How Not to Diet Every Day

If you are on a diet every day, like me, here is what not to do: 

Do not solemnly resolve to be on a diet from the next day. 

When the next day comes, as it sorrily will, do not welcome it with copious breakfasting. 

After the dotty breakfast slip, do not defiantly reinstate your resolve to start the diet from now. 

In a few short hours, try not to congratulate yourself prematurely for a fulfilled two hour post breakfast fasting feat by sneaking in one of those treacherously anti-oxidizing, the darkest of the darkly addictive chocolate snacks. 

Resist the urge to lunch. This will be hard and tricky. A time of true challenge. You will meet it with a philosophical inclination and a refreshingly questioning mind. 

What is the place of man in this world and the place of a man on a diet in it, you will ask? And what is life, its truth and beauty, if not for constant munching? And is man a less of man if he cannot bear to starve himself, even for a minute or two? And must one’s worth of necessity be diminished by a pathetically diminished will to diet?

You will not desist, but go further. 

You will want to crack the history of dieting and inquire about its politics. And is there an ethics of dieting or merely an aesthetics to it? And how vain and unhealthy is our modern obsession with appearances? Which will lead you to the consequent delightfully dumb dilemma: is it better to be fat and good or thin and mean, a skinny bitch, like your right neighbor? And is not dieting, at its roots, an unnatural, decadent first world fad, a politically incorrect gesture of our supremacist overpamperhood? 

To diet or not to diet, you wonder pedantically at this point, and the point is that you should not. Because, let’s face it, it is much easier to philosophize than in the mind to suffer thousands pangs that flesh is heir to -- like hunger. To be hungry, and stay hungry, that is the catch. 

Reader,  you are smart and can turn any argument on its head, even when slightly starving. But even more urgently, you are chubby. And in an uncute, unseemly way, too. That portliness that festers inside you can only be a portent of some ghastlier bodily things to come. Stop it. Cut it at its roots. Right now.

Or at least right after dinner. A slight, tiny, healthy dinner, just to get you through the night and the next morning, when you will not be on a diet because today or yesterday or the day before you were not on one either.

Here is a healthy tiny advice from the big unhealthy me, who keeps telling it to my own very self, who has never managed one day of dignified, lie-detoxing, unambiguously launched low calorie high fat burning dieting regime.

Just don’t eat all the time, a lot. Much will be gained if you don’t.