Thanksgiving was an all around good time. There was plenty of excellent food and everyone was in fine spirits. Only one thing bothered me, and as we get into New Year’s resolution season I’m bracing myself for similar encounters. From the other end of the table, about halfway through dinner, I heard my father and younger sister agreeing that keeping Thanksgiving dinner under 1,500 calories consumed is a kind of triumph. There was general assent from the other adults. And there it was: the morality of food and fitness, perched over our table like an unwelcome dinner guest. Before I get to that though, I’m going to tell you the secret to losing weight and keeping it off. Are you ready? I’m only going to say this once.
Get off your ass and don’t eat so fucking much.
It’s as simple as that. Now, before you dismiss that as just another way to phrase the dreaded words, “Diet and Exercise”, consider that I described it as “simple”, not “easy”. There is a vast difference between the two, though people who peddle gym memberships, diet books, exercise equipment, nutritional systems, and abdominal contraptions don’t often point it out. Decreasing your food intake while increasing your physical activity is simple - but it certainly isn’t easy. That is a vitally important distinction that is all too often lost.
Consider that we’ve actually adopted the language of morality to our cultural struggles with the bathroom scale. We use the same words to describe behaviors that are simple and easy to avoid, like stealing and killing, as we do for behaviors like eating too much, which, whatever consequences they may have, are not usually easy, and are certainly not immoral. It is now common usage for someone to say, perhaps prior to eating dessert, that it’s okay to do so because they were “good” today. Similarly, the word “bad” is now often used to refer to having recently overeaten. Take a step back for a moment and ponder the implications of that. Basic and useful human emotions like pride and guilt are being perverted daily in service to a belief system which holds as its paragon of virtue the ability to appear physically similar to the altered photographs of highly abnormal people which appear in glossy magazines.
We have elevated the concept of “fitness”, with its subtle edge of Darwinism, to a social ideal. Some of the side effects of this stupidity include well meaning silliness like NAAFA, that’s the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. This is an organization more or less dedicated to saying that it’s okay to degrade the quality and decrease the quantity of one’s life. (As of this writing their homepage was reveling in the news that Canadians who are so obese as to require two airline seats now only need to pay for one.) And yet our culture and our values are so screwed up that an organization dedicated to self harming behavior actually has a pretty compelling argument. Boiled down to its skinny essentials it amounts to little more than “Fat Happens, Deal with It”, and they’re right.
Fat people are unduly stigmatized and so inevitably some of them rise up and shout against the culture that stigmatizes them. Doing so doesn’t make being fat any less unhealthy, but it does highlight just how dumb it is to hold well defined abdominal muscles as a mark of personal triumph. It’s an extreme reaction to an extreme culture; that neither position is particularly logical doesn’t matter in the least. We don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water though; it’s perfectly okay not to look like a model, but carrying around a lot of excess lipids will cost you in every possible way.
Which brings us back to Thanksgiving; it’s a day where overeating is a tradition and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. We eat lots of good food, as a tribute to those who came before us and didn’t always have the option and as a reminder that lean times can still come again. How much you want to overdo things, if at all, is up to you, but first and foremost it’s a celebration. Feeling guilty about that last helping of turkey and stuffing serves only to spoil the mood.
We are coming now to the eating season; Christmas and other less commercially important celebrations will be dominating the calendar for the next few weeks. After that it’s time for New Year’s and the millions of weight loss resolutions which annually accompany it. So when you see an ad promising you (Yes You!) a new and fitter body, and you will, remember something before you pull out the credit card. You already know how to lose weight - it’s simple - but no amount of spending will ever make it easy.
