I Ate a Sweet Potato for Breakfast and Now I’m a Fitness Celebrity
Wow, I thought, I’m onto something with these sweet potatoes.
This is a Throwback Thursday piece!
My whole life, I was just like you — eating crap on the go, working and messing around on social media until 2am, sleeping for five hours and then drinking four cups of coffee the next day. I basically only drank water when my pee looked like yellow Gatorade. My hair was starting to fall out from stress and lack of nutrients and I’m pretty sure I was developing rickets.
I knew my lifestyle was unhealthy, but I figured that I had just started my eventual physical decline. There was no way out of this tailspin. I gave in to the inevitable.
Then one day, I ate a sweet potato for breakfast.
And overnight, I became a paragon of fitness and health inspiration for those around me.
“A sweet potato, wow!” said my boss at work admiringly, although I hadn’t told him what I had for breakfast. “Are you going paleo? That’s such a healthy way to live!” People at the office looked at me enviously, asking if I had lost weight and telling me my skin looked amazing. The VP implied if I kept it up, I would be promoted for the first time in five years. My assistant didn’t drink a single Diet Coke that day out of respect.
I worked efficiently for eight hours and felt total mental clarity without caffeine for the first time since I was eight years old. My work was precise and excellent. I know this because my many co-workers told me so repeatedly in an envious tone.
By 4pm I had met my Fitbit step goal for the first time since putting it on three years ago. Honestly, I had forgotten I was wearing it until I felt a strange buzzing on my wrist. I don’t know how it stayed charged. I actually walked 30,000 steps that day, mainly trying to get more sweet potatoes.
If I could feel this good after eating one for breakfast one day, I HAD to make this a habit.
The next day I ate a sweet potato for breakfast again. And when I logged into Instagram, I had 30k followers. So I posted a picture of my sweet potato. 25k likes. 10k comments. People asking me how they could become more like me and follow my lifestyle. Eat sweet potatoes for breakfast, I typed back. They started the hashtag #sweetpotatoforbreakfast to show me that they were taking my advice seriously. Soon there were 55,000 photos on the hashtag.
Wow, I thought, I’m onto something with these sweet potatoes.
So I ate one for breakfast on the third day, as well. Next thing I knew, I was approached by a Nike VP who asked me to change into a pair of Luxe leggings real quick on the side of the street. He took one picture of me casually squatting and $150,000 went into my bank account. I never even gave him the routing number.
The fourth day I ate my sweet potato as I got dressed and realized my clothes no longer fit — I had gained 10 pounds of muscle and lost 25 pounds of fat overnight. I threw on a pair of shorts and a sports bra and booked a fitness modeling job for the cover of Shape magazine on my way to getting a promotional deal with GNC.
These sweet potatoes are working! I thought to myself as Rihanna played in the background at the Shape photo shoot. I’m a thought leader in the health and wellness industry!
The fifth day, I won a fitness competition by 1,234 points and set a new world record. The sixth day, I launched an exercise and wellness app that broke iTunes and made me a billionaire.
Maybe I could form an entire life philosophy around eating sweet potatoes for breakfast, I mused, idly watching my Instagram numbers grow larger than Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift’s combined.
Maybe there’s a whole life in this.
And on the seventh day I went to brunch and lost all my gains.
Caitlin Kunkel is a comedy writer, satirist, and noted pizza scientist. She teaches at The Second City and is one of the co-founders of The Belladonna. Buy their book, New Erotica for Feminists: Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust, and Equal Pay, here!
