Losing weight is like going to war

Have you ever noticed that when you are trying to lose weight, the whole world seems to be against you? Fattening food seems to be everywhere, often offered to you for free. Physical activity seems to be a luxury you can hardly afford to fit into your daily schedule. Sometimes it just seems so unfair, doesn’t it?

To be honest, I’ve never been very overweight. But as the years have sneaked by I’ve accumulated a few extra pounds here and there, and I realized that if I didn’t arrest the trend a few extra pounds added on each year could eventually add up to and unhealthy me.

So when I started a new job about a year ago that offered me a free gym membership and paid time off to exercise, I had no excuse not to try and get a little healthier. So far I’ve lost about 10 pounds in a little less than a year by following a pretty simple plan – eat less and move more. The idea is a simple one, but you’d probably agree that the execution is anything but.

We live in a world that is awash in food, and most of it seems to be high in calories and low in nutrition. Walk through a grocery store and it seems like the chips, cookies, ice cream, and red meat just jumps into your cart. Every restaurant menu seems to be loaded with delicious, fattening food that comes in oversized portions. And any time you go to a social gathering there seems to be a spread of stuff you really shouldn’t eat, but it would be rude not to have a little something.

As for moving around, well, who has the time? There aren’t many places you can safely walk to, so we drive everywhere. Most of us work in jobs that require us to sit most of the day. And once we get home we have to watch our favorite TV show, surf the Internet, or fire up the Playstation. Sometimes I wonder if we even need our legs anymore.

The deck is definitely stacked against you if you are trying to eat right and be more active, but the situation is not hopeless. There is a difference between something being difficult and being impossible. Losing weight is merely difficult. Okay, maybe I should say it is very difficult. But it’s not impossible.

What you really have to do is commit yourself to going to war with the world around you. We live in a culture that promotes sloth and gluttony, and if you are going to overcome those bad influences you need to recognize them and actively resist them.

Look for opportunities to get up and move around. Walk whenever possible. Park in the back of the lot instead of looking for that spot near the door. There is always some project around the house that needs doing – tackle it. The more strenuous it is the better.

Start thinking about what you eat. We tend to consume food mindlessly, while we’re doing other things. Pay attention to your appetite and only eat when you are really hungry. When I was a kid and I wanted a snack, my Mom would tell me to eat some fruit. If I said I “wasn’t hungry for that” and asked for junk food, she said I wasn’t really hungry. She was right.

We are habit-forming creatures. That works against us a lot of the time, because bad habits are so easy to fall into. But it can work in your favor, too. Good habits, once they take hold, can drive you to do the right things.

Once you get used to exercise it becomes addictive and (believe it or not) you’ll find yourself eager to move around and do things. And fattening food becomes less desirable, over time, when you stay away from it.

The key is making up your mind, and taking action. No one ever loses weight accidentally. The world may be against you, but you are stronger than you think.

If only the real world was like an Obama speech

Whatever your opinion of our current president may be, you have to give him this – the man is no slacker. He has been a very busy guy from day one, and he is not afraid to make big decisions and grand gestures. Whether he’s getting the country out of a ditch or driving it off a cliff is a matter of opinion of course, but no one can deny that he’s got his foot down hard on the accelerator.

This week the president was overseas, sharing his charisma and can-do spirit with various foreign audiences and heads of state. One of the main items on his agenda seems to have been to start repairing our battered image in the eyes of the international community. He had this to say in a speech before an adoring crowd in Turkey:

“"Let me say this as clearly as I can. The United States is not and will never be at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical ... in rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject."

His words are stirring and packed with an emotional punch, as we’ve come to expect from him. But, as we’ve also come to expect, some of the ideas expressed in those words don’t seem to have much connection with logic or reality.

To be sure, it is true that we are not nor could we ever feasibly be “at war” with Islam or any other religion. Islam is a large, diverse belief system practiced in many different parts of the world and in many different forms. We could not conceivably go to war against such a thing even if we wanted to.

So I have no argument with the first part of the quote cited above. But that last part about us having a “partnership with the Muslim world” and “rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject” suffers from a bad case of what-is-he-talking-about.

If we have secured some sort of partnership with the entire Muslim world, that news somehow escaped my notice. The “Muslim world” is as diverse and hard to pin down a concept as the religion of Islam, and I can’t begin to imagine how we could secure a partnership with such a thing.

And it is beyond ludicrous to suggest that “people of all faiths” reject “violent ideologies.” The men who flew those planes into the World Trade Center were people of faith, as were those who planned and finance their operation and those who cheered the success of their mission after the fact.

What the president was describing was the world as he would like it to be, a world where the great majority of people of all faiths shared the same ideas about peace, community, and freedom. It’s a shame that we have to live in this world and not the one that exists in his speech, but such is life.

In fact there are tenets of Islam that are practiced by a significant portion of its adherents that conflict directly with some of our core beliefs, such as freedom of worship and expression. You can quickly earn a death sentence even in some of the more moderate Islamic countries if you say something considered to be disrespectful to their Prophet or dare to convert to a different religion.

Some of these countries are our allies of course, because in a complex and imperfect world we have mutual interests with them that outweigh our disagreements, for the time being at least. But make no mistake, here in the real world there are differences in our belief systems that run deep and are dearly held on both sides. Barring a sudden shift in the value system of one side or the other, any partnership we have with the “Muslim world” figures to remain a tenuous one at best.