Diets don't work.
Eating healthy, tasteless foods in minuscule quantities while sweating, panting and pulling muscles WILL make you lose weight, of course. But many of us decide fairly quickly that the cure is worse than the disease. Whether it's because we actually enjoy eating food that tastes like, you know, food...or because we dislike pain and shortness of breath (or both)...we choose to remain corpulent. "I have the body of a God...the Buddha." "I'm in shape...round is a shape." "A waist is a terrible thing to mind." And so on and so forth.
The only way a diet will work is if you make it a permanent lifestyle change...stop calling it a diet and start referring to it, if you have to at all, as "the way I eat."
I've never managed to do this, simply because I've never managed to convince my brain that "food" is actually medicine. Contrary to every commercial for food you ever saw, nourishment is not supposed to taste good. You know how Buckley's Mixture "tastes awful...and it works"? The same can be said for tofu, flax, and whatever else you masochists are pushing as health food these days.
Also, like medicine, you're only supposed to eat a teaspoon of food at a time.
Okay, I know I'm exaggerating. A little. But seriously, folks, tasty food is a function of four things:
CALORIES
FAT
SUGAR
SALT
Do you ever find yourself craving some nice, unseasoned iceberg lettuce? I rest my case.
You can deprive yourself of all the good things in life for a while, but you'll get to missing them, and sooner or later you'll invite them back. Unless you're really committed. Some of you people should be committed, is my view, but I keep that view quiet and only write it here where nobody will see it.)
So, yeah, diets, fitness regimes, whole new ways of living...none of that really gets along with me. I'm a creature of habit and routine. I find it comforting.
Usually.
Lately, though, a significant part of my everyday routine has turned toxic. I hadn't really noticed how toxic until the real world stress ramped up considerably. When the important stuff comes calling, it has a way of throwing all the crap you thought was important into sharp relief, and the picture it reveals isn't pretty.
(I don't mean to be cryptic, truly I don't. Some of the stress you can guess at, some you probably can't. Most of it should be resolved relatively soon, at which point I will spill what can be spilled, okay?)
Behold, the Social Media Diet. Which isn't actually a diet, but a whole new (to me) way of acting and interacting on social media.
I've been on Facebook since 2008 and on Reddit almost as long. Both places are giant buffets with nearly unlimited options. Any particular click can send you down the rabbit hole, where you may learn wondrous and sundry things...or dark and dirty things. More of the latter, latterly, it seems to me.
I've never been one to slow down and look at the accident in real life...yet another of the many effects of my overactive empathy gland. Gaze too long at carnage and it produces a kind of malignant psychic echo in me.
But somehow I found myself doing that more and more in my virtual life. I'd venture into forums where the prevailing point of view was different from my own, and try to engage. I'd tell myself it was to better understand opposing viewpoints. Maybe that was even true, a little. I'd tell myself it was to help center both myself and these nameless strangers. That, too, was marginally true.
The thing is, though, more and more people are absolutely wedded, or perhaps I should say WELDED, to their ideas on an increasing number of topics. You can't dislodge them with facts. You can't influence them with rhetoric. You can't even budge them with bullshit, because they are quite simply not interested in changing their minds. Mention a different point of view, no matter how gently, and they'll treat it as a personal attack.
I can, of course, be guilty of this myself, although I try not to be. There are certain triggers that cause me to dig in my heels...and lately those triggers are everywhere.
It's amazing how many topics nowadays turn out to be all about Syrian refugees. You may think you're in a thread about music, or something to do with health care or education, and sure as hell somebody's going to bring up the regiments of ISIS soldiers masquerading as refugees. and there goes the neighbourhood (and the country, and the discussion, and my sanity.)
But Syrian refugees aren't the only hot button. Our Prime Minister is another: the same online forums where the ISIS hordes are on the march are the places where Justin Trudeau will singlehandedly be responsible for the apocalypse. (To be fair, there were times I felt that way about the last Prime Minister, and all of us except him are still here.) I get that you may disagree with political policies. I do it all the time. But the personal attacks, the name-calling, the ranting and raving...is it really necessary? Apparently it is: that's how the game is played, now.
Well, I'm not playing any more.
I've reconfigured my subreddits to avoid unfiltered political crap, and I'm unfollowed most of the media I had subscribed to on Facebook. I've also cut down, and will continue to cut down, on my own Facebook posts. Really, at this point, my Facebook friends know what I'm about. I don't have to repost every meme I see and agree with to drive home the point.
It's meant losing a few friends. Two of them abruptly cut contact with me earlier this year: I obviously offended them so grievously that they choose not to speak to me again rather than bother to tell me what I did. Six or twelve months ago this would have really bothered me. Now I find I don't care. I am who I am. I certain don't mean to hurt anyone, ever, but I guess sometimes it's unavoidable. So be it.
I've been offended myself, just that grievously, by some others. I checked first to see if they really were welded to their hate; they were; click click "unfriend".
I don't need hate in my life. Simple like that.
So many people seem to be capable of going days, weeks or months without posting to Facebook. I don't know if I'm one of them. But I can moderate my activity, in frequency and importance. I already have. And I've noticed a difference in my mental well-being just cutting back the little I have already.
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