Fitness Friday: 9 Ways to Get Fat and Stay Fat
1. Make excuses. Tell yourself things like, “I can’t.” “Healthy food is too expensive.” “I’m too busy to exercise.” “I don’t like vegetables.” “I can’t cook.” “My knee hurts.” “I’m too tired to wake up early.” “I’m too tired to stay up late.” “I’m too tired to walk at lunch.” “I’m too tired when I get home from work.” “I’m too tired to stop at the gym.” “The gym is not convenient for me.” “The gym is too expensive” “My basement is too small.” “I hate Jillian Michaels.” “Running hurts my hip.” “It’s too hot outside.” “It’s too cold outside.” “Lifting weights makes me bulk up.” “Jillian Michaels hurts my hip, is too small, is too expensive and makes me bulk up.”
2. Sit. All day. Drive everywhere and spend lots of time scouring the parking lot for the absolute best parking space. Play Farmville and check your Facebook newsfeed often. And Twitter. And your blog list—including this blog. When you are finished, turn on the TV and watch it. For maximum impact, bring your laptop to the couch WHILE you watch TV. Stay up late watching TV with your laptop so in the morning, you can say with true conviction, “I am too tired to wake up early.”
3. Eat out. A lot. Allow chain restaurants to decide the quality of the ingredients in your food as well as the portion sizes on your plate. Don’t bother ever cooking at home. Besides, you are way too busy checking Facebook to be bothered with all that grocery shopping and cooking nonsense.
4. Ignore how you feel. After you fill up on a giant slice of cherry cheese coffee cake and a Super-Large-Venti-Colossal Pumpkin Spice Latte with extra whip, pretend you do not feel both lethargic and jittery–all at the same time. Tell yourself everyone feels gross after breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. Everyone has joint pain and digestion issues. Everyone hates exercise. If you ignore how you feel long enough, the bad feeling will go away or resolve itself, or whatever. Just like debt. And vehicle maintenance.
5. Drink soda. All day long. Tell yourself everyone has a vice and this one is yours. Could be worse—at least you’re not a meth addict or a serial killer. You know you need to drink water blah blah blah, but you don’t like water. And water is too expensive. No, wait. Never mind that last one. Soda has water in it, so how bad can it be, really?
6. Find a new diet that promises quick results and try it. The more extreme, the better. Stick with it for a few days, or even a few weeks. When you don’t see the promised results (because you won’t), quit. Go back to your old eating habits, only this time, tell yourself you deserve an extra helping of cherry cheese coffee cake, because, dang it, you just, like, TOTALLY deprived yourself during that stupid diet. Do this every few months. After about a year, conclude “I’ve tried everything and diets don’t work for me.” Add that to your list of excuses.
7. Don’t read updated health and fitness articles. Throw your hands up in the air in frustration and declare, “Even the experts disagree about what is good for me and what is bad for me. All the information is conflicting! Next thing you know, they’ll publish a study telling me vegetables are bad. I give up. I’m just going to eat what I want.” And then swing by McDonalds and grab yourself a Big Mac, fries and a large shake. Eat a hot apple pie for dessert (do they still sell those?). You deserve a break today—especially after that stupid diet you tried last month.
8. Get a few word tracks to say to your judgmental healthnut friends. Things like, “My Granny ate this way and lived to be 92. My Grand-Pappy ate this way and, bless his heart, that man STILL walks the mall and watches Judge Judy every single day.” “ I’ve been eating this way my whole life and I’m fine.” “I don’t want to deprive myself—I deserve to be happy—and I deserve a break. Today.” “Life’s too short to be obsessed with diet and exercise.” “This is just the way God made me.” “I don’t feel led to focus on that right now in this season of life and ministry.” Use the God-card often. No one can ever trump the God-card. Not even your healthnut friends.
9. Eat an abundance of foods with ingredient lists that look something like this:
Enriched wheat flour bleached (flour, malted barley flour, niacin, ferrous sulfate, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, water, cherries, sugar, butter (pasteurized cream and salt), cream cheese (pasteurized milk & cream, cheese cultures, salt, carob bean gums), high fructose corn syrup, whole eggs, margarine (partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonseed oil, nonfat dry milk, water, salt, mono & diglycerides, soy lecithin, artificial flavor, beta carotene as color, vitamim A palmitate added ), yeast, food starch-modified, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (soybean and/or cottonseed oil), almonds, invert sugar, corn syrup, nonfat dry milk, whey, salt, monoglycerides, natural and artificial flavor, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, corn starch, monocalcium phosphate), potassium sorbate and benzoic acid and sodium benzoate (as preservatives), calcium sulfate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, corn starch, dextrose, soy lecithin, ascorbic acid, canola oil, ammonium sulfate, honey, turmeric and titanium dioxide (as color), propylene glycol, citric acid, malic acid, spice, lactic acid, maltodextrin, glucono delta lactone, red 40, yellow 5, yellow 6, blue 1, cellulose gum, propionic acid, gellan gum, phosphoric acid, sodium citrate, xanthan and tragacanth gum, caramel color, glycerin.
When you do eat it, focus on the fact that it has “cherries” and “almonds” in it. Point that out to Miss Judgy Mc Judgington Healthnut Friend, while she eats actual cherries and almonds. And while you’re at it, point out to her that her son has his face buried in a Cool Whip container.
Better yet, don’t bother flipping the package over to read the ingredients at all. Don’t question why the ingredients are there in the first place, or even what they are. Ignorance is bliss, right?
(BTW, those are the ingredients of the Panera Bread Cherry Cheese Coffee Cake–I bet you thought you were choosing the healthy option when you stepped in to Panera.)
Q4U: Are you, like, TOTALLY mad at me now?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Related Posts:
No Diets Allowed (easy habits you can implement into your day to get healthy)
Bang for Your Buck (the most effective exercises you can do when time is short)
Healthy Food on a Tight Budget (the title says it all)
STOP PICKING ON ME!!! 😉
I love it…. in the Boston area we have BC/BS insurance commercials that speak to most of your excuses.
So true – so sad.
I'm laughing and feeling convicted….at the same time!
I was very impressed with your list of ingredients. I thought you'd made them up to be funny. Imagine my surprise when I saw the disclaimer at the bottom.
Now with regard to number 7…that is a huge frustration for me. But I read everything I can get my hands on. They can be hugely conflicting, so I pick the parts that I like best out of each one, like the one that says chocolate is good for you. I am sure, however, that is not my problem. 🙂
Lori
Did you actually type out that whole list of ingredients or did you copy and paste from somewhere. If you did type it out, that is dedication, girl!
I'm sorry, I can't talk to you right now, because I'm too mad to talk to you…
Of course anger is always a secondary emotion, so perhaps the real issue is conviction and denial as I sit with my lap top in my lap and the tv on in the background AFTER returning from a four day camping trip where I ate junk for three days straight…
But I'm not denying that I felt terrible after every meal…So that's something, right?