Joining the rabble

I have a horrible confession to make—a terrible, shameful, humiliating confession of a shocking plunge into depravity and loathsomeness. Sorry, nothing to do with sex; that’s old hat. No, it’s worse than that: I’ve started dieting. Oh, please forgive me! I don’t know what I was thinking of when I did it! Well, yes, actually I know perfectly well what I was thinking of: I was thinking of 195 pounds on 5 feet 7 inches, among many other things. My chagrin regarding this derives from the fact that I’ve always had a sort of supercilious contempt for people who felt they had to indulge in such vain attempts to improve their appearance or health or whatever. Well, I said to myself arrogantly, I’ll never descend to that level. And here I am, down with the rabble.

Spent Halloween with my niece and nephew-in-law and their two kids, who said they had recently started the South Beach diet (a.k.a. the South Park diet to the cynical) because they had felt the need to trim weight off what looked to me like healthily trim bods, and they raved about the results they had seen in only a few weeks. And it was only a few days earlier that I had suffered the shocking reality check mentioned above at a doctor’s visit. (The pain in my leg mentioned in the last post turns out to be superficial phlebitis, which always sounds to me like flea-bites but is actually inflammation of arteries—or, in bad cases, deep veins—in the legs.) So I thought, well what the hell, I have to do something, I might as well try this.

I enrolled for it online instead of buying a book. Online enrollment costs some bucks, but not nearly as much as wine or high-speed internet. And it involves the option of journaling, if you want to keep track of your “progress,” and the chance to browse other journals to see how their authors are doing. It’s supposed to motivational, I guess. Most of the others restrict themselves to a line or two of telegraphic brevity, but yours truly, of course, could not resist the temptation to use a dieting journal as yet another platform for the display of his keen, insightful intellect and deathless, scintillating prose, and turns his journal entries into small essays. And, not very surprisingly, I don’t have any more audience in this medium than I do in this blog. In my browsing journal entries, my own never show up. Once more, my fragrance wasted on the desert air. I was tempted to widen the scope of my oblivion by copying the journal entries into the blog, but they involve too many details of the diet which would be boring and meaningless to anyone not sharing it.

But browsing the other journals has been a bit of an eye-opener and, I hate to say, has rather confirmed my perception of dieters as rabble. A not-surprisingly-large proportion of them are what are called yoyo dieters—people who try again and again and again, often with several different diets (Atkins often being mentioned), and either fail to lose any weight because they keep falling off the wagon, or lose it and then gain it back (I’ve seen a few of my friends do that). And their woeful tales of weakness and despair are full of guilt and remorse, sometimes approaching self-loathing, and they often come across as losers, whether born that way or made. One woman blamed her fall from grace on the fact that she was missing the boyfriend she’d broken up with. And yes, not at all surprisingly, the vast majority are women—hardly any men, from what I can tell. This could be expected on the basis of the numerous obscene cow whales I see in supermarkets, their carts piled to overflowing with junk I can’t even stand to look at, and the general obsession of this nation’s women with their appearance. Only in Boulder do the men seem to be as vain as the women everywhere else.

I’ve been on SBD (as it’s called by its users) only four days, and I’ve already failed to maintain the discipline for two of those, once when a dear friend invited me to dinner, and once during the weekly Sunday brunch of the church choir. And, as I have discussed in detail in the journal, I refuse to feel guilty about it. “The essential issue is, who’s in control, the diet or me? If the diet is in control, I’ll feel guilty about failing to keep it; if I’m in control, I won’t. It would be easy to say that if I were really in control, I wouldn’t break it in the first place, but the point is, I’m in control when I break it.” Yes, the other journalers have indeed motivated me: they’ve motivated me to avoid falling into the guilt trap they’ve fallen into. “The point has been made elsewhere that it’s as easy to become addicted to dieting as it is to suffer the addiction to food that made dieting necessary. Addictive behavior can attach itself to almost anything anyone does: eating, dieting, drinking, exercise, religion, work, you name it. If it’s intrinsically good, it can be turned bad by addiction.” The rabble are diet addicts—dietoholics, to coin yet another loathsome neologism. I am not one of the rabble, and I will not let South Park turn me into a dietoholic.

And I’ll probably never lose much weight. C’est la goddamn vie, as one of my teachers used to say.