Most of the time I was in college, I was trying to gain weight. Influenced by some combination of He-Man episodes and Mens Health covers, I – like most of the guys I knew – was convinced that bigger would be better. I took creatine and bench pressed and drank protein shakes and ate and ate. And, the whole time, I stayed 135 pounds.

Which, at 5’6″, put me at precisely the same size as Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. A fact I began to appreciate post-college, as I started to compete in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai fights. The very real threat of getting my ass kicked in front of a crowd kept me honest in the gym, convinced me of the relative importance of function over cosmetics.

But, appreciative or not, I didn’t have much choice: In the five years since college, I stayed at 135 pounds so consistently that I didn’t replace the batteries in my scale when they died about a year and a half back.

Still, last week, in the locker room at the gym where I teach CrossFit classes, I absentmindedly stepped onto a scale, to play with the old sliding-weight mechanism. And clocked in at 150 pounds. Assuming the scale was simply out of whack, I went home, re-batteried my own scale, and weighed myself again. Still 150 pounds.

A caliper test – and the equally reliable ‘jump up and down naked in front of a mirror’ – confirmed that I’m still floating around 8% body fat. Which means, in theory, that I’ve put on some fifteen pounds of muscle.

Certainly, college-aged me would be thrilled. But, so far as I can tell, I look exactly, exactly, like I did fifteen pounds ago.

I said as much this weekend in Denver, to my brother, my parents, my grandmother, my aunt. And, by consensus, none of them had any idea where those extra fifteen pounds went.

Except for my eleven-year old cousin. Who, at several points, knocked on my leg to determine if it might actually be hollow.