Theme Park at its Darkest

2.

It is not necessary to be a professional athlete training twice a day, for four hours a day, to achieve these outcomes.

For those who have seen my Facebook, I have achieved my results (of which you can be the judge) training approximately six days a week, of which only two sessions are weight training sessions. It is also worthwhile bearing in mind that I didn’t play any sport at all until I had left school.

Most of my current aesthetic result has come from the sixteen-hour fast and a commitment to no added sugar during the week. I still eat pizza, pasta and chocolate on the weekends. 

I have had some adventures in dieting myself, as detailed in previous posts. My overwhelming discovery at the end of the odyssey was amazement at how easy it is to manipulate your weight: if you do what the plan says you have to do, and you are disciplined about what you eat and when you eat it, you’ll get the result. There is some variation involved, but it is astonishingly simple.

The fact it is so difficult to do it speaks a lot to motivation, discipline, and people’s willingness to ‘do the work’.

It also relates to unfashionable notions of discipline, and choosing to see oneself as responsible for one’s own outcomes.

We are perfectly happy to view teenager’s high school academic results as largely representative of this, but the same attitude no longer relates to their body composition, or anyone else’s, for that matter.

We have come to understand there are more variables at work, particularly pertaining to trauma. These variables are very helpful in terms of managing compulsions, but the paradox here is that once we ascribe motives to forces impacting on us, we also give those forces the power over our lives and decisions.

I will assert that the dictum ‘you are what you eat’ is pretty much true. Your mindset, and your experience of reality, is profoundly impacted by what you eat, especially in relation to sugar and alcohol.

If you can choose what you want to eat and when you want to eat it, you can control your body shape. And because of the considerably powerful impact of things like sugar and alcohol and their ability to distort our perceptions and our emotions, there is actually a feedback loop at work here.  

If society is evolving as far as perceptions of beauty are concerned, this is a very good thing. It is true that men who are unattractive physically, yet rich or talented are described as ‘sexy’, perhaps the same will soon be true of women. Kim Kardashian with her new beau, twenty years her junior, is probably indicative of this.  

However, if people are told that every iteration is beautiful, then there is no hope, or true motivation, for change. If you’re unsatisfied with the status quo, perhaps it is helpful to remember one of my favourite quotes from Philip K. Dick: “Reality is that which, once you cease to believe in it, refuses to go away.”

This entry was posted on July 2, 2022 at 4:07 am and is filed under Observation with tags diet, discipline, Jordan Peterson, Kim Kardashian, obesity, Philip K. Dick, Sports Illustrated, Yumi Nu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.