|
|
|
About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
|
|
Sonata for Lard-Ass and Television in Bacon Minor It occurs to me that this here plastic snack-pack bag of TERIYAKI FISH JERKY doesn't have any "nutritional information" printed on it. Not even on a sticker. I bought it in Hawai'i, which is actually a part of the USA, for those of you who are inclined to forget that we collect taxes from a Polynesian paradise ... that sells fish jerky in plastic packs hanging on pegs in convenience stores. But anyway, by law it's supposed to tell me about grams of protein and milligrams of sodium and all that rubbish, and it doesn't. No expiration date printed on it, either, but, hey, it's jerky. If you can trust what it does say.
Thing you should learn from this: If you are in Hawai'i and care at all about the supposed healthiness of what you shove in your mouth, you should leave. Or die. People who have food allergies should not be in Hawai'i. People on diets should not be in Hawai'i. Hawai'i is rich in in tree nuts and ground nuts. There are tropical oils. There are strawberries, tomatoes, melons, and weird fruit you've never seen before that may have similar potential threats hidden in them for the sensitive. Sugar, fruit and otherwise. Red meat. Pork. Fats and lard. In buckets. Food falls from the sky. Even cows, if you stand in the right place. Sugar-and-salt-soaked dried fish strips is only the tip of the iceberg. Although an iceberg in Hawai'i would be a rarity. Unless you're talking about the lettuce. You can't even hide from wheat and eggs and dairy products.
Hawai'i is for happy people, not for people who have to worry about what they eat. If you want to stay healthy in Hawai'i, swim five miles a day. It's the only way.
What is it so different here in Atlanta? Or wherever it is that you live?
Our obsession with food is bizarre and inconsistent. Sure, what we take into our bodies has an impact. But what is it we're trying to do with the carb-counting, the handfuls of vitamins, the good fats and the bad fats, the amino acid cocktails, the pond-scum-and-grass smoothies.... I don't get it. Are we trying to fine-tune our diets so that we eat the bare fucking minimum required to keep us alive at our desks?
Stress kills us way faster than trans-fats and nicotine. No multivitamin or dietary supplement is going to counteract that. Who can afford all that crap, anyway? The bottom's gonna fall out of that market as soon as the rich people who are buying fifty-dollar bottles of dietary supplements can pay a hundred and fifty bucks for a rejuvenation shot.... Poor people will always eat rice and beans and potatoes.
Why don't you think about it like this:
Your body's biggest goal (and I'm not one of those people who separate the mind from the body, so lump your brain in there too) is to make you feel better. Period. If you spend all day eating ice cream, it's because your body knows that it is way more important to make you feel better than it is for you to eat a healthy and balanced diet. People die from feeling bad. Sometimes they kill themselves and get it over quickly. Sometimes they simply spend a few years or maybe even decades deteriorating. But feeling bad kills you. Sooner or later. That's why you eat crap that makes you feel good when you're depressed or anxious. Because if you can snap out of the mood with a quick blood-sugar high, then you can get out of bed, get out of the house, and do things.
Doing things is what makes you healthy. Doctors, however, tend to recommend regular exercise, and boy, if that isn't the sum total of Western medicine right there. Exercise. An ingredient. Like, say, iron. Or protein. How exciting.
If you sat across from a plate of pure protein, or a plate of iron chelates, I doubt you'd have any enthusiasm for tucking any in your gob. I mean, mucus is basically a colloidal suspension of proteins, isn't it? Yum.
So. Exercise, huh? Not appealing. The trick is to do something that involves moving around a bit. Food with iron and protein in it. Something to do with exercise in it. See?
Getting out and doing things makes you feel better. Accomplishing goals makes you feel better. Seeing every item on display at the nearest museum and taking the effort to understand why that particular item is there will make you feel better. Even if it takes several trips. And yeah, you'll probably do some moving around and stuff. Find your favorite area of town and walk down every street, taking note of the things that make it your favorite part of town. Look for new things you might have missed. Go hiking, maybe, but not just to get tired and put miles on your legs. Look at what you're huffing past.
Eat a whole meal, not just a plateful of mucus. A whole meal, as it were, will be a lot more appealing.
Do whatever it takes to perk yourself up to the point where you can leave the house, sure, and then go do things that make you happy. Amazingly enough, this dumps stress. And once you're active and less stressed out, you can start trusting your cravings again. And then you don't have to be stressed out that you're not eating healthy enough, because you'll stop craving the "make you happy" food as much.
What the hell have we done to ourselves that this isn't a reflex anymore? Why are we so geared toward looking for the magic fix-it pill? Food isn't medicine and medicine isn't food. And watching television isn't doing something. TV will at least be rendered completely moot when you can watch whatever you want whenever you want wherever you want on your pocket-sized XM-Video®/iPod®/TiVo® thingy. Might not be home-theater quality, but at least it won't nail your fat ass to the fucking couch. Get out of the house and take your "entertainment" with you if you can't make your own.
Your super-entertainment gadget won't beat the snorkeling out at Two-Step in Captain Cook, over by Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, but not much will. If you do it like I did, you'll have to win an awful lot of Sky-Miles® on radio call-in contests before you can get there. So do what you can where you are.
[*]
Vidicon's tan is fading. |
|
Pages: 1 of 1 Sonata for Lard-Ass and Television in Bacon Minor
|
|
