Have you ever tried to lose weight? I have, but I love the taste of good food too much and I despise anything that makes me too sweaty. Needless to say, the loss of weight has never been easy for me. Why is it that all of the goals that have a positive impact on your life are so stinking hard and take so much stinking work? Every… single… one. Being a good parent is hard and takes work. Relationships are hard and take work. Making money is hard and takes work. Just getting through an average day isn’t exactly a walk in the park. And being healthy is absolutely sucktastic.
Theodore Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” Why exactly in the hell do we quote this man? If your life is full of effort, pain, and difficulty, you are to be envied. What is the purpose of living a life like this? What joy can be found in a life like this? I guess if the effort, pain, and difficulty result in some sort of reward, there is a silver lining. Silver is overrated. I want my lining to be gold.
Life would be so much easier if you could just eat whatever you wanted with no negative consequences. Why isn’t life like that? Why does everything that tastes good have to be bad for you? Why can’t turnips cause cancer and aged cheddar cheese lower your cholesterol?
There is going to be some healthy jerk who reads this and thinks something like, “Oh, nothing tastes better than fresh arugula sautéed in olive oil with organic pine nuts and a touch of sea salt!” This person has never tasted bacon.
There are those who say that our bodies crave “junk” (i.e. good food) because that is what they are used to eating. If we would just change our habits, we would come to love the taste of fresh greens and other low fat crap which are really what our bodies crave… our bodies just don’t know it.
… uh, sure…
Then why did almost all native people risk their lives in the pursuit of wild game? I’m sure there were all kinds of leafy greens that could have been gathered with minimal risk of death. They wanted meat! They wanted roasted meat and charred meat and raw meat. They wanted to bite into the still beating heart of their latest kill!
“The fat of the land” refers to the best part of something… because fat rules! I don’t remember reading anywhere in the Bible, “And take your father and your households, and come unto me: and I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and ye shall eat the brussel sprouts of the field.”
And then there is the whole “eating in moderation” train of thought. Eating in moderation is all good and well if you don’t mind walking around hungry all of the flipping time. I hate being hungry.
Of course the whole secret to losing weight is taking in less calories than you burn. Exercise helps burn calories. So, in theory, if I could just exercise all of the time, I could probably eat whatever I wanted. But I can’t exercise all of the time. First of all, exercise sucks. It’s hard and it makes me tired. Second of all, even if exercise didn’t suck, there is no way I can do it all of the time. Why? Because I have to work a job to make the money to buy the food to put in my mouth to intake the calories that need to be burned by the exercise that lay in the house that Jack built… or something like that.
Needless to say, I’m trying to lose weight. At a mere 5’7″, 200 pounds puts me on the verge of obesity. Once I can actually call myself obese, I am left with no choice but to pitch a tent in the sporting goods department and live out the rest of my life at the local Walmart. I don’t want to live in Walmart, thus the weight loss regimen. I’ve been “dieting” for almost a month. The pounds are very, very, very slowly coming off. I track my caloric intake, I track the calories burned through exercise, and I constantly crave a bacon double cheeseburger. Losing weight sucks… and I wrote “pitch a tent”… heh heh heh…