What Sunshine Go Along Decides

So, I'm adjusting my diet a bit. 

I'm not an obese man, but, according to skinny, nerd experts everywhere, I'm what you might call 10 - 12 pounds overweight. This is due to the fact that, instead of acting like I hate myself and sustaining on the bird feed doctors recommend, I like to eat burgers, drink beer relentlessly and exercise only when it's convenient. While an expert might say I'm being negligent, I prefer to say I choose to live the life that paupers everywhere would be jealous of. 

(Find a homeless man and ask him how he'd like to spend the next ten years. I guarantee you his response sounds a lot more like my life than a personal trainer's. You know this.)

But... to be fair... I'm going to attempt to live clean and healthy for about a month or so and see what comes of it. If there difference between "eating like a scared rabbit" and "taking a whole pie to the throat as I see fit" is only something like 8 pounds, I'll promise, between hearty chugs of beer, to never ever do this again. 

And now, to assuage any concerns you might have, here's a brief FAQ:

"But, eating healthy makes you live longer. Wouldn't you want to live as long as possible? By eating like a jerk, you're taking years off your life here."

I appreciate your concern. I really do. Typically, when you ask a question like this, you get one of two responses:

1.) I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.

2.) What good is living forever if I'm miserable?

Either of those responses would do well in this space, but I'm going to reject them both and offer up a third:

3.) That means I have to spend more time on earth with your judgmental whining, doesn't it? Excuse me while I peruse ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com for dinner recipes.

"Skinny people look better. I'm sorry. They just do. I don't know why you'd want to be a fat, ugly slob. Are you some kind of jerk?"

You keep calling me a jerk. I suspect we'll be fighting before this FAQ is over.

Skinny people look skinnier. If you consider that more attractive, then that's your thing. But, the more important point here is that I stopped caring what other people think of me a little while ago. Sure, it might make me a bit of a jerk, but it also frees me up to eat all the cake I want. So... tied one all.

"Overweight people are a burden on the health care system. You're the reason that insurance premiums are higher than..."

Stop this. Stop it now. You're completely wrong about this.

"But even ten pounds is enough to put you at risk for diabetes. You should consider the cost benefits of..."

I'm not getting into the health care debate. I said stop this.

"Single payer! Public option! Skyrocketing costs!"

OK, fine. I'll try and be quick about it.

I'm not an economist. I'm not a health care expert. I'm merely a dude. But I don't think the issue with the health care system is overweight people - it's the extravagant money involved.

Think of it this way... what's the difference between Vince Vaughn in a movie like Swingers and Vince Vaughn in a movie like Made? What's the difference between your favorite band's first album and the crap they've been churning out ever since? 

The bottom line is this: Any time you have something that's inherently good, fun or cool, it will remain that way until it becomes ridiculously profitable. That includes entire genres of music, internet technologies like Twitter and homemade porn. In its infancy, any good idea is completely free of stupid. Once a corporation decides to make money off of it, it becomes a soulless shell of itself, filled with profit margins and decisions that are driven by maximizing profit, rather than increasing quality.

If there was little or no money involved in health care (between drug companies, medical supply companies, labor, legal fees, lobbyists, insurance and everything else), you'd be able to walk into a doctor's office and get top notch heart surgery that day without destroying your budget. The best thing that ever happened to acupuncture, reflexology and voodoo was staying off the insurance companies' radars. If United Healthcare gave its customers a yearly voodoo allowance, severed chicken heads would cost $40,000 by the end of the week. The wild west had its negatives, but being able to get your cancer knocked out by the local blood-letter for a fistful of silver nuggets without being placed on a permanent drug regimen had to be awesome.

So, in short... my ten pounds isn't putting a strain on a damned thing. If it was fifty, you'd have an argument. Maybe I'll die earlier, but if it cost my insurance company less than $200,000 to let me do it in a hospital, we'd all be wasting our energy debating things over things like fantasy football instead.

"Are you doing something with carbs?"

Yes. I'm eating them. Just not in beer form.

"How much weight are you hoping to lose?"

I don't know. I... I really don't know. I'm not interested in thinking about it. We'll see what happens.

"Are you exercising? You can't just eat less without exercising."

I'm not sure if this will qualify as an answer but... I'm not going to exercise - I'm going to stop not exercising. 

"That doesn't make any sense."

It would if you thought about it.