Dieting And Exercising, Just For the Hell Of It

RECENTLY I WAS ASKED ABOUT MY EXERCISE REGIMEN, which is flattering, since there really is nothing all that special about it. I replied that it changes over time, as my interests change, and that I currently enjoy a good working relationship with a certain treadmill at the local senior center. My questioner seemed bemused. isn't that a bit boring, she inquired? Why, not at all, I smugly replied, for even as I run while going nowhere, I think, I daydream, i fantasize. Continuing her ostensible bemusement, she pressed further: "what, precisely, do you think, daydream, and fantasize about?" My reply was direct. "About being anywhere other than where I am, and doing anything other than running on that infernal treadmill". My answers were more than mere smart ass banter. Forcing discipline down one's own throat can engender in one a sense of self satisfied self esteem, rather like enrolling in boot camp and surviving it. When we enjoy our exercise for its own playful or competitive sake, we might be more inclined to sustain it, and reap the resulting health benefits. And yet, sometimes self imposed misery feeds into a sense of accomplish through survival of extreme circumstances, like boot camp, one hundred mile extreme marathons, or sheer cliff climbing. The rule of thumb might be: there are many trails to the mountain top, whatever works for you....... The second component of the equation of misery and sacrifice is, alas, diet. In this, we are evolving, maturing. We are at long last beginning to cast our millions of diet books and diet plans into the oven, since they seem to be of service only to those seeking to gain weight. In the enlightenment of modernity far fewer folks subject themselves to insane diets of exclusive meat and lettuce, drink eight eight ounce glasses of water daily, or force fast after six in the evening. height and weight charts, once upon a time so very worshipfully memorized, are finally beginning to gather dust in the forgotten corners of our newly liberated minds. Everyone, we now know, has a unique dietary destiny. Follow your bliss, and don't brainwash yourself into believing that you absolutely must resemble, in body shape, people on magazine covers. If you starve yourself, your body rebels against the tyranny of the brain by calling a halt to caloric combustion, we now realize. the vain brain may well want to pinch less than an inch, but the belly and the butt have other ideas regarding stored energy. savings accounts of fat deposits are evolutionary hedges against future famine and the dreadful specter of starvation, all too prevalent in human history and pre history, predicated upon endless recurring epochs of prepaid practice. Diet and exercise? Just do it, as the corporate slogan says, the only way, your way. Who cares how you feel anyway, other than you? you'll look lovely, and isn't that what really counts, in the land of the well fed,and the home of the vain?-------------------------------THE MORE READERS WE HAVE, THE MORE CREATIVE AND ORIGINAL ESSAYS CAN BE PUBLISHED. PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!