Almost every day I see an article explaining why some group or another has no choice but to become obese. Here's an article about how farmers are too rushed and stressed to eat anything but junk food. It takes too long to wash the dirt off the greens! We have to eat donuts instead!
I eat good food, I think, but that won't keep the weight down if the volume is too great in relation to my meager caloric needs. Is that my society, or me?
7 comments:
Plainly, it's your society. It takes a village to raise a fat kid into fat adulthood, with too little caloric needs....
Eric Hines
Your society has reduced your caloric needs substantially in several ways. You have the option of adding some of the things back in -- like heating your home with firewood you split and carried yourself -- but you have the option of eating whole grains, too.
They're too busy to cut firewood! They have to eat donuts instead, because they have stress.
I teased a nurse at a doctor's office the other day. She wanted to know about my exercise regimen, which I described as wheelbarrow work. Why would you fill a wheelbarrow and roll it around, she wanted to know? Because the stuff is over here, and I need it over there, I told her. She was completely blank. "But that's not exercise," she objected. Obviously it's not enough exercise in my case, but the fault doesn't lie in the nature of the activity.
I'm of the mind that it's more along the lines of forgetting one of the basic tenets of Greek living: moderation. Enjoy everything that life has to offer -- in moderation.
I offer, as an example, this article I read this morning.
"'But that's not exercise,' she objected"
Says the woman who has obviously never moved a wheelbarrow full of dirt in her life.
pheh
The funny thing was, I think she understood it was arduous; it just didn't fit her notion of standing on a treadmill for a set number of minutes, or walking or jogging a set circuit. The exasperated "why" was the funny part.
Like all habits, it gets harder and harder to have a choice over the years. But you chose many times to get to the habit. There is lots of interesting stuff about gut bacteria and digestion that suggest that we have diminished choice the longer we live.
Yet not no choice. In a final extremity of damaged brain and a lifetime of habit, we may come to a place of no choice - a very CS Lewis The Great Divorce no choice. But until that day we can still shake free.
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