Friday, April 8, 2011

Break On Through (To the Other Side)


193.6 lbs


Ah, I have the swagger of Jim Morrison right now minus the drug abuse, rotten leather pants or bathtub. Yes, yes, yes. Bye, bye, 195 lbs until this coming Sunday. If I am good enough, I won't see you for long 195, you fat bastard. Instead of feeling like I am in limbo, it feels more like playing limbo - how low can you go?

Now I posed a question on what should be my next experiment yesterday and the winner is (due to underwhelming response ha!) - eat on $20 from things bought at the 99 Cents Store. But here is the kicker, I am also going to do a vegan diet modified by my friend Melissa who offered an option #4 that was not even on the table. That week will be difficult and I know it has been difficult for Melissa since she has to also limit certain things in the vegan diet because of Celiac Disease in her family. There are no glutens allowed and also Melissa has to make sure there is no processed sugar or soy. Celiac Disease is a serious allergy to gluten, particularly. It causes the small intestine to basically stop processing food efficiently when gluten is present and gluten seems to be everywhere, even in whole foods. The damage to a person's digestive tract who has this disease, after eating gluten, is devastating. So Melissa's job each week is to make sure her children are able to grow up healthy and strong with a very limited dietary palette and she has to do this without the benefit of processed foods. Hats off to Melissa! I used to watch her chow down on burgers when we were younger, so she has to have the strength of Atlas to pull it all off on a daily basis.

By watching Melissa's posts on FB and posts from other friends, I have noticed how intolerant people are to other people's dietary needs. One post in particular caught my eye and here is the story. For those who are link impaired, the story basically goes a little something like this. A waiter, claiming to be a Chef in a high end restaurant caused a furor by openly saying he was poisoning those who have Celiac Disease by surreptitiously putting gluten in their food. He openly mocked them and posted it on his Facebook page. The idiot nearly closed down a restaurant that was very accommodating to those who could not have gluten in their diet. It also caused a furor among those who have the disease. I would call him a bastard but bastards have guile, he is just a self important imbecile.

The same goes for those folks who whine about people who have peanut allergies. They act like it is imagined or something relatively mild like lactose intolerance. So many imbeciles have killed or maimed those with the allergy because somehow they thought they were funny or know better. My point is that why should we be making it hard for those who do not have a choice in what they can eat? Hey I have no problem with the way I or others might want to poison ourselves. I do have a huge issue with those who would choose to poison other people. People with food allergies have it hard enough as it is. I would think if you asked the same people who think that people with Celiac Disease or any other food allergy are just faking it whether it was appropriate to make fun of someone in a wheelchair and they would say no. I also feel the same way about those who ridicule the obese because, quite honestly, if they had their choice they wouldn't be.

There is the plain and honest truth, a lot of us have choices but a few of us don't. Perhaps the obese woman in the motorized cart at the grocery store has been on a medicine that makes it impossible to lose weight. Maybe the really big guy at the bank has a genetic disorder that doesn't allow him to process food properly. You never know.

For those of us who are overweight and do not have any particular medical reason for being so, the choice is pretty simple but fairly difficult to make. One word comes to mind when I see someone who has lost a lot of weight through diligence alone - courage. The same word comes to mind when I hear of people living day to day in an environment that could kill them. Imagine a world where the next bite you take might kill you, maybe that will make your own choices easier because we do, actually, live in that world. The thing is, the food we eat is a whole lot deadlier to a few of us even without overindulging. As my friends and I have learned, food is a drug, use it wisely.




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