, is among the ten highest earners in the company. If you have the pleasure of listening to Alex speak (he’s on YouTube) or perusing his YPR Facebook feed, it will become painfully obvious that he has no time for losers. He’ll belligerently scold laziness, stopping just shy of outright telling his wide-eyed, mouth-breathing audience that he don’t give a fuck if you sign up for Vemma or not. He makes it very clear that hardworking people “will” get rewarded—not “may.” He says it with the same certainty one would use to assert a scientific law. His Facebook feed is peppered with posts that can be crudely summarized as “luck is bullshit” and he’s fond of reminding people that he was once just an Arizona State student getting kicked out dorms and being put on academic probation. My personal favourite post, though, is an image of him in sunglasses and a hoodie posing alongside big bold letters that read: “All dreams are crazy, until…they come true.” Ill-placed punctuation aside, there is one hypothetical scenario that could undermine this the-only-problem-is-you outlook: What if there were no quitters? What if the company was full of keen, ambitious, young people like him? Would they all, at the very least, make some profit? I tried to get in touch with Morton as well as four other high earning affiliates to ask them just that. I got one, “msg me on fb,” one unfollowed-up “how are you” and one “not interested.” I also got the run-around from the PR company connected to Vemma HQ which, apparently, couldn’t find a single person in a building of more than 200 people who had time for a ten minute phone call or written statement. They had several weeks to do so.[8] * By the end of the night, it becomes clear that Andrew would not be happy if I used his name in the article, a sentiment he shares with at least one other affiliate I spoke to. While Andrew made it clear that every word attributed to him should indicate his full support of the company he has good reason to be nervous. YPR pariah says missteps and bad words about the company usually result in names being “dragged through the mud” and even when the Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto, got in touch with Vemma HQ, the spokesperson did not reveal her full name. The reality is that this business is a controversial one, and few are willing to go out of their way to embroil themselves in that controversy. It simply isn’t worth it. They have their audience and, in the case of the successful affiliates, that audience hangs off every word they say. Morton has more than 22,000 Twitter followers. Why would he step away from that audience to answer a few questions for an article he knows isn’t changing any minds? After all, he’s walking proof that the dream can be a reality. The business model incentivizes people like Morton to bring all your insecurities screaming to the surface, because even if you do think this business is a whole bunch of baloney, you cannot possibly argue with the fact that he makes more money than a lot of us do. But what if the opportunity he was selling was not only very likely to fail but financing the golden bait he was dangling in front of you? What if the truth was that the dream would never be more than that? If you were about to become one of his customers, wouldn’t you want to know? --- Notes: [1] These are privately released numbers and to my knowledge have not been verified by any external bodies. [2] It’s not that this ‘vast majority’ will not make money. The problem with this model is that the vast majority must lose money in order to function as it does. [3] This itself is suspicious considering the Federal Trade Commission’s “70 – 30 rule.” That is, “70 per cent of product must be sold to customers outside of the distributor chain for a company to qualify as legal.” Vemma Canada’s numbers are almost the same at 71.4 per cent. [4] The most popular comments are all some variation of: “I’m driving a BMW thanks to Vemma so fuck y’all.” [5] See note 1. [6] I should make it clear that despite the tone of this piece, there is absolutely zero ill-will directed at Emilio, Andrew or the other affiliates. I am not one of the YPR’s frequently cited examples of a young affiliate who had signed on and failed. I never paid for the product and never attempted to sell it, I simply signed up to secure a spot in the pyramid-looking network but decided not to go ahead after I began researching. [7] Revealing his identity would have compromised his ability to collect information about the company. [8] I am obligated to admit here that when This accepted a similar article (several months after the one you’re reading here was already written) Vemma COO Brad Wayment did send me an email. He gave me the familiar “results aren’t typical” spiel that you find in tiny disclaimers at the bottom of all their bolded success stories and cited some obscure term and/or condition which says affiliates can say how much money they make but must also tell the person on the receiving end of that information that they must look at the Vemma income disclosure statement. I know I’m going to catch some flak from those of you who read your terms and conditions top-to-bottom (probably the same people who read footnotes) but I’ll go ahead and say very few affiliates know of that condition and even fewer follow it, meaning this information doesn’t merit anything other than a footnote on it. Also, Vemma fucked off as soon as the deadline for the magazine passed, leaving several unanswered questions in this humble—but more thorough—piece. When I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad and I got on a plane and flew off to a hockey tournament in North Carolina. It was the same sort of forced father-son time I knew all too well after a childhood of long drives to tournaments closer to home, so I settled in for what I figured would be an uneventful flight. Shortly after we took off, my dad turned on his laptop and started watching Robin Williams Live on Broadway, a stand-up routine that was, admittedly, a little more graphic than his other work I’d seen (which at that point had been Aladdin, Jumanji and maybe Flubber). It was nothing that, in his adult opinion, I couldn’t handle. So he rummaged through his briefcase and pulled out a little two-pronged headphone jack so I could watch with him. You already know Williams’ stand-up is known for his motor-mouthed soliloquies and wild one-man spectacles. In his tribute in the New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott describes the time he ran into Robin Williams in Cannes during the film festival’s fireworks: You can probably imagine the rapid-fire succession of accents and pitches—macho basso, squeaky girly, French, Spanish, African-American, human, animal and alien—entangling with curlicues of self-conscious commentary about the sheer ridiculousness of anyone trying to narrate explosions of colored gunpowder in real time. Re-watching his standup today, it’s a perfect description, one that explains how this man can turn his own act on its head, switching between family-friendly impressions and jokes about fake tits. As an 11- or 12-year-old who still shuffled nervously when I heard a swear word within earshot of my parents, you can imagine what kind of experience I was in for. Sure, I understood almost none of it, but the awkward parts that I did catch were overpowered by the hilarity of it. You know as a kid when you laugh at everything your dad laughs at because he obviously knows what’s funny? Sometimes there’s a half-second delay when you look over at him to see if he’s laughing before you start laughing too? Or there’s the odd time you go out on a limb and laugh first, hoping he laughs too, but when you realize he’s not it makes you doubt everything you’ve ever thought was funny? Well, when my dad laughed—and he laughed much louder than anyone in a darkened plane cabin has a right to—I forgot that feeling. It was just unmitigated happiness. It didn’t matter if I knew, for Williams’ last joke, why he’d buried his face in the crook of his obscenely hairy arm or what he was doing with that water bottle. I was laughing because dad was. On the night Robin Williams died I came across a story Williams had written in the Times last year in remembrance of a comedian he loved: Jonathan Winters. He talked about watching Winters with his dad and after a joke that had something to do with squirrels and nuts “my dad and I lost it,” Williams wrote. “Seeing my father laugh like that made me think, ‘Who is this guy and what’s he on?’”
As soon as I read that quote I felt a weird connection. What did it mean that Williams had those same moments with his dad? What does it mean that my dad and I shared those moments watching him? What does it mean that Williams killed himself and what does it mean that, six years ago, my dad did the same? Obviously none of those are questions I’m equipped to answer. All I can say is that it has compelled me to write something; to toss in a little more than my two cents in the wake of all this. Despite my reservations, I think it can be meaningful to share these connections, in fact for the very reason that these connections—whether they’re about fathers and sons, laughter or suicide—often prompt others. It’s been a while since I’ve scoured the obits and eulogies, the penetrative analyses and sad ruminations, in hopes binding together bridges of cosmic significance between little coincidences. Of course I had no more claim to this tragedy than anyone else, but I’m happy I found something. Notes on the university diet If you were there at that moment, the first thing you’d notice is the guy in the red lumberjack jacket. He’s half-running up the street holding a small oily box in one hand and a plastic fork in the frozen grip of the other. Even in the freezing rain, he can’t help shovelling a mouthful or four of this delicious boxed snack on his way to whatever warm destination he’s so eager to reach.
The reason you notice him is not because he’s doing something that everyone else on this drunken stretch of asphalt is not—it’s because his jacket matches the bright red sign hanging above his head. In a little while, people will cluster under this sign in Ottawa’s Byward Market, lined up to get inside this eatery full of university students and a few others too. Some girls will be freezing in tiny skirts and low cut shirts, while others will be warmly wrapped in the kind of comfy, high school logo-ed hoodie that hasn’t been worn outside the house since they graduated. All of them will be waiting for poutine: a pile of fried potatoes and gooey cheese slathered with enough gravy to drown a small animal. Welcome to a Canadian tradition. This is Smoke’s Poutine just before 2:00a.m. As the night goes on and the bars close, the tiny establishment becomes more and more crowded. The line-up is out the door, as the cool smell of spilt beer wafts in from the sidewalks and the warm smell of gravy drifts out of the shop. Tonight should be a slow night. The weather is terrible and the clocks turn back an hour at 2:00A.M., meaning most bars will cut into Smoke’s sales by staying open an extra hour. Nevertheless, the engine that is Smoke’s—which does about 40 per cent of its business on weekends between 1:00 and 4:00a.m.—will serve up more than 110 steaming boxes in the next hour. The overwhelming majority of these clients will be university students. It’s a familiar routine for most students. After a night drinking multiple beers or mixed drinks at one of the bars or clubs, they will be faced with a decision: go straight home to “sleep it off” or grab a bite to take the edge off the impending hangover. Smoke’s is only one of many spots in the city that have become a part of this ritual—one that offers a tiny glimpse into the university lifestyle. It’s a ritual I’m more than familiar with after four years at school in Ottawa. The feelings of guilt that follow a trip to Smoke’s are usually complemented by feelings of physical pain, as my body tries desperately to pump that artery clogging sludge through its system. Despite this far too common routine, I’m still at a reasonable weight (185 pounds, 6 feet tall) and many other 21-year-old university students can say the same. In fact, Statistics Canada’s report from 2011 indicates the 18-34 year old segment of the population is about 10 per cent less obese than the older segments. Though all of these age segments have grown fatter in recent years, the younger population has always remained leaner than their elders. But my, perhaps, ill-conceived anxiety is rooted in one unfortunate fact: I won’t always be young. At some point I will have to confront the metabolic certainty that I will no longer be able to able to ingest pounds of late night grease and beer and stay at a decent weight – a few weekly gym visits just won’t cut it anymore. According to Ottawa dietician Cindy Sass, it is an unavoidable truth: at some point, everyone’s metabolism slows down. A few friends have already seen it happen before graduating. One of them is Ariel Fried, a 22-year-old law student at Carleton. After sustaining a knee injury in third year that brought his quasi-competitive soccer career to a halt, he was left hardly able to walk, much less run. Not surprisingly, the drinking and late-night food quickly manifested around his waistline. At the beginning of his fourth year, with an almost fully recovered knee, he decided to join Weight-Watchers to lose the 15 pounds he’d added to his 5’9” frame. But Ariel never really did Weight-Watchers. When he signed up, he learned all about the point system that Weight-Watchers prescribes to each its clients which, their public relations people say, makes it more a “weight management” tool than a diet. Ariel was given a 40 point allotment for every day based on his goals. Fruits and veggies didn’t cost him any points. Most bread products were around two points and anything cooked in oil had an additional two points tacked on. A bottle of beer was worth five points. But Ariel’s point-tracking effort has been half-hearted at best. He never writes down his points, he hardly ever uses the website, and when asked, he couldn’t tell me what the three-month $60 subscription actually bought him. Even still, Ariel has lost eight pounds since joining the program. It has mostly helped to educate him on the smaller things. Now, instead of having a heavy snack, he’ll eat a mango; instead of eating out after the bar, he’ll pick up food and bring it home for the next morning. But these are about the only ‘sacrifices’ he’s made. Ariel still goes out at least once a week and still routinely orders an abominable series of drinks he calls “the line-up of legends”—a tequila shot followed by a jäger-bomb, followed by a rum and coke, and chased with a beer, totalling a calorie count he wouldn’t even hazard to guess at. Simply put, his lifestyle was tweaked rather than changed. For most 22-year-old boys with a ‘weight issue’ these tweaks are enough. A study out of Université Laval in Quebec City showed that 37 per cent of staff at the school considered themselves “overweight” compared to only 23 per cent of students—yet students “showed less desirable eating patterns than staff members.” In short, most students could get away with it. With that said, certain bad habits were as common for staff as they were for students. Out of the more than 3000 people surveyed, very few staff met the daily requirements “for vegetable, fruit, and fish intake, or physical activity.” This study points to a common trend in our fattening population. Most people—in university or not—do just enough to keep off the extra weight and up until that point, they do what they want. Cindy says this behaviour has created, what she calls, “skinny fat people.” These are the unhealthy men and women who “look fit” but, internally, face similar health risks as the obese. Yet, far fewer of these people feel the same sense of urgency to change their behaviour. The healthy lifestyle has become about appearances. It is less about being fit than it is about looking fit. As soon as the 15 pounds comes off, it’s back to old habits. * One of Ariel’s roommates, Dylan Lavin, has become well acquainted with these habits. In fact, the third year sociology student is the embodiment of what most mothers fear their boys will become when they leave for university. He’s the kind who stops off at the LCBO to grab a few cans of Strongbow cider to drink in the library while studying; the student who cuts out of his Friday lecture halfway through to go for afternoon beers; the guy who projectile vomits on the sidewalk out front of a nightclub after accidentally swallowing a mouthful of chewing tobacco (all these things happened on the same Friday, by the way); the guy who will shamelessly tell a reporter he always gets “sandwich stuff” in his chest hair; the guy who rarely eats anything at home that isn’t an oven-ready meal, a sandwich, cereal, or mac&cheese. This is the laid-back, hard drinking type we often associate with university, the more obviously unhealthy lifestyle. In two years they’ve lived together, Dylan’s habits have rubbed off on Ariel, whether that means sharing a box of Kraft Dinner or deciding to order in—again. Ariel’s other roommate hardly ever orders in. If Dylan is the Ying of the University diet, Pavel Melnichuk is the Yang. As we sit down for a chat about eating and exercise habits, Pavel scoops spoonfuls of salmon caviar onto thick buttered slices of bread drizzled with honey. “It’s the black caviar that’s really expensive,” he tells me. He later mentions that this nine dollar container would have cost $300 if it were sturgeon roe. Pavel has loved to cook ever since high school. Because of him, their fridge, freezer and pantries are full of all kinds of exotic ingredients, condiments and leftovers: Thai basil, white truffle oil, kefir yogurt, smoked salmon, tom yun soup, carbonara, yarlsburg cheese, cornish hens, veal scallopini, pork bola bola. Taking anything out of a fridge this full is a tense and strategic exercise, like playing jenga. This passion for cooking has also rubbed off on Ariel and, in combination with Dylan’s less gourmet habits, Ariel has settled on a more moderate lifestyle. He doesn’t spend a hundred dollars a week on groceries like Pavel does because, every once in a while, he likes to eat out. But, he also doesn’t go out all the time because he enjoys preparing a nice meal just as much. As Ariel and I sit down for dinner, he brings out two pieces of roasted chicken and several thick portabello mushroom heads marinated in a port wine glaze and topped with goat cheese. “Alright Ariel,” I tell him, “now you’re just showing off.” * While home-cooked meals are certainly a step in the right direction, health-wise, Cindy says it would be a mistake to think that eating at home automatically equals a healthier meal. This is especially true for inexperienced cooks, like second year students who have just moved into their first house. Matt Chong is now 27 and he graduated from Carleton back in 2007. In his second year, he really began to take pride in his cooking. “It was my coming out party,” he says. There were a lot of pastas, breads and complex carbohydrates; cheese and fatty meats; and of course no shortage of boxed, ready-made meals in his freezer. Now he’s got carrots, baby spinach, and red peppers in his fridge and steaks, chicken, homemade soups and chilli in his freezer. He still takes pride in his cooking, but he soon recognized that he was “going to balloon” if he kept eating like he did in second year. Matt’s younger cousin happens to be my roommate. Like Matt, Connor Davies has begun to enjoy cooking and – though he isn’t overweight – he’s got the soft pokable belly to prove it. He likes to talk about food while we eat and cannot stand when something he’s prepared turns out wrong. In order to avoid having anything turn out wrong, he usually falls back on a few key flavour enhancers: butter, oil, lard, or some combination of these. Some time ago, he cooked a chicken casserole with veggies, chicken stock, white wine, bacon and butter. When I tried it, I was struck by the combination of flavours in the viscous jus that had collected around the meat and veggies. It tasted oddly like the gravy from Smoke’s poutine. The fact remains that food that is bad for us often tastes the best, whether it’s cooked at home, eaten out, or ordered in. While Ariel is preparing the chicken, he calls out to Pavel who is hurriedly packing his bag before an exam. “How do you do the chicken when you make it?” Ariel asks. Pavel comes into the kitchen to reveal his secret technique. As the two of them stand over the pyrex dish with the pieces of uncooked chicken, Pavel cuts through three slices of butter. He drops one between the dish and the bottom of the chicken, slides one between the top layer of skin and the meat, and lays the final piece gently atop the skin he just folded over the other piece of butter. Then, he does the same for the other quarter chicken. Now, is all that butter necessary? Definitely not, but I’m sure you can guess how good it tasted. * Stress can often perpetuate some of these unhealthy habits, as it did back when Bryan Sirois started working. He graduated from Carleton in 2006 and now lives in a cozy, contemporary one-bedroom with his fiancée, Josée. When I arrive at his apartment, he has just finished roasting coffee beans which are spread out over the counter to cool off. His fridge is stocked, but not excessively so. Inside there is a fat glass pitcher of water, and some leftover Thai curried chicken and rice. When I ask about the single bottle of Coke he chuckles, knowing exactly what this article will be about. “That’s for the pulled pork,” he says. Bryan hated his first job out of school. It was a government job as an HR business analyst. It was a dead end for him. His projects were being constantly stifled and office enthusiasm jumped no higher than it would at a funeral. Not surprisingly, physical activity wasn’t part of the culture there and his utter loss of motivation in his working life soon threw his diet into a sort of tailspin, rotating between four lunch spots: a local pizza joint, St. Hubert’s, McDonald’s and a quick serve shawarma franchise. After a long day, he would usually try to ease his nerves with a bit of weed which, inevitably, led to more take-out. Bryan, who was once a competitive cross country skier and member of Carleton’s varsity team, gained 40 pounds over the four years he worked this job, one after graduation and three working full time as a student. “I kind of brought my girlfriend down with me,” he adds. She put on 30 pounds while she was living with him. Today, Bryan stands at a lean 195 pounds. After moving to a new job as an underwriter at Export Development Canada, his habits started to change. He is more motivated and his projects are moving at a faster pace. Fitness is now part of the culture at his workplace. His new colleagues play volleyball, run, lift weights, and bike, so, Bryan started to as well. He now hits the gym on his lunch break and runs half-marathons so he can see his training pay off. As he did all this, his girlfriend—now his fiancée—quickly shed the extra weight she’d put on. “Who’s racing bike is that?” I ask, motioning towards the sleek red frame propped up in the small space between the couch and arm chair. “That’s Josée’s,” he says. “I bought it for her birthday.” Josée just happens to be training for a triathlon. But this healthier lifestyle doesn’t mean the partying stops. Just last weekend Bryan was out until four in the morning, splitting 60 beers with six of his friends from university. Last month he celebrated his bachelor party down in Vermont which, as Bryan’s old friend Matt Chong points out, wasn’t so different than a weekend in second year university: not a vegetable in sight, hardly a moment to sleep, big greasy breakfasts from Denny’s and not a single non-alcoholic beverage until Sunday. University and working life accommodate all of these choices, healthy and unhealthy. If you remember, Smoke’s does 60 per cent of its business during the week when, as Ottawa store manager Matt Jenkyns says, the professional crowd from the surrounding offices descend on the shop to fill their bellies with the same steaming goodness as students. Sure, the ‘university diet’ is often unhealthier, but it doesn’t automatically change as soon as we transition into a full time job. It’s much more complicated than that. * As I leave the poutinerie that late night, I see a guy standing in the middle of the intersection, holding a poutine up in the air as his friends yell at him. With a dumb look of triumph on his face and little consideration for the fact that the light above him is green, he holds his arms open wide, embracing the frozen air in nothing but a t-shirt. After an approaching car is forced to stop, he stubbornly staggers over to the sidewalk. The driver patiently waits for him, knowing full well how these late night shenanigans work: until he’s staring the problem in the headlights, he’ll stay in that intersection for as long as he wants… |
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