Diet, exercise, diet, exercise, diet, exercise
Frankly, I’m a little tired of hearing these words. Everybody has a gimmick to make us all look young, skinny and beautiful. We have low calorie food, jogging, diet pills, slim ,fast, starch blockers, dream away. 20 minute work outs, Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda to name a few. It is such an IN thing that even if your friends aren’t dieting and exercising, it still ends up being the topic of conversation, at some point in time.
It makes me tired just watching all the sweating, moaning people exercising on television. Those skinny young girls in tights and sweat bands, selling this way of life, look real cute in the TV commercials, but how can a person who never in their life looked like they do, expect to look that cute, just by doing what they are doing.
My argument is, what is wrong with being a flabby, middle aged person, who would rather sit down, have a drink, a steak and watch television, other than trying to stuff their cellulite body into purple tights and working up a sweat dancing around to rock and roll music, drinking mineral water and eating bean sprouts.
If this kind of misery could make a 45 year old, look and feel like a 25 year old, I’d be all for it. But nobody has convinced me that it works yet. I doubt very seriously that you feel better after pushing yourself to the point of exhaustion and starving yourself everyday.
A few months ago the biggest thing to hit the market was starch blockers, with the promise that you could sit down and gorge yourself with bread, spaghetti and potatoes and still lose weight. Yuk! Can you imagine having a pill, bread, plain spaghetti, and dry potatoes; for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Well the government stepped in and made quick work of this one, so now they have Dream-Away. This outfit claims that if you take one of their pills before bedtime, as you sleep you can lose | one or two pounds every night, no muss, no fuss. Now what I want to know is, Where does it go? Do you wake up in the morning with a grease spot on the sheets? And you have to wonder if you would take a handful before bed- time would you disappear completely. Maybe if the government steps in on this one, they could re-market these things as population control pills.
All this brain washing has made its mark in some ways. It makes you feel so guilty that you order a hamburger, french fries and a diet Pepsi. While having lunch with my friend Georgia the other day, the cloud of guilt was hanging over the table as usual. We had four glasses of iced tea and only three packets of sweet ‘n low. We nearly pushed our lasagne and garlic bread off the table in the panic to find another packet of low calorie sweetener.
Flabby middle agers still have a glimmer of hope. In a couple of years, the government will probably say that diet and exercise is hazardous to your health. Then we can sit back in our easy chair, push the remote control on the television, and say the words that we all enjoy saying. “See, we told you so.”
