There are a lot of people in the world who eat with the primary goal of providing themselves with optimal health and nutrition. I'm not into this. One of my greatest sources of happiness in life is eating exactly what I want exactly when I want, and I find that focusing on health and nutrition unduly detracts from this simple pleasure. Health and nutrition people can't understand this. "But what could possibly be more important than your health?" they say. "It will make you live way longer."
Here's an analogy:
Imagine a sex act that doesn't give you an orgasm and (either on its on merits or by virtue of the partner you're doing it with) isn't particularly fun for you. The kind of sex act where you wouldn't feel at all deprived if you never engaged in it again. Now imagine the combination of sex act and partner are such that it takes a long time. It takes far longer than it would take you to have an orgasm with your favourite sex act. It takes long enough that you're starting to wonder why people consider premature ejaculation a problem. And imagine doing this sex act in a position where you have to do all the work. You can't just lie down and relax, you have to do it all yourself - and it takes way more work than your favourite sex act does.
Now suppose you have to do this sex act somewhere between three and six times a day, every single day, for the rest of your life. Even if you're away from home or out with friends, when it's sex time you have to drop everything and find a suitable place for the sex act (which is often away from all the fun everyone else is having), and you have to either carry around all the equipment necessary or make sure it's available wherever you'll be going, all of which is rather conspicuous and is detrimental to general social spontaneity.
Even if your favourite sex act isn't contraindicated, it's difficult to fit it into your schedule since so much of your time and energy (and physical tolerance for friction) are consumed by the non-fun sex act.
And if you complain about any of this, people reply with "But it's SEX! What could possibly be more important?" and cite research studies that show that if you have sex this particular way, you'll be able to continue to do so for decades longer than most people can maintain an active sex life.
Doesn't that sound like a special kind of purgatory?
4 comments:
I would so love to be able to eat whatever I wanted whenver I wanted. For me, eating is one of the life's greatest pleasures. Focus on health and nutrition definitely distracts from this. But health is not an abstract concept: it's something that affects the rest of your happiness in very real ways. So if one happiness (food, alchohol, cocaine, whatever it is) begins to rob you of other happinesses, then the first happiness has to be regulated.
You seem to frame this as an either/or proposition. (Correct me if I'm misreading you.) For me, it's a balancing act.
If I eat whatever I want whenever I want, I will contribute contribute greatly to my own poor health, so that first happiness (food) will start to jeopardize all my other happinesses. Don't want that.
If I eat solely for health and nutrition, I will feel deprived and unhappy. Don't want that, either.
So I work on balancing the two, so I can have some of both.
(I'm also lucky in that I enjoy a lot of very healthy foods.)
How does this strike you?
The situation you describe is baseline. The problem is I'm happily going through life that way, and I keep getting told I need to eat more X or less Y.
I don't know if this is broadly applicable or if it's just me, but I find that as I get older I'm not physically capable of eating as much food, as in I get physically full sooner. I quite often find myself with no more room in my tummy but my palate still craving something. So even adding something that I'm not already eating takes away from that balance.
But people who are more nutrition focused don't seem to be able to understand that, so I'm hoping this analogy will help them.
Oh, now I get it. You're already doing this.
"I quite often find myself with no more room in my tummy but my palate still craving something."
When I was younger and thinner I was always like this. It was annoying - big meals were such a waste for me.
Building on the analogy for the record, baseline eating habits include at least some healthy food just like baseline sexual conduct includes taking one's partner's desires into account. As grown adults who've lived in the world for some time, we find the balance and proceed with life and this is all so unremarkable it doesn't even bear mentioning.
But constantly editing one's diet towards optimal nutrition is like constantly editing one's sex life so that more work is required for fewer orgasms, all for the stated goal of being able to do so for even longer.
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