Uggh. Sometimes, life’s little realities can be difficult to accept. I am very much a fan of the sedentary lifestyle; however, it does have its drawbacks. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting abandoning it, for it has served me well. No, I am aware of too many anecdotes of athletic types in their 20s and 30s who are already on their second or third hip, knee, or shoulder surgeries as a result of mishaps from their sporting misadventures. Such injuries also come along with lengthy recovery and physiotherapy timelines that make a sedentary life a wiser choice. Notwithstanding a heart attack in 2013 that required the installation of four stents, which was totally unrelated to lifestyle choices, the sedentary life has never done me any harm.
The problem is, though, I like food. Not just any food, good food, and I like cooking good food. Often times I will be contemplating what to make next, even while I am still eating. Diet, exercise, and food are vertices of a triangle—I call it the triangle of self-loathing—that are connected in a way that makes the adherence to a purely sedentary philosophy impractical. You are, after all, going to want to continue being able to fit through doorways, and you can only suck things in for so long before you have to breathe again.
You might be thinking that diet and food are the same thing, since diet is just the food that you eat. Here, though, I think of food as all the meta characteristics of food, like variety, availability, and deliciousness, while diet is more of an intake limiting thing you force yourself to do in order to avoid dealing with the dreaded third vertex of exercise. So, to get the thing at the top, I will inevitably have to include some of the things at the bottom, otherwise I will start looking like a triangle, a big fat, bloated triangle whose pants don’t fit. Like I said earlier, life’s realities can be difficult to accept sometimes.
—DG.
Inside Doug's Head 