Let Sleeping Blogs Lie

So Matt and I were hanging out with some friends one weekend, right? These friends were from … elsewhere. We asked if they wanted to go get lunch and they told us they had been dreaming of revisiting a particular delicious local bakery they had discovered on their last visit. So we went. It was a zoo on “Pay What You Can Day” complete with screaming kids and pushy tourists and orangutans throwing poo (except for the last thing), but that’s not really related to the story.

I get my salad and my water and fight a small girl child in pigtails for a table. Then I wait. When Matt walks over with our pals they have purchased four huge, I mean HUUUUUGE pastries. One of those pastries split between the two of them would have filled the mere mortal human. They had four. I wasn’t judging (at that point) so much as surprised. But we ALL eat differently when we are on a vacation. Don’t lie.

We ate our faire and went about the business of site seeing and the like. About 2:30 in the afternoon it was time to get a coffee. Right? Isn’t that the nationwide agreed upon general time frame/range for a coffee? We don’t have tea time or siestas here, but we have Starbucks and Coffee, Bean and Tea Leaf and we have collectively, with an unspoken understanding agreed that there is a time in the day to visit said establishments. I can’t drink coffee as it raises my blood pressure and then I crash very hard about 30 minutes after. I sure do miss me some coffee. It was an abusive relationship, but I miss the good times. I had to cut coffee out of all my old photos and add shots of water bottles and V8 just so I wouldn’t be reminded of some of the special things we shared. Too painful. But I digress.

Anyhoo, we get in line for the coffee and these friends don’t order coffee so much as coffee desserts. You know what I’m talking about - Carameled and chocolated and iced and frappaccinoed and whipped and creamed and sugared and immense. Along with those coffees … another pastry. This one looked like a small cake of some sort. Again, live it up! You’re on vacation!! Right? Well …

For the next hour or maybe … five, all I heard about was how uncomfortable it is for this gal because she’s 40 pounds overweight. And I heard about how hard it is to lose weight after the age of 30. And I heard about how it’s easier for men. And I heard how there is no time in the day to fit in a workout. And I heard that she didn’t understand why she hadn’t lost weight before the trip because she stopped eating ice cream for a week!!

When I told my councilor this, she called it “Willful Ingorance.”

I’ve heard this term often in reference to political stuff, but it was the first time I had heard it in reference to things that … come on … are common sense.

I know. You are chastising me for judging but … I’m not giving on this one. Since my MOTHER was a girl it has been understood that if you want to lose weight, you cut out or DOWN on sweets FIRST THING. You will not be able to convince me that there is a single human being on this planet who thinks they can keep a trim figure by eating pastries the size of a pit bull’s head and Gigantasaurus sweet delicious coffees all day long. This information was around since the invent of TAB. There is a reason diet sodas rule the earth. I grew up a fat kid and the information I got was, “If you want to be thin, you gotta eat rabbit food.” Rabbit food. This refers, of course, to the kind of rabbits who eat chocolate brownies and tiramisu for lunch and wash it down with a bag of white sugar. Apparently.

So listen, this behavior walks briskly past willful ignorance and then jumps right off the highest cliff and into the waters of Denial and Unconvincing Rationalizations.

If you don’t know my motto (I have several, actually) by now, it’s Embrace yourself wrinkles and all. Eat your goodies all up and enjoy the HELL out of them, carry your pounds around like a ribbon for honorable mention and love life. Or change some things and drop some pounds and get comfortable in your skin and pin that medal to your chest. Either answer is a good life. But the guilt and the shame and the self flagellation is not productive, it’s not healthy and it’s not really all that fun to be around. That’s the hard truth.