This building sticks out in Mainz like a sore thumb, although at certain angles it can be a nice picture. It’s also attached to my gym, which I will use as a forceful segue into something completely unrelated to myself, my day, or anything, but it’s been on my mind.
What happened to Eat a Pizza a Day Guy? There was this dude back in, I don’t know, 2016? 2017? who started a YouTube channel about fitness, and soon he decided to embark on a challenge: Eat one large Dominos Pizza a day for an entire year, and not only not gain weight, but perhaps even get more shredded. The concept was interesting, but make no mistake, this was truly an independent creator rising from the creative ether. Production value and camera presence started off shaky and unsure, with videos only getting a couple dozen views at most. I don’t even know how I found the guy. Although every video on YouTube is technically still “YouTube”, we all know that feeling when we see something completely random – no connection to us whatsoever – with only like 8 views and shot on a Windows phone from 2010. It just feels illegal somehow, like you’ve entered the dark web or accidentally spied on someone’s hidden server. But alas, Brian Northrup showed up on my YouTube homepage in just this way. This is the man’s name, and his channel still exists, but what haunts me even now is not that he hung it up after his successful year, proving the impossible. No, it is the nature of his disappearance.
When you search Brian Northrup (I only use his name because his channel is still ‘active’ and public on YouTube), all you see now is his iconic chiseled profile picture that surely would cause my girlfriend to wonder about me if she saw it on my computer screen, and a series of empty tabs where his content used to be (and the banner you see above). This man was dedicated, learning about making videos, interacting with his rapidly growing audience. At his peak he accumulated over 2000 subscribers to follow along his pizza and fitness journey, seeing for themselves that calorie-in, calorie-out is all that matters. And in the end, he succeeded: a whole year eating these pizzas. Afterwards, for about a month, his posts remained consistent with no signs of slowing down. He tinkered with food reviews and workout options, and even just some old school vlogging. Then one day, he posted on Instagram that he had gone to the enemy, had ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut. After this post, he was never heard from again. His Instagram remains up for anyone to see, but hasn’t been updated since 2017, with that very post, and his YouTube channel has been cleansed altogether. By god we couldn’t believe it. By this point the parasocial relationship had grown strong. I had advised him in one video that having any background is better than having a plain white wall. In the next video he put some funko pops behind him on top of his couch. We as a community watched this man ravage his body for science, and the respect was palpable. We expected a goodbye.
Yet he was gone without a trace, his last comedic whispers of his betrayal of Dominos hung floating in the residual internet air like frozen breath on a cold winter’s night. Was it some kind of shame that kept Brian from returning to the channel? To say “hey guys, I think I proved my point. I did the whole year and learned a lot, but it’s time to get back to my life. Making videos was fun, but it’s not my passion. Thanks for your support. It’s been fun.”? We never got this last answer, but I still hope it is accurate. Sometimes I fear he may have choked on his final pizza of betrayal and passed away with pepperoni in his throat and an iphone camera filming him across the room. Maybe that’s why the channel is not taken down entirely; perhaps his family is paying tribute to his sacrifice by leaving him his online legacy. The videos, they removed, of course, because it’s too painful to leave them, and they wouldn’t want people wasting their time commenting and asking if Brian is okay. They certainly wouldn’t want someone digging into the situation 5+ years later and writing an in depth Op-ed about their poor sweet Brian, gone too soon. So they left his infinite tombstone where it lay in its tiny partitioned space and corner of the internet. One imagines they simply didn’t have his Instagram password to do the same. Yet this is most unlikely. More likely, as I have done with the gym each time I’ve tried to create a routine, he probably skipped one day, which turned to two, which turned to three, until it wasn’t worth it to return at all just to bask in the failure.
The fact I even know this guy’s name is an insane symptom of the strange and cthulhu-esque (which is to say tentacular and chaotic) connectivity we have established for ourselves on this planet, creating aliens of ourselves through new means of communication. I watched a dude eat a pizza every day for a year, and he wasn’t even famous. Just some guy. And now he’s gone, and I remember him. And he has no clue I exist. From any angle you look at it, it’s just strange. But still, every once in a while, I look up and find myself wondering, “where is pizza man now?”.
See you tomorrow.
Nick
Nick Denardi 